https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=BQ4VSRg4e8w
Music This one’s particularly complicated, so because with Piaget you enter a whole new domain of axiomatic thinking, that’s the right way to think about it. See, each of these people that we’re discussing, each of these theories, comes at the construction of the world from a different perspective, and it’s really fundamentally different. It’s different way deep down at the level of fundamental assumptions, and so Piaget, who’s probably the world’s most famous developmental psychologist, although he didn’t consider himself a developmental psychologist, he considered himself a genetic epistemologist. And what that meant was that he was interested in epistemology, which is how knowledge structures work, and genetic means formulation of, and so he was interested in how children formulate their knowledge structures in the world. And he was a constructivist because he believed that human beings construct the, they don’t only construct the representations of the world, it’s deeper than that, it’s more like they construct the world itself. Now it depends to some degree on what you think of as the world, and of course that’s, so there’s a reality definition issue that’s nested at the bottom of this, and it’s a very complex one, and so I’m going to have to walk you through it piece by piece. Now Piaget was a genius, he was, he wrote a paper, I believe on mollusks, when he was 10 and had it published in a scientific journal, and he was offered the curatorship of a museum as a consequence of that, and his parents had to write the museum directors and tell them that he couldn’t curate the museum because he was only 10. And so that gives you some idea about Piaget, and he’s published many, many, many books, and many of them haven’t been translated into English yet, and so he was quite the, he was quite the, you know, large intelligence creature, and he studied all sorts of things. So I’m going to tell you a little bit about constructivism, I’m going to start with a quote from Piaget, and it’s, he’s, some of his books I found quite straightforward, and some of them very difficult, and I think it’s often because of the quality of the translation, this happens to be a relatively difficult section, I don’t think it’s translated that well, but whatever, we’re going to go through it, I’ll explain it to you a little bit. So Piaget said, Under the converging influence of a series of factors, we’re tending more and more today to regard knowledge as a process more than a state. Any being or object that science attempts to hold fast dissolves once again in the current of development. It is the last analysis of this development, and of it alone, that we have the right to state it is a fact. What we can and should then seek is the law of this process. Quotes. We are well aware on the other hand of the fine book by Kuhn on scientific revolutions. Now there’s an awful lot of information in that paragraph, so we’ll unpack it a little bit before we go on. Now, one way of looking at science is that it’s a collection of facts, right? That’s what Piaget is stating to begin with, and we assume that the facts that science has gathered are facts and static, but if you observe them across time, what you find is that scientific facts tend to shift and transform, because scientific theories that are applicable in one century, let’s say, turn out to be less applicable in the next. Now there’s been a lot of argument and discussion about this, because the fact that facts change seems to indicate that they’re not so self-evidently facts, and there are people, and perhaps Kuhn would be among them, who believe that science consisted of the juxtaposition of paradigms, so those are sets of axioms within which something operates, and the paradigms, he considered them often incommensurate. You couldn’t move from one to another, because the axioms were different, there was no necessary, what might you say, there was no necessary means of communication between them, but, and Piaget knew of Thomas Kuhn’s work, that’s the structure of scientific revolutions, which was published in 1962, it’s a classic text in the philosophy of science, and what Piaget assumed more was more like a, I would say, more like a classic view of science, where, so for example, when Newton, came up with Newtonian physics, there was a set of propositions upon which Newtonian physics was based, and then when Einstein transformed those propositions, what happened was that Newtonian physics became a subset of Einsteinian physics, and so, the way that Piaget looked at the development of factual ideas, at least in part, was that you’d come up with a set of ideas that were facts, and then that would be superseded by a different theory within which that original theory would be nested, and so that what happens, is that each theory, in some sense, although it transforms, it becomes more complete as scientific progression continues, now Kuhn didn’t precisely believe that, although exactly what Kuhn meant by a paradigm shift, because Kuhn originated that term, isn’t clear, but he didn’t seem to actually believe that science had this capacity to present a series of facts, and then alter the underlying presuppositions, and then to nest that within a broader series of facts, like you would assume if you were thinking about the relationship between Newton and Einstein, so Newtonian physics is a subset of Einsteinian physics, so now, that’s kind of how Piaget thought about how human beings developed knowledge, he believed that we came up with, well let’s say you wanted to chop down a tree, that might be a good example, I mean, you could use a dull axe made of bronze, and it’s like, well that would chop down the tree, it’d be a lot of work though, and then maybe you replace that with a sharp steel axe that’s designed like a wedge so that you can really hack down a tree with it, or maybe you replace it with a saw, and so, it’s not like the bronze axe couldn’t chop down the tree, but the steel axe can do a better job, and the saw can do even a better job, and so, the way that Piaget thought about the transformation of human knowledge structures from infancy onward, essentially, was that infants would produce a representation of the world that was sort of low resolution, but quite tool-like, it would work in the world, but then as they progressed, the nature of those tools would become refined, and sometimes transform completely, so sometimes, imagine that a child would use, in a sense, a low resolution picture of something, and then they would increase its resolution as they filled in the details, that would be assimilation, that’s the Piagetian notion of assimilation, you’re using the same basic theory, but filling in the details, and then now and then, you’d have to switch to another picture entirely, and that would be more like accommodation, that’s where you’d have to transform your internal structures completely in order to properly represent and act within the world, and so that’s the basic difference between accommodation and assimilation, so assimilation is like micro-alterations, and accommodation is transformation of the knowledge structure itself, and so that’s part of, so what Kuhn pointed out was that there’d be a set of facts, and then there’d be an anomaly arise of some sort, so like at the end of the 19th century, the only remaining anomaly was, at least one of the remaining anomalies was that, no matter which direction you shine a light beam in, and no matter how fast the platform on which you’re standing is moving, the only remaining anomaly is that, I mean the light beam has exactly the same velocity, which seems impossible, so if the earth is moving this way around the sun, and you shine a light off the earth, you’d expect the speed of light to be the speed of light plus the speed of the earth, and then if you shone it the other way, then you’d expect the speed of light to be the speed of light minus the earth’s speed, but that isn’t what happens, no matter how fast the platform on which the person shining the light is standing, the speed of light is always the same to every observer, so, and people kind of thought of that as, that wasn’t the only anomaly, but that was one of them, thought of that as the only anomaly left in physics at the end of the 19th century, and turned out that was a bad one, there were some other ones as well, like the fact that light tends to behave as a wave and a particle, more or less at the same time, which doesn’t seem possible, so there’s a couple of things left over in Newtonian physics that the Newtonian physics couldn’t explain, but by the end of the 19th century, there were famous scientists saying, yeah, well we got this all wrapped up, there’s really nothing left to discover, and then along came quantum mechanics and Einsteinian relativity, and bang, the whole world was like really different, and quantum mechanics is much more comprehensive theory of the world than Newtonian physics, all of the electronics you use wouldn’t work if quantum physics wasn’t correct, roughly speaking, and so, that little tiny anomaly blew into something that knocked the slats out from underneath the entire axiomatic structure of Newtonian physics, it showed it was wrong at its fundamental levels, even though it turned out to be a subset, a correct subset of something that was much broader, and so you can kind of think of that as, that’s what kids are doing as they progress, they develop a theory that accounts for a certain set of, you could say facts, but this is another place it gets tricky, and then they modify those and make them more and more refined, but now and then they have to undergo quite a transformation, and that’d be a state of mind, and they have to be able to do that, 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trying to do that, and so that’s a really complicated problem, and in order to solve that, you kind of have to think about facts like tools, instead of thinking about them as objective, independent realities, because a bad tool can still work as a tool, whereas a bad fact just kills you stone dead, and so, in any case, that seems to be a completely unnecessary phenomena. Oh, god! There’s no reason for that. It’s just sheer spite as far as I can tell. Okay, so here’s one of Piaget’s propositions. And it is that because facts flux in some sense across time, you’re looking for something that doesn’t change across time, to call it a real fact. And so what Piaget is trying to point out in this, let’s call it introductory paragraph, is that the one thing that doesn’t change is the manner in which people generate facts, rather than the facts themselves. So the ultimate fact is a fact about the way people generate facts. Alright, and so Piaget’s theory in part is a theory about how knowledge is acquired and transformed. And so it’s not a study of the knowledge itself, it’s a study of the process by which the knowledge is generated. And he believed that that process was unchanging, at least with regards to human beings. And so you can think of the Piagetian genetic epistemological mystery as being, how is it that people form and transform representations of the world? And one of his conclusions about that is that there’s a standard process. And then the reason that I’m telling you about Piaget right now is because, as far as I can tell, the standard Piagetian description of the manner in which knowledge is acquired and transformed is the same thing that’s represented in the mythology of the shamanic transformation. Which is that there’s a state of being, and then it’s disrupted by something chaotic, and there’s a disintegration period, and that’s the space between the stage transitions for children, in which time they’re often in. In which time they’re often upset because their little theory about the world isn’t learning it, isn’t working anymore. And then in that chaotic period, they adjust themselves to new anomalies. And anomalies are what occur when you act in the world and what you want to happen doesn’t happen. Right? Because that means there’s something wrong with your knowledge structure. If you act, and then something happens you don’t want to happen, something’s wrong with the way you’re representing the world. Or you could say something’s wrong with the world, but good luck with that. Although, you know, people can modify the world as well as modifying their belief structures, and people do that a lot. But so, the Piagetian stage transition, as far as I can tell, is a micro-case of the broader idea of the existence of an orderly state, its dissolution into a chaotic state because something unexpected has occurred, and then its re-transformation into a more integrated state. Now Piaget would say, well, the initial state and the chaotic state and the final state aren’t the ultimate realities. The ultimate reality is the process of moving through those stages. And that’s how people acquire knowledge. And you could say that’s the central element of human beings. And I would say that’s another re-representation of the hero myth. Because the hero is the person who notes anomaly, notes something that’s changed that’s outside of explored territory, encounters it, defeats it, let’s say. Or gets something of value from it, and then recasts it into the world, shares it with the community, restructures the world. And so that’s the central story. It’s not the central story of human beings, but it’s close enough for our purposes at the moment. So, okay, so that’s what Piaget is about. How do human beings encounter the world, and what happens when they do that? Now the thing about the world for Piaget is it’s also a complicated place. It’s not exactly the set of all objective facts that remain to be discovered, because Piaget is a constructivist. And he’s more of a pragmatist than he is precisely a scientific realist. And so that’s a complicated thing, a very, very complicated thing. I don’t know if any of you, and maybe this is completely irrelevant, I don’t know if any of you listened to my argument with Sam Harris. But Sam Harris is a scientific realist, and I was trying to make at least in part a Piagetian point, but he was having none of that, that’s for sure. But Piaget makes the point, and so I’m going to let him speak in some sense as we proceed through this. And well, you’ll see why he does what he does. So if all knowledge is always in a state of development and consists in proceeding from one state to a more complete and efficient one, so that implies a hierarchy of states, right, that you move from one knowledge structure to the next one, which includes the previous one and is better. And it’s better because it covers more territory. That’s how you know it’s better. It does the same thing the old tool does, plus some additional things. So it’s a definition of better. It’s a good thing to have a definition of better and worse. If all knowledge is always in a state of development and consists in proceeding from one state to a more complete and efficient one, evidently it is a question of knowing this development and analyzing it with the greatest possible accuracy, which is something I happen to agree with, but that’s partly because I read Piaget, and I think I understand what he meant, and he’s quite the thinker. So I’m going to see if I can clue you in a little bit about this, because it’s exceedingly complex. And most of the time when people talk about Piaget, they just talk about his surface experiments. They don’t talk about what he was actually up to. What he was up to was, well, he was trying to figure out how people represent the world and learn. And that’s not only that. This is another thing people don’t know about Piaget, is that he was trying to reconcile the chasm between science and values. That’s what drove him through his entire intellectual life. He was attempting to bridge the gap between science and religion. That’s another way of thinking about it. And that was explicit. He knew that. That’s why he did everything he did. And so the thing that’s so cool about Piaget, I think, is that he actually started to provide what you might think about as a rational basis for morality. It’s not exactly rational, though that’s the thing, because it’s rational belief, like scientific realism, has a certain set of presuppositions at its core. And Piaget doesn’t use those presuppositions to solve the problem. The problem is so deep, the gap between what is and what ought to be, that’s David Hume’s problem. You can’t derive an ought from an is, just because you know a bunch of things doesn’t give you an unerring guide to know what to do about those things. There’s a gap there. And Harris and people like him say that gap is illusory. But most philosophers, including David Hume, including Piaget, these are heavy duty people, including Heidegger, would disagree with that. They don’t believe that that gap is non-existent. And Harris believes that you can nest values within science. And that’s the proposition that he continually puts forward, like most of the so-called new atheists. But it’s a hell of a lot more difficult to do than you think, that’s for sure. So, anyway, how is Piaget purporting to manage this? Well, one thing he does is, for Piaget, it’s really important that you have a body. And that’s one of the things that’s very cool about his thinking. So you can think about him as an early exponent of embodied cognition. It’s like, he’s not exactly a Cartesian, a follower of Descartes. He doesn’t really believe that you have a spirit, or say a rational mind, that is in some sense separate from your body. Which is an implicit presupposition of a lot of philosophical claims. Piaget really sticks you in your body. And the other thing that Piaget claims is that your abstract knowledge is actually determined by the structure of your body. And that it unfolds from your body up into abstraction. And that’s what happens as infants transform into adults. First of all, almost all their knowledge is embodied. And what that means is that it’s not… Look, there’s a couple of different kinds of memory. Like the most fundamental distinction you might think of is between procedural representation… …and procedural memory and representational memory. So when you remember your past, that little movie that runs in your head, or maybe the facts that you can recite about your past… …that’s episodic memory. That’s representational. But procedural memory is different. Procedural memory is how you walk. You don’t know how you walk. That’s how you ride a bike. It’s how you play the piano. It’s how you type. So it’s automatic. It’s built into your nervous system. It’s built into the nerves that innervate your musculature. And they’re completely separate memory systems. Now one can represent the other, which is interesting. The representational system can represent the output of the body. Which is basically what happens when someone tells a story. Even when you tell a story about your own life. But the contents of procedural memory precede the contents of representational memory. And they’re shaped in different ways. So for example, part of the wisdom that’s encoded in your body is there because of things you’ve practiced. But it’s also there because you’ve practiced things in a social environment. And so while you practice those things, the effect of the social environment shaped the way you learned it. And that’s encoded right in your neurons. It’s not representational. It’s encoded in the way you do things. It’s encoded in the way you smile when you look at someone. Or frown. Or when you do that. And that’s all implicit. It’s not under your conscious control. It’s not even in that system. And so Piaget figured this out. And so one of the things he said was that… You start as an infant by building your procedural memory. Not your representational memory. That’s partly, perhaps, why you can’t remember your infancy. You actually don’t have that kind of representational memory there. What you do is you act. You learn to act. You build your body so that it can move. And you do that partly by experimenting with your own body. But you also do that by experimenting with your body in a context that’s shaped from the beginning by the presence of other people. So for example, you know, a child learns how to breastfeed. And its mouth is pretty wired up right at birth. And the rest of its body isn’t wired up very much at all. But its mouth is. And you might think, well that’s just a reflex. And Piaget would agree with that. It’s something built in that a baby can do right at birth. But even in the act of breastfeeding, the baby has to learn how to modify that reflex. So that it gets along with its mother. So even at the very beginning, with the most, you might think, the most primordial acts. There’s a sociological influence. And there’s a mutual dynamic going on that’s really, really important. It’s really important. And so in some sense for Piaget, the structure of society is implicitly built into the structure of the procedural memory system. And so one of the things you might think about that, and Piaget makes much of this because he looks at the relationship between play and dreams and imitation. So he’s kind of a quasi-psychoanalyst. One of the things that means is that coded in your behavior. Coded in your behavior. Is the social structure in which you emerged. And it’s coded in a way that you don’t actually understand. You just know how to act. And then you can figure out how you’re acting and you can extract out of that some of the social rules. But you don’t, you don’t, that doesn’t mean that you know the rules. It meant that the rules were built into you. Here’s a way of thinking about it. Like a wolf pack. A wolf pack knows how to operate together. It knows how to hunt, right? And each wolf knows where every other wolf is in the dominance hierarchy. But they don’t know they know that. They don’t have rules, right? They don’t have a code. They don’t have laws. What they have is behavioral regularities. Patterned behavioral regularities. And those are like a morality. They’re very, very, in fact, that’s exactly what they are. A dominance hierarchy of animals that aren’t representational. You know, that don’t have language. At least they don’t have language. The dominance hierarchy is a kind of morality. It’s a way of, it’s a way of setting up individual behavior within a social context to maximize cooperation and minimize competition. And so, well, and so Piaget would say that, you know, the origin of, and Franz de Waal, who’s a great primatologist, by the way, Franz F-R-A-N-S-D-D-E-W-A-A-L. He’s written a lot of books about the emergence of morality and chimpanzees in particular. And, you know, he follows the same line of logic. It’s that the morality emerges out of the interaction between the chimpanzees. And it’s bounded by the necessity that the actions take certain forms. So, for example, if the chimpanzees act in a way that each of them kills everyone else, it’s like that’s the end of it. It’s the end of the game. So that’s not a very functional morality. It doesn’t produce survival of the individuals. It doesn’t produce flourishing of the individuals, certainly. It produces extinction of the individuals and the death of the group. So, as far as de Waal would be concerned, from an evolutionary perspective, that sort of mode of interacting is a dead end. And so one of Piaget’s claims, implicit claims, is that, and this is one of the things that’s so brilliant about Piaget, is that the interactions between people, the social interactions between people, necessarily emerge within a kind of bounded space. And the space is the space of the game. So, we’re always playing games, always. And a game, you might think about a game as a microcosm of the world. And a small child’s game is a tiny, fractional microcosm of the world, but then you get up into adult games, and you could think about those maybe as multiplayer online games, that’s one good representation, but even more sophisticated things like being a lawyer, say, or like working at McDonald’s or any of those things, those are also forms of game. And people negotiate the rules, and that game is nested inside sets of broader games. And so, for Piaget, the games that children play kind of transform inexorably and what? Incrementally into the games that adults play. And a game that’s playable as an adult is a functional game. It’s an acceptable game. One of Piaget’s claims is that not only do people start playing games unconsciously, in a sense, and implicitly, but then they start to play games more consciously. They actually represent the games to some degree, at least in their actions. Then they start to learn the explicit rules of the game, but only later, after they know how to play it. And then, at the highest stage of moral development, they start to realize that not only are they players of games and followers of rules, but they’re also producers of rules. So, you start out not being able to play a game at all, then you can play a game with yourself, then you can play a game with a few other people, then you can play rule-governed games with lots of people, and then you realize that you make the rules and you can make new games. And that’s the highest level of moral development, according to Piaget. It’s brilliant. It’s bloody brilliant. He’s the first person that I ever really encountered who was able to put the notion of an emergent morality on something, you know, broadly commensurate with a scientific perspective. But you have to understand that in order to do that, he had to sacrifice a little bit of his notions of scientific realism, and that’s what makes him a constructivist. And so we’re going back to constructivism. So, he says the beginning, and this is the beginning of the development of knowledge, it does not unfold itself as a matter of chance, but forms a development. So, he said not only do knowledge structures change across time, and they’re embedded in the social world, but the manner in which they change across time actually has a bit of a structure. And so that would be the Piagetian stages of development, just so you know. Now, people have debated ever since Piaget proposed this, if those developmental stages are fixed and necessary, and if he identified them properly, and even as well, whether or not they could be sped up, which he always called the American problem, could you speed up these stages of development. And there’s a lot of argument about whether those stages exist in the manner that Piaget described, and whether they’re fixed and all of that, but that’s still the fundamental element of his theory. So, and since the cognitive domain has an absolute beginning, which means you’re here now, but at one point you weren’t, so there was an absolute beginning to you as a phenomena, it’s to be studied at the very stages known as formation. That’s his rationalization for being a genetic epistemologist, right? Someone who studies the formation of knowledge structures across time, like an embryologist, someone like that, right? A developmental embryologist. The first aim of genetic epistemology is therefore, if one can say so, to take psychology seriously, and to furnish verifications to any question which each epistemology necessarily raises, yet replacing the generally unsatisfying speculative or implicit psychology with controllable analysis. And so basically what he’s saying there is that you can guess, in a sense, like Freud did about developmental psychology, Freud kind of projected backwards from his patients into the dim mists of childhood, and came up with like a hypothetical developmental sequence, and Piaget said, well we’re not going to do that, we’re going to go run experiments on kids, often individuals, but sometimes multiple individuals. We’re going to observe exactly what they’re doing. He watched his kids in their cribs, for example, unbelievably intently, and with great… He was like an ethologist, which is a person who studies animal behavior observationally, like Franz de Waal. He was like an ethologist of children. Not exactly an experimental psychologist, although also an experimental psychologist, and he more or less established the field of developmental psychology. So he said, well let’s empirically analyze how children learn, and then maybe we can figure out how this knowledge process unfolds, and we don’t have to guess about it. We can use controllable analysis. And so you could say he introduced scientific methodology, even though he wasn’t a scientific realist. He introduced scientific methodology into the study of child development, but more importantly into the study of how knowledge structures unfold across time. So he was a philosopher as well, but a strange type of philosopher, because he was interested in how philosophy itself emerges in the mind of the child. And so that’s what Piaget was up to, and it’s quite remarkable. And he had an incredibly wide range of interests, befitting someone who probably had an IQ of like 190. I mean, he was seriously a smart guy, like way, way outside of the normal range. And so this is the sort of questions he was trying to answer. Well, how do you, on what do you base your judgments? Because you make judgments about things better or worse, say. Well, how? How do you come up with that ability? How does that emerge? And on what basis do you make the judgments? There’s a famous ruling on pornography that I believe the Supreme Court of the United States laid down, and one of the justices wrote something that’s become infamous or famous, depending on how you look at it. He said, well, I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see it. And that’s a notion of the incomplete ability of the representational system to represent the contents of implicit perception or the procedural system. You can know that you know something, but that doesn’t mean you can describe why. It doesn’t mean you can describe how you know it. And you don’t. How do you focus your eyes? Like, you don’t know how you focus your eyes. You just focus them, you know? How do you smile? Like this. Well, maybe less ugly, but you know, you can’t describe how you do it. You can’t describe the musculature. You can represent the output of the act, and you can do it, but you can’t represent it, and you’re just stuffed full of skills like that, which is another example of the way that you’re way more complicated than your understanding of you. You know, one of the things people often ask is how can we use the rat as a model of a person? Because, like, you know, a rat’s not much of a person, depending, of course, on the person. But the real answer to that is, well, compared to what? Like, compared to your understanding of a person, a rat is an excellent model of a person. So it’s not as good a model of a person as a person is, but compared to imagination, let’s say, it’s incomparably better. And, you know, that’s because we share, like, I don’t know what, 98% of our genes are some damn thing with rats. It’s like, it’s really up… I think we share 90% of our genes with yeast, for God’s sake. You know, and so we’re a lot more rat-like than yeast-like. So, and I think with chimps it’s over 99%, you know, so it’s not a bad model. Obviously it’s not perfect, but it always depends on what you compare it to. You know, and you hear animal rights activists say things like, well, we can replace that with computer simulations. It’s like, no, we can’t, because you can’t simulate what you don’t know, or at least not very well. So that’s a silly idea. You know, even though they have a point, it’s not so great to torture animals to death and all that, but… What are his norms? Well, that’s a good question. Where do norms for behavior come from? You have norms. When they’re violated, it annoys you. Doesn’t mean you know what your norms are, but you do kind of get a sense of what they are when they get violated. That really upset me. Well, what does that mean? Well, you don’t really know. You might have to think about that for, like, six months, why you got so upset about that, but you can notice that you got upset. And that means that you do have expectations and norms, let’s say, but you don’t know where they came from. Now, obviously, in part, they came from your intrinsic structure, but also, there are consequences of your learning, but even more importantly, there are consequences of your learning in a social environment. So all of those phenomena, which exceed your comprehension, determine the nature of your norms. And often, you only detect them when they’re violated. So, because why bother paying attention to something that works? You just don’t. No one does. They take it for granted. It’s almost the definition of something working. It’s like, you know, you think, I’m driving my car to school, and you think you’re in a car, but you’re really not in a car. You’re in a thing that gets you from home to school. And you can pretend that that is so annoying. You can pretend that… So you might think, well, the thing that I’m in is kind of a weird example, is this object with objective qualities that you call a car, but that isn’t exactly how you actually perceive or act towards it. What happens is that as long as it’s doing what it’s supposed to do, which means that its function is intact, not what it is, but its function, then it’s not going to be able to do anything. So, you might think, well, I’m in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, and I’m going to be in a car, procedures in the world in accordance with its understanding, and something goes wrong. What does the child do? Cries, right? It defaults. It defaults to this distress cry, and what happens is the adults move in with their superior skills and their enhanced understanding, and they mediate between the partial knowledge of the child and the actual complex world, and without the child. That’s why if you take your child to the mall, and just leave, you know, it doesn’t take very long for them to get really, really, really, really upset, you know, depending on the child. Some of them almost instantaneously, you know. One day I was in the Boston airport with my daughter, she was about three and a half maybe, and my son, he was about two, and we were there to pick someone up, it was just packed, and so I had them by the hand, you know, and I told my daughter a bunch, if she ever got separated from me in a crowd, just to sit down immediately wherever she was, and I would find her. Don’t move. Well, somehow I got separated from them, and I looked behind them, and they weren’t there, and I found out later she followed someone else who looked like me from behind. And I found her in about three minutes, you know, which is a long time, man, if you’re three years old at an airport, she was sitting there like paralyzed, you know, but her brother was with her, and he didn’t care at all. And the reason he didn’t care is because as far as he was concerned, she was an adult, but as far as she was concerned, she was an abandoned kid in an airport. You know, it was very hard on her, and it’s because, you know, she was protected from the complexity by her primordial representations and my presence, but as soon as my presence disappeared, the complexity came flooding back and just overwhelmed her. That’s chaos and uncertainty. Then she’d cry, and the cry says, help, I’m out of my league, I’m drowning, I’m drowning, you know, and she intervened. And so that’s how kids in part can get along in the world with their incomplete knowledge representations. It’s always also how you get along in the world. Because it’s incomplete beyond belief, but you’ve got all these other people around you and the whole damn society filling in the gaps. And so you walk around like you know what you’re doing, but you don’t. You just hardly know it all. You know, if you can fit into that system, great, you’ve got it on your side, and you can use it to fill the gaps. That’s also partly why people are so concerned with maintaining their social identity. Like the real identity. I’m not talking about some surface identity, but you see, because you have set up a set of expectations and desires about how you want the world to unfold. And you do that within a social context. And as long as your desires and the actions of the community match, which means you’re at home, roughly speaking, as long as they match, you stay emotionally regulated. You like that. That’s why you can stay calm in here. It’s like your desires are being played out by everyone else. Because one of your desires is that none of these crazy primates starts brandishing a knife, for example. Or even twitching. Or any of that sort of thing. You don’t want any of that. And if it starts happening, it’s like you get wary very quickly, and maybe you’ll look, and maybe you won’t, and maybe you’ll freeze. Maybe you’ll get the hell out of there, or maybe you’ll get aggressive. But that match has to maintain itself intact, or your entire nervous system gets dysregulated. And the reason for that is that as soon as that match is disrupted, the underlying complexity and chaos of the world reveals itself, and so does your inadequacy. And then your body defaults into predator mode, and the fact that you don’t know anything, and that everything is really complicated becomes very evident to you very quickly. And people hate that. And that’s the worst thing that can happen to them. The bottom falling out of their world. And so that happens more when your fundamental presumptions about things are challenged. And then you have to solve the problem of what constitutes a fundamental presupposition. How do you know which presupposition is peripheral and which one’s central? And you can tell in part, because the more upset you get about something, the more central it is that that thing’s about to your entire structure of belief. And that’s one way of getting into that unconscious structure of belief from a psychoanalytic perspective. So one of the things that happens to me, for example, as a therapist, is I’ll be talking to my clients, and they’ll be talking about something difficult, and all of a sudden they’ll cry. And they often don’t know why, so I stop them right there. It’s like, something went through your mind. Something happened. And the cry indicates that you’ve moved beyond your domain of competence out into the unknown world, all of a sudden, into chaos. What’s that chaos? What exactly happened? And people, you know, they’re usually embarrassed that they cry, but often they can remember what flitted through their mind, and it’s a represent… it’s some encounter with the chaos beyond their conceptual systems that produces that emotional response. And then we can dig into that, find out that’s a trauma, especially if it’s more than a year and a half old. Those can be of various depths and profundities. You know, sometimes they’re so bad that the person just breaks down completely, and they never put themselves together. You know, that’s when something’s just walloped you. It’s hit you right at the bottom of your axiomatic structure, so to speak, right at the trunk. But when you’re doing therapy with people, and you watch how they respond emotionally, you look for those tiny eruptions of negative emotion. And those are like holes in their conceptual structure. And those have to be sewed up by them and you in the process of dialogue. You figure out, okay, there was a bit of unexplored territory there that manifested itself. It produced an emotional response in you that indicates that you’ve reverted in some sense to childhood. That would be the Freudian interpretation. Now we have to figure out what it was that’s in that hole, what caused that tear. And then we have to go back and articulate it and analyze it and study it until we can sew it up. And get to the gist of it to make it into an adaptive story. And then you can leave it behind. And it actually produces neurological transformation. As you do that, the memories in some sense actually move their psychophysiological location. You could say, their location in your psyche. But you can also note that the brain systems that are handling the memories aren’t the same. So they’re much more limbic. They’re way lower and closer to the emotional centers when it’s still raw trauma. And by the time it’s fully articulated, it’s more represented in an articulated story. A causal story. And that’s partly why writing about emotional events actually helps you overcome them. And it’s possible that writing about how it is that you overcome emotional events in general is actually the best kind of therapy. Not how do you solve a particular problem. But how is it that you orient yourself in the world so that you solve the class of the fact that there are problems. That’s the ultimate story. And I think that’s the hero myth. And I also think that that’s the knowledge generating process that Piaget is talking about. That’s because you’re constantly overcoming problems in the world. And the problems are that you don’t know enough to get what you want from the world. And so you get that mismatch. There’s you’ve got whole brain systems that are designed to do nothing but detect that mismatch. Like crucial central brain structures. And we’ll talk about that a lot when we get into the physiology. So, alright. On what is an individual based’s judgements? What are his norms? How are they validated? How do you know if you’re right about your norms? What’s the interest of such norms for the philosophy of science in general? That’s a really tough one. It’s like, well you have norms and expectations as a human being. And because of that, they have a determining influence on the manner in which you conduct science. So for example, here’s one of the problems with a straight realist view. So we could be having a discussion and I could say, well you know, that tile is to the right of that tile. And then I could say, well this brick is smaller than that brick. And then I could say, you know, the roof is white, really quite white there and it’s dark back there. And like after about 20 statements like that, you’re just going to want to slap me. And the reason for that is that, well those statements are perfectly valid representations of fact, but there’s an infinite number of facts and most of them are irrelevant. And that’s the thing. That’s the thing. The facts have to be relevant. Like if you come to a lecture and all the person does is tell you irrelevant facts, what happens? You’ve been in lots of lectures like that. What happens? When you start fantasizing about something that might be more worthwhile. You know, or you go to sleep. Because your brain is a lot smarter than you are. It figures, hell, if all we’re going to get exposed to here is an infinite number of irrelevant facts, we might as well have a nap until something important happens. So it’s true. It’s exactly how it works. Now this is going to get big. Isn’t that what happens next? No. So, okay, so, and then how does the fact that the child, children think differently affect our presumption of fact itself? Children live in the world. They think differently about the world, but yet they survive. And so, well, I already mentioned a partial solution to that. Adults intercede, you know, around the edges, around the borders. Children do this all the time, eh? So it’s called referencing. And they do it two ways. So for example, if you’re in a room with your child, maybe two, eh? And a mouse runs across, the child will orient to it, watch it, track it. That’s pretty much unconscious. And the mother, let’s say, will do that too. And then the child looks at the mouse and then looks at the mother. And the reason is, is because the child doesn’t know what a mouse is. And so then it looks at the mother to read from the mother’s face, which is a projection screen of emotions, how to classify the mouse in terms of import. And if the mother is like all calm about it and gives the kid a pat, it’s like, you know, okay, whatever, you know. Not danger. That’s what the mouse is first. Danger? Not danger. It’s way after that that it’s a mouse. You think, no, it’s a mouse to begin with. It’s like, these things are not so straightforward. They are not so straightforward. So anyways, if the mother climbs up on the table and has a screaming fit, then the child’s already prepared, because of this anomaly, to be emotionally responsive. The child looks at the mother’s face. It’s got terror on it. The child thinks, small danger? Big danger! It’s like phobia, phobia, phobia. Now, all kids, that won’t happen too, because some are very emotionally robust. But if the child’s very high in neuroticism, trait neuroticism, the probability that they’ll develop a permanent, semi-permanent fear of the mouse is extraordinarily high. And that’s what should happen, because the mother tells you what the mouse is, and the child is very, very, very dangerous. And that’s the first thing you want to know about something. Is it safe or is it dangerous? And that’s a tricky one, eh? Because whether something is safe or dangerous is not exactly an objective fact. There’s a guy named J.J. Gibson who wrote a book called An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, which I would highly recommend. And his claim in that book, it’s a real work of genius, I believe, is that when you walk towards a cliff, you’re going to see a mouse, and you’re going to see a mouse. And what I believe is that when you walk towards a cliff, you don’t see a cliff. You don’t see a cliff and infer danger. What you see is a falling-off place, and you infer cliff. And you can tell that. Some of you have vertigo. You go up on the 26th floor, out into a balcony, and it’s like, you don’t want to go near the edge. Maybe you feel like you’re going to throw yourself over, because people have that kind of, what if I fell? What if I jumped over? It’s like, stay away from that. It’s like, that perception of the danger precedes your perception of the balcony and the object. Now, you know, that’s how your brain is wired. The danger’s first, the object’s second. So when people with blindsight, who I’ve talked about before, who think they’re blind, they can’t see, and they tell you that, they can still detect fearful faces. And you can detect their detection by measuring their skin conductance. And so their eyes are mapping right onto their fear and reflex systems, without any intermediary of objective perception whatsoever. So, don’t be thinking that what you see in the world is the objective world, and then infer its meaning. It could easily be exactly backwards. And it looks like, if you look at how the brain is set up, that it is in fact actually backwards. Or at least parallel. But the danger-not-danger perception has to be very, very, very, very fast. And so it precedes the more elaborate, cognitive interpretations, even the perceptions, because it actually takes a while to see something. Because it’s really complicated to see something. And so you can’t just wait around to see the damn thing before you act. You’re just not fast enough. So they say, if you’re a pro tennis player, the time it takes the ball to leave your opponent’s racket to get to you is not long enough for you to plan any motor act. So what you’re doing is, you’ve got the mo- you disinhibit the motor act by looking at the stance of your opponent, and watching. And by the time they hit it, you’re already prepared for the response. Because you’re just not- It’s coming at 120 miles an hour. It’s like, it’s going 50 feet. You don’t have the reflexes for it. So your eyes are making your body ready without, in some sense, without your conscious perception. You become conscious if you make a mistake. In fact, that’s kind of what consciousness is for. It’s like detect, error, fix. Detect, error, fix. That’s consciousness. It’s not plan what you’re going to do next, although it’s not that simple either. So what are the problems that Piaget was trying to address? Well, what are numbers? What does it mean for there to be space? What do we mean when we talk about time? How did we come up with that concept? What does speed mean? How do we know an object is permanent? How do we know that an object stays the same across sets of transformations? That’s a very classic Piagetian problem. So let’s say you give a kid a ball of clay, and then you crush it so it’s now a cylinder. It’s like, is that the same thing? Or is it a different thing? And the answer is, well, it’s the same thing and it’s a different thing, but there’s something about it that remained constant across the transformations. And so one of the things that Piaget is trying to figure out is what remains constant across transformations, because you might think about that as a real fact. Protons are like that, right? They remain constant across transformations. And so we assume that they’re pretty damn real. And they last, I don’t know how long protons last. It’s like, I don’t know what it is. It’s some tens of billions of… So don’t worry, your protons are going to just sit right there and behave. You know, so they last for a very, very, very long time across sets of transformations, so we can regard them as real. He was interested in why children play, and why there are patterns in play, and how that’s related to dreams. And he was really interested in the fact that we imitate other people. And this is another part of Piaget’s staggering genius in my estimation, because he was one of the early developmental thinkers who understood that our capacity for learning was not so much mediated by language, as it was mediated by our capacity to use our bodies to represent the bodies of other people. And that’s mind-boggling. It’s a mind-boggling idea. So, you know, you hear monkey see, monkey do, but it’s actually not true. They’re not very good at imitating. Octopuses, or octopi, they can imitate, actually. So if you give an octopus a bottle with a cork in it, and there’s a crab in the cork, it can figure out how to get out the cork and snake out the crab. But if you get an octopus to watch another octopus do that, it’ll learn to do it faster. Those things are smart. And that’s partly because they’re all tentacles, right? And so they actually have something they can do something with, like our hands. There’s our tentacles, you know. And octopi can operate in the world because they have tentacles. And you know, you hear about the superhuman intelligence of things like dolphins and whales. It’s like, yeah, no. They’re basically test tubes. You know, what are they going to do? Snout up a city? It’s like, no, they’re not going to do that. They can’t manipulate the world. So whatever their intelligence is, it’s way different than ours. Okay, imitation. So partly what you’re doing all the time is imitating other people. All of you are imitating each other right now. You can tell, because look around. You’re all doing exactly the same thing. So it’s mass imitation. And that’s really a huge part of social structure, is that we’re constantly imitating each other. And so that means that your body and her body are very much matched physiologically right now. You’re in the same state. And you can tell because you basically have the same expression. And as long as all you crazy primates, violent primates, have the same expression on, you can pretty much be sure that all of you are thinking and about to do approximately the same thing. And so you can keep that match between your desire slash expectation and reality happening. And that’s why we have a face. It’s so that other people know what the hell we’re up to. And that’s why you’re always watching people’s faces. Because you want to see what they’re up to. And that’s why you have whites around your iris. Gorillas don’t. And so that’s because I can see exactly where your eyes are pointing. Because they’re highlighted by that white. And I’m unbelievably good at detecting the precise direction of your gaze. And so if you stand on the corner and look up at buildings, other people will stand beside you and look up. Because they think, well, that guy would be standing there pointing his eyes into the sky, unless there was something of interest to a primate like me. And so this classic social psychology experiment, you’ll get people gathered around trying to figure out what the hell it is that you’re pointing your eyes at. Right? Because that indicates intense interest. Interest in something valuable that I might be able to share or partake in if I can figure out what it is that you’re up to. And so all your ancestors who didn’t have nicely defined eyes, they all got killed or they didn’t mate. And that’s why you have these beautiful white eyes with this, like, colourful iris in the middle. So that people can tell what the hell you’re up to. And they’re more likely to cooperate with you, more likely to mate with you, and less likely to kill you. Which is, you know, probably a good thing. All things considered. And so, you know, if you look at the same thing that someone else is looking at, you’re imitating them. And one of the things that’s interesting is that if you’re looking at the same thing that someone else is looking at, and you inhabit the same value structure, then your emotional responses are going to be very much akin to one another. And you can tell that when you go to a movie, and you watch the hero, and you embody the hero while you’re doing so, and the emotions that you produce inside of you by imitating the hero on the screen enable you to figure out what the hero is going through, and you can learn from that. And so that’s a very complex form of imitation, and we do that when we tell stories, or we watch stories. And those stories are really complicated, because as we already outlined, they’re not just factual representations of someone’s action during a day. They’re representations of the important things that the person did, the meaningful things. And so when you go see a movie, all you’re doing is watching meaningful things, if the movie’s any good. And you know that, because well, if the movie isn’t meaningful, well then, you leave. You’re bored. And the fact that it’s meaningful is what keeps you in the seat. And you don’t necessarily know why. In fact, you often have no idea why it’s meaningful. It’s like watching Pinocchio rescue his father from a whale. It’s like, what the hell? You know? Why is that meaningful? Well, you don’t know, but it is. So, moral concerns. Well, we already talked about Piaget’s concern about morality. Oh boy. This is really not good. Okay. Here’s a proposition, constructivist proposition. Knowledge does not begin in the eye, by which he means there are kind of two ways of looking at the world. There’s more, but we’ll start with that. One is that all of your knowledge comes from outside sense data. And that’s kind of a behaviorist claim. And before that, it’s an empiricist claim. And then, the other idea is, no, that can’t be right, because you have internal structures that enable you to look at the world and interpret it. And so, some of those might be implicit, axiomatic. Like the fact that you have two eyes, and you look outward into the world, and that you can hear, and that you can touch. It’s like, the fact of those senses isn’t dependent on the empirical reality for those senses to manifest themselves. They’re already built into you. And people like Kant, for example, made the proposition that we had a priori knowledge structures, and that we used them to interpret the world. And so, it’s different than empiricism. And so, what Piaget is saying, well, neither of those are right exactly. It’s not like you will learn everything from the world, through your senses. And it’s not as if you project everything onto the world as interpretation. It’s something in between, and it’s a dynamic. And so, it’s like bootstrapping. That’s the right way to think about it. You know, when your computer boots up, that means bootstrapping. It’s off, and then a bunch of simple processes occur, and then out of those simple processes, some more complex processes emerge, and then out of those, some more complex processes emerge, and all of a sudden, your computer is there. Well, that’s kind of what Piaget thinks happens to you. You bootstrap yourself. And so, you have got a couple of reflexes to begin with, like the sucking reflex, for example. And you’ve got some proclivities, like maybe you can sort of flip your hand, or you develop that, and you have reflexes. So, you know, if you blow on a baby, for example, the baby will go like this. It’s built into it. It’s like a, it’s a startle reflex, essentially. So, that startle reflex is there right from the beginning. It’s a whole body reflex. And, you know, if you stroke the bottom of their feet, their feet will sort of curl up, and if you put your finger in their hands, even a newborn, if you put your finger in their hands, you can lift them right up. And it’s sort of, well, clinging ape thing, you know, because chimpanzee infants cling to their mother for like five years. And so, that reflex is still there. So, the kid comes into the world born with these simplistic, low-resolution procedures that enable it to get a foothold on the world. And then out of that, the child emerges. And that’s, so the constructivist idea is that, well, it isn’t like you have your heads full of fully developed axiomatic structures, and it isn’t that you get all your knowledge from the world. It’s that you have a bit of structure there to begin with that gives you a toehold on the world, and then you act in the world. And as you act, you generate information, and out of that information, you make the structures inside of you, and you make the world. That’s a constructivist idea, is that you take whatever’s there, this tremendous complexity, and you sort it into you and the world. And so, that goes back to that William James idea about that initial chaos. It’s a hard concept to grasp, because that isn’t really how we think. You know, we think that there’s an objective world, and there’s a subjective world, and that the objective world is just there, and the subjective world is just there, and the objective world is just there, and the subjective world is maybe a subset of that. But that is not Piagetian presupposition. It’s not a presupposition of phenomenologists in general, who we’ll talk about later. So here’s one example of how to think about this, in a sense. It’s like, you know, you think, as Piaget said, you kind of think that your representations of the world are fixed. So, we’ll go back to the you’re in a long-term relationship, and the person betrays you scenario, right? So, you’ve been with this person 10 years, you assume fidelity and faithfulness and honesty and all of that, you weave a shared narrative, you both inhabit that, it structures your existence and regulates your motion, then you find out that the person has not only betrayed you once, but multiple times. It’s like, okay, what you thought isn’t what happened, but here’s the weird thing, you see, because you interpreted the world, obviously, within the confines of that relationship, and you had, you know, obviously you had an interpretation, but there was also a world. That’s the world you thought you lived in. It’s like, those were facts. Well, all of a sudden, those aren’t facts. They’re not at all facts. And so what happens, that’s that descent into the underworld. It’s like, all of a sudden, what happens is that past that you thought was fixed, now becomes this weird mixture of fantasy, because you’re wondering, what is it that happened then? And you’re going to run through all sorts of fantasies, some of them are going to be really dark, you know, really dark about what happened in the state of the world and all that, and those are unconscious fantasies, and that’s mingled inextricably with the world, right? Because you don’t know the facts anymore, which kind of suggests that maybe you never did know them, and that’s a pretty strange thing, because, you know, you’re operating as if you’ve got this factual representation of the world, but it can be upended like that. And so that makes you think, well, what about these facts? They’re kind of hard to get a handle on. You see this a lot in court room situations, because, of course, what the court decides is what happened. And the answer is, we don’t exactly know, because you can keep making the context of interpretation wider and wider. So, you know, maybe you bring your partner to court because they’ve betrayed you, let’s say, and you’re trying to get a divorce settlement predicated on that, but then they tell a bunch of stories about how you were just as miserable as you could possibly be, and that anybody with any sense would have betrayed you and never told you about it, because, you know, that’s just what a normal, sensible person would do. And so then the question is, well, were you actually betrayed? And if you were, well, who was it that betrayed you? Was it your partner or was it you? Or was it your bloody mother or your father who taught you to act that way, or who didn’t teach you? It’s like, it’s a hell of a thing, because you can just keep altering the interpretive context, and within it the facts shift around. And then you might say, well, they’re not facts. It’s like, yeah, yeah, you can say that, but it’s more complicated than that by a large margin. Anyways, so Piaget’s notion is essentially that, well, this is how I interpret it. This is sort of, this is my thinking in some sense, but I’m offering it to you as a scheme for helping you understand Piaget. It’s like Jerome Bruner, famous cognitive psychologist, said, we seem to have no other way of describing lived time except in the form of a narrative. And a narrative as far as I can tell, I think this is the same thing as one of Piaget’s knowledge representations. As far as I can tell, there’s a representation of you and there’s a representation of the future, and there’s behaviors that you use to transform one into the other. And so when Piaget talks about, so this is kind of where the mind meets the body, that’s how it looks to me. It’s like, you have a conception of you, and you have something you’re aiming at, you want to have happen. Those are both representations. But when you act in the world, those aren’t representations anymore. Those are actually actions. And so mind transforms into body when you act out your notion. And that’s sort of how the mind is linked to the body, as far as I can tell. And so what Piaget says is that the behaviors are built before the representation. And so we’re going to take a look at that. So here’s Piaget’s notion of assimilation and accommodation. Whereas other animals cannot alter themselves except by changing their species. That’s through Darwinian means, right? So what happens is, a bear is a kind of solution to a set of problems. And they’re the problems that the bear’s environment presents. And the bear is just a bear, so it’s sort of like bears were 10,000 years ago. And the only way the bear can solve a new problem, basically, is by generating new random bears, which is what it does when it reproduces, and hoping that one of those more random bears is a better fit for whatever random change might occur in the environment. That’s the whole Darwinian issue, right? You can’t predict which way the environment’s going to go. And so what you do is, you take your structure and you vary it, and you throw those out into the world. And some animals do that expensively, so they have infants that they have to program to that specific environment, but it takes a lot of investment. And some creatures do that cheaply, like mosquitoes. It’s like, they don’t care for their kids, but they have a million of them. So like, who cares if 999,998 die? There’s still twice as many of you as there were. So those are two different reproductive strategies. And you could think about all those mosquito offspring as new mosquito ideas, in embodied form. And most of them are bad ideas, and so the environment just wipes them out. Well, Piaget’s point is, we do the same thing with our cognitive structures, and that’s the thing that’s so interesting about people, in some sense that we’ve internalized the Darwinian problem. And so when you think about the future, what you’re doing is generating a multiplicity of potential environments, and then you’re generating a sequence of avatars of yourself to live in those fictional futures. And then you watch what happens as that avatar lives in each of those fictional futures, and if the avatar fails, you don’t act that out. It’s bloody brilliant. It’s brilliant. That’s what our brain does. It’s like it hypothesizes potential futures. It runs simulations, and it kills them. And that can be really painful, but it beats the hell out of dying yourself, or maybe sometimes you won’t think so, because it really can be painful. But it’s something that, as far as we know, only human beings can really do, right? We invent possible futures, and invent possible future selves, and kill them off in our imagination. And that’s what you’re doing in an argument. That’s what an argument is. It’s like, well, here’s an avatar. A representational avatar, you know, that’s based on certain axioms, and I’ll articulate it, and you’ll articulate yours. And we’ll have them have a fight, and whichever one survives, we’ll accept as true, and we’ll move forward and act that out. And, you know, arguments can be pretty damn intense, but hypothetically, they’re not as intense as acting out a stupid idea. That’s the thing, right? Better to have some conflict, and reach resolution, in an abstract sense, than to embody your stupidity and die. And so, you know, it’s sort of a trade-off between anxiety and annihilation, or pain. Whereas other animals cannot alter themselves except by changing their species, man can transform himself by transforming the world, and can structure himself by constructing structures. And these structures are his own. They’re not eternally predestined, either from within, or from without. Also, Piaget, you know, he’s a constructivist. He believes that there’s something that your bio-sense can’t do, and that’s what he’s trying to do. And so, he’s trying to change the way that he’s a constructivist. He believes that there’s something that your biology brings to the table, and sets up the parameters, let’s say, within which you can play games. But within those parameters, there’s a very wide range of games that you could play. And so, it’s not a biological determinism, even though it’s a biological framing. And you can think about it like a chess game. You know, let’s assume that the rules of chess are biologically determined, just for the sake of argument. You can still play a near infinite number of chess games. And so, it’s the same with you. You come into the world with a set of built-in axioms. That’s sort of your body and your nervous system. But you can play a very large number of games within that set of frames. And one of the things that’s very interesting about that, something that’s very mysterious to me, is this is a game that I played before with students, so I’m going to play it with you, if you don’t mind. So we’re going to play a game. You ready? Okay, you move first. Right, exactly. You don’t know what to do, right? Well, that’s so interesting, because I basically made the presupposition that you could do anything. You’re completely free. And well, what do you do? You throw up your hands. It’s like, you don’t know what to do. I’m so free. It’s like, free to do what? Well, that’s not freedom. It’s just nothing. But if I said, well, look, what we’re going to do instead is when I move my arm right, you’re going to move your arm right. So let’s do that. Okay? So, I’m going to go like that. Good. And then I’ll go like that. And then we’ll have a little dance. Yeah, yeah. So you can play a game like that with a kid instantly. And they like that. They’ve got that, man. And so, I’ve got some pictures of that. I’ll show you that in a bit. But even a newborn baby, if you stick out your tongue, they can stick their tongue out back. And now, if you think about that, that’s just absolutely mind-boggling that they can do that. And they really can. They really do seem to be able to do that right at the moment of birth. And so, you know, you hear babies have no theory of mind. It’s like, Uh, yeah, no. They can imitate. That’s pretty bloody amazing, man. Like, you haven’t seen robots that can do that yet. Although there are robots now that you can teach by moving their arms. You move their arms, and then they’ll do it. And so, you can actually program them by moving them. And then they’ll just repeat it. And so, they’re getting damn close to imitation. They’re really getting close. And then look the hell out, man. Because they’re going to be imitating each other as well as us. And they’re going to do it so fast, you just won’t be able to believe it. So, that’s coming. The organism adapts itself by materially constructing new forms to fit themselves into those of the universe. Whereas intelligence extends this creation by constructing mental structures, which can be applied to those of the environment. That’s the Darwinian idea that I just mentioned. You know, the guys that are building the autonomous cars, like, they don’t think they’re building autonomous cars. They know perfectly well what they’re doing. They’re like fleets of mutually intercommunicating autonomous robots. And each of them will be able to teach the other, because their nervous system will be the same. And when there’s 10 million of them, when one of them learns something, all 10 million of them will learn it at the same time. So, they’re not going to have to be very bright before they’re very, very, very smart. Because us, you know, we learn something, you have to imitate it. It’s like, God, that’s hard. Or I have to explain it to you, and you have to understand it, and then you have to act it out. We’re not connected wirelessly with the same platform. But robots, they are. And so once those things get a little bit smart, they’re not going to stop at a little bit smart for very long. They’re going to be unbelievably smart, like, overnight. And they’re imitating the hell out of us right now, too. Because we’re teaching them how to understand us. Every second of every day, the net is learning what we’re like. It’s watching us, it’s communicating with us, it’s imitating us. And it’s going to know, it already knows in some ways more about us than we know about ourselves. You know, there’s lots of reports already, and I’m sure you’ve heard of them. And so maybe you’re pregnant, and that’s just tilting you a little bit, right? To interest in things that you might not otherwise be interested in. The net tracks that, and it tells you what you’re after. It does that by offering you an ad that you’re interested in. And so you’re going to be able to do that. And so you’re going to be able to do that. And so you’re going to be able to do that. And so you’re going to be able to do that. And so you’re going to be able to do that. And so it tells you what you’re after. It does that by offering you an advertisement. It’s reading your unconscious mind. So, well, so that’s what’s happening. So, alright, so what’s the motive for development? Dysequilibria, that’s a Piagetian term. Well, this is a life is suffering idea. It’s like, why learn something? Because you’re wrong. Who cares? It makes you suffer. You care. If you run out a little scheme in the world, a little action pattern, you don’t get what you want. Especially if you’re two years old, you burst into tears and cry. And why is that? It’s because you don’t know where you are, and you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s like time for some negative emotion. It indicates that you’re wrong. And that’s terrible in some sense, because it almost always means that to learn requires pain. Now, I don’t believe that exactly. People are curious, you know. And to go out and be curious and to learn new things can be very exciting. And so, what it seems to be is that there’s a rate of learning that’s too fast, and that hurts you. That’s what makes you cry. But if you get the rate just right, you’re just opening up enough novelty so that you can benefit from the possibilities. That gives you a dopamine kick, fundamentally. You can benefit from the possibilities without being overwhelmed by the unexpected element of it. And you can tell when that’s happening. And this is one of the coolest things, as far as I’m concerned. And I learned this partly from Piaget. It’s like, in order to withstand suffering, let’s say, your life has to have some meaning. That means a bunch of things. It means that part of the way that you overcome suffering is by making the suffering into something meaningful. And I don’t mean that metaphysically, I mean it technically. You made a mistake, it causes you suffering, you learn something about it, you don’t make that mistake again. It’s real adaptation. It’s not defense against death anxiety or something like that. It’s real adaptation. But more importantly, the reality that you learn through pain is the oldest reality, we’ll say. It’s really old. It’s as old as nervous systems. And so, you’ve adapted so that you’ve learned to transform your knowledge structures in a way that will minimize your potential exposure to future pain at a rate you can tolerate, or maybe even enjoy. And so what’s happening is you don’t actually like being static. It bores you. But you don’t like being thrown into chaos. It’s like, no, a little bit of that’s fine. What you want is you want to be opening up your knowledge structures on the periphery to transformation, voluntary transformation. That’s voluntary exploration. And so, some things manifest a little bit of interest in chaos. And so you put a little feeler out there that you’re willing to let die. And it comes apart, and you gather a bit of information, it comes back together stronger. And you do that all the time if you’re smart and you’re looking for new information, forging for new information. And that means you keep taking little bits of yourself apart and reconstructing them. And over time, that keeps you alive and active. Part of the reason you’re alive is because you’re dying all the time. All the cells in your body. If they don’t die, you get cancer, and that’s it. You’re done. You’re a very, very tight balance between death and life. At every single level, including the cognitive level. And it’s not that fun to learn something because you have to kill something you already know in order to learn it. That’s another Piagetian observation. Because you’re always interpreting something within a structure. And if that interpretation is wrong, even in a microwave, kill that structure. And it’s a biological structure. It actually hurts to kill it. But maybe you can generate something new in its stead. And if you get the dynamic right, let the rate right, then you find that exhilarating, not painful. And that’s, well, you can tell when you’re doing that. As far as I can tell, you can tell when you’re doing that because you’re engaged in the world in a meaningful way. And what your nervous system is doing is signaling to you that you’re not in a static place. That’s death. You’re not in a chaotic place. That’s death. You’re balanced between the static and the chaotic such that the static structures are transforming at exactly the right rate to keep you on top of the environmental transformations. And so you’re surfing. In Hawaii, surfing was sacred. Well, that’s why. It’s like, can you tell someone how to surf? Well, you can’t. Because they have to go out there and dynamically interact with the wave. But they can stay on top of the wave. And that’s what you have to do. And if you’re staying on top of the wave properly, then it’s exhilarating. And that’s the kind of meaning that it rejuvenates you, literally. It makes you able to tolerate the suffering in life. And it’s not metaphysical, precisely. It’s because that is what you’re doing at that moment. You’re overcoming your limitations. And of course, that’s what you have to do in order to know and to learn. Because you want to be doing both of those things at the same time. That’s what you do when you play a game properly. Your parents say, doesn’t matter whether you win or lose. This is a Piagetian observation. It’s how you play the game. What does that mean? Well, it means that you should play the game in a manner that increases the probability that you’re going to be invited to play many games in the future. Perfect. So you master the skills of the game, but at the same time you master a set of meta-skills, which is the skills that remain constant across transforming sets of games. And that’s what it means to play fair. That’s the bloody basis of morality, as far as Piaget was concerned. It’s so damn smart. You know, because you think all interactions have this game-like quality. They’re sort of bounded. But there are commonalities across all the games. And you want to extract out the commonalities, and you want to learn to inhabit the universe that’s made out of the commonalities between games. And that’s what it means to be a good person, roughly speaking. You know, it varies to some degree from culture to culture, obviously, because each culture is a game unto itself. But there’s something that transcends that, that’s the nature of games across game contexts. And you know that. You know that. Because you can tell the difference between a game and something that isn’t a game instantly. Everyone knows. And it’s not like there’s only one kind of game. There’s hockey, say, and there’s World of Warcraft. I know it’s way out of date, but so am I, so it’s not surprising. But the fact that those things are very, very different in many, many ways, doesn’t stop you from identifying the underlying commonalities. You know they’re games. And they’re like stories, in a sense. And that’s a Piagetian observation. Very, very smart. So, why do you develop? Well, it’s because your previous idea there, your previous frame, micro-frame, let’s say, doesn’t fit the circumstance. And so, something happens. You go like this. What’s up? Well, the world isn’t what you thought. And there’s something wrong with your knowledge structure. This is partly what makes Piaget a pragmatist. You see, the pragmatists, American School of Philosophy, William James and his followers, they knew that we had bounded knowledge. We don’t have infinite knowledge. And so they thought, well, that means we can’t really be right about anything, because we’re definitely wrong. And so how is it that you can operate in the world, given that you’re always wrong? And the answer is, you set up a procedure that has rules for what constitutes true within the procedure itself. So you play a game, and at the same time you set up the rules. So you might say, well, is this joke funny? And then the answer is, well, do people laugh? Now, when I tell the joke, do they laugh? And if the answer is yes, then it’s funny enough. You’ve taken a particular definition of funny. You’ve transformed it into a local phenomena. And if your behaviour matches the prediction in that local area, you say, well, that’s true enough. Is it like transcendentally funny? Well, maybe you’d have to tell it to 200 different groups of people to figure that out, but mostly it’s funny enough so that when I predicted what would happen when I told the joke, that’s what happened. And you don’t predict it, by the way. You desire it. It’s not the same thing. Because prediction has no motivation in it, but desire does. And we’re always motivated. Always, always motivated. So, well, here’s a way of thinking about the Piagetian system. So two-year-olds, they’re very chaotic. And they bounce between one highly motivated emotional state to another. And so the first thing that the two-year-old has to do is get his or her act together. More or less inside. And so, you know, two-year-olds still have tantrums and they still cry a lot and they still run around like mad being joyful crazily, which you have to train out of them right away, because it’s nothing but disruptive. And it’s one of the most painful things about being a parent. It’s like 90% of the time you’re going, stop having fun! Stop having fun! You know, and then you turn into a teenager and your parents get what they ask for. And so, but because positive emotion is so impulsive and so chaotic, it’s really hard to manifest itself, it’s manifested within a predictable environment. And so you’re dampening down your child’s enthusiasm non-stop. But it has to be regulated, because happiness is impulsive and chaotic. And people don’t like to think that, because they think, oh, we should be happy. It’s like, mannocks are happy, but they’re maniacs. That’s where the word comes from. Like they’re just… It’s not good. They’re too happy. Way too happy. Like someone who’s way too stoned on meth or on cocaine. And I mean that technically, because they’re very similar biochemical states. And cocaine produces happiness. Pretty much in its pure form. So does meth, very rapidly. And so, it’s just not good. You know, you lose judgement. Happy people do not have good judgement. They’re too happy. They get dopey. It’s like, you know, it’s like irrational stock market bubbles. Oh boy! It’s always gonna go up! It’s like, no. No, it’s not always gonna go up. But that’s what you think when you’re happy. Anyways, a two year old has to get all these motivational systems sort of hammered into one thing, internally. Now, in some sense from the Piagetian perspective, that happens within the child. He thinks of the child as egocentric. And that development takes place internally. And then it’s not until the child’s, let’s say about three, that it can learn to bring its controlled unity into a unity with another controlled unity, and make a game. That happens around three. And so, what happens is that instead of the child only pursuing his or her goals, although modulated by the social environment, the child is able to communicate with another child and establish a shared goal. And that’s what happens when they play. And so, obviously, you play Monopoly. That’s what you’re doing. But when you play Peek-A-Boo, you’re doing the same thing. It’s like with your parent, you’re actually playing with object permanence. Dad’s gone. Oh look, Dad’s here! Ha ha ha! Look, he’s there! Dad’s gone. Dad’s here. Dad’s gone. Dad’s here. And you can do that for like three hours. They never get tired of it. Because every time you reappear, it’s a miracle. And you watch babies. It’s so funny. Like, you go like this, and they go… Then you pop back out. They’re so happy! They’re just overjoyed! And then you take yourself away, and they’re like, what’s going on? What’s going on? Bang! You reappear. They don’t have a real memory, you know? It’s like, reality is manifesting itself in all its freshness, moment by moment. And they can’t remember. There are neurological conditions that do that. So sometimes, and there are people that this has happened to, so they get hippocampal damage, and so they can’t move short-term information into long-term storage. And there’s this one guy, very interesting case. He was a concert pianist, and he had a hell of a neurological injury. He could still play the piano. He couldn’t remember. He had amnesia. He couldn’t move information from short-term storage into long-term storage. So, as far as he was concerned, it was always like 10 days before he had his accident. He never got past that. He was stuck in that moment. But he could still play the piano, and it was so interesting. You watch him. There are films of him. Before he sat down to play the piano, he’d have like a seizure. And then he could play the piano. Procedural memory. That was intact. And then at the end, he’d kind of have a little seizure, and then he’d go back to being who he was. But he had these notebooks, and all he did was write in them. Over and over, the same thing. It’s as if I have never seen this before. It’s as if I’ve never seen this before. It’s as if I’ve never seen this before. So he’s in this ecstatic state, where everything was novel and new and pure and paradisal. But there was no continuity. And so, when his wife would come to visit him, he would just be overwhelmed to see her. Overwhelmed every time. And even if she just left the room and came back in, it was exactly the same thing. It’s just like the kid. It’s like no object permanence. And every time the face appears, it’s a staggering. And you can see that in the reflexes of the child. And that’s without object permanence. And so that’s what Piaget was talking about with regards to object permanence. It’s very, very cool. So, anyways, the two year old’s a collection of these sort of random motivations, more or less gets his or her act together by about three, if they’re being socialized properly. And that means that the parents are doing their best to make the child acceptable to other children. That’s your damn job as a parent. You have to understand that. Because if your child isn’t acceptable to other children, they won’t play with your child. And then your child will be lonesome and isolated and awkward. And they will never recover. Because if the kid doesn’t get that right between two and four, it’s over. They’re never going to learn it. The other kids accelerate forward, and they’re left behind. And it’s not a good life for that kid. They don’t learn how to play with others. And then they’re done. And there’s a huge literature on trying to rectify antisocial children, say from the age of four on. It’s like, no, you can’t. And you can go ahead and read three, four hundred papers on rectification of antisocial behavior and figure it out for yourself. But I did that for about five years. And it was a while ago. But I know the literature hasn’t changed. So you’ve got to get it right between that period. You’ve got to get the kid together enough so they can control themselves well enough so that they can adopt a mutual frame of reference with a peer so that they can start using that to scaffold their development further and become more and more sophisticated in social interactions. And that’s what you’re acting as a proxy for the social environment as a parent. That’s what you’re doing. Now a gentle proxy, an informative proxy, maybe even a merciful proxy, but a proxy nonetheless, because they’re not going to be around you forever. They’re going to be out there among people who don’t really care about them. And if they don’t have something to bring to the table, at least the ability to cooperate, they’re going to be lonesome and isolated. And that’s not going to be good. Well, here’s an idea. So as you’re moving from what is to what should be, you’re in this little frame of reference, this little game, this little Piagetian game. Sometimes you get what you want or predict that’s on the left hand side that makes you happy and it validates your frame. So if the frame keeps working across different circumstances, you get a reward from that. The reward produces a dopaminergic kick. That makes you feel good, but the dopamine also enhances the strength of the circuitry that underlies that particular representation. That’s what reinforcement is. It’s different than reward. Reward is what you feel, let’s say, roughly speaking. Reinforcement is the effect of the dopamine bathing the neurological tissues to make it stronger and grow. And so if the neurological tissue underlies a sequence of actions that produces a desired outcome, there’s a biochemical kick that strengthens the nervous structures that were activated just before the good thing happens. And so that’s how something you know that’s valuable gets instantiated. And if it fails, instead you get punished, pain, anxiety, and that starts to extinguish that circuitry. And we don’t know how that works exactly. We don’t know exactly if those circuits then start to die because they can degenerate across time, or if what happens is you build other circuits that inhibit them. So it’s like you’ve got this knowledge structure, it’s built into you. And once it’s there, there’s not really much getting rid of it, but you can build another one that tells it to shut up. That’s sort of what happens when you’re addicted to drugs. So cocaine bathes the tissue that was active just before you took the cocaine with dopamine, and so that gets stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger. And so you’re basically building a cocaine-seeking monster in your head. And that’s all it wants. And it has rationalizations, and it has emotions, and it has motivations, and it’s alive. But it wants one thing. And the problem is, once you build that thing, especially if you nail it a couple of hundred times with a powerful dopaminergic agonist like cocaine, that thing is one vicious monster. And it’s alive, and it’s in there. And you can’t get it to go away. The only thing you can do is build another structure to shut it up. But the problem is, is that as soon as you get stressed, it interferes with that new structure, and the old thing comes popping back up. Not good. I wouldn’t recommend it. And the faster acting those dopaminergic agonists are, cocaine is a good example, but so is meth, the faster they hit you, which is often why people inject them, instead of snorting them, say, the faster that transformation from steady state to dopaminergic bath, the bigger the kick is. And so, you know, so speed of introduction of the substance matters, which is why you drink shots instead of drinking, say, wine or beer, because alcohol has, you know, very similar, very similar effects. So… Alright, so if you get what you want, well then you feel good, but not only do you feel good, but the frame itself is validated. And if you don’t get what you want, well then, not only do you not get what you want, but the frame itself starts to come apart at the seams. And the question in part is, how far should the frame come apart? How deeply should you unlearn something when you make a mistake? God, it’s a very, very, very hard problem. And I’ll show you a partial solution to it, this very useful thing, and this is a Piagetian idea too. Let’s see. Yeah, I’m gonna go to this for a minute. So… I’m gonna decompose something for you. And this is partly to give you an introduction to the way behaviorists think, but it’s also to help unpack how the Piagetian notions work. And so, from a Piagetian perspective, high order abstractions are actually made of what’s common among actions and perceptions. So, and those things are unified in some sense. So, an abstraction isn’t what’s common across sets of objects. It’s more like what’s common across sets of perceptions and actions. And so, it’s a hard thing to understand, but this will help you understand. Okay, so let’s say you want to be a good person. It’s kind of abstraction, alright? And then you think, well, what does it mean to be a good person? It’s a box. It’s an empty box. No. It’s a box. And it says good person on the outside, but it’s full of things. It might even be full of transforming things. So, but you know what it means. You say good person. You kind of know, and you kind of know. But, you know, if we started talking about details, we might start to argue. But it’s like pornography. You know it when you see it. Okay, so what does it mean to be a good person? Well, we could decompose it. We could say, well, if you’re, one way of being a good person is to be a good parent. And you basically say that being a good parent is a subset of being a good person, right? Because person is bigger than parent. And maybe it would be to be a good employee, and to be a good sister, and to be a good partner. Sort of on the same level of abstraction. So, you decompose good person into your major functional roles, let’s say. And you’re good at all of them. Whatever that means. Well, let’s say, if you’re a good parent, well, you have to have a good job, because otherwise you starve, and so do your children. So, at least you have to financially provide in some manner. That’s a subset of being a good parent. It’s not the only subset. And then to be a good parent, you also have to take care of your family. And so you could decompose that into play with baby, or complete meal. You might say, well, if you can take care of your family, you can either order a meal, or you can cook one. It’s like, good for you. And so then, you’re cooking a meal, and you think, well, what do you decompose that into? Well, now you’re starting to get to the micro level, say. Because let’s say you’re making broccoli. So you take the broccoli out of the fridge, and you put it on the cutting board. That’s actually action. That’s not abstraction. It’s actually something you’re doing with your body. So the abstraction grounds itself out in microactivity. Actual action. That’s the connection between the mind and the body. And so, you’re cutting broccoli, right? But that’s not abstraction. And so, if you take apart these higher order moral abstractions, what happens is you decompose them into action perception sequences, and they’re embodied. Now, Piaget’s basic claim is you build the damn abstractions from the bottom up. That’s the fundamental Piagetian claim. So the kid comes into the world with some reflexes, and starts building a body of embodied knowledge out of that, in interaction with other people. And then they start playing games, and that abstracts. But they move from the bottom of the hierarchy, which is actual micro actions, up to the top of the abstraction world. And so, this is how you boot yourself up. Little bitty stories. Little bitty stories at the bottom. Cut broccoli, you know, and then cut corn here. Set table, do dishes, complete meal, take care of your family, be a good parent, be a good person. And, you know, one of the propositions that I am offering you in this class is that to be a good person, you’re actually not stuck in one of these. To be a good person means that you’re the thing that transforms these things continually. And so that’s what’s at the top of the hierarchy, and that’s basically the hero story, which is you’re in a state of being, an anomaly occurs, you allow it to demolish you, and then you rebuild. And that’s at the highest end of the moral hierarchy, and that’s also essentially a Piagetian claim. So, let’s think about emotional regulation, because this is a really good schema for understanding emotional regulation. How upset should you get, and how do you calculate it? Because if you make a mistake, you wake up in the morning and your side hurts. Okay, it’s the first symptom of pancreatic cancer, you’re dead in six months. 100% chance. Or, you know, you pulled a muscle. Well, which is it? You might say, well, the chances of the pancreatic cancer are low, but they’re not zero. And like, infinite times any proportion is a very large number. So you might be thinking, why don’t you just have a screaming fit any time ever any little thing happens to you? Which is exactly what happens, by the way, if you’re two years old. Right? That is what you do. So, and it’s because you don’t know. You don’t know. Like, things fell apart. What does that mean? Could be anything. Well, that’s no good. Well, so let’s say you’re arguing with your partner. You know, and they, I don’t know, they make a lousy meal, or maybe no meals, and you’re kind of sick of it, you know? And so you say, you’re a bad person. And what’s the evidence? Not only are you a bad person, but you’ve always been a bad person. And the probability that you’re going to improve in the future looks to me to be zero. It’s like, what’s the person supposed to do? Punch you. Right? Really. Because there’s no room in there for any discussion. You’re done. It’s like, you’re horrible. And you don’t change. And you’ve always been horrible, and you’ve never changed. And, you know, inferring from that into the future, you’re going to stay horrible, and you’re not going to change. Well, any argument can go there immediately. It’s a really bad idea, and it happens all the time, and this is why people can’t have a civil discussion. You know, they can’t say, um, here’s an example. So you’ve got your four year old, you want them to clean up their room. And so, it’s full of toys, let’s say they’re three and a half. You look at it, you say, look, you know, clean this up. Clean up your room. So you shut the door, and you go away, and you magically hope that when you come back, the room will be clean. But of course, the child has no idea, in all likelihood, at that age, or maybe it’s two and a half, something like that. They don’t know what clean up a room means. That’s like way up here, man. It’s like you told your child, there’s massive be a good person, you know, and then you come back in half an hour, and they’re no better a person than they were. And you get upset. It’s like, you can’t do that. And then you have to say, you see that teddy bear? And you know that that kid knows how to see a teddy bear. And they know how to pick it up, because you’ve watched them see a teddy bear and pick it up. And you know that the child knows the name of the teddy bear. It’s teddy bear. And so, you point to the teddy bear, and you say, do you see that teddy bear? And they go, yes. And you say, that’s good, pat pat. And they get a little kick of dopa bean. So that’s happy day for the kid. And then they smile at you, so you feel pretty good about that too. And then you say, you think you could pick up that teddy bear? And they say, yeah. And so they go over there, not every kid, by the way, but they go over there, and they pick up the teddy bear. And it’s like it’s a good day for both of you. And then you say, you see that little space on the shelf? Because you know they know what a shelf is. And you know they know what a space is. And you say, take that teddy bear and put it in the shelf. And they go over there, and they put it in the shelf. And then they look at you, and you’re smiling. And so the probability that they’ll do that again is now increased. And watching you smile produces a dopaminergic kick, and you’ve just strengthened those circuits. So I would highly recommend that you do that with your children and with your partners. Right? You watch them like a sneaky person. And every time they do something that you actually want them to do, you notice and you give them a little pat on the head. Yeah! And then they like you. That’s cool. But if you don’t want them to like you because you hate them, then you won’t do that. And you think, well, I don’t hate them. It’s like, oh yes you do. You just think about the last month, man. There’s been 20 times you absolutely hated them. And maybe that’s the predominant emotion. And that’s not so good over time. So when they do something good, if you really want to screw things up, watch like a hawk and wait till they do something good, and then punish them. That’s really fun, that is. That really messes with them. And people do that all the time. So if you really want to muck things up, you can even do it more subtly. You can wait till they do something good, especially if they’ve never done it before and they’re just kind of tentatively trying it. And then you can ignore them. That’s a really good one. That’s even better than punishing them. Because at least when you punish them, you’re paying attention. If you ignore them, it’s like, that’s just perfect. It also takes hardly any effort on your part. So that’s an additional plus. So anyways, so if you’re having a discussion with someone, it’s like what you’re doing with this kid, you know. It’s like you say, maybe you’re negotiating about meals. You don’t start with you’re a bad person. That’s way the hell up here, you know. You blow the whole person’s schema right out from underneath them, and you might as well get divorced, which is what will happen if you keep doing that. Soon you’ll roll your eyes at each other. That means you’re getting divorced, by the way. So if you ever watch it, it does, I’m serious. There’s good empirical data on that. Once you’re at the eye-rolling stage, there’s no going back. So you should intervene way before that. It’s disgust, that, eh, eye-roll? Once you’ve hit disease-carrying rodent status in your mate’s eyes, there’s no coming back. So anyways, so what you do, if you want to have a conversation with someone, that’s a corrective conversation, is you sort of take a Piagetian attitude. And the attitude is, go to the highest level of resolution that you can manage. So let’s say, and that’s what you’re doing with the kid. It’s like, clean up your room. Be a good person. It’s like, you’re going to be a good person. It’s like, clean up your room. Be a good person. It’s like, no, they don’t know anything about that. But they do know how to pick up a teddy bear. And then maybe you think, cleaning up your room is a hundred things like that. And so you have to teach the child each one of those hundred things. And then they learn, this is the scheme. They learn what’s the same across all of those different actions. That’s clean, right? Pick up the teddy bear, put away the Legos, make your bed. And really, like the motor output is completely different. But they fall under the heading of clean. But unless you fill the heading of clean with all the subordinate categories of the action perception sequences that make up clean, the kid can’t do it. And so partly what you’re doing by attending to your child constantly is noticing where they are in the construction of this hierarchy. is noticing where they are in the construction of this hierarchy. And they start way down here. And so that’s why you play peek-a-boo, for example. And you interact with them, because you can watch. You do a little something, and if they respond, you’ve got some sense that you’re at the same level. And kids in playgrounds do that with each other right away. So if you see two three-year-olds together, say they’re fairly sophisticated for three-year-olds, what they’ll do is they’ll start playing a little primitive game with each other. Like a dog. You know what a dog does when it wants to play? It kind of goes like that. And that’s what kids do. And that’s what adults do, too. It’s a play invitation. It’s like I’m ready. But you’re smiling. It’s not like I’m ready. And so you can tell the difference between a play fight and play. And kids can, too. So it’s an invitation to play. And so if you’re interacting with your little kid, they got that play circuit. Man, that thing’s in there like when they’re from birth, I think. Because you can play with a kid right from birth. At least something like peek-a-boo. And so you’re on the same wavelength fundamentally. And then you interact with them, and you see if they’re following what you’re doing. It’s what I’m doing when I’m lecturing, more or less. I’m watching you guys and seeing if we’re more or less in the same shared space. And we want the space to be expanding. Because if it’s just staying the same, well, you might as well play whatever you play on your computer. It has to be expanding at the same time. That’s optimal. And so when you’re playing with your kid, you put them on that developmental edge where they’re undoing and then rebuilding their little skills. You know, you can do that. I had this memory from when I was a little kid a while back. And I remembered, I used to go over to these people’s house with my father and my mom. And it was way up in northern Alberta. And these people were Russian immigrants. Children of Russian immigrants. And they had a farmhouse way out in the country. Way out by the way where the railroad actually ended. If you walked north from there, you’d walk until you hit like southern Europe. Without running into another person. It was way the hell out in the middle of nowhere. And anyways, they had a nice house. Like a warm house. You know, they had three kids and they were way older than me. But it was a real fun, comfortable place to go. And I used to sit in the living room with my father and his friend whose name was Nick. And Nick was a really playful guy. I really liked him. He was like my surrogate grandfather. And I used to, I don’t think I was more than about three. I’d sit there and I’d try to hit his foot with my fist. And he would be talking to my dad, you know. And my dad would say, Jordan, don’t bother Nick. And Nick would say, well, he’s not really bothering me. Because dad was checking it out to see if I was an annoying twerp or if I was a fun kid, you know. Because it’s a fine line. And so I’d try to hit his foot and he would move it. And I had this memory a while back and I thought, wow, that was a good memory. And I thought, what is going on there exactly? And I realized, well, he was sharpening me up. He was sharpening me up. You know, it’s like I was aiming at something. You’re aiming at something. You’re pointing your eyes at it. You’re pointing your whole damn soul at it. You’re aiming at something. And you’re trying to get your behaviors and your conceptions in line and organized so that you can attain that aim. That’s what people do. You know, we throw rocks at things. We fire arrows at things. We shoot guns at things. We aim at things. Our whole body is that platform for aiming. And I was trying to aim at his feet and he’d move his feet, you know. But he’d let me hit it now and then. And so let’s say you’re a rat, OK, because like I said, a rat’s a good model for a person. Let’s say you’re a little rat, a juvenile male, and you want to play. Because you want to play. And you’ll work to play. And that’s how we know you want to play if we’re experimental psychologists. Because you’ll button push like mad to get access to an arena where you can wrestle with another little rat. And so rats wrestle just like human beings. Just like human beings. And they even pin each other. Just like human beings. And they love that. And so if you put little rat A in with little rat B, and little rat B is 10% bigger, little rat B can stomp the hell out of little rat A all the time. So they go out there and they have a little dominance competition. And little rat B is going to win because he’s bigger. So now he’s dominant rat. So then they play and they wrestle and little rat A loses. And then next time they both know that little rat A is the inviter because he’s subordinate. So he’s the one who has to go up to the big rat and go, you ready? And the big rat then will wrestle. However, if you repeatedly pair them, and the big rat doesn’t let the little rat win, at least 30% of the time, the little rat won’t invite him to play anymore. And that was Jaak Panksepp who figured that out. And that is mind boggling. Because it tells you, there’s an ethical basis for play that’s so deep that the damn rats, and they’re rats, right? Not known for their sense of fair play. The big rat has to let the little rat win 30% of the time or the little rat will not play anymore. And even rats know that. It’s so profound, that discovery. Like Panksepp discovered the play circuit in mammals. That’s a big deal. That’s like discovering a whole continent. Like that’s a big deal. He should have got a Nobel Prize for that. That’s built in. That sense of fair play. That’s mind boggling. Because that’s evidence for the biological instantiation of a complex morality. Fair play. Even if you can win, you shouldn’t all the time. So when I’m trying to hit Nick’s feet with my hand, I’m really paying attention and he’s moving it pretty well. But now and then I get to nail it. And I’m feeling pretty good about that. And he makes it a little bit more difficult all the time. And I’m getting better and I’m building up my motor coordination. I’m building up my social skills because I don’t hit too hard. And I don’t cry when I miss. Because that just makes you annoying to play with. Right? So I’m learning really complicated things about how to go about finessing my aim. And that’s what you’re doing with your kids. And what are they aiming at? Well, they aim higher and higher. So when my son was about two and a half, we had him start setting the table. You don’t say, you know, I’m going to beat grandma’s fine china and go set the table. It’s like, no, you don’t do that. You say, you know what a fork looks like? He goes, yeah. See, do you know where the forks are? Well, that doesn’t work because the drawer is way up here. Right? So you have to hand him a fork. You say, look, take this fork and go put it on the table. And he’s like this high. You know, so he goes over to the table and he puts the fork up here. Can’t even see what he’s doing. He puts the fork up there. And then, you know, he’s reasonably happy with that. And then you go and give him a really sharp knife. No, you don’t do that. You don’t do that. You give him a spoon and you say, well, go put the spoon beside the fork. And you don’t say, look, you stupid kid, you got to leave enough space between the fork and the spoon so the plate can fit there. Don’t you know anything? You’re stupid. It’s like, well, that’s right up here. Right? You’re a bad kid. No, that’s bad. You don’t do that. You go down here and you say, well, good micro routine adaptation there, chum. Let’s try it again. You know, when you build that up and you can’t extend the kid past its point, his point or her point of exhaustion. Because it’s got to be a game. And a two year old can probably only do that for… You can watch them and some are more persistent than others. But 10 minutes, 15 minutes, you’re pushing your luck. You can take a two year old to a restaurant for about 40 minutes. And expect them to sit and behave. But after that, you know, the will exhausts them. All right. Well, anyways, that’s Piaget in his nascent form fundamentally. And so if you remember that diagram and you think about how that would be built from the bottom up and how there would be a stage transition every time those things are learned, you kind of got the essential elements of Piagetian theory. So we’ll see you Thursday. .