Maps of Meaning 01 (Harvard Lectures) (v3Bu7oCB8_k)

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Oh, all the books here have to be bought separately. They’re all at the coup though. Okay. Yes, there are. Is anybody else missing a syllabus? Okay. This will be the setup. Yeah. All the readings at the top are in the course book that’s at Nomen Copy. Okay. The books that are listed below, well they’re all separate books. Okay, well let’s just go over that. Are you ready? Yes, anytime. Okay, let’s go then. Oh, all right. I should welcome my extension school students too who will be looking at this tomorrow night. Okay. If you turn to the back of the syllabus where it says 2, calendar of events, the titles that are listed on the right hand side are all chapters from the course book that’s at Nomen Copy. Okay. So, I’m going to go ahead and go over that. Okay. So, I’m going to go ahead and go ahead and go ahead and go ahead and go ahead and go ahead and go ahead and go ahead and go ahead and go ahead and go ahead and go ahead and go ahead Okay. If you turn to the back of the syllabus where it says 2, calendar of events, the titles that are listed on the right hand side are all chapters from the course book that’s at Nomen Copy. Okay. And then if you look at reading list and due dates, it says adjunct readings. Those are all books that are, well it’s either this one, which is for weeks 1 to 3, or books that are available at the COOP. Okay. And the address for Nomen Copy is 1304 Massachusetts Avenue. Alright, and as I said, there’s a mixture of analytical psychology texts, that’s basically Jungian psychology, some philosophy, some literature, and some modern neuropsychology. And that basically covers the domain of the course. And so I’ll start the introduction now. Okay. This is a course about the causes of social conflict. I’m not interested in social conflict from the perspective of a political scientist or a sociologist. I’m interested in intergroup conflict, but not at the level of group analysis. I’m interested in what role social identity or group identity plays in individual psychology, and why it is that individuals are motivated to participate in acts of social conflict. I’m using for an example here the Holocaust. I was thinking last week, writing part of the preface to the book that you’re going to read about the Holocaust Museum in Washington. There was a lot of, obviously this is a museum to the Jews primarily who were killed by the Nazis in World War II. There’s a number of museums like this throughout the world, and their central motto is never forget. And this has always been confusing to me, this notion of never forgetting, because I don’t think you can remember something that you don’t understand. And I don’t think we understand why the Holocaust happened in World War II. I think you might regard the Holocaust as an unlearned lesson, and I don’t think that you can process information that you don’t comprehend. So to say never forget, the question is, what is it that you’re supposed to remember? Is it the fact that six million people were killed? Is it the fact of that particular event, or are you supposed to be giving some consideration to Holocaust-like events that have occurred throughout history? Because there are people who think that what happened in World War II was a relatively unique event, and something unparalleled in history. This is not a position that I adopt. I think it’s a very common sort of event. It was the event of that sort that has proved most shocking to the European conscience, so to speak. But it hardly strikes me as unique. And people often talk about the Holocaust in terms of the relationship between the Jews and the Germans, or between the Jews and the Nazis. The Jews obviously playing the part of victims, and the Nazis often are always playing the part of the perpetrators. And of course this is absolutely comprehensible from the historical point of view. But it also strikes me that if what we remember is that the Nazis killed the Jews, that we’re already on the road to making a mistake that’s similar to the mistake that was made, that led to the Holocaust to begin with, which is to identify characteristics that lead to patterns of action of that sort as characteristics of groups, identifiable groups. And it seems to me, I mean I’m not trying to equate the role of the Jews and the Nazis in producing the Holocaust. That would obviously be absurd. But what I’m trying to say is that the lesson seems to me to be, especially when you consider the propensity for Holocaust-like events is deeply rooted in human nature, the lesson to draw from the events of World War II is that that’s what human beings are like, not what the Nazis were like. Because these sorts of events happen all the time. I mean it’s obviously the case that there are, well, in the 20th century alone. Well, the English invented the concentration camp in South Africa. The Germans perfected it. The Chinese used it to great advantage. Solzhenitsyn estimated, I’ll show this on the next slide, that 66 million people in the Soviet Union were killed as a consequence of internal repression, many of whom went through camp-like procedures on their road to their demise. See, ethnic cleansing occurring in places like Rwanda and even once again in Europe, in the Balkans. Whatever it was that we were supposed to have learned from the events of the Second World War hasn’t been learned nor been remembered because you can’t remember what you don’t understand. And that’s what this course is about. I’ve been working for, since 1985, I guess, on trying to figure out what it is about people. Remember Hannah Arendt, maybe you know this, maybe you don’t. She’s a famous political scientist. She was a student of Martin Heinegger. She wrote a book called The Banality of Evil. And one of her points was that these people, she was talking about the Nazis in particular, people who perpetrate events like this, if you meet them, if you talk to them, if you have an encounter with them, the thing that’s often striking about them is not their striking abnormality or their evident evil, but the fact that they’re very much like other people that you might have met, which I suppose might not be surprising. So surprising when you think about how thoroughly, for example, the Nazi movement dominated the German consciousness, or likewise with communism in the Soviet Union. I mean, those ideological movements characterized people. They didn’t characterize some strange sort of misfits whose consciousness was characterized by something incomprehensible that led them to perform the kind of actions that we’re theoretically supposed to remember. My perspective on all this is that the fact that people are capable of perpetrating atrocities like those that characterize the Holocaust says something about what people are like, what everybody’s like, because it strikes me that that kind of tendency is something that’s deeply rooted in human nature. And then to say that, but what was it about the Nazis or what was it about the Soviet communists that led them to participate in this sort of behavior is completely beside the point in a sense. All that does is you’re looking for some sort of group characteristic that’s devoid, and you don’t have any personal relationship with that group. The problem is instantly made abstract, and as far as I’m concerned, if it’s abstract, well then once again, nothing is remembered. Now what I want to do is to try to, I want to outline the reasons why something like the Holocaust could have occurred, and what it is about us that make us so concerned with protecting our group identities, what those identities mean, what role they play in the regulation of emotion, that’s the critical thing right there. For me, ideologies are the expression, in a sense, the verbal expression of the internal structures that regulate our emotions. When you mess around with someone’s ideologies, therefore as a consequence, you’re messing around with the inhibitory structure that regulates the interplay between their emotions. So we’re going to study in part in this course what emotions are, and how they’re rooted in neuropsychology and neurophysiology, and how they manifest themselves in behavior, how they might be controlled, and how that might tie into something as abstract as social identity. Usually there’s not much of a link made between the concept of sociological processes, so to speak, and intra-psychic processes or neuropsychological structures, but it’s obvious if you think about it for a moment, that whatever your identity is plays some role in regulating your emotional nature and your physiology, because your thoughts are embodied, they’re part of your mind, they’re part of your brain, if you want to get right down to it. People have belief systems, and they’ll do anything to protect them, and I find that peculiar. What is it that’s so important about a belief system that would lead people to do things, normal people, as far as I’m concerned, to commit acts that under normal circumstances would be conceived of as incomprehensible even by those people? So I also hope to make, as I said, I want to make the lessons here personal. I’m not interested in discussing the issue from the abstract perspective, because I don’t think that an issue of this magnitude deserves to be discussed at an abstract level. It’s not an abstract problem. There’s something peculiar about us that we have to learn to control, because as far as I’m concerned, we’re too technologically powerful to remain at the whims of the uncomprehended aspects of our nature. Peace, predictability, and the delusion of self-representation. What does that mean? Well, if you can predict something as a general rule, it’s hard to determine why it is that you think you understand something when you think you do. If you think about it for a moment, it gets complicated, because you’re surrounded by things that at some level of analysis you cease to understand. It doesn’t matter what phenomenon it is. Even the most mundane objects become mysterious if you look into them far enough. Take something as simple as a chair. It’s made out of wood. There’s nothing remarkable about that. But if you start to look into the structure of the wood and how the organism in the tree produced it, and all the chemical reactions that go about bringing that about, and the developmental history that led to the emergence of plants and trees, well, you can see that even in something mundane there are embedded all sorts of mysteries. But for the large part, we treat a chair as something we understand. Well, that’s in part because we’re only concerned with it with regards to its function. And if it serves the function of being able to be sat upon, then we don’t pay any more attention to it. So we think that if we can predict the behavior of something that we understand it. So, in peace, when we observe ourselves acting peacefully, we presume that we’ve got ourselves under control, that we actually do understand each other because we can predict the behavior of others and we can predict our own behavior. And that deludes us into thinking that’s therefore our models of ourselves are actually accurate representations of what we’re like. Well, the problem is in wartime we don’t act like we do in times of peace, but then of course during wartime when people are committing violent or socially aggressive acts, they don’t really have all that much time to sit around and self-reflect. So it’s not time to be building models about who it is that you are and why it is that you’re that way. You’re too busy doing whatever it is that you happen to be involved in to protect your territory or to take someone else’s territory or to expand your ideological dominion or whatever it is. In peaceful times, we look at ourselves and we see ourselves behaving peacefully and predictably and nicely and we make the free supposition that as a consequence that’s what we’re like and that we also understand ourselves. This is a big mistake because if you put someone under extreme circumstances then there will be things about them that will be revealed to them that can only be revealed under extreme circumstances. And it’s extreme circumstances that we’re concerned about in the course of this course. I want to find out, see, I think that one of the things that ideology does, group identity for that matter, is regulate our emotions. And if you’re a member of a community that has a successful ideology and so the social structure is basically stable and successful, then your emotions are regulated so well that you don’t even know that they’re there. Just to say that you’re protected by something that you don’t understand from something that you don’t comprehend. And what I want to do is open the gates a little bit and let you see what’s underneath your comfortable social identities and what it is that you’re protected from by the weight of your history. Well, this is the central question I guess. First of all, I think social aggression is a primary human characteristic. If you even have a cursory knowledge of human history, it’s obviously the case that war plays an immense role. And it seems to be the case that this is also true down on the final genetic ladder. I mean, for a long time it was thought, for example, that chimpanzees live peaceably. And this appears to be the case. As long as you study chimpanzees within their own family or kin unit or I suppose roughly speaking tribe, they behave peaceably to each other even in their dominance. Dominance disputes are usually settled more or less peacefully. But good old discovered not so long ago that chimpanzees conduct wars and planned wars by all occurrences and that when a chimp group is faced with an interloper from another group or with another group that they’re capable of engaging in the same sort of behavior, it’s much more fundamental level in the sense that we are. It also seems to be the case, as we’ll see a little bit later in this discussion, that similar things are true. Even animals as simple, so to speak, as rats. It looks like the capacity for social, it’s strange, it’s strange because it’s obvious that people have a tremendous capacity for social affiliation. I mean, we make groups. In the West people are usually considered as rugged individualists, so to speak. But it’s the case even in the most individualistic of societies that we’re constantly in contact with other people. Almost all our environment is other people. We’re all members of literally often dozens of groups, families and groups devoted towards certain tasks and so on and so forth. We’re very, very, very social, thrive in a social community. But it looks like the flip side of that is the fact that we’re so capable of making social groups also makes us very capable of organized aggression against other social groups. So it’s a strange phenomena that it’s our very capacity for social organization that also gives us this terrible capacity for social aggression. So that’s another thing that I want to take a look at in the course. I really want to get at the core of this too. Like I said a little while ago, I’m not interested in messing around with the question on an abstract level. I want to end the course with a concrete answer about why it is that people are capable of doing the sorts of things that characterize Nazi behavior, say during the Holocaust. I want to make that so crystal clear that you can map out the argument from presupposition A to conclusion D so that it’s socially and personally applicable and so that you also get a glimpse perhaps of what might be necessary from the perspective of personal and interpersonal conduct to alleviate the likelihood that you’ll get trapped into doing something like that. So one of the things you’ve pointed out, because he’s very concerned with the events of the Second World War and social aggression in general, is that you have to understand is that these great evils tend to take place one small step at a time. People get trapped into them over a long period of time. They make a small bad error, but it doesn’t look so big at the time. That leads to another type of error that’s not so big as well, and that leads to a third error that’s not so big. But if you put together 40 of those errors or 50 of those errors, then all of a sudden you see that someone’s traveled down a road to a place where they might not have wanted to have gone in the beginning had they been conscious of it. So one of the things about never forgetting is to understand, is to engage in primary prevention, so to speak, which is to understand how the, us in the second half of the course has to do with that issue in particular. Personal relationship to group identity and group fostered action. So the first part of the course basically deals with why it is that we’re susceptible to social aggression as a consequence of our biological makeup. What it is about us that makes us like that. And the second part of the course is about how certain patterns of personal conduct heighten the possibility that socially aggressive acts will take place, and about how it is that you might avoid engaging in those sorts of acts. That’s just an overhead that details some of the things I’ve already discovered. It’s a good poem here. I’m going to tell you a story from the Soviet Union that Solzhenitsyn told. He introduces it with a poem from the Russian poet Mayakovsky. He says, With cohesion, construction, grit, and repression, bring the neck of this gang-run riot. That’s a nice poem. Solzhenitsyn wondered, well, who is the gang? That’s the question. As I said, he estimated that 66 million people died in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1959. Solzhenitsyn also estimated that a substantially larger number perished in communist China, but no one really knows the stats on that. Now, this is a debatable statistic, as Solzhenitsyn points out in his book. This is from the Gulag Archipelago. As soon as the official statistics are released, he’ll revise his estimates. This includes, for example, several millions of peasants pushed into the tundra, forced relocation in the early 20s. Six million Ukrainians, I believe it was six million, and three million Ukrainians, I believe it was seven million. And three million Ukrainians, I believe it was eight million. And three million Ukrainians, I believe it was nine million. And three million Ukrainians, I believe it was nine million. And three million Ukrainians, I believe it was nine million. And three million Ukrainians, I believe it was nine million. And three million Ukrainians, I believe it was nine million. And three million Ukrainians, I believe it was nine million. And three million Ukrainians, I believe it was nine million. And three million Ukrainians, I believe it was nine million. And three million Ukrainians, I believe it was nine million. And three million Ukrainians, I believe it was nine million. And three million Ukrainians, I believe it was nine million. And three million Ukrainians, I believe it was nine million. The second volume of which you’ll read is his story about the Gulag. And the Gulag was a system of forced labor camps that were set up in the Soviet Union soon after Lenin died. In fact, I guess some of them were set up before he died. And upon which the Soviet economy really ran for much of what constituted its life. Now Solzhenitsyn started his travels through the Gulag originally as a Russian front line soldier. It’s a neat story in a sense. He got thrown into a German prisoner of war camp. And when he was repatriated to the Soviet Union, Stalin threw him in a concentration camp. And the reason was, as he did with all the returned Russian prisoners of war, who were treated by the way terribly in the German prisoners of war camps because Stalin refused to sign the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners. So not only were they in prisoners of war camps, which was miserable enough, but they were starved to the degree that the other allied prisoners used to give them food. They didn’t have much food themselves. So he was a front line soldier, then he got thrown into a German prisoner of war camp. And then when he finally returned to Russia, Stalin threw him in a concentration camp. And the reason for that was that the Russians who were in German prisoners of war camp had been contaminated by their exposure to Western ideas. That was his rationale. So anyways, then he spent a decade and a half in there, about some concentration camps. And when he got out, he developed stomach cancer. So that’s a brief summary of some of the highlights of his life. Okay, in this scene, he’s being transported from one camp to another in a railway car that’s being roughly outfitted for transporting human beings. He’s sitting with a friend that he calls Pannon. I’m just going to read you this story. My friend Pannon and I are lying on the middle shelf of a Stalopin compartment. That’s one of these cattle cars, basically, that are refitted for human transport. And have set ourselves up comfortably, tucked our salt herring in our pocket so we don’t need water and can go to sleep. But at some station or other, they shove into our compartment a Marxist scholar. We can tell this from his goatee inspectors. He doesn’t hide the fact, so he’s been arrested. He’s a devout communist, but he’s been arrested by the communists. He doesn’t hide the fact he’s a former professor of the Communist Academy. We hang head down in the square cutout, and from his very first words, we see that he is impenetrable. But we have been serving time for a very long time and have a long time left to serve. And we value a merry joke. We must climb down and have a bit of fun. There’s ample space left in the compartment, so we exchange places with someone and crowd in. Hello. Hello. You’re not too crowded? No, it’s all right. Have you been in the jug a long time? Long enough. Are you past the halfway mark? Just look over there how poverty-stricken our villages are. Straw thatch, crooked huts. That’s an inheritance from the Tsarist regime. But we’ve already had 30 Soviet years. That’s an insignificant period historically. It’s terrible that the collective farmers are starving. But have you looked in all the rubbings? Just ask any collective farmer in our compartment. Well, everyone in jail is embittered and prejudiced. But I’ve seen collective farms myself. That means they were uncharacteristic. The goatee had never been in any of them. That way it was simpler. Just ask the old folks. Under the Tsar they were well-fed, well-clothed, and they used to have many holidays. I’m not even going to ask. It’s a subjective trait of human memory to praise everything in the past. The cow that died is the one that gave twice the milk. Sometimes even cited problems. And our people don’t like holidays. They like to work. But why is there a shortage of bread in many cities? When? Right before the war, for example. Not true. Before the war, everything, in fact, had been worked out. Listen, at that time in all the cities on the bullgut there were queues of thousands of people. A local failure in supply. More likely your memory is failing you. But there’s a shortage now. Old wives tales, we have from seven to eight billion bushels of grain. But the grain is rotten. Not so. We’ve been very successful in developing new species of grain. And so forth. He’s imperturbable. He speaks in a language which requires no effort of the mind. And arguing with him is like walking through a desert. It’s about people like that that they say, he made the rounds of all the blacksmiths and came home unshod. And when they write in their obituaries, perished tragically during the period of the Stalinist cult, this should be corrected to read, perished comically. But if his fate had worked out differently, we would have never learned what a dry and significant little man he really was. We would have respectfully read his name in the newspaper. He would have become a people’s commissar, or even ventured to represent all Russia abroad. To argue with him was useless. It was much more interesting to play with him. Not at chess, but at the game of comrades. It really is such a game. It’s a very simple game. Play up to him a couple of times, or so. Use some of his own pet words and phrases. He’ll like that. He’s become weary and snarling, and doesn’t like to tell his stories because all of them will be twisted and thrown right back into space. But if he takes you for one of his own, he will quite humanly disclose to you what he has seen at the station. People are passing by, talking, laughing, life goes on. The party is providing leadership. People are being moved from job to job. Yet you and I are languishing here in prison. And we must write and write petitions, begging a review of our cases, begging for a pardon. Or he will tell you something interesting. In the Communist Academy, they decided to devour one comrade. They decided he wasn’t quite genuine, not one of our own. But somehow they couldn’t manage it. There were no errors in his essays, and his biography was clean. And all of a sudden, going through the archives, what a find! They ran across an old brochure written by this comrade in which Vladimir Ilyich Lenin himself had held in his hands and in the margin of which he had written in his own handwriting the notation as an economist to his ship. Well, now you understand our commanding smile confidentially. But after that, it was no trouble at all to make a short work of that muddlehead imposter. He was expelled from the Academy and deprived of his scot of rank. This story is a perfect example of the kind of phenomena that I’m interested in trying to understand. A Communist professor in the S6J, he doesn’t think, doesn’t have to think, because he has an understanding of the phenomena that he’s trying to understand. He’s a very good scholar. He’s a very good scholar. He’s a very good scholar. He’s a very good scholar. He’s a very good scholar. He’s a very good scholar. He’s a very good scholar. He’s a very good scholar. He’s a very good scholar. He’s a very good scholar. He’s a very good scholar. The second part of the story is that being like this is also extraordinarily clannish in a sense. He tells a brief story about being in the Communist Academy where everyone shares ideology and finding the outside so that he can be essentially destroyed. There are specific reasons why the two halves of that narrative were stuck together. The first attitude leads inexorably to the second attitude, which is to say the adoption of an authoritarian ideology, which is basically the presumption of omniscience in the sense that if you’re an ideologue, you think that what you think is the right thing to think. There isn’t anything else that needs to be thought. It’s you that has the answer now. You might not think it’s you. You might not think that it’s your leader for the ideology in and of itself, but the point is you’re the one that’s in possession of the absolute truth. Every fact that might exist to dispute that is eliminated. The problem with eliminating facts is that sometimes they come in embodied form, which is to say we tend to think of ideas as disembodied abstracted entities, but the truth of the matter is that ideas are representations of human patterns of action, and sometimes the enemy idea is actually the enemy. There’s very little difference from the practical perspective between repressing facts that are uncomfortable and repressing people whose viewpoints or even styles of existence are equally uncomfortable. So this is another example of the sort of thinking that I want to explain. I want to explain the motivation for that. Why is it that someone would adopt a rigid ideological position and then defend it sometimes to their own death, but more frequently to the death of others, and I feel that not only is that acceptable, but often even morally justifiable. It’s the thing that should be done. You’re a good patriot, so to speak. So this is the question. This is what I want to address in the course, basically. I don’t want to take a stab at the questions, so to speak. I don’t want to be to our own bush. I want to answer these so that when you’re finished, of course, you know what purpose group identification serves, why it’s so important to people, how it developed, what it means to have a belief. So if people have beliefs, we never really question, I guess, what it means when you say that I have a belief. I think the world is a particular way as opposed to some other particular way. So why do we feel threatened when groups we identify with are challenged? Why does challenge make us aggressive and righteously aggressive? I guess those are the core questions that the course centers around. There’s more. I’ve described the whole course, obviously, in this first lecture. This is about half the story. I’m also interested in how our own personal behaviors make our group identification more or less dangerous, and what can be done about that as well. Okay. So to understand why we are capable of atrocious behavior, you have to understand how we think. And I want to approach that from a variety of different perspectives. I’m going to give you initially grounding in modern neuropsychology, neuropsychology of emotion and emotional regulation, because that puts the discussion on what I think is a firm foundation. As I said, I bring in analytical ideas and ideas from literature and philosophy as well, but it’s nice to also have reference to some facts that are acceptable as facts. That’s why we start with neuropsychology. How do we think this is half the story? We’ll discuss the other half as we go through the course. The course is predicated on a theory of knowledge that suggests that we classify objects and situations according to two separate types of schemes. And the first type of scheme is one that everyone is essentially familiar with. That’s the scientific scheme that makes the presupposition that there’s an objective world that’s apprehensible to the senses that can be collectively described, which is only to say that the thing is real if you can sense it. It usually means if you can touch it most fundamentally or see it, or in some other way detect it, if you can describe the procedures by which that detection occurred, and if someone else duplicating those procedures comes up with the same observations. And that’s a real thing. That’s a fact. It’s a scientific fact. And we’ve been able to codify a methodology for determining what is from the objective perspective. And I don’t think there’s no real reason to dispute that. It seems more or less self-evident. It’s a relatively new procedure. We’ve only been really good at it for 500 years at the most. It’s only been that long since the scientific enterprise has been transformed into something that was actually codified. It’s obviously an extraordinarily efficient way to proceed. And there’s no point, in a sense, in debating its utility. That’s one type of knowledge scheme. But there’s another type that people have spent much less time formalizing, partly because it’s more difficult to formalize it with regards to the scientific method. We more or less have a set of agreed upon rules by which the endeavor should proceed, and also by which to judge the validity of the outcomes of the procedures. You can write them down. They’re very much formalized. That’s why almost anybody can do scientific research, especially the type of scientific research that Thomas Kuhn described as normal, which basically means that you have a set theory, which you’re not trying to challenge. You’re working within the theory to more or less flesh it out. So you’re a technician putting to work potent technical tools that you can virtually do by rote. Anyways, we figured that out and formalized that. That’s an answer to the question, what is, how to control things. The second type of information, that’s the type that I’m concerned with in this course, and that is not what a thing is from the objective perspective, but about what it is from the perspective of determining its implications for behavior. You say, well, there are things, and there is also knowledge about how to behave in their presence. The first kind of information you might consider. The second kind of information is more akin to what is being traditionally described as wisdom. Wisdom is the knowledge of how to conduct yourself. Things exist, and the fact that their existence has implications for behavior. And it’s the implications of the existence of things for behavior that I want to focus on. Because in our social communities, we come to agreements over vast stretches of time about what sorts of behaviors are to be considered appropriate in which situations and under which conditions. And it’s this agreement that lends predictability to our interpersonal relationships. I can take an example just of this course. We all share a map, so to speak, of what behaviors are appropriate in a situation like this. And essentially what that means is that we can come in here and conduct our business, and we all know what that business is going to be. There’s no dispute about that. And we all know, more or less, what our respective roles are going to be in conducting that business. There’s no space for dispute at all, which basically means that our shared map of the significance of the events that are occurring in this room eliminates the need for conflict. We don’t even have to fight about what’s going to happen in here. We don’t have to fight about who owns that sun-kissed orange juice, or who’s going to take control of the pens, or who owns that particular computer, or who’s going to… or how the discussion is going to proceed. That’s all mapped out for us in some ways. And that means that we’ve rendered ourselves in this particular situation predictable, which means that there’s no reason for any of us to regard any of the other people in the room with any sort of apprehension whatsoever. So in a sense, you could say that for me, you’re a fixed object in terms of your significance in this environment. And the reason for that is because we’re engaging in a culturally determined process, none of which we’re questioning, or at least that we’ve accepted implicitly, or explicitly and implicitly. You’re at a university. This is what happens at a university. You know that. I know that. We don’t have to set any of the ground rules. Well, it’s our shared apprehensions about the implications of situations for behaviors that constitute our cultures. And it’s those shared maps that bring predictability to our interpersonal relationships. You can only understand that if you understand what the world is like when it’s not predictable. And it’s difficult to understand that for modern people who live in peaceful times, because our culture is so successful at regulating our interpersonal behavior, and even the environment for that matter, that we hardly ever encounter a situation where anything remotely unpredictable happens. So you can’t tell what it’s like to be faced with something that’s unpredictable. So you don’t know what it’s like when you’re in an environment where culture doesn’t reign, because you’re part of a successful community, and you’re extraordinarily well protected. You’re like a boy that lives inside a castle. You can’t see over the walls. It doesn’t even know that they’re there. There’s all sorts of terrible things outside the castle, but everything inside is peaceful. And that’s the world. And the boy has no idea what he would be like if he went outside into the real world, where things were actually unpredictable, because he’s only had a chance to observe his behavior under stable conditions, where everything’s predictable and acceptable. It’s even worse now, in a sense. It’s better in a way, too. I mean, it is peaceful now in many ways. I mean, even compared to 15 years ago, there’s much less ideological dispute in the world about how to conduct affairs than there was, say, in the mid-70s. And people have more or less… I mean, I know there’s exceptions to this, but people all over the world have more or less accepted the necessity, for example, for a market economy. There aren’t very many ideologies that appear attractive, even in the imagination, in contrast to Western-style democracies. And I mean, that’s a pretty recent occurrence, and it’s unlikely to last for any great length of time, I think. But it is peaceful now. And the fact that that piece makes it even more difficult for us to either understand ourselves, or to be sufficiently motivated to understand ourselves, you know? Because when things are going really well, and everything’s predictable, then you presume that you know what you’re doing. In fact, that’s the basis on which you base your judgments about whether you know what you’re doing. If you perform a procedure, and what you predicted occurs, you’re right. Now, that doesn’t mean you know everything, but as far as you’re concerned, that’s sufficient. So, anyways. The fundamental point is this. We share a map of the significance of things and situations, including other people, including ourselves. And that maps our culture. And one of the lines of arguments that I want to develop throughout the course of this course is that that shared culture takes the form of a story. In fact, that’s what a story is. A story is a description of the significance of situations or events for behavior. And a story is the kind of information, a story is a form of information that transmits abstract knowledge about how to act. So you have on the one hand scientific descriptions, but they’re descriptions of facts, things that are sensory apprehensible to a collective. And you have another form of information, that’s narrative. And a narrative contains information about how you should conduct yourself, and literally how you should propel your body through space under which circumstances. And a shared narrative constitutes a culture. Now, let me show you what I think the basic structure of a story is. Okay. Scientific description is concerned with what is. And we have rules for determining that. A story is concerned with what is, but not from the perspective of the senses, but from the perspective of implications for behavior. So that’s the meaning, essentially. Things have an existence and a meaning, and the story is concerned with the meaning. And meaning is a description of the current state, a description of the ideal future state, and a description of the means of transformation. I’ll show you this one. If you run a fantasy of any sort through your head, so you have a plan. A plan that’s relevant to some determination of action. You just want to go down to the corner store to get a loaf of bread. You conceive of yourself here as lacking something necessary. You apprehend in the abstract an ideal goal, which is your trip down to the store. And you also formulate plans about a gift there. And you evaluate occurrences on the way to the store in relationship to your idealized future. Just to say that anything that gets in your way, basically, on the way to the store, if you’re in a hurry, for example, that’s regarded as an inconvenience. Anything that hurries you along, that’s regarded as something positive. Which is basically to say that you use your apprehension of the ideal future, which is always construed in relationship to your present conditions, as the schema by which you determine the significance of things. Because you’re always construing the meaning of things in relationship to what you want to do in relationship to your function. And this basically constitutes the whole story, in a sense. At least the simple version of it. Okay. I’m going to just stop there for a second and ask people if they have any questions. And then the next thing I want to do is give you a really brief overview of how your brain determines how things should be evaluated in terms of their emotional relevance. Does anybody have any questions so far? The quote that you put up, what is the ring the neck of the Gangnam ride? Is that the ring the neck of the ride or ring the neck of the people that are under the, that are being exposed? Well, it was a, that poem was a comment by a poet, I think his name was Blankovsky, on the necessity of eliminating dissent. So, like, you could think, the Soviet Union, for example, ran on a number of five-year plans. Five-year plans where, you know, we’re going to, we are here, we’re going to get to here. Here are the means by which that’s going to be done. Then anybody who was viewed as deviating from that plan, of course, was instantly regarded as a threat. And Blankovsky was saying, well, those are the Gangnam ride, fundamentally. Anybody who doesn’t agree with the forward motion of the current society is instantly regarded, well, they’re instantly regarded fundamentally as an anomaly, but more, more pragmatically as a threat. And Blankovsky was making the point that those people, they should be eliminated. They deserve to be eliminated, which is even, you know, even a further step, in a sense. They constitute the class of things that deserves to be annihilated, because it’s construed in relationship to some ideal. You might be wondering, why the hell is this a story? What does this have to do with the story? Well, I can give you the most fundamental example, in a sense. I want to tell you what stories are, and then I want to take a look at their substructure, because, well, the fact that there’s a substructure to stories is evident in a number of subtle ways. It’s partly evident because myths that have been collected throughout the world have a remarkably similar nature. That’s one bit of information that’s relatively curious. It’s also very strange that people like stories. Children will listen to stories without any external reinforcement. They’re intrinsically rewarding. People watch TV all the time because TV is full of stories. We pay to go see movies. We’ll buy novels. There’s something about stories that are intrinsically attractive to the point that will actually work to be allowed to be in contact with them, which should beg the question. Since we’re willing to go to all that trouble to look at stories and to receive them, perhaps they’re actually serving some function. I mean, it seems at least reasonable in the function they’re serving. I’m trying to point out this. A story, good stories, really makes your emotion. And if you share a story with someone else, then you can predict them, and both your emotions are rate. If a group of you share a story, then you have a culture, and you’re all more or less predictable to one another. It’s very useful because then you can be organized and you can move forward in one direction and so on. But mostly you’re predictable to one another. So to make the story aspect of this more comprehensible, you might think of this as political utopia. That’s one way of viewing it. Or as a vision of paradise. And then that’s the archetypal aspect that underlies the notion that the future could in fact be better than the present. I mean, even in trivial ways, we’re doing this all the time. We’re always moving from a state that we can see love as not entirely ideal, towards a state that we can see love, even in the smallest ways, as somehow better than where we were. And that’s the sort of thing that in fact gives us impetus to move forward in a literal sense. But underlying that is the notion. Way under, so to speak, is the notion that the world as it is presently constructed is somehow in need of redemption. And there is a state, a hypothetical state that exists somewhere in the future, so to speak, or somewhere at least, towards which the world could move. And all religious stories, all religious systems share that sort of notion, political utopias as well. I mean, it’s really evident in the case of something like communism, because communism was always trying to establish the kingdom of God on Earth, so to speak. Although, of course, theoretically without the religious overtones. They, of course, were just made implicit instead of being allowed to be explicit, because Stalin was as close to a god, and a pretty miserable one, as any religion has managed to construct. This is a simple story, basically. Stories have a slightly more complicated structure than this, which we’ll discuss later. How would you distinguish, or how do you distinguish between a strategy and a story? This would be a strategy in here. A strategy is just, that’s a good question. This is actually, this is somewhat simpler than the real structure, because in a sense, each of these strategies is this whole structure in a smaller sense. So you could say this structure is composed of smaller units like this all the way down. I don’t know how far down, I’m not going to be able to figure that out, but like, because every goal can be conceptualized as viewed as sub-goals that have the same notion. For the purposes of the present discussion, this is sufficient representation. But that’s something, that specific issue we’ll talk about more in the latter part of the course, because the fact that a story is made up of sub-stories, right down to the lowest level of resolution, has implications for certain forms of mythological representations. Representations of trees, actually. I don’t want to get into that at the moment. So, anyways, that’s the story. You said, I put up there the domain and constituent elements of the known. Well, I think that’s kind of an odd title for a diagram like this, but I would say that from the perspective of the regulation of emotion, a story about where you are and where you’d like to get to and how you’re going to do that, that is what you know. Remember, we’re not in the domain of facts here, construed from the scientific perspective. We’re in the domain of wisdom, behavioral knowledge, and what you know is where you are, where you want to be, and theoretically how to get there. So, I’ll explain this in some more detail later. Yeah, oh, sure, absolutely. Okay, so I said the first thing we’re going to do is describe in some detail how the brain works. And I want to do that because I want to give you some insight into how it is that we process emotional information. And you need to know that we think in stories before you can actually understand how it is that we process emotional information. So, I’m going to put up a somewhat complicated diagram. Remember, basically, that it will take three weeks to discuss the brain. Okay, but here’s the idea. It’s not as complicated as it looks. Okay, at the top, well, this is a circle, and you can start anywhere in a circle, but we’ll start at the top. It’s how you process information. Well, obviously, the bottom line is if you have a certain amount of sensory input. Okay, so I’m going to put up a somewhat complicated diagram. The bottom line is if you have a certain amount of sensory input. Okay. That sensory input is interpreted with regards to its significance as a consequence of its interaction with what you already know, which is basically to say that your present, which constitutes the sensory information theoretically that’s impinging on you at this moment, is a veridical picture of the external world, but your interpretation of reality as it’s unfolding. I’m not saying, I’m not trying to make a point that there’s no such thing as an external reality or that you’re living in a delusion or any of those things, just that you’re always interpreting what’s going on in relationship to its significance to you. And you have models. It’s models that are doing that. You have theories about what someone’s like, what you’re like, and what the situation consists of, and what you should be doing next, all of the input that you have that constitutes your online experience is a function of your interpretation. It’s based on actual information, but it’s still a function of interpretations. Okay. So we use your declarative memory, and that’s one form of memory storage, to construct your version of the present. That’s the significance of things as they’re unfolding at the present time. You can only really make judgments about the significance of things by contrasting them with what you would like to happen. So that’s your image of the desired future. Okay. If you’re doing something that’s even, that’s very simple. Well, let me give you an example. There are experiments where people’s task is to pick up an object, and they can see the object in front of them. Okay. So you’re given the task. That’s the basic story. The story is what you’re required to do is to transform yourself from the person you are now into the person who has possession of that watch. It’s just a standard laboratory experiment. But the watch is actually not there. It’s an image that’s generated by mirrors. And when you move towards the watch, you find that it’s not where it appears to be. Well, the fact of the object not being where it appears to be is an anomaly with regards to your current plan. And you’ll react to that emotion. The first thing that will happen is that, well, obviously you’re going to be surprised, right? You think, this is pretty easy. I’m going to pick that up, and you find out the thing that you see is not actually there. That’s an anomaly. You contrasted your desired future, which was your aim when you moved your arm, with the actual outcome of your actions. So that’s a mismatch. It’s a part of your brain called the hippocampus that seems to be responsible for comparing what’s actually going on, insofar as you can interpret that, with what you want to happen. And if a mismatch occurs, that sets up a whole sequence of related events. And those events manifest themselves in emotion, and in thought, and in behavior. Most evidently in emotion. If you’re going to do something, you’ve done it before, and it doesn’t work out the way you expected it to, the events that constitute the anomaly, the unexpected occurrence, they’re surprising. And the question then is, what does surprising mean? Well, it basically means that something threatening has occurred, and something unknown has taken place. What does the unknown mean? The thing about the unknown is that you don’t know what it means. That’s a pretty straightforward statement. But you see, that immediately introduces a strange sort of paradox, because you lack infinite information. Obviously, people don’t know what they’re doing all the time, which means that you come into contact with things that you don’t understand a lot. And that means, in a sense, that you have to know what to do when you don’t know what to do. Because you don’t know what to do a lot. And that doesn’t just bring you to a halt. What is the case, then, your nervous system is hardwired to move to a sort of default position, when the plans, the explicit plans that you have, that you’re carrying out, fail. So as long as you can say, in a sense, as long as you know what you’re doing, which means that you have a representation of where you are and where you’d like to be. You’re carrying out your plans to make the move, and things are going according to plan. Well, as long as you’re doing that, then the higher centers of your brain, the cortex, basically, it’s under control. You know what you’re doing. You feel comfortable and secure. As soon as something unexpected happens, the control shifts, and this is something that’s basically beyond your capacity to control, though you can interfere with the process. Control shifts from the cortical centers to the more fundamental areas of the brain to the limbic system. When something unexpected happens, two things occur. You stop. You feel a little bit of anxiety. It depends on how unexpected the occurrence is. If it’s really unexpected, you’ll be very, very frightened. If it’s just minor, something minor, unexpected, you’ll just stop. Your sensory processing will heighten. You’ll gather more information, and you’ll explore. And as you explore, you generate information, and the information is supposed to bring you back on course, basically. So you’ll say, well, what you’ll do if you’re trying to reach for the watch and you find out that it isn’t where you think it is, while you start making different sorts of approach sequences until you end up producing the outcome that you intended. When something unexpected occurs, two sets of circuitry are activated. One looks like it’s dominated by the right hemisphere, and the other looks like it’s dominated by the left hemisphere. Unexpected things make you anxious and curious, and you can localize those emotions in the body, so to speak. Anxiety is the emotion that accompanies the cessation of your body’s plan-directed activities. You could say that anxiety is what you feel when you slip into the mode of pause, pause for further analysis. What you expected to do didn’t happen, so you have to stop. Curiosity is what you feel when it’s necessary for you to explore further, to gather new information, to update your plans. And exploration is basically governed by the interplay of the circuitry, brain circuitry, that mediates anxiety and curiosity. Curiosity, by the way, that’s associated with positive emotions, and anxiety, as you all well know, is associated with negative emotion. People would rather not experience it. Curiosity, or surprise, is basically a juxtaposition of those two sets of emotions, which work antagonistically. The unknown produces conflict all by itself. That’s the, in a sense, and it’s kind of early to introduce this, but that’s the central theme, in a way, of the whole course, is that you have a hardwired response to the emergence of the unexpected. You have to, because you have to know what to do with something unexpected or cursed. It’s instinctive. Your instinctive response to the unknown is anxiety plus curiosity, which is to say, cessation of ongoing motor activity plus a drive to move forward and explore. Your exploratory activity is actually the sum total of the activation of the two sets of circuitry that mediate that response. When you explore, if you explore, something unexpected happens. You don’t have to explore. You can note it in and get the hell out of there. It’s safe, but you don’t gather any new information. It’s a good short-term strategy. It’s not a good long-term strategy. But anyway, the point is that surprise activates curiosity. And it tells you forward. You generate new information. You update your plan, and soon you can get to where you want it to go. The point is that mismatch between what you expect to happen and what actually happens, that disenacts the anxiety. If mismatch occurs, there’s a little sub-organ in your brain called the amygdala. And the amygdala looks like it’s responsible for the addition of emotion to sensory experience. Now, behavioral psychologists have presumed in the past, most psychologists have presumed, particularly behaviorists, that you learn to be afraid. Newer models of the neuropsychology of emotion reverse that presupposition and say, no, you know how to be afraid. Anything that you don’t expect makes you afraid. That’s your default position. What you have to learn is how to be secure. By the time you’re an adult, you’ve learned how to be secure so well, under most circumstances. Under secure circumstances, you’ve learned how to be secure so well that you don’t realize that your a priori or default position is fear. You’re so well-inculturated, assuming you’re successful, that the true nature of your emotional response is, in a sense, hidden from you. Which is precisely as it’s supposed to be, because the whole purpose of socialization, the whole purpose of learning, is in fact to shut off the circuitry that says something of indeterminant significance is occurring now. People do not like it when that circuitry is activated. Not on it. That’s a bit in the air, because people like to explore. You like novelty in small doses. Small, controllable doses, it’s like food. It’s when something truly unexpected occurs that uproots or upsets your plans that anxiety really becomes disinhibited. People like that less than anything else. Anyways, the amygdala labels things that are unexpected as simultaneously threatening and promising. That basically puts you into an approach of what is called fear. So, what does that mean? It means that anything unpredictable is not neutral. Anything unpredictable is frightening. That in and of itself immediately sheds a certain amount of light on why it is that we’re somewhat loathe to accept people whose behaviours we can’t predict as one of us. People who are from a culture that’s different from ours, for example, who have a story about how things should go that runs differently from ours. Their behaviour cannot be predicted with certainty. You are instinctively wired, so to speak, to label unpredictable behaviour as threatening. You can think about this in really concrete terms. You can experience this sort of thing regularly, for example, on a stroll through Harvard Yard. If you look around you, you’re all decked out in symbols, so to speak, that indicate your particular status. And goal-directed nature in a community such as this. You’re all relatively well dressed. You’re all relatively… no insults intended. You’re all well-groomed. You’re attentive. And your behaviour is very much indistinguishable from one another. You’re all participating in the same sort of ritual. And there’s no reason for you to view your neighbours sitting beside you with any degree of suspicion, because you’re convinced that you can predict them. If you take a walk through somewhere like Harvard Square, where there are people who, in a sense, have fallen out of the culture. So there are people there who are mentally ill. Some of them are schizophrenic. Many of them are alcoholic. They’re homeless for one reason or another. They’re hard on your guilt, if nothing else. But they’re also unpredictable. And you’ll find that people do standard things in the face of unpredictable others. They tend to avoid them, walk around them, or at least to feel very uncomfortable in their presence. And that’s because you do not know what to do in the face of someone whose story you cannot easily determine. You don’t know what they’re like. You don’t know if they’re going to hurt you. You don’t know if they’re dangerous in some regard. You don’t know what your obligations are with regards to them. They’re already labelled as part of the unknown, so to speak. And you’ll give them a relatively wide berth. The only message that’s really necessary from this particular slide is the idea that you’re always contrasting what you want to happen with what you think is happening. They’re both models. And wherever there’s a deviation, wherever what you want to happen isn’t going on, then you feel anxiety, curiosity as well. You’re impelled to explore it. But anxiety is the thing that comes up first. And the larger the magnitude of the unexpected occurrence, the greater the amount of anxiety. So one of the things we’re going to try to determine in the course is how you can understand how large a disruption a given unexpected event is. Because, you know, minor… Well, I think… Let’s go back to this other diagram for a second. Here’s a way of looking at it. So let’s say you’re going somewhere and you have three plans to get there. And this plan doesn’t work. So that means it produces an outcome that isn’t what you envisioned. And this plan doesn’t work. It produces an anomalous outcome as well. But this plan does work. Well, that’s no problem. I mean, those are pretty minor-leak disruptions. All you do is you keep the same vision of yourself and the same vision of the future. You just switch between plans. But you’re really in trouble if none of your plans work or if someone messes around with your representation of this or this. So you can say, for example, you want to get into medical school and you need 30 courses to get into medical school. And you should have A’s on all of them. And you get a B plus on one course. Okay. Well, you still have all these other courses. That’s not such a big deal. It’s a minor-leak disruption. It causes you a certain amount of anxiety and produces a certain amount of exploratory behavior. Perhaps you might go to the professor and say, why is it that I got this B plus when I was expecting an A? And don’t you know what that’s going to do to my vision of the ideal future? And so on and so forth. That’s one sort of disruption. You’re a bit anxious, but hey, you have 29 other courses. It’s not such a big deal. Now, instead, you write the MCAT and you score in the 15th percentile. Well, now you’re in trouble. Because you have a vision of yourself. You think this is your version of the unbearable present. You’re not a doctor. That’s a pain in the neck. But you’re a potential doctor. You have the intellectual resources at your disposal and the educational background and the familial push, perhaps, to make you into a doctor. And so that’s what you’ve conceived yourself as. That’s your story about yourself, because you’re this person with this set number of potentials. And you also have a vision of where it is that you’re going. The MCAT score comes back in near the 15th percentile. Well, your ideal future, it’s gone. That’s a big problem. Because that means that all of the events that have surrounded you, that surround you now, and as far back as you can remember, that were given determinant significance by this particular plan, have all been cast into chaos. Everything that you’ve done up to that point has been predicated on the notion that this is where you were going. And that means that the significance that you attributed to everything was attributed to everything in relationship to that goal. You blow out the goal, and all those significances are back up in the air. You have to modify your version of yourself. What the hell are you going to do now? You’re not going to be a doctor. You put a lot of work into this. Plus, it’s your whole self-conception. Well, this is gone. This is gone. I mean, this is irrelevant, right? I mean, the other 29 courses, why the hell are you even here now? So that’s one example of the levels at which anomalies can occur. Minor League anomalies, no problem. You just scoot around them, and you go to the same place. Major League anomalies, it’s a new ideal future. Now, that’s part of the reason that people are so prone to ideological conflicts. It’s like, this is an ideology, you could say. It has a particular version of the way things are now. You know, the communist ideology is pretty explicit. What’s the unbearable present, so to speak? Well, I know this is a bit dated, but we’re running out of hardline ideologies to hope fun at. So I have to use an old one. But the unbearable present is the class struggle, and we have reasons for that. It’s basically the fault of the rich who are exploiting the poor. The ideal future is the point at which those unfair divisions of capital are eliminated, and there’s a whole bunch of means to that end. That’s an ideology. Well, someone else has a different ideology, a different version of the significance of current events, a different version of the significance and the nature of the ideal future, and a completely different apprehension of how to transform one to the other. When those two cultures come into contact, well, first of all, they make each other anxious because they’re not commensurate. They’re not commensurate goals. And if this is the structure that regulates emotion, well, what’s going to happen? You can’t just give up your damn plans because then your emotions are dysregulated. You fall into chaos, so to speak. You don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are, you don’t know what to do, and you don’t know where you’re going. And that makes you anxious. Neither side is going to give up their certainty. Well, the only thing left then under those circumstances is conflict. And you see this. I mean, look, how do arguments escalate? An argument with someone that you love even, they want one thing, you want another. You discuss it, you’re not getting anywhere. Your temper’s raised because the abstract discussion isn’t helping. Finally, you give up. Maybe you move to violence to solve your problem, to hammer out the stories of the people to hammer out the stories, so to speak. You can do that by oppressing the person who has a different view point. Okay. So your brain is set up to contrast a vision of what you would like with a vision of what’s occurring. And when something unexpected occurs, there’s a whole sequence of emotional processes that are disinhibited. The amygdala governs them by all appearances. It’s an extraordinarily ancient organ that works in concert with the hippocampus. The hippocampus, by the way, evolved in the course of phylogenesis basically when amphibians left the ocean. So the circuitry has been around a long time, a lot longer than your higher cortical centers. It’s very sophisticated and it’s very powerful. And I think you could say that we spend our whole lives trying to make sure that the amygdala is shut off. We don’t like it when it’s off. Again, that’s not exactly true because I think a tiny bit of activation under controlled circumstances, that’s optimal. But there’s a threshold and it differs to some degree from person to person. If you exceed that threshold, there’s nothing that you dislike more. Because the amygdala is the thing that says everything that you are is in danger. We like to keep it shut off. Most of the time it’s shut off as long as we associate with people who are predictable to us. As long as we know where we’re going and things that we predict are occurring, it shuts up. And the cortical centers are in control and we go down the path that we’ve chosen. You could say as far as your brain is concerned, let me step one step back. What’s emotion? Emotion is the subjective sensation that you feel when you encounter a situation that has implications for action. Emotion occupies the space between sensory input and motor output. So if you encounter something that has significance, you feel an emotion. And an emotion is the subjective sense that accompanies the activation or the pre-activation of motor output systems. That’s basically how it occurs, how it appears. You can think of the world the way that we normally think of it, which is something that exists objectively. Something that’s amenable to scientific description. Or you can also think of it as a place that’s full of things that have implications for actions. As far as stories are concerned, the universe is a place that’s full of things that have implications for action. That’s the environment from the narrative perspective. The most fundamental substructure of narratives can be found in myths. And the next thing I want to show you is how myths fundamentally represent the world insofar as it’s conceived of as something that has implications for behavior. Something with emotional significance. So the world of the scientific object, so to speak, is devoid of emotional significance. Really by design. Part of what you do in the scientific procedure is eradicate anything that’s purely subjective, like emotion. If you think a theory is true because you like the theory, that’s not sufficient grounds for considering it true from the scientific perspective. You’re supposed to make yourself objective, which basically means to eradicate your emotional assessment of a given situation. But the thing is we’re always assessing situations for their affective significance. You don’t have to do that because emotion or affect means how to act. And you always have to figure out how to act in every situation. So it’s reasonable to construe the world as something that has meaning. As a place where meaning exists. This is how the world is conceived from the mythological perspective. It’s quite straightforward. I’m not going to talk much about this. The mythological representation of chaos is just the attempt to represent the place that everything comes from before there’s any divisions between anything. I don’t want to get into that right now. But from the mythological perspective, this is how the world is. This is a creation myth, basically. The original thing splits into two components. One of which is the unknown, and the other of which is the known. Now the known has this structure. It’s a story. So if you know something, you know the story that goes along with it. Which means that if you know a territory, if you explore a territory, it means you know how to act there. That’s all that I’m trying to emphasize here. And from the mythological perspective, the world is constructed of three things. One is all those things that you don’t know. That’s the domain of the unpredictable. And it has a priori motivational significance. Which basically means that on first contact, it scares the hell out of you, and then it makes you curious if you stick around long enough. First face it reveals is the one that makes you anxious. That’s unexplored territory. That’s the dark forest, barbarian lands, dark water, the land of the dead. Tiamat is well, Tiamat is a dragon from Mesopotamian creation myth from which everything comes basically. Anything frightening, anything threatening, anything that makes you run away, anything that’s in the dark, anything that’s unfamiliar, that all constitutes the unknown from the mythological perspective. That’s half the world. That’s the division between chaos and order basically. From the mythological perspective, that’s what the universe is composed of. Chaos is divided from order, and that’s the world. You live in order, hopefully. Chaos surrounds you, like the ocean surrounds an island, fundamentally. But this diagram is basically trying to represent the known, the great father. That’s culture. The village, the nation, explored territory, the city, the family, the king, the predictable. That’s where you live. That’s where everything is transformed from chaos into order, where everything can be predicted. And it sits on top of the unknown. Psychoanalytic interpretations of the rationale for social conflict have often posited that what you see in people who you are willing to persecute is your own dark side, those things about you that you’re most unwilling to admit. And I think there’s a certain amount of truth in that. But what’s more accurate and more fundamental, and much less difficult to understand in a sense, is that if someone is not familiar to you, you don’t have to presume anything about them. The mere fact of their existence as something unfamiliar is already sufficient to give them a certain emotional valence. And that emotional valence, at least on initial contact, is the promotion of anxiety. You don’t have to think in some ways about the necessity of projection or your own incomprehensibility to yourself, or your propensity to only see the evil in others, because the mere fact of unpredictability is enough to render someone associated with this domain. That’s the thing. I said we classify things in two different ways, in a sense. We classify things from the scientific perspective, but we also classify them from the perspective of their significance for action. And you could say that a natural category is the class of all things that you should run away from. And from the perspective of that sort of classification, everything that is the sort of thing that you should run away from is the same thing. So that means any time you encounter something that’s unpredictable, that thing is instantly thrown into the category of all the things that have ever frightened you, all the things in your life that you haven’t been able to control, because the idea of the thing that you should run away from is one of the most fundamental types of classification there is. So we’re always classifying things in terms of their fundamental significance for behavior. I found out, for example, I thought about that, I guess about six or seven years ago, as reading Mercier, Eliade, There are many creations, the world comes out of the body of a dragon. For example, in the Mesopotamian creation myth, Marduk versus Tiamat. Tiamat is a dragon who lives at the bottom of the ocean, and she’s the mother of all the gods, but they make a lot of noise and irritate her, and they also kill her husband. This makes her quite mad, so she decides she’s going to eat them all. And one of the Mesopotamian gods named Marduk is elected by the other gods to go and fight with Tiamat and Da. He encloses her in a net and cuts her into pieces, and out of the pieces he makes the world. He creates order from chaos. He’s the third feature of the mythological world, by the way. There’s the unknown, and there’s the known, and there’s the process that mediates between them. Turns one into the other. That’s the hero, Marduk’s the hero. He cuts up the dragon and makes the world, so he’s assimilated to a creator god, basically. The reason I’m telling you this story now, though, is because I found out from Eliade that many archaic cultures, the Iranians and the Egyptians, There were three others whose names I don’t remember at the moment, The symbol that they used for the stranger or the barbarian was the same symbol they used to represent the chaos that predated the construction of the world. This is so interesting if you grasp the significance of that, because it meant that the Egyptians, the ancient Egyptians, for example, never let a foreigner into one of their temples because the foreigner would bring chaos into order. The foreigner was chaos. That’s the thing for the Egyptian. The foreigner was chaos. They used the same symbol. That’s how people think. That is how we think. If you’re not from the same tribe, however that’s defined, most fundamentally it would be the family, but obviously we’ve abstracted that up into the nation or into an ideological unit or whatever. If you’re not us, then you are chaos. And all by yourself under those circumstances, if you’re an agent of chaos, you have emotional significance. Here’s something I can’t predict. I’m afraid of things I can’t predict. I can’t predict your threat to me. All the path from that to oppressing you is not very long. It’s a very short one. One of the things we’re going to study to a fair degree is mythological representations of the world. I find this extremely interesting. The reason for this is because as soon as you know, as soon as you know that we use stories to regulate our emotions, and as soon as you know that there are two types of information that we need to gather, one being factual information and the other information about how we should behave, then you have the possibility of reading mythological accounts or stories in general from a completely different perspective. Because you don’t have to think anymore, well, this mythological account, for example, the creation of the world has no relationship whatsoever to evolutionary theory. We know evolutionary theory is more accurate. Therefore, this whole sequence of accounts has to be cast into the realm of pseudoscience or superstition. Well, then you lose all the information that’s in those stories. As soon as you know that those stories aren’t concerned in the least with the construction of the objective world, but are concerned with the world as it has significance, well, then you have a whole new way of approaching them, a whole new mode of interpreting them, and you can start to understand the nature of the stories that actually underlie our culture. And believe me, that’s so useful. Well, it’s so useful you can hardly believe it. You find all of a sudden that all these stories that you’ve heard since your earliest days, stories that are basically rationally incomprehensible, as soon as you twist your presuppositions about their origins just 45 degrees, then you can see the order in them, exactly what it is that they’re trying to put forth, and they all of a sudden make sense. Well, I think knowing this, regardless of its implications for social conflict, knowing that, getting a key to the meaning of these stories, that’s worth having to plow your way through all the information that you have to read in this course. Because you’ll, I’ll tell you, you’ll go see things, see movies and read novels and look at myths, and you’ll think, I know what that means now, isn’t it so interesting that that’s what it means? You can immediately see the relationship between the story and your own, the position that you occupy in the midst of things. It’s very fascinating. So we’re interested in representation. Here, I want to read you a bit of a story here. It said, the unknown is the great and terrible mother. Well, you know, you’re going to have to accept that, my word for that, at the moment. But the basic notion is, a feminine imagery tends to be used to represent the unknown. And the reason for that is because the unknown is the mother of all things. That’s obviously a very mystical way of thinking about it. But all I mean is this. Every bit of, as far as the myth is concerned, information is the world. Okay, that’s the known. All the information that you generate, you generate in contact, as a consequence of your contact with something you didn’t understand. Which is only to say that you generate information by exploring. It’s not very, that’s obvious, well, I mean, it’s not much of a step from there to construing the thing that you’re investigating, which is the unknown, as the source of everything. Perfectly reasonable presupposition. And it’s not such a difficult leap to make, to construe the source of everything as something feminine. Something that gives birth to things. Anyways, it doesn’t matter if you follow that train of logic or not, or if you accept it. That isn’t the case, and that is how myths tend to represent the unknown. One of the books that you’re going to read is called The Great Mother, and that’s a work by Eric Newman. It’s 300 pages of description of mythological representations of the feminine. Anyways, that’s the mythological aspect. I want to read you a good story about rats. Because I want to show you how deeply grounded these sorts of notions are. I want to tell you a little story first, before I read it. I was watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon the other day with my kids. And you’re probably more or less familiar with the Bugs Bunny cartoon characters. A sheepdog and a wolf. And they go to work in the morning. And the sheepdog’s job is to guard the sheep, and the wolf’s job is to eat them. And they punch the time clock in, and then they go into their respective roles. Anyways, the sheepdog is always beating the wolf up badly, and he gets the real rough end of the stick. Now, there’s one scene there. The sheepdog is sitting on a cliff watching the sheep, and it’s raining. And the wolf gets a bright idea. He’s going to put hair tonic on the sheepdog’s hair. And it’s raining so that the sheepdog won’t notice. So he sneaks up and puts hair tonic on his head, and hair grows down over his eyes. So the sheepdog’s sitting there, and the wolf climbs up the cliff. And the first thing he does is he has a glove on the stick. So he’s hiding behind the cliff, and he puts the glove on the stick, and he raises it in front of the sheepdog’s face. No response. Now, that wolf is exploring unexplored territory. And it does it cautiously. It sticks the stick on there. Nothing happens. So then the next thing it does is it just pokes its head up and goes right down. And it looks. Nothing terrible happens. So then it climbs up on top of the cliff, and it weighs its hand in front of the sheepdog. It’s starting to smile now. It thinks it’s pretty smart. Then it’s jumping up and down. Okay, so it’s explored the territory. It’s mapped it. Originally, the unexplored territory was anxiety provoking. The wolf underwent a whole sequence of exploratory activities, mapped the territory, and saved. So then it’s off to steal a sheep. Okay, that’s funny. It was funny because animators are great at picking out what we do and exaggerating them. So they’re comical. That’s exploring unknown territory. Okay. Most of the time when behavioral psychologists teach a rat to be afraid, and that’s what they think they’re doing, they take a rat that’s secure. So they presume that the natural state of the rat is secure. But the only bloody reason the rat’s secure is because it’s already explored its cage. So you put a rat in a cage, and it’ll freeze because it’s scared. And then if nothing terrible happens, soon it unfreezes, and then it slowly starts to explore. It might just move its eyes first and sniff, and then if nothing terrible happens, it starts to move. And soon it checks out the whole cage. And if nothing is in there that’s going to kill it, it has a nap or whatever. Maybe it looks for some food. It has to explore before it’s secure. Now, more modern animal psychologists, ethologists, are starting to study the reactions of things like rats in the natural habitat. And that’s what this story’s about. So take a rat, and rats, they’re social. Set them up in a burrow, and they let them set up their burrow. They map out their territory by exploring. So they have this whole burrow system set up, and the rats know it. Nothing’s dangerous there. That’s home. Put a cat in one section of it. Okay, that’s this story. When a cat is presented to an established mixed sex group of laboratory rats living in a visible burrow, the behaviors of the subjects change dramatically. In many cases, for 24 hours or more, the initial act of defensive behavior, flight to the tunnel chamber system. So the rats are cruising along where they think it’s safe, and there’s a cat. Well, it’s like home into the burrow. It’s followed by a period of immobility during which the rats make 22 kilohertz ultrasonic vocalization, which apparently serves as alarm cries at a high rate. So they’re, to put it, they’re freaked out. They run home and scream. They’re frozen. And they scream. And they must be screaming something like, oh no, there’s a cat. And all the other rats hear this. They’re all in their burrows. They’re terrified. They’re frozen into immobility by the appearance of this unexpected thing. As freezing breaks up, it’s interesting. Think of a good myth. Perseus in the Gorgon. Show the face of the Gorgon. Is this female head that’s covered with snakes? That’s an image of the unknown. That thing turns you to stone. Anyways, as freezing breaks up, proxemic avoidance of the open area gravitably gives way to a pattern of risk assessment of the area where the cat was encountered. Okay, so the rats are frozen and they think, oh no, death is around the corner. They don’t precisely think that, but that’s how they act. And if nothing happens that’s also terrible, well, they start to relax a little bit. And as soon as they start to relax, the circuitry, they’re very curious about this unexpected occurrence, but they’re overwhelmed by anxiety. They don’t do any exploring. They run back and make sure that nothing terrible happens, just like that wolf did with a sheepdog. They run back. As their anxiety recedes, their curiosity starts to predominate. So they go back to the open area. Subjects poke their heads out of the tunnel openings to scan the open area where the cat was presented for minutes or hours before emerging. So they’re like watching. This is new territory now. There was not supposed to be a cat there. So let’s just see what happens. So they’re watching and watching and remapping the territory. When they do emerge, their locomotory patterns are characterized while they kind of run flat so they can’t be seen. But the thing that’s really neat is they do short corner runs. I think this is so interesting. So you think, here’s the area that the cat was seen. So it’s like… Cat. Now the rats saw the cat there, so this is all of a sudden being re-novelized, this area. It was once mapped and made secure, but the appearance of the cat there has thrown their plans for a loop. So what do the rats do? Well, the cat’s disappeared, but they don’t trust this area anymore because it was associated with the cat. So they do corner runs. The bravest of rats leaps out of his tunnel and runs right across a small area. And if he doesn’t get killed… That’s safe. So then he runs back. Takes another chug on it. Safe. Other rats are doing the same thing. Soon, if there’s no cat, the whole area’s mapped again. These risk assessment areas appear to involve active gathering of information about possible danger sources, providing a basis for a gradual return to non-defensive behaviors. Active risk assessment is not seen during early post-cat exposure, but rises to a peak about 10 hours later. These rats are scared. Non-defensive behaviors such as eating, drinking, and sexual aggressive activity tend to be reduced over the same period. That’s because the anxiety system just predominates. You don’t think about anything else when there’s a cat around. It’s such a great story because you get an idea of how the rat’s universe is set up. There’s known territory, and then there’s unknown territory. And known territory can turn into unknown territory as soon as something unpredictable happens. And when something unpredictable happens, that whole area is made novel again. The rats have to undergo this very complex pattern of exploratory activity to make their territory secure again. So that’s quite interesting. Now it’s also the case… I gave you here a representation of novelty. That’s what novelty does to people. It’s half threat, which may produce anxiety. It’s half promise, and impels exploratory activity. Anxiety comes up first. This has been known among behavioral psychologists for about five decades. The exploratory and anxiety circuitry are mutually inhibitory, but the anxiety circuitry has the upper edge in terms of potency and rapidity of rise. It’s fundamental. So… Okay. So… Let me show you something. Oh, it’s also the case… So, rats, they identify each other by smell. And if you smell something, you identify it by smell. And if you smell like you should smell, then you’re familiar. You’re not contaminated with the unknown. So your behavior is predictable, which basically means that I know your place in the dominance hierarchy. I know what role you play with all the other animals. And I know how to behave in your presence. You’re familiar. You’re kin. And I can tell that if I’m a rat by the way that you smell. Okay, so you take a rat that everyone loves, and you pull it out of its cage, and you wash it off. And you throw it back in with the rats. You kill it. Because that rat is now contaminated with the unknown. And we don’t like to have the unknown around because it upsets our predictability. And when our predictability gets upset, then our anxiety levels rise and all hell breaks loose. Literally all hell breaks loose. Because actually, hell is a mythological representation of the unknown. These thoughts impart. Now… From the mythological perspective, the world has three constituent elements. The unknown, which is everywhere. The known, and the process by which one is turned into the other, which is basically exploration. So the knower is the archetypal pattern of exploration. The thing that mediates between the unknown and the known. And from the mythological perspective, part of the process creates the world. See, that’s absolutely fascinating too. If you think about it for a minute, because you can think about something like the fact of, say, take our democratic system. Our democratic system is deeply rooted in religious presuppositions, many of which we forget now, but it doesn’t really matter. They’re still there. They’re implicit. They’re there. Now, one of the implicit presumptions is that every individual in our society is worthy of respect. That’s the core aspect of your natural right, fundamentally. Even if you’re a criminal, like even if you’ve broken rules that you admit you’ve broken in this society and others that have the same presuppositions, you still have a whole sequence of rights that cannot be violated. Because in principle, there’s something about you that’s worthy of respect, regardless of your behavior. My question is, what is that? What is that? Well, you can see this in simpler social animals like wolves. Wolves, well, they live in social groups. They have dominance hierarchies. And wolves are always trying to climb up the dominance hierarchy, which is good for the wolf pack, because the strongest animal, more or less, the most competent animal should be at the top. But anyways, if one wolf fights with another wolf, they very seldom injure each other if they’re in the same group, which is good because you don’t want the group diminished by constant intragroup conflict. Well, the top wolf, the wolf who wins the conflict, which is usually more of a threat posturing than actual physical engagement, although sometimes a real fight breaks out, if the wolf that loses the dominance dispute manifests submissive behaviors, which basically means it rolls over and shows its throat, which means you can kill me now if you want, the top wolf stops. And you can say, well, the stronger wolf acts as if it’s constrained by knowledge that even the weaker members of the group still can conceivably contribute something of value to the group. Well, that’s what we’re like, too, in our group organizations, except we’ve got that principle up almost to the point where we understand it. It’s the individual who, in contact with the unknown, generates information. That information constitutes the group. And the individual is valuable because they are, in fact, assimilated from the mythological perspective to the force that creates the world, which is basically the force that renders the unknown predictive war that creates order of chaos. You say the aspect of people that’s divine, theoretically, is the part that stands on the border between the unknown and the known. And it moves information from unexplored territory into explored territory, expanding the dominion of the group. That’s any of this. Okay. Who’s this? Mrs. Kelly, the devourer. She’s a negative mother, so to speak, from the mythological perspective. And I find her very interesting. She’s the best representation of this sort of thing that I’ve ever seen. Now, if the myth, you think, myths, they last a long time, sometimes tens of thousands of years, and they often even last across cultures. And you think, well, what the hell is it? What could a story actually be telling you that could be useful given that much change? Well, the mythological world that stories are concerned with is composed of three things. The unknown. Well, it’s always there. It doesn’t matter when you live or where you live or who you are. That’s part of your experience. It’s always going to be part of your experience. It doesn’t matter how much you know. There’s always things that you can’t predict. The more you know, well, the more potential problems there are, because knowledge in itself even breeds new problems. That’s always there. The fact of culture is always there. I mean, the cultures may change, but the fact that there’s culture and that you’re a product of culture and that you have to add to it, or at least establish some relationship to it, that it protects you and creates you, and that you contribute to it, that never changes. And the fact that you’re the intermediary between those two forces, that never changes. And that’s what myth describes, those three things. This is a representation of the unknown. The unknown is also, as well as being the thing that gives rise to everything, it’s also the thing that destroys everything. It’s the things that we cannot control that in the final analysis lead to our demise. It’s our ignorance that causes our death, in a sense. We just can’t stop something. We can’t stop aging. We can’t stop disease. We can’t stop starvation. Those are all things that we haven’t got a grip on. They’re all things that are still unknown and unpredictable, and sooner or later they get us. Let’s look at Kelly. Well, the first thing I’d like to say is that I said the unknown automatically frightens us. There are other things that automatically frighten us, more or less. There’s some dispute about this in the behavioural literature. There are things that you can learn to become afraid of very easily. Spiders, snakes, fire, blood, skeletons, disembodied bodies. Those are all elements of horror movies. It’s pretty obvious that people are more or less afraid of them. It’s not that difficult to figure out why. The only debate in the psychological literature is whether those fears are actually innate, or whether you have to acquire them through very brief exposure. It doesn’t matter, as far as I’m concerned. The point is that those things might be regarded as extraordinarily appropriate representatives of the unknown. What’s myth trying to do? It’s trying to encapsulate behavioural wisdom under what circumstances in what world? Well, the answer to that is in the world that’s composed of the unknown, the known, and the mediating force. If you have to adapt to the unknown, which you have to do, the thing to do, logically, say you have an infinite amount of time at your disposal, is to come up with a representation of what the unknown is. A strange thing to do, because you don’t know what it is. So the question is, how the hell can you represent it? But the one thing you do know about it that’s always the case is that it makes you afraid, and it makes you curious. So if you want to make a representation of it, then you use those things that you do know something about that either make you afraid or curious. So let’s look at this figure, a figure to whom, at some point in history, and not so long ago, human sacrifice has actually offered it. We’re going to look a little bit at the reasons for that. This is Kelly. She is the thing that everything goes back to. She’s a representative of the unknown. Well, let’s look at her. Now, she’s something that produces religious devotion in those who apprehend her presence, seizure of meaning, fundamentally, which you can assimilate to a religious experience. She has eight legs like a spider. She spins the web of faith. That’s the reason. The web is made out of fire. Her hair’s on fire, too, by the way. She sits in the middle of that web. She has a headdress of skulls and usually has a snake around her waist. A snake’s a symbol of transformation because it sheds its skin, so theoretically it’s something that’s reborn. But anyways, she often has staring eyes and protruding teeth, which is something else that people are pretty much supposed to respond to. And she is, in her hands, are tools of creation and destruction. And she’s simultaneously giving birth to this gentleman and eating him. But that is a symbol of that. And I would say, well, okay, now you understand two things. You understand that you have an innate response to the unknown, and that it’s a permanent constituent element of experience from the perspective of emotion. And if you look at a figure like that, then you can get some apprehension of what it is that people are trying to avoid contacting in an attempt to maintain things predictably. Okay, and… Well, I’m just going to close this, I guess. This is a hint about the second part of the course. So the first part of the course is going to…there’s a lot more detail to this story than I ran across today. And there’s some complicated factors that make the whole story much more interesting. I mean, this is interesting already, I think. This is the most…this has something to do with hope, let’s say. You’re innately predisposed to respond to the unpredictable with anxiety, and perhaps to eliminate it if you can. You can understand why that is. You need to be able to predict your circumstances. You have to be able to. You can’t just give up your story or your culture because that throws you completely into chaos. And that’s unpleasant, as unpleasant as anything you could imagine. But other people believe different things. And obviously, when you come into contact with them, well, there’s a high likelihood of depression. And the aggression of such magnitude that there’s a good probability that you’ll be destroyed. And so, the person that you’re aggressing against, not really striking as, you know, all that great a solution. On the one hand, you give up your ideas, well, then you’re subject to affective dysregulation of the most intolerable sort. On the other hand, if you pursue your particular ideas in the face of opposition, then you might run into a circumstance where aggression is inevitable. And that’ll be the end of you. This is a bad sort of paradox. So what can be done about that? Well, that has, I guess you could say, to give you the answer in the tiniest sort of nutshells, it has something to do with your attitude towards anomalous information. You have the highest likelihood of not falling into this sort of trap if, when something unexpected happens to you, you register it and you explore it to see why it was that you were wrong, to accept the fact of the anomalous information and to explore it. This is a neat figure, and I’ll close with a discussion, just a brief discussion of this. That’s a Bodhisattva. It’s an Eastern image that I suppose you could assimilate to some degree to Christ in the West. It’s an image of the hero. And the hero is the intermediary process between the known and the unknown. The hero is some person who goes out, learns fighting, see this in dragon stories. I should have mentioned that when I showed you the dragon. Dragons, they live in the bottom of the mountain and they sit on a treasure. And if you want the treasure, you go out of your community that’s threatened by the dragon. If you want the treasure, you go to its lair, you overcome the dragon and bring back the treasure. When you come back, then your community is transformed. The last story about exploration says the dragon is the thing that’s simultaneously threatening and promising, as well as archaic and ancient and powerful. The hero is the person who leads the community to encounter that archetypal phenomena, to overcome it, to get the treasure, to bring it back to the community, which is therefore enriched. That’s the path of the hero. This is a very interesting image. That figure, you see the attempt by the author to make it recurring. And this is the sky, by the way. And this might be conceived of as a tunnel. But it’s a tunnel into time, not into space. This is the most, this is the present, and this is the past, as it extends back as far as can possibly be imagined. This figure sits on, I know it’s kind of blurry and that’s unfortunate, but let’s see here. See these figures at the bottom? These are figures that are very much like Kelley. Same sort of thing. And this representation is this figure triumphing, in a sense, over this figure. And this, this is surrounded by fire as well. Again, that’s a symbol of transformation. This is an attempt to portray the fact that the pattern of behavior that is characteristic of the hero is something that constantly recurs through time. That’s an archetype from the Union perspective. The fact of exploration and the tendency for exploration. That’s an inbuilt part of the human psyche. It’s biologically predicated. It’s part of the apparatus that you inherit, so to speak. It’s nothing to do with inherited memories or anything that abstract. It just has to do with the fact that that’s the sort of creature you are. You always serve as the intermediary between unexplored territory and explored territory, and that’s true no matter where you live. This is a figure that, well, that is a drawing that attempts to represent that idea pictorially. It’s a very complicated idea. Most religious traditions, perhaps without exception. Of course, there’s always exceptions. Are predicated on the notion that identity, identity with this figure, identification with this figure, is necessarily at the core of proper human adaptation. And without that identification, chaos will necessarily reign. Okay. Sure. What’s that? Oh, yeah. I have that chest. I just basically do that. So does everybody have a syllabus? Okay, does everybody have the directions to the syllabus? Okay, does everybody have the directions to the coffee shop? Okay. Is that a computer image? Yeah. Yep. Sure. That’s from Joseph Campbell’s book. Yeah. I actually don’t have a study guide with me. I simply don’t know how to make that. No, it’s for probably a great book next week. Yeah. One thing I wanted to ask you is have you seen or looked at Antonio László? Yeah, I’ve been following D’Amesio’s work for a long time. He’s the only, for a long time, he was the only neuropsychologist that I knew of in North America who was actually interested in the, the psychophysiology of cognition. Yeah. So he’s actually, some of the ideas that are in the book are derived in part from some of D’Amesio’s work. Yeah, that’s the, Descartes’ error. Yeah, yeah. Sure. Yep, absolutely. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, if you just put your name in there, they’ll direct you to your terms. Okay, your name and your student ID. Oh, that’s yours? Yes. Okay, thanks. Did one of them open the door? Oh, good. Well, you’re welcome to go in there. So, that’s my, almost the end of this. So, if, if you just cover it, just the basic thing. Well, that, that would be best. That’s really my concern, is that you would talk to me as well. Sure, yep. That’s fine. Yep. Sure. Yep. Absolutely. Yeah, they are and, yeah. Okay. And what’s this, what’s the problem? Are you going back? Oh, yeah, all right. I guess I’ll have to sign this. Thank you. Thanks. Hi, how are you? Good, thank you. I don’t have my phone yet, but. Yeah, okay, whatever. Papers from the last. Yeah, they’re done. They’re marked. They’re downstairs in my office. I’m going to put them out on this bench. And you can just pick them up or you can come down with me here in a minute or two. Okay, thanks a lot. Okay. Whoop. What’s the course number? 2435. Yeah, that’s fine. Dr. Fitton, are you taking the new one for 95? No, because I have a sabbatical next year. So it’s not a good idea. You should find someone who would be around. Yeah, I know. I just found out last night. Yeah, as long as you’re convinced that you can. Yeah, it’s okay. It’s fine. Yeah, okay. Oh, good. Yeah. Okay. Oh, 12 bucks or something. It’s not very expensive. Okay. Thanks. Yeah. Yep. You might try Rich Fignelli. If you have a well thought out project that you’ve already worked on, you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding someone.