Maps of Meaning 02 (Harvard Lectures) (UdJBqCI4dpU)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=UdJBqCI4dpU

There are copies that have the drawings as well. So you should have 343 pages. And how many drawings are there? Susan, you have them. How many drawings are at the back of your book? There are. Four. Four drawings. If you don’t have it, check for 4257. I just found mine floating in the middle. Oh, yeah, that’s them, all right. Oh, these are the origin of the way. Oh, yeah, yeah. OK, you might want to put those at the back of your book because that’s where they’re supposed to be. Oh, you did? Well, that’s good. 14, so that looks like everybody. So we have 14 people. So that’s a good start. OK, so I’m going to lecture for a while. And then what you should have read today was the preface of the thing that you picked up from Noman Coffee and the first chapter, which is called Maps of Experience. And in terms of this book, you should be reading it now and also for the next class. We’ll go over this in some detail, too. So I’ll start. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them. I’ll try to leave at least half an hour at the end open for a general discussion. And really, feel free to stop me at any point if what I’m saying doesn’t make any sense or if you have some relevant associated issue. OK, now the first thing we have to figure out, basically, is what it is that we’re talking about in this course. And so we have to establish the domain of inquiry. That’s basically the purpose of today’s lecture. The reason I got interested in this sort of thing, as I mentioned to you last week, was because I am interested in figuring out why people are motivated to commit acts of aggression, really atrocious acts of aggression, because that’s the kind I’m really interested in, in defense of their belief systems. You’re probably best, if you can, pulling somewhere over there because they need a closer view of that. So if you guys could just cram together a bit, if you would. Maybe we can get a few more people in here. OK, once again, does everybody here have a syllabus? OK, and does everybody have this book? OK, is there anybody that wants this book? OK. Hi. Just have to write your name and your ID down there. Sorry. All maps of meaning is available at Nomen Coffee. No, they’re not binding it? No, there’s, yeah. If you talk to the people that have a clue, they’re binding it. Because people have been getting bound copies. And if you don’t get a bound copy, tell them it’s supposed to be bound, OK? Because you don’t want to pack that thing around unbound. They didn’t even have any when I went yesterday. Yeah, I know. They’re doing them on an order-only basis now. Yeah. Although I ordered eight more of them. They told me yesterday that there had been 45 copies that were pre-ordered and guaranteed, and then they were all gone. Is that the case? Yeah, well, I didn’t expect to get rid of 45 copies. But did you get one? They didn’t have any? I ordered one. Yeah. That’s what they’re doing now. So other 45 people in the classroom? No, I also teach it at the extension school. So that’s the reason. OK? OK. So we’re done with procedural issues, theoretically? OK. OK. Well, I’ll reverse myself here again. OK, so what we’re going to talk about today is, I’ll start the story again. I got interested in what I’m going to teach you about, because I was interested in looking at motivation for social conflict. Maybe I can get you to shut the door if you want. Don’t disturb the whole floor. Oh. That’s me. That must be Ellen Landers. Is it Ellen Landers? I’ll come back in here, and I’ll wake you up. OK? OK. With regards to the videotape, if you can ignore it, that would be best. There’s no real purpose to it. I want the videotape. So it’s not like your comments are going to be widely shown to anyone. So try to just not worry about it. You’re right. When I started giving some consideration to the problem of motivation for social conflict, so I was interested in why people become rigid in their ideological identifications and in their cultural identities. And I was interested in really why individuals do that. So I started to get interested in what role social identity plays in information processing, which is hence the title of this course, which is kind of wordy and useless. But the thing is, everyone knows that we have social identities and ideological identities. They’re religious, they’re cultural, they’re intellectual, whatever. But nobody’s really paid much attention to studying how the representations of that cultural identity alter the manner in which we feel emotion, in which we perceive, and by which we act. I’m interested in how our internal representations of our culture modulate our emotional expression. That’s the best way to put it. You know, your brain basically is programmed as you’re socialized. That’s what socialization is for. Obviously, it’s socialization that instills cultural identity. And equally, obviously, the process of socialization that leads to cultural identity must have some impact on the way you think. Obviously, equally on the way that your mind functions, and the way that your brain functions. See, North American neuropsychologists have been loathe to give any consideration to this sort of notion, to think that cultural transformations might have some direct impact on physiological function. But the Russians, by contrast, this has been a central tenet of their neuropsychological theories, basically, since day one. This is particularly true with regards to Alexander Luria and what’s his name? Degotsky. Now, you can think about this. It’s quite obvious if you think about it for a second, with regards to something like the capacity to read silently. Now, it is the case that, well, this is a relatively new talent. I mean, literacy is a new talent, right? Most people weren’t able to read 500 years ago. It’s only been 500 years, and only for a little bit of that, that the capacity to read has been widespread. And the capacity to read silently is a relatively new development in human history. Now, it’s a peculiar thing if you think about it, but nonetheless, the capacity to read silently localizes to a specific part of the brain, which is to say, it’s as if you have a part of the brain that’s evolved for that purpose. It’s the same place in everybody, more or less. There are individual variations. There are differences when people are lateralized differently. But all that aside, if you learn to silently read, there’s a part of your brain that specializes for that. And it’s pretty much the same place in everyone. And it wasn’t there, or it wasn’t doing that sort of activity 2,000 years ago. In fact, I read at one point, I don’t know where the reference to this is, like so many things that I make reference to. But I read at one point that people thought Julius Caesar was a magician in part, and he was obviously a remarkable person, but in part because he could read silently. He didn’t have to read aloud. So it wasn’t just reading that was remarkable. It was being able to read without talking. Anyways, the point of all this is that your brain, this is Luria’s view of the brain fundamentally, is your brain is an organ that produces sub-organs, culturally specific sub-organs. That’s its remarkable capacity, is that it can generate new modules that are specialized for certain tasks as a consequence of environmental programming. Well, this is an interesting sort of notion, which is to say that at some level of physiological analysis, at least, your culture determines how your brain works. Now, it’s very plastic. Your brain’s very plastic when you’re a child. You can sustain immense amounts of cortical damage in childhood and still grow up normally. For example, if you were very, very epileptic as a child, sometimes what surgeons will do is take out a whole hemisphere, the whole right hemisphere, gone. And children who have hemisphericemies, if they’re done young enough, still grow up to be relatively normal. Quite normal, in fact. And there are other cases, too, where people are hydrocephalic, which basically means that their ventricles don’t vent properly. And cerebral spinal fluid builds up in the skull. So these people often have skulls that are slightly larger than normal, not necessarily obvious, but still the case. And they end up with a skull that’s essentially full of liquid with a very, very thin layer of brain tissue around this ball of liquid. And there are a number of case reports of people who have like 5% of their cortical tissue intact who have high functioning intelligences and normal personalities. So the point is, especially the higher cortical levels of your brain are very, very functionally flexible in childhood. Now, by the time you’re an adult, the pattern changes a little bit. Kind of looks like your brain dies into its adult configuration. That’s an interesting way to look at it, which is to say, you have way more neurons than you need, especially right before you’re born. And environment prunes your brain down to its adult configuration. So, although, of course, you develop connections as well, but you lose a lot of neurons. So, and by the time you’re an adult, your brain is nowhere near as flexible as it was when you were a child. And if you sustain damage to certain parts of your brain that are already specialized, well, then you have the damage and you can work around it and all that, but it can still be really permanent. Question? So that’s sort of the marking in its- Yeah, that’s right. That’s a good comment. Because the brain adapts whereas the body- Yeah, that’s a great comment. And if you start thinking about that, it has really revolutionary implications. So you can say, for example, if I have an idea that’s really radical, and say, in a sense, that changes the configuration of my cortex, I can transmit that, maybe not to you, maybe your brain is already fixed. So to speak, put down the generations and alter the structure of brains henceforth. So you could say, well, ideas can spread throughout a population that way. That’s a Lamarckian spread. But even more interesting, I think, and this is speculative, of course, but let’s say that there are certain types of revolutions in thought that are actually the consequences of biological mutations. So you could say that, well, you’re a particularly odd sort of person from the genetic perspective, and as a consequence, you think in a very, very unique manner. But the thing that’s so interesting is that if you can still communicate those thoughts, then the effect of that genetic mutation can be transmitted throughout the population without any biological alteration at the genetic level at all. So that’s really something that’s interesting because it means that the consequence of genetic mutations on cognition can spread throughout the population as fast as communication can move. So that’s, yeah, the Lamarckian- Does everybody know what Lamarckian transmission is? Well, Lamarck was the character who thought that the reason that you could transmit acquired characteristics, so the reason giraffes have long necks, is because they kept trying to stretch their necks, basically, and they transmitted the capacity to do the stretching to their offspring. So you could transmit acquired characteristics down the genetic line. Now, there’s no, you can’t do that. That’s wrong, but that’s what Lamarck thought. But he wasn’t completely wrong because that is how this sort of transmission works. It’s non-genetically mediated accumulation of biological resources. So that’s very interesting. So, yeah, that’s a good comment. Okay, anyways, so that’s kind of, that’s some of the background to why I’m interested in the neuropsychology of culture. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, you want to read Vygotsky and you want to read Luria, because the Russians are really interested in the effect of culture on cognition and the regulation of emotion. And as far as I’m concerned, like for a long time, they were five decades ahead of North American Europe in terms of exploring this sort of thing. I’m not exactly sure why that is, but that is the case. So, okay, well the first thing that I started to realize, I guess, this is sort of an emergent realization. It wasn’t something that happened early on when I was trying to develop these ideas, but it became a way of making them clearer. I started giving some consideration, I guess, to the old philosophical distinction between fact and value. You know, that what? Value, and you could say value, that’s kind of in the domain of what should be, and or ethics. And fact, well that’s kind of in the domain of what actually is, or what was, or what could be, you know, taking the past, present, and future into consideration. It’s long been known in philosophical circles that you can’t make any, you can’t draw any conclusions about what should be, what ought to be, from an analysis of what is, which is to say you can’t derive an ought from an is. And there’s some sort of divide there, and you can sort of think about this. Just knowing the particulars of a situation doesn’t mean that you know how to act there, and I think that’s really where the division takes place, which is to say that coming up with a description of the characteristics of a place, like let’s say you’re from a lower working class family, and you, by some misfortune, you have to go to a tuxedo ball, where there’ll be nothing but rich people. You don’t really know how to act. You know, you can describe the circumstances, you basically know what it is that you’re going to encounter, but that doesn’t tell you anything at all about how it is that you should conduct yourself. And the other thing that’s kind of interesting about that is that how you should conduct yourself, and this ties indirectly to what we’re going to talk about today, depends on what aim you want to, or what goal you want to pursue. You know, so you have to decide that a priori. If you’re going to go to this party, you can say, well, I don’t like people like that. Anyways, they’re all capitalist exploiters, and they deserve my contempt, so I’ll go there and act miserably and make everyone dislike me, and that’ll be perfectly fine. And that’s an, that’s an ought, as far as you’re concerned. That’s a moral injunction. And if you accept that line of reasoning, you’re going to act one way. And if your other line of reasoning is, well, maybe I have something to learn in this situation, I’ll just shut up and watch. Then what constitutes the ought under those circumstances is something completely different. So, you know, you can switch around what the should be is by determining where it is that you want to go. That’s obviously not something you can do with facts. Like, whether you want to be liked or whether you want to be hostile, it’s nothing to do with the, like, the, the objective aspects of the situation. So, yeah, there’s a real, so that’s a, that’s a problem. So, that’s sort of the background, so let’s go into this. Now, we all know that people have belief systems. But we don’t really know as far as I can tell what that means. It’s like, have a belief system. This analysis sort of suggests that there isn’t such thing as, there’s no such thing as a belief system. It’s that at the very minimum a belief system is composed of two elements, which is your description of how the world is from the factual perspective. And also your description of how the world should be. Or you could say, your interpretation of the reality of phenomena, and also your interpretation of how you should act with regards to those phenomena. So at the very least, when you’re talking about beliefs, you’re talking about something that has two constituent elements. Now, this has been known for a long time. Now, it strikes me that there’s a real, there’s a, an analogous division in human cognition between fact and value that you might describe as the division between science and myth. We don’t really fight with people over what things are from the scientific perspective. And that’s, I think, in part because unless you’re emotionally identified with your particular theory, which basically means unless you’re, you imbued your theory with dreams of career, for example, or dreams of prestige, or whatever, one scientific theory is pretty much as good as the next. Which is to say that from the scientific perspective, all facts are equivalent. They don’t have any intrinsic emotional significance. You’re supposed to be objective with regards to your description of the world. We don’t really have to fight about what the world is from a scientific perspective. It’s partly because there’s not so much emotion involved in it. Although that happens sometimes. That’s more of a contamination than something central to the scientific enterprise. People are always trying to get rid of that. You don’t mess around with your data to make it turn out the way you want it to. Because the way you want things to turn out has nothing to do with the scientific enterprise, at least in part. The other thing is, from the scientific perspective, is we have a method of solving arguments in the scientific world. So you can put whatever your competing hypotheses are about the nature of things to a test. And in a sense, if you can’t do that, what you’re talking about is probably not scientific at all. That’s what some people think, at the very least. So first of all, there’s not a lot of emotion entangling the scientific viewpoint. And second of all, if there is a problem, a dispute, we have a very, very formalized mechanism for working it out. And people are usually willing to abide by that because, well, it works. It’s demonstrated its utility from the pragmatic perspective. Plus, it’s comprehensible. You can outline all the rules. I mean, we really have a strategy for that. You don’t even have to be very bright to be a scientist. All you have to do is be very thorough and follow the rules. This is made explicit, the scientific procedure that happened about 500 years ago, if you’ll hear about us. We know how to come up with a description of the world from the sensory perspective that everyone can agree about, or less. That isn’t what we fight with people over the line. What’s important to us is not what things are so much as what they mean. And so then the question is, well, in a sense, what does meaning mean? And that’s much the same as asking, what is an emotion, or what is a motivational state, or what is a drive state? These things have proved very difficult to nail down in the past. What’s the meaning of meaning? But, well, I’m going to give you a provisional definition, and that is that the meaning of something is its implication for behavior. And I mean that literally. And behavior is the act of propelling your body through space. That’s at least one dimension of meaning. There are more profound levels of meaning. You could also say that something is meaningful if it has implications for the schema that you use to generate behaviors. That’s a more profound piece of information, something more profoundly meaningful. Because then a phenomenon, an event that occurs can change your reaction to whole classes of events. That’s a really meaningful phenomenon. But we’re not going to discuss that so much today. Today we’ll just stick with the simple definition of meaning, which is implication for behavior. And, well, I’ll give an example in the chapter that you were to read today. Well, a girl, a little girl, three years old or whatever, she’s exploring her environment. And we tend to think that when someone’s exploring their environment, what they’re trying to do is map the sensory properties of that which surrounds them. I mean, that’s how we think. So the girl, in the example I used, well, she’s wandering around touching things and poking about using all the exploratory tools that she has at her disposal, some of which she thinks up and some of which she copies. She approaches an antique table, and on top of the table there’s a very fragile green glass antique vase. She reaches up to touch it in the course of her exploratory activity. Her mother immediately shrieks, no, don’t touch that, comes over and grabs her hand and pulls it back. And sits the girl down and says, that’s not something for you to touch. Well you see, the girl has just discovered something about what that thing is from the motivational perspective, which is to say, well, you can view that object as something that has sensory properties, but you can also view it as something that has motivational significance. And the motivational significance in this case for that child is ambivalent, because the thing is interesting. It’s green and it’s shining and draws the exploratory tendency out of the child. She wants to approach it, but it’s also something that’s linked with punishment. So that’s an ambivalent phenomenon. Much of what we do when we map our environments is map them for motivational significance. Now because we’re so good at being scientists, or we have become so good at being scientists for the last 500 years or so, we tend to think that when we map the environment, what we’re mapping it for is its sensory properties. First of all, you think about it, animals are not scientists. So whatever they’re doing is not akin to science, except in its more primitive form. Whatever animals are doing is more like whatever it was that we were doing before we became scientists. So you could say, well, what it was that we were doing, whatever that was 150,000 years ago or 250,000 years ago. We still manage to map the environments because we can live in them, and obviously we’re all still here, so our relatives were pretty good, or our ancestors were pretty good at doing that. But we weren’t doing it from the scientific perspective, we were doing something else. What we were doing is mapping the environment for implications for behavior. You see, you really want to think about this good and hard, because if you think about it, it’ll start changing the way you view the world, because it answers some strange questions that are otherwise difficult to answer. Like, why do you stop asking questions about things? You know from the scientific perspective that you’re surrounded by a surfeit of mysteries. There’s nothing you comprehend absolutely in your field of experience. There’s more questions about the factual nature of things wherever you look. Like sometimes you ask questions and sometimes you don’t. You might ask, what is it that stops us in any given circumstance? You can’t answer that if you start thinking about how it is that people think scientifically. You can only answer it if you start thinking about how it is that people think from the motivational perspective, because I can tell you that you’ll stop asking questions, say, about like, I don’t know any of you very well, at least at the moment. The fact that I don’t know you very well isn’t compelling me to do a tremendous amount of exploration, because I know you well enough so that I can predict your behavior in this circumstance, which is to say that I have a very detailed vision in my mind of where this next two hours is going to go in terms of the whole two hour period and every sort of sub-temporal aspect of that down to the immediate present. And as long as none of you violate my presuppositions, I don’t have to ask any questions about you, because I’ve got you mapped and likewise for me. As long as things go according to your predictions, you know the world. And the thing you’re trying to predict is the effect that your behavior has on phenomena in terms of motivation. So anyways, so you can just sort of keep that in mind. So, look, as far as I’m concerned, we think two different ways. One way is being formalized, and that’s the scientific way. What the scientific enterprise is, is the attempt to come up with an accurate description of the sensory properties of phenomena insofar as those are collectively apprehensible, which is to say that we want to know what things are from the sensory perspective. And we engage in a communicative exercise to determine that, because if I want to figure out what this is from the scientific perspective, it’s much more effective if I can have a dozen people working on it all at once. And we’re all communicating our knowledge, and we can build up a very detailed picture of the thing. But the only reason we want to do that is so that we can track the motivational significance of things more accurately. Just to say once again, why does an animal care if something is green rather than red? Well, it may be because being able to discriminate colors finely, more finely means more accurate mapping of the motivational relevance. Which is to say that if you can only see in black and white, for example, if something that’s the same hue red is poisoned as something edible green, well, you’ve had it. Because you can’t distinguish them if you can only see black and white. Now, if you can see color, which means you can make a finer level of sensory discrimination, you can keep better track of where the good things are, where the bad things are. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s really why we do science, in the final analysis, when you get, because you’ve got to ask, what’s the motivation for doing all these weird things looking at fruit flies, et cetera, et cetera. We want to keep track of where the motivational significances of things are. And we can do that better by making finer and finer discriminations between things. Because then we can say, well, this thing is that, and this thing is that, and it’s useful to be able to do that. I don’t understand the difference between interest and value. When a cat may value the food that he’s about to eat but is not necessarily interested in it, but still he places value on it. So I don’t understand how that works out. Well, we are interested in things that have value. But not all things that have value have interest. Isn’t the food a biological need? Yeah, so is novelty, though. Well, the thing about food is that it’s interesting if you’re food deprived. And it’s not if you’re not. So it depends on your current stated interpretation. So you can never identify anything as having interest as an intrinsic aspect of that thing. That’s something we’ll cover in more detail, too. But if something is valuable to you, you’re interested in whether the valence is positive or negative. Now, that interest can fluctuate. And when you ask a question like that, too, you want to make sure that you’ve discriminated in your own mind the difference between the two terms that you’re using. So there’s obviously some overlap between interest and value. It strikes me that probably what you’re referring to is that things that have no specified biological significance but that are unpredictable are interesting, whereas something like food is valuable. So you might be able to say that interest is the more general phenomena of value before it’s being discriminated into its subcomponents. Because if something unexpected happens, it attracts your interest, which means that you value it. But you have no determination of the value yet. You can only say, here is something that I didn’t predict. And then the purpose of exploration is to put it into the appropriate boxes. That’s something that you want to give some consideration to. Because in a sense, that’s one of the most fundamental things that I want you to learn, is that when we classify things using exploration, we’re not attributing meaning to something that has a neutral background. We’re taking something that has a very broad range of nonspecific meaning and restricting it to something specific. So for example, I’ll make it more concrete. You take a rat by the tail and you drop him into a new cage. While interest is everywhere, it’s nonspecific. The rat’s going to sit there like this. First of all, it’s going to be paralyzed because it doesn’t move. Its motor systems are inhibited by its anxiety system. It is not moving. And the reason it’s not moving, the rat doesn’t know this, but this is what we would presume, the reason it’s not moving is because in novel territory there may be a predator. If you don’t move, then predators can’t see you. So the rat sits there like this, and maybe it’ll sniff a little bit because that doesn’t draw any attention to itself. And if nothing happens that kills it, slowly it starts to unwind a little bit. And then the systems that mediate curiosity, which are the incentive reward systems, technically start driving the rat around, and the rat will explore. And what it’s trying to do is reduce the nonspecific value of the novel environment to something specified, which you could say in a sense. Is there anything here that will hurt me? So it’s looking for punishments. It’s actually looking to avoid them, but it wants to know where the hell they are. Is there anything here that will make me anxious, which is to say, is there anything here that signifies that a punishment is likely? Is there anything here that I can eat or that will otherwise satisfy one of my consumatory requirements? Or is there anything here that will signify the presence of something that will satisfy one of my consumatory requirements? Those are four categories. Punishment, satisfaction, threat, and hope, basically. And what the rat is trying to do is to restrict the indeterminate significance of the novel circumstance to a discriminant category, which is to say it wants to know exactly where all the things that have determinate value are located. Mostly it’s going to map nothing, because that’s the alternative category. It’s like no relevance. And most of the things around you are mapped into that box. You think about your reactions in this room. Most of the phenomena in this room are not attracting your attention. I mean, you can divert your attention to them, but those things, those are irrelevant. Had I not pointed them out, perhaps you’d remember they were there, perhaps you wouldn’t. They signify nothing from the motivational perspective. So you’ve mapped them as irrelevant. And most of the things you map are mapped as irrelevant. That isn’t how they started out. They started out as novel. That’s the fundamental, that’s the ultimate position. Anyways. The historical progression, I guess, say for the sake of argument, the scientific method was established more or less 500 years ago. And you could say, well, it was at that point where our mythological models of reality and our scientific models split. Now, I’m going to ask you to swallow a presupposition for the time being. And that presupposition is that, because it will take me a while to explain the logic behind it. Look, you know how you get scientific information. It’s basically taught to you explicitly. You can read experiments and you read theories and so on. It’s part of the explicit education. But how you pick up knowledge of how to act, well, that’s not quite as explicit. It’s not as easy to figure out. I mean, obviously, you model. We know that children pick up a lot of information by modeling behavior, which basically means that they copy adults. And that basically means they watch adults act, move their bodies through space, and they duplicate those patterns of action, and they generalize from them. So that’s one way behavioral wisdom is transmitted. And some of it’s explicit as well, at least in terms of the receipt of rewards and punishments, because parents will modulate their children’s behavior by engaging in motivationally significant interactions with them. At least that’s what you should do if you’re a parent. That’s your primary responsibility in a sense. So that’s what we mean when we say that you’re paying attention to someone. It basically means that you’re modulating their behavior with your behavior, with your emotions. So a child will monitor, or a parent will monitor his child and react positively when something that the parent wants to happen happens, and negatively when something happens that the parent doesn’t want to happen. So the child’s behavior is, well, that’s just classical reinforcement theory, basically. You exchange rewards and punishments and threats and promises and modulate behavior. We do that all the time in our interpersonal interactions. That’s part of the reason why people with personality disorders can sort of have an uncanny effect on you, which is to say that if you’re personality disordered, you have a really potent expectation about how someone else will behave, usually like a son of a bitch, fundamentally. And if someone with a personality disorder encounters someone who doesn’t act like that, they’re a challenge to their belief system. People with personality disorders are extremely good at turning everyone they meet into the same person that they already met. And they do that, I think, by exchanging very, very subtle and covert reinforcements, which is to say, you’re engaged with me and I have a personality disorder. Every time you act properly, I’ll ignore you or say something contemptuous or look away or do something quite subtle. And every time you act like a miserable bastard, which is basically what I expect, I’ll at least pay some attention and possibly even reinforce you covertly. And you’ll find, if you get close to me, that it’s almost like you’ve been distorted by a gravitational field as your behavior starts getting pulled in these strange directions. We do that to each other all the time. And one of the things you might consider is, well, our societies are very large. We’re all engaged in these patterns of mutually modifying interactions and something emerges from that that’s stable. And I guess I would say that the things I’m going to teach you about mythology are the things that I view as stable, emergent properties from centuries of reciprocal interaction. So if we’re engaged in some pursuit, you’re going to modify me and I’m going to modify you. And neither of us really know precisely what that means, because we’re not conscious of all the reasons that we do everything. And that’s a spin. I mean, it’s bad enough if there’s only two of us, but if there’s like 50 of us, well, then you can imagine that calculating all the permutations of the interactions becomes virtually impossible. The point is we will settle into some sort of stable configuration or not or we’ll all disappear. Those are the options. And human societies do settle into stable configurations. And we don’t really understand how that happens, but we have developed the ability to describe those configurations without understanding them. And I think that makes up a big part of mythology. Myths are the stories we tell ourselves about how we behave when we don’t know how it is that we behave or even why. So we’re going to file that when there’s things to consider in the future. Let’s go back. Excuse me. Was there some connection between the distinction you were just making and the declarative and non-declarative memory that one of the pieces talks about? Absolutely. Yeah, we’ll discuss that in some detail. I think there is. So you have these three separate memory systems. One of them is non-declarative, which basically is non-representational. That’s the procedural system. Procedural memory governs your motor output if it’s habitual fundamentally. You use your procedural memory to walk with because walking is way too complicated to do as a consequence of representation. It’s such a complex, you can’t think about how to walk. It’s a habit. It’s a skill. It’s like if you play the piano, if you know a piece off by heart, as soon as you think about it, your fingers stumble over themselves. Because it’s too complicated to think about. You can’t handle all that information in your active conscience. Anyways, we’ve coded a lot of behavioral information in our procedural systems. It’s not declarative. It’s not representation. It’s there. Well, I think part of what a story is, is it is the representation of the patterns of behavior that are coded in the procedural systems. So you see, when we’re engaged in any sort of interaction, you and I are both modifying the contents of our procedural memory systems by exchanging, to put it very harshly, by exchanging reinforcements. We do not understand the nature of the pattern that’s the outcome of that exchange. But we can watch it. And that’s what a story is. I think that’s our episodic memory system that picks up images, basically. Your right hemisphere is good at recognizing patterns. And your behaviors, behaviors have patterns, obviously. That’s why you can predict behaviors. You have patterns. One of the ways that we make those patterns explicit is by making images of them and then describing the images. And that’s basically what a story does. When you read a kid’s story, basically what you’re doing is you’re using words to activate images of behaviors. You’re trying to instill behavioral patterns by doing that. You don’t understand the story. That’s obvious. There’s lots of stories we tell our kids that we have really foggy stories. Fairy tales are like that. They have very peculiar stories. But the kids are interested in them and they’ll listen to them over and over and over and over and over. And that’s because there’s a lot of information in those stories. Like, more than you can possibly imagine, all embedded in those stories. And the person who’s listening to it doesn’t understand it, and the person who’s telling it doesn’t understand it, but the information is still transmitted. Which is very peculiar. It’s very strange. So I started thinking about that because I was very… well, when I started understanding that religious systems of thought actually had some meaning, that the stories they were telling were accurate, then I couldn’t figure out, well, if they’re accurate, how the hell did they develop if no one understands what they mean? Which is impossible, right? It’s like how do you develop a system of thought in the absence of any understanding of what the system means? Well, that seems like a completely insoluble problem. It’s like, well, Jung pointed out something similar with dreams. He said a dream will sometimes give you a premonition of a future state. He didn’t mean that you could interpret the future by reading your dreams. He meant that the thing that you will become is, in a sense, operative now in its nascent form. And while that nascent form has more to do with dream structure and imagination than it does with anything explicit, if you can interpret your dreams, sometimes you can see where it is that you’re headed. And again, it was the same mystery. How is it that your brain can know where you’re going to be when you can’t even understand what that means? But that’s why this multiple memory system theory is really useful, because you can say, well, look at social animals, for example. Like a wolf obviously does not have a declarative representation of the nature of its social structure. It knows who’s what on the dominance hierarchy, and it knows how to behave. But it can’t describe its patterns of behavior. They’re not conscious, meaning they’re not representational. They’re not declarative. But they’re still there. And they’re there because they’ve been selected for from the Darwinian perspective. It’s like these patterns of interaction. There’s certain patterns of social interaction that are stable over time. They emerge as a consequence of social interactions. And they emerge way before the groups that have the patterns understand what the patterns are. And our attempts to spin stories, our descriptions of those patterns of action, before we understand what they are. I’ll give you another example of that. People have said that everything in Freud is in Shakespeare. But the thing about Shakespeare is that nothing in Shakespeare is explicit. It’s still all story. He was a great spinner of drama. All Shakespeare’s plays, plays, which is a reference to behavior, all Shakespeare’s plays are images of patterns of action. You could say what Freud did insofar as you grant his theorized creed is make an image of a pattern of behavior explicit representation from the perspective of semantics, from the perspective of words. Same with myths. Myths are full of wisdom about behavior that hasn’t yet been made explicit. And now the problem with us, of course, is that we think, well, our heads are full of a lot of bizarre nonsense. And that makes it very difficult for us to figure out what myths mean. And that brings me back to this. This is why I’m telling you this whole story. 500 years ago, the scientific methodology was formalized and we found out very rapidly. Let me read you something from Jung. He’s talking about the typical attitude of the medieval individual. So this is the orthodox Christian medieval individual. And you have to realize that 500 years ago, although in Europe, although there might have been sectarian differences within the Christian community, in most cases, you were Christian not because that’s what you believe, but because the world that you lived in was a Christian world. It wasn’t like you had 15 different belief systems, all of which were equally coherent, to sort of choose between. It was that the world you inhabited was Christian. That was the explanation of the universe. So anyways, Jung said, you know, it isn’t until cultures start mixing, for example, you can’t think like a Muslim if you’re a Christian, unless you’ve met one. And if they’re not around, well, the issue doesn’t even come up. So, anyways, Jung said, how totally different did the world appear to medieval man? For him, the earth was eternally fixed, and that rest in the center of the universe, encircled by the course of a sun that solititiously bestowed its warmth. Men were all children of God under the loving care of the Most High, who prepared them for eternal blessedness. They all knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves in order to rise from a corruptible world. To an incorruptible and joyous existence. Such a life no longer seems real to us, even in our dreams. Natural science has long ago torn this lovely veil to shreds. At least, from a fundamental perspective, we know perfectly well that the earth is not the center of the cosmos. At least not in the way that it was conceived from the medieval perspective. And it was very, very rapidly, after the scientific methodology became formulated, scientists were generating observations like mad that seemed to exist in direct conflict with the most fundamental statements of religious systems. For example, the fact that the sun was at the center of the universe originally, but I mean, we don’t even believe that anymore. It’s just some semi-obscure star, not all that particular and powerful, often some backwater corner of one galaxy among hundreds of billions of galaxies in a universe that’s so big that you can’t even comprehend it. So, I mean, that’s a different picture. And of course the logical conclusion to draw from this, I mean, the same sort of thing happened to Galileo. The heavens were supposed to be perfect from the medieval perspective. I mean, every planet was supposed to have a perfectly circular orbit even because the circle was the most perfect of figures. And the moon was supposed to be something that was completely without blemish since it was part of the heavenly order. Galileo, with his telescope, showed that there were mountains on the moon. And the priests that he attempted to demonstrate this to wouldn’t even look through the telescope because for reasons that we’re going to discuss as this course continues. But the point is that very rapidly after the formalization of the scientific methodology, our ability to regard mythic descriptions of the world as valid was essentially destroyed. Well, I think this is, I mean, I would like you to think about this and see if there’s anything wrong with the explanation because it seems so simple that it’s observed. But I think we made a big mistake of logic somewhere along the way because we made the presupposition that what we were doing when we were doing science was the same thing that we were doing when we were doing religion. Which is to say that what religion was, was an attempt to describe the world in the same terms or attending to the same phenomena that we attend to when we’re doing science. So then we have the general attitude that, well, what religion was at best was sort of a science with an abysmally poor methodology based on erratic and unpredictable and biased observations that were all designed to produce a given end. All the religious people seem to have sort of swallowed that more or less whole as far as I can tell too because, I mean, with obviously these are generalizations and there are certain exceptions, but people still seem to believe that whatever it was that religion is doing is the same thing that science is doing. It’s just like a different viewpoint in the same plane. So you get these weird arguments, say, between fundamentalist Christians and evolutionary biologists. They’re talking about different worlds and they don’t know it on either side. I want to tell you, at least in part, what the nature of the world that the myths describe is and how it differs from the scientific world. And the basic premise of this is that what myths are concerned about is the world that you act in. That’s what it’s trying to describe. So myth tells you, well, here’s how human experience is structured with regards to how you should act. It’s not that big a surprise. I mean, no religion is concerned with morality. The morality is the study of how to act. So it doesn’t seem like such a major leap in some regards. But it seems peculiar that people couldn’t have figured out on a general, like in a general sense, that what religions were doing and what science were doing were not really commensurate. They weren’t in the same domain. Science is concerned with facts. And religion, stories are concerned with value. And you know, a story has a moral, right? That’s what you’re supposed to derive from the story. You take primitive stories like Aesop’s fables. The moral is made explicit at the end. Here’s the characters acting out their roles and here’s the behavioral information you’re supposed to derive from that. Analyze the story for the moral. The moral is, in the light of the behavior which you just received, how is it that you should adjust your ongoing behavior? That’s the kind of information that stories have. Stories provide you with information about how to act, which is information about the motivational significance of things and situations. And when you have a story, a good story, about a given situation, you know how to act. And knowing how to act inhibits your anxiety. Because knowing how to act means that when you do something you can predict outcome. And as long as there are predictable outcomes all around you, then you’re not anxious. It’s knowing how to act that inhibits your anxiety. So I would say, well, then it’s not much of a reason to make the presupposition that it’s stories that inhibit your anxiety. The fact that none of us are made anxious by any of the other people in this room is fundamentally because we share the same story. So we act in a predictable way. So when you mess with someone’s story, you’re messing up the structure they use to attribute determinant significance to objects and situations. And you can mess with someone’s story merely by behaving in your own peculiarly culturally determined way if you happen to be among foreigners. You don’t have to say anything, although words are perhaps even more potent than behaviors. But just your mere existence poses a certain amount of threat. Okay. Anyways, Nietzsche, he observes something similar to what I’m telling you about 100 years ago. He said, you know, it’s kind of peculiar if you think about it that we’ve torn the intellectual foundations out of Christianity using science. But we all run around acting like Christians, more or less. He’s talking about Europeans here 100 years ago. So this is peculiar. Now, you might debate and think to yourself, well, I don’t act like a Christian or whatever it is that your particular religious background has to be. But of course, that’s really quite ridiculous because you did not invent all your behaviors. In fact, you probably invented almost none of them. Most of them are copied. They’re copied from your parents or from other people that you met, from significant others throughout your whole life, from books you read, from movies you watched, and so on and so forth. Insofar as you are inculturated, your behaviors are not your own inventions. And that’s the whole purpose of culture. If you had to invent every one of your behaviors, well, you’d never get anywhere. So you copy behaviors that have been accumulated by humanity over large periods of time. So whether you think you have a religiously based morality or not is really not the issue because, well, you do. Human society has been religious for like veering or nearing 100% of its entire developmental history. You don’t shake that in 500 years. I mean, really, you could say, well, religions have only been explicitly tumbling down in the sense if they have been for 100 years. See the rise of big ideological systems to replace them. As far as I’m concerned, a system like communism or any authoritarian system, that’s just an instant replacement for religion. Anyways, Nietzsche said, when one gives up Christian belief, for example, one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality, Christianity is a system consistently thought out in complete view of things. If one breaks out of it a fundamental idea, like the belief in God, for example, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces. One has nothing of any consequence left in one’s hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know and cannot know what is good for him and what evil. He believes in God, who alone knows. Christian morality is a command, its origin is transcendental. It is beyond all criticism and all right to criticize it. It possesses truth only if God is truth. It stands or falls with the belief in God. If modern Westerners really do believe they know of their own accord intuitively what is good and evil, if they consequently think they no longer have need of Christianity as a guarantee of morality, that is merely the consequence of the ascendancy of Christian evaluation and an expression of the strength and depth of this ascendancy, so that the origin of modern morality has been forgotten and the highly conditional nature of its right to exist is no longer felt. What Nietzsche is basically saying is that the fact that you might think that you can have a morality without a Christian, we’re talking about Christian morality in this particular circumstance, but it could be any morality that’s derived from a system that was predicated on the notion that there was some transcendental being. The fact that you can think that you have a morality that will last without that belief is proof of how potent that belief system is actually being. It has worked so well and protects you still so well that you can be incautiously convinced of its lack of necessity. I noticed in your footnote on that here that you said he had originally said to English. Yeah. I know this applies to character of belief systems in general, but he was referring to the moral realist philosophers? Yeah. That English tradition, which I think was about the same time. Yeah, he was irritated by attempts to argue that morality had a rational basis and it was in fact derived as a consequence of rational thought. You can just see it right there. That’s right. And not only that, not only that you can see it and that it’s right there, but that that’s how it was originally derived, which is to say that reasonable people got together and rationally decided that this is how they should conduct their affairs. Onichi said, look, look, you look at the historical record. You behave first, then you figure it out, and there’s huge gaps of tens of centuries between figuring out how to behave or between acting and then later being able to say how it is that you have. So he thought that the English were putting the cart before the horse in an immense manner, having no vision for the length of historical development. So after that happens and then you make declarative representations of it, then for instance when a new person is born and you teach them declaratively, you teach them verbal stories about their religion, for example, does that get into their behavior? So that then by listening to the stories about that they actually learn the behavior, the procedural level of how to act, without believing the verbal words? Yeah, well that’s a good question. I mean, I don’t know exactly what impact watching stories has on behavior. I think really what watching stories probably does to you is reconfigure your conceptions of the present and the future, so that the motivational significance of things shifts and that has a consequence on your behavior. But you also have to realize that movies and books and so on portray heroes, and heroes are models for emulation. A model for emulation is essentially someone to be imitated. So I don’t think that you can write off the direct impact of the story on behavior. When kids play, for example, when they pretend that there’s something, what they’re basically doing is embodying an imaginative representation of a pattern of action. And that is what their play does, at least in part. So there is some direct effect, I think. So, okay. I’m getting this. Nietzsche said, look, we have no rational reason for continuing to behave in the way that we’ve behaved in the past, which is to essentially adopt Judeo-Christian presuppositions in European society, because we don’t believe in the fundamental premises of the system by which those moral rules were generated. So you could say, well, Judeo-Christianity is a tree. A tree of presuppositions, and we live out here in the branches, and the most fundamental presupposition is that there is a god. And if you break the tree at that point, then the whole tree is dead. You just don’t know it. It might take a long time to die. And this was basically his theory, for example. That’s why people in the 20th century were so unbelievably susceptible to rational ideologies, like fascism and communism, rationally described ideologies, because their foundation had been made very unstable by destruction at this point in their presumption hierarchy. Well, this is an inhibitory network in the sense you can think of it as a methodology for keeping anxiety under control. When this goes, well, that whole thing is cast into doubt. The Grand Inquisitor, doesn’t Dostoevsky’s point there that the trunk of the tree was not the belief in God, but that it had been captured? The Grand Inquisitor’s point was that the foundation of the society had been captured by the archaic, the religious, the spiritual aspect that became repotentiative, just undermined. Yeah, yeah, okay, that’s fair enough. Well, that’s something that we’ll have to talk about. Yeah, I don’t want to answer that right now. I’ll just answer it really briefly. You could say, well, the belief in God is the belief in two things. One is authority, and the other is process of adaptation, basically. And the priests, to the degree that the priests in Dostoevsky’s story encapsulated this, this was theoretically made unnecessary. You say, well, we’ll tell you what the world is like. That’s all you need. But you remember in Dostoevsky’s story too, the Grand Inquisitor, he let Christ out the back door. Because that’s why that’s a brilliant story. It means the ending of dozens. Even though the Grand Inquisitor is a fascist fundamentally, he’s representative, I think, in that story of the Catholic Church. Tremendously potent authoritarian structure with sufficient flexibility to allow the active process, some small measure of freedom in which to operate. What did you say the process is called? Well, in Dostoevsky’s story, the process is Christ, the Grand Inquisitor, he’s the active spiritual… He’s the active spiritual process as opposed to the static structure of the Church, which is basically what’s a government in a sense. He’s trying to make things order as order as possible. Okay. So, anyways, as far as I’m concerned, we have a split in our consciousness. And the split is between what we assume to be true from the scientific perspective and how we’re willing to govern our actions. Because our actions are still governed by mythological presuppositions that we no longer presume to be valid. We’re still willing to accept them. And we also know that they’re useful. I mean, for example, Western democracy is predicated on the notion of the natural right. And the natural right is a transcendental idea. Nobody’s been able to pin the damn thing down. I mean, what we found is we can’t do without it. And at the basis of natural right is the idea that, you know, there’s something about you that’s more or less incomprehensible that I have to have respect for. Although I can’t categorize it, I can’t describe it rationally. If I act like it’s not there, things immediately go very badly astray. The notion of natural right… I mean, people have tried to come up with rational explanations for the natural right. But that’s foolish. That’s foolish. Because, like, every system… at the base of every system is a presupposition. That’s because, say, well, that’s because you don’t know everything. And because you don’t know everything, that means that whatever you do has to be predicated on some presuppositions, right? I mean, you have to take a leap of faith at some point that the presupposition of the natural right tree is that there’s something valuable about the individual. And once you accept that, that’s like a rule of the game. We’ll just play that game. You’re valuable, and I’m valuable. We don’t know why. Given that premise, there’s a whole bunch of necessary conclusions. Those are the whole body of our natural rights. And you might say, well, once you’ve accepted this, you can rationally derive those. But you can’t provide rational underpinnings for that, because that’s just, in a sense, it’s just an arbitrary decision. It’s just a game rule. It’s like, if you want to play the game, if you want to play this particular game, you have to accept that rule. I don’t think it’s arbitrary, actually. I think there’s a real reason why that particular phenomenon emerged. Like, it’s fundamental. That’s another thing I want to do in this course. Sorry, I jump all over, but, you know, that’s life. I want to show you that this presupposition is not arbitrary, that it’s a necessary emergent property of successful patterns of social interaction. And that even if you wipe it out, it’ll pop back up. You can say that emphasis on individual worth is the hallmark of any society that’s properly functioning and stable in the long term and also capable of updating itself when it’s necessary. And then it’ll just pop up over and over and over again of its own accord. So that’ll help us get away from the idea that morality is arbitrary in some sense. You know, the old argument says, no matter what moral rule you can think of, there’s some society somewhere on the planet who does exactly the opposite thing. People have used that sort of argumentation to, for that sort of evidence to argue that there’s no such thing as transcendental morality, or that’s a useless pursuit. Nietzsche’s point was, people say that, you know, they’re willing also to undermine their own belief systems by pointing out obvious things like, you know, if you shoot a rocket far enough out of space, you’re not going to find heaven, and so God’s not out there. We still act like our moral systems have value and they’re useful, and it really does appear that acting that way works. So then you have to wonder, well, if it works, you know, what’s at the basis of it? And it’s really interesting, when I first started thinking about these ideas, there was still a lot of debate on the world scene in the sense about how it is that we should conduct our affairs. You know, at the very least there was two major sources of, or two major bodies of ideas that were in deadlocked competition. One was authoritarian, more or less, the communists, the communist bloc. They had their notions of how to configure the world. And then there was our side, and we were basically at each other’s throats, and that was very disturbing to me at the time. That sort of all fell apart now, with any luck. And it does seem that whatever it is that we’re doing in the West seems to work, at least better than anything else anybody can come up with. So Nietzsche was arguing, this morality has transcendental origins. You can’t have it if you don’t accept the transcendental origins. You might think you have it, but that just proves that you don’t understand it. It’s also the case that this morality, which has transcendental origins, works. And it also seems to be the case that its presuppositions are- Okay. I said I wanted to allow some time for discussion, so I just want to cover two things here. Okay. Let’s look at this. Myth is concerned with morality, and morality is how to act. Nietzsche pointed out a hundred years ago that the fact that there was morality was a much more difficult problem to solve than which morality was right. I guess in a sense, the fact that there is morality is one of the questions that we’re going to be addressing in this class. Why is there morality? What does it mean that there is morality? And given that there is morality, is there anything that can be said about it that’s universal across morality? We know that within different moral systems there are differences of opinion about what should be done across moral systems. There are differences of opinion about what should be done. But the fact that there are moral systems seems to be a universal of human culture. So there’s something universal in the domain of morality at the level of analysis that says that every human culture has a morality. I’m interested in looking at the meta structure of the morality, to see if there’s anything that we can pull out that’s common to them all, because that would give us some idea about what morality is. If we want to come to agreement in the long term about how it is that we should conduct our affairs, and so in part lessen our propensity to engage in social conflict, it seems to me to be reasonable, to be useful, to be able to apprehend rationally what the basis for the fact of morality is. And so the methodology here is, well, we’re going to look at some neuropsychology, because I’m interested in what modern research has to say about the way we regulate our emotions. So that’s one domain of evidence that we’re going to cover. The other domain is comparative mythology. We’re going to look at mythologies from different cultures and see if we can extract from them what their central structure is, to see if there are any commonalities in that structure. So that’s basically the notion. The basic issue here is, how can the current state of experience be conceptualized in abstraction with regards to its meaning? Which is to say, well, that’s what knowing how to act means. What are the significance of the phenomenon that you currently apprehend? Meaning means implication for behavioral output. Logically, therefore, myth presents information relevant to the most fundamental of moral problems, which is what should be done. So that’s the question that stories are trying to answer. How is it that you should act? The desirable future, which is the object of what should be, can only be conceptualized. Sorry. It can only be conceptualized in relationship to the present, which serves at least as a necessary point of contrast and comparison. Which is to say, well, if you think that things should be a particular way, you’re always conceiving that in relationship to the way that you conceive of them being now. And those two things, this is kind of a peculiar aspect of this form of cognition. You evaluate your present state in terms of your ideal future, but you also evaluate your ideal future in terms of your present state. So there’s a constant interaction going between the two. That’s why poverty, for example, is relative. And I think it’s relative in terms of socioeconomic effects. It’s where you are in the dominance hierarchy that determines the effect of socioeconomic status rather than your absolute level of material well-being. This is something that’s really worth considering for psychologists when they talk about SES. Because, well, to give you one example, like the black community in the US, which is a population that’s frequently studied with regards to the consequences of low socioeconomic status, as a population group constitutes the 13th most wealthy nation on the planet. You could also say, so that’s kind of interesting when you’re thinking about things in absolute terms. It’s also the case that even the poorest people in North American society, with the exception of people who’ve fallen completely out of the world, have access to technologies that 200 years ago were nonexistent. And I’m not talking about computers, I’m talking about heat and running water. So poverty, that’s just one example. Poverty is where you are construed with respect to where you could be. And there’s some, obviously there’s some level of absolute poverty too. I mean, if you don’t get enough to eat, well, that brings everything to a halt. But the point is that you can’t conceive of where you are from the affective perspective without also conceiving of where you could be and vice versa. Myths answer the following stories. What is, which is what is the nature of the current state of experience from the motivational perspective? What should be? To what end should we be moving? And how can we get there? Well, and I showed you last week, this figure. Well, that’s a story as far as I can tell. Now, you want to use your imagination for a minute. Say, that’s not just a story, it’s also a kingdom. What a ridiculous thing to say. You can imagine that there’s a castle wall around that. And that what surrounds it is hostile territory. So that can be viewed as, sometimes in mythologies it’s viewed as an ocean. Might be one way of looking at it. Might be viewed as barbarian lands or dark forests. The point is that out here is where things that you can’t predict take place. And everybody who shares your story is predictable. They live inside your kingdom. Everybody outside is contaminated with chaos, basically. But you see why that is. And that’s why that is, is even in this class, is we have a vision of where the class is going to go. Both over the course of the whole semester and just today. You know, we have a vision of how it’s going to progress and how we can, how we conceive ourselves in relationship to all the others in this class. And exactly what’s going to happen and what the plan is. And so as far as we’re concerned, we compose a unit. And we’re a unit because we can predict each other’s behaviors, and we can predict each other’s behaviors because we all have the same story. That’s what a story is. How does this tie in with mythology? One thing I haven’t said anything about is why do I think this all has anything to do with mythology? It’s kind of a glaring question. That’s why you look at the Christian viewpoint, for example, and say, put a map onto this structure. Well, Christianity gives you a picture of man. That’s a mis-do. And Christianity says, well, what is man? Contaminated by original sin? That’s a hereditary taint. You have it, whether you deserve it or not. It’s there. In desperate need of redemption, and living in a sea of chaos and misery, basically. I mean, this is a pretty negative summary, but it’ll do for the present purposes. That’s our present state. And we don’t want to trivialize this. The Christian perspective basically is, look, there’s something fundamentally screwed up with the world. Human beings do not fit here really well. We pose a constant question to ourselves. We don’t understand our place in the nature of things. We’re always doing things that we don’t understand. There’s a central mystery here that we haven’t solved. This is not a trivial conception. And people laugh about original sin, you know, as if, you know, what sort of weird concept of that. But this says, well, there’s something about human beings that we don’t understand. It makes them evil. Well, it isn’t just lack of socioeconomic goods that’s done that, that’s for sure. Well, then there’s also some damage of the ideal future. That’s paradise, or heaven, or even the kingdom of heaven on earth. So it doesn’t have to be something that’s purely spiritual. Spiritual, that means in a sense, well, that means a domain of the imagination. And you could say, well, paradise is the archetype of the ideal future, which is to say that whenever you’re committing an action of any sort, to act means to have a plan, which means to say that you are here and you’re going to go here, and you have behavioral routines to bring that transformation about. So whatever act you undertake has that structure. So you could say, well, the collection of acts as a whole has that structure, and the act is to adopt the structure. You could say, well, you could abstract out from all the particular notions of your ideal future some abstracted meta-notion of the ideal, and that would be paradise. So that’s, well, you can see how these myths sort of get built. The notion that there’s some sort of ideal, that’s something that’s inherent to people, and you can build your ideal, well, just by imagining what the best of all possible situations could be. And Christian morality, by the way, is the acceptable procedures by which the unbearable present can be transformed into the ideal future. And if you share that, well, then you’re part of a community, right? And a community means that you’re walled in with all these other people who think like you and all the barbarian hordes and the discord and the male content and the unpredictability. That’s outside. All right. So that’s a story. And while that was a religious story, you say, well, the communists are the communists, you say, well, the communists’ stories like that. I mean, it’s a pretty outdated story, I guess, in many ways. The current situation is characterized by socioeconomic inequality. That’s a consequence of class, the class struggle, the way we can erect a heaven on earth by distributing income and opportunity equitably. We have to undergo a period of intermediary chaos, which I’ll get to later to bring that about, et cetera, et cetera. You know, and one of the things that’s happened to many, many, many European communities, and this is an appalling thing, is that when their religious structures collapse, the first thing they do is replace them with far more idiotic political utopias. And as far as I’m concerned, I mean, this has happened in many places. It’s happened in Russia, it’s happened in Germany, I think it happened in China. I think it’s happening in Quebec, as a matter of fact, as well. Well, that’s the… Well, anyways, that’s what I think. In Quebec, they lost Roman Catholicism in the late 50s, and now they think that if the political situation was just transformed, that the world would turn into a utopian. That’s what happens when people lose their religious beliefs. So that’s the first thing they do usually, because there’s a big hole there. Okay, so that’s the simple story. I just wanted to say, well, there’s more to this story in the sense, there’s also transformational grammar, and that kind of looks like this. Well, it’s… Go ahead. I just wanted to ask you why you chose to call the present unbearable. I mean, that seems to have such a strong… It implies a really strong affect instead of, like, imperfect, or… Yeah, well, it’s just… What do you say? It’s kind of satirical, I guess. I mean, you’re always trying to change it. No matter what it is… Look, I’ll give you an example, okay? I’ll give you an example, and I’ll give you a quick one. I read this really funny story in the Atlantic magazine the other week, and I hated liking it because… But anyways, I did like it. It was kind of funny. But so this guy, he’s a travel writer, and he goes on one of these cruises, and everything’s done for him. Absolutely everything. It’s like if he goes swimming in the morning, and he sits down on his beach chair, he gets a towel. There’s a guy there that’s hired just to make sure he has a towel. And if he gets up to walk around the pool, the same guy’s job is to go and get his towel and replace it with another one. I mean, he doesn’t have to do anything. He said he could eat at the restaurant 18 times a day. And if he didn’t feel like walking up to the restaurant, he could call room service and get whatever he wanted, and it would be there in 10 minutes. He said for the first three or four days, he was really guilty about this. Like, he couldn’t stand the fact that… Well, it’s often… People from the Third World often man these ships, by the way, because they work cheap. And anyways, he was real guilty about having… Being weighed on hand and foot, basically. And so for the first two or three days, he was sort of wracked by guilt. But by the end, he said… And this is quite funny. He said, by the end of the trip, having adjusted to his new circumstances, he was finding himself increasingly irritated by the fact that when he called for room service and they brought him a sandwich, they always put it too close to the little decorative orange slice, and the edge of it got soggy. So anyways, see… This is very funny, you know, and that’s what people are like, because you adjust to sort of your expectations adjust to match the situation, and then you construe the motivational significance of events with regards to that conceptualization. So that’s kind of why I put that. It’s like for him, the unbearable present was the fact that, you know, the corner of his sandwich was soggy. He was really irritated himself for reacting in this manner, but he said, well, that’s just what people are like. When your set of expectations alters, the valence of phenomena instantly changes, and that’s why the Buddhists in part think the world is mayas, right? You just generate a story about what should happen. You can switch the valence of phenomena virtually, virtually at will, but not entirely. Well, I mean, there’s still certain constraints, so… You’re always trying to run from this in a sense to get to this. It doesn’t matter what your situation is. And this is permanent, like that thing just moves more or less with you wherever you move. So that’s the simple story. And then there’s the more complex story, which we’ll talk about in detail. So you have this. That’s the known. You know, that’s an ideology, for example. Well, if something interferes with one of your plans, if something unexpected happens, you just switch to another plan, all right? But if something interferes with a more fundamental presupposition, like who you are, where you’re going, then this whole thing can come crumbling down. And that’s represented here. And this is transformational. A transformational grammar instance, I guess. It’s how Conception A can turn into Conception B, which is to say that people’s belief systems will shift radically. So you also need a structure for… You have a belief system. That’s one thing, and you need one. But you also need a process by which your belief system is updated. Because your belief system is supposed to map the environment, and the environment keeps changing. And now and then you have to undergo a fundamental revolution in your beliefs. And that’s basically what this is pointing out. You have a… Well, you know, the example I gave, you’ll read about it in detail. It’s like, first of all, there’s a little story in the book about this guy who’s going to a meeting, and he’s going to be a real star at this meeting. His elevator’s late. So he thinks he’s going to be late. And the fact that the elevator’s late is really distressing because he’s construing the significance of that with relationship to his meeting. So that makes him mad. And then he’s down, he goes up in front of the building, and now he’s kind of late for his meeting. And so he walks away. Like anybody that gets in his way, it makes him mad. It’s like little old ladies or lovers out for a stroll or whatever. He construes their existence with regards to his plans. So if he had lots of time, well, they wouldn’t bother him at all. But the fact that he’s late makes him a ball of beer to go. So anyways, when the elevator doesn’t show up, he has to shift plans. He goes down the stairs and says, well, that’s a minor league irritation. Well, say when he gets back, he’s done with his meeting, and his boss calls him into the office and says, you’re fired. You’re incompetent. You’re the worst employee we’ve ever had. Well, he had visions of being a star in his head, was evaluating everything with regards to that. Still being quite irritated about the fact that he’s late. Still being quite irritated about the fact that the elevator wouldn’t show up. But now something’s really happened to him that’s a major league discrepancy. It’s blown out a few fundamental positions. It’s knocked out his version of who he is and what he’s doing and where he’s going. It’s blown. The whole structure he uses to interpret the motivational significance of phenomena. And that means that an event that’s not emotionally neutral has taken place. It’s an event that has a tremendous amount of emotional significance. He’s very anxious. He’s very depressed. It’s like you could say in a sense, and we’ll try to outline this in more details, his motivational systems are no longer regulated. He doesn’t know what anything means anymore. And when you don’t know what anything means, everything makes you anxious. That’s a problem. That’s what this represents. So he’s down here. Everything’s gone chaotic. He said, I don’t know who I am anymore. And that happens to people. Well, then you have to re-evaluate your whole past and your present and your future. Your whole story shifts. Everything changes. And maybe you can do that, or maybe you cut your throat. Because that happens to people too when everything falls down. They just can’t handle it. They’re overwhelmed by their negative emotions. And that kills them. That’s the end of them. Well, let’s say he pops back out of it. He’s a little bit more humble this time. Figures out maybe he didn’t like his goddamn job anyways. He should have done something he wanted to do a long time ago. Maybe he wouldn’t have been such a bastard and got fired in the first place. His conceptions of who he is and what he wants to be have changed. His emotions are re-regulated. He interprets the world from a slightly different perspective. But the meta-structure of the perspective is still the same. He was here in this kind of structure when he was there. He’s still in this kind of structure here. It’s just that the contents of the structure are different. So there’s a stability in structure as well as flexibility for change within the structure. This is the big mythological story, by the way. It says you can look at this all sorts of ways. I’ll try to diagram this out later. These are castles, kingdoms. This is a dominance hierarchy. We’ll discuss that in some detail later. If you’re in a corporation, for example, you share a dream with everybody in the corporation. You arrange yourself in a power hierarchy to attain the goals of the corporation. To get from here to here, you move up the dominance hierarchy. It’s in your best interest under those circumstances to keep the corporation going and also to prop yourself off the levels of the dominance hierarchy. So there’s a dominance hierarchy here. The king of the dominance hierarchy, maybe he’s the CEO or whatever, he’s the active representative of the ideal future, which makes him the king basically from the mythological perspective. Anyways, so that’s a community. This is a dragon. That’s what we’re looking at. A dragon is something that lives in a cave. It’s very dangerous, but it sits on something very promising. It has a hoard of treasure. Dragons are the places that anomalous events emerge from. They’re representations of the chaos that surrounds predictable territory. The thing about chaos is that it’s threatening and promising at the same time. In those little circles, it says that the adaptive behavior is a planned sequence of adaptive behavior. It seems that you’ve presented that the majority of our behavior is not able to be planned or formulated declaratively. Do unplanned adaptive behaviors fall inside the little circles or in the metas? All I meant really by planned is that you draw on your reservoir of habitual behaviors and put them into play to attain certain ends. So it’s like even the guy rushing to the meeting, he doesn’t have to think about how to walk. Those sequences of behaviors are already habitual. He just says, well, the plan is I will walk there. So that’s all I meant by that. You just have your conceptualization of your present state is somewhat general, and so is your conceptualization of your ideal future. But you have specific plans to move you from one state to another, and you can shift between them. So this is a simplistic viewpoint of that structure. We’ll look at the real structure of that much later in the course. That’s all I mean by it. Those are sub-routines that will enable you to pursue your goal. That’s all. So what if you’re doing something that is an adaptive behavior and it’s not something like walking. It’s something like trying to make a good impression on others. But what if you’re taking some sort of mythical knowledge that you’ve gotten about how to behave to make things work out that you can’t formulate that as a plan, and you have this goal, and this is how you’re getting there, but you haven’t planned to get there that way. You’re just trying to get there. The whole point of psychoanalysis is that you can have plans that you don’t have a representation of. Not only plans, but even representations of the ideal. Right. Sure. Absolutely. Yeah, well, it depends on their level of representation. So you can have fantasies that you haven’t made explicit. By the way, I think this is a fantasy, and so is this. It’s the fantasies that guide your motivational judgments, your dreams about the future. If you don’t know what you’re doing, then you engage in exploratory behavior. So you say, well, I have this ideal future in mind, but I don’t know how to get there. Then you try out different patterns. That’s something we’ll discuss next week, actually. So that’s a default position. I know where I want to go, but I don’t know how to get there. So since I don’t know what to do, what can I do? That’s a paradoxical question, but the answer is you know the answer to that. So you start engaging in exploratory behaviors of various sorts to make what you want to happen start happening. So things that you do know how to do that you don’t know you know how to do, they just fall inside that little circle on top. Like things that you’re doing without being aware or planning to do them that way, but you’re doing them because you’ve learned them. Well, they would form subroutines of this, basically. So you use what you know how to do automatically in your attempt to do what it is that you want to accomplish, like walking or moving your hands or whatever. You sequence those behaviors that you already know how to do. In describing the first circle, you basically described a kingdom with an authoritarian rule and whatever. Are you going to go into, during the class, what kind works best? Because you’ve also described elsewhere, and I don’t remember how the democracy works, and how there isn’t a generalized hierarchy, but people have a hierarchy and there’s certain specializations. Yeah, well we’re still doing really introductory work. We will go into that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, because what I want to do is find out, well, this is the myth of the way, by the way. This is the, that’s what I said up there, it’s this story that myths refer to most particularly. It is the structure of adaptive structures and how they transform. And when myth is describing the world, that’s what it’s describing. It says, well this is, from the mythological perspective, the world is constructed of the distinction between chaos and order. It’s like before chaos and order are divided, you don’t have anything. And you can say, well this is chaos and this is order. But order is also something that has to transform because anything orderly that doesn’t change dies. Because, well it’s hard to say exactly why that is. Because things change and you have to keep up with them is the simple answer. I have no idea why that is. It just is the case. So the mythical world is the world that’s always stable, which is to say there’s an unknown. That’s chaos. It has a certain effect of valence, which is frightening and promising. That’s always there, the unknown. And then there’s the known, that’s your culture. That’s the story you share with everyone. That’s your procedures to bring about what you want to bring about. That’s your kingdom. That’s always there. And then there’s a process that mediates between the two. That’s you. That’s always there. Those are the three constituent elements of the world. Chaos, order, and the hero actually. Although those all have, they’re split into positive and negative representations of mythology as well. So that’s the mythological world. And as far as I can tell, it’s a completely internally coherent representation of experience. And it includes, it concentrates on affective valence and motivational significance rather than on sensory structure. What sort of things would affect the content of the new adaptive structure? Okay, what do you mean by what sorts of things? Well, what would influence a particular shape that it takes, a particular story that it tells? Well, hopefully past experience. I mean, these are fantasies. But to the degree that someone’s healthy, they’re fantasies that are constructed on knowledge that’s generated as a consequence of past endeavours. So let’s say like you’re doing something and you fail in a major way, in an unexpected way. Well, hopefully what happens, that basically means that there’s a bunch of information about your circumstance that you failed to either notice or to adapt to. That’s what it means if a failure comes as a big surprise. As a general rule, you’re not paying attention. So hopefully what happens when this is reconstructed, that’s what’s sort of on a higher plane, is that all the anomalous information that you didn’t take into account, probably because it was threatening, is now incorporated in here. So, that sounds like Coon’s paradigm. Yeah, that is, exactly. What Coon was describing, look, that’s normal science. Right. Yeah. And that’s revolutionary science. But see, what Coon found, basically, was this structure in science. But what Coon found was only a substructure of a much broader process of adaptation. So it’s like a mythic structure of science then. Yeah, well, I mean, what Coon was describing is how cognitive systems stabilize and restructure, but in the scientific domain. But you could just say, well, cognitive systems stabilize and restructure, no matter what we’re applying them to. So Coon, now, Coon, this is a very strange quirk of history, because Jung said this like in 19, about 1930. He said, this is how religious systems progress. And I can’t first reason, I cannot understand, no one seemed to notice that. And then Coon said in 1962 or 61, this is how scientific systems transform, and it was like, it was a revelation. But anyways, who knows? I mean, it’s easier for people to accept and understand, probably, in the scientific domain, because we feel that we understand that type of knowledge, and we do, because the rules are explicit. It’s harder to understand how this works when you’re talking about valence. But the thing you have to remember, it’s like I’m trying to make this argument as concrete as possible. You have to map valences, you have to, because you have to know how to behave. And you have to get what you need out of the world. And we have a structure for doing that. It’s of primary importance. That’s what we do while we’re alive, and everything else is just an adjunct to that. So when you’re looking at this sort of thing, you’re looking at the most fundamental aspects of cognition, as far as I can tell. And you’re basically, the purpose of cognition, as far as I can tell, is to regulate emotion. That’s why we have it. That’s what it’s good for. We want to not be in pain. We want to not be anxious. We want to have a future that’s full of hope and satisfaction. And we’re always trying to adjust our models of the world, hopefully, to ensure that that occurs. When we do more specific cognitive exercises like science, well, that’s a subspecialization. It’s very useful. Hopefully, it’s very useful. It’s dangerous, too. Other questions? You mean to say that the second is more adaptive than the first? Well, hopefully. It doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t have to be. Jung described something that he called regressive reestablishment of the persona, which is you’re trying to do something, and you fail. And when you reorganize yourself, your sphere of attempts is much more constricted. So you can get worse as a consequence of this. Because all that anomalous information that you haven’t processed, you can’t just let that in. It doesn’t change you by letting it in. You have to adjust your behavior to the anomalous territory. And that takes a lot of ingenuity and a lot of hard work. That’s why Freud, you know, Freud found by the end of his life, he said, well, mere consciousness doesn’t entail cure. Well, that’s because just knowing that something there isn’t the trick. The trick is if there’s a threat that the environment poses. Like, let’s say people find you obnoxious. That might generally fall. And that isn’t what you want. It’s interfering with your future. Well, the problem, just knowing that people find you obnoxious, that’s not that useful. To assimilate that information is to take it in and move differently and respond differently. So that other people are no longer that category of things that’s hostile towards you. So it’s not just heightened consciousness. It’s like total reconstruction of your behavioral outputs. You have to learn to pay attention and to listen and to have some respect for somebody else’s story. The new system also depends on what’s available, right? I mean, that’s why you can regress because your past is available and that’s why people are so susceptible to ideologies. Just because it’s around. Yes, that’s true. It’s easy, too. Because you’re not saying it without ease. So what’s there is what you grab on a lot of it. Yeah, yeah, that’s true, too. So that’s why brainwashing institutes basically work. They toss anomalous information at you until you crack and then they throw a new system at you which you grab on to immediately. The Koreans did that very effectively to American prisoners of war in the 50s. So that’s how the army works. That’s how fraternities work in a more minimal sense. That’s how initiation ceremonies work. So it’s not always negative that that occurs. It’s only negative if what you’re handed is less useful than what you had. Or less useful than what you could have constructed yourself. Okay. I know that was sort of rambling. Any other questions? What’s the process of coming up with the whole system like that? Does that imply that you should have power over it or that it’s… It’s exploration. What, I mean, the whole process of coming up with a system like this. Are you, where are you by doing this in the system? You’re here. You’re the thing that moves from here to here. But, I mean, if you’re the person who comes up with this system and plans it out like that, I’m still doing it. That’s right. That’s right. That’s why the way is the proper path of life from the mythological perspective. And to identify with the way is instead of identifying with this or with this, knowing that they’re temporary, is to identify with this. Because it’s the only thing that’s constant across the constant spans. So there’s known territory and there’s unknown territory and there’s the process by which one is generated out of the other. And you said, well, where does the individual fit, basically, where are you? Well, if you’re doing this voluntarily, then you’re identifying with the process by which cultural information is generated rather than with the information itself. So that makes you always on the… Always in the proper locale, so to speak, to construct the world. That’s where all the interesting occurrences take place. That’s a proper place to live. I’ll close with an example of that. Say, well, here’s another symbol that you’re all familiar with. That’s the Tao. And Tao means two things. It either means the way, depending on the translation, the way, which is that, or it means meaning. So to live in Tao is to live in meaning. And this symbol is a symbol of the totality of the world. And why is that? Well, it’s because this is chaos. And that’s usually given a feminine connotation for reasons that we’ll discuss later. And this is order. And it’s chaos and it’s the split between chaos and order and the mutual coexistence that makes the world. And this dot is black because anything orderly can immediately be turned into chaos, more or less unpredictably, and sometimes by your own efforts. And chaos can also be turned into order. That’s why this little dot is white. Also by your own efforts. Exploration does that. And Tao, the man who lives in Tao, lives on this line. With one foot in order and one foot in chaos. And the reason for that, see, that’s where all the interesting things are happening. That’s where the information is flowing. If you’re all here, you predict everything. Well, that’s secure, but it’s boring. And it’s not just boring symbolically. It defines boring. There’s no new information happening here. And if you’re here, well, you’re so overwhelmed with new information that you can’t do anything with it. And you want to be here. And if you’re here, then you’re doing this. You’re paying attention to anomalous information. Always. You’re allowing that to destabilize the structure when it’s necessary. You have to do this. That’s the hero in the Valley of the Beast, by the way, or the sun that pats its way out of the dragon at night. And back up. So that’s the path of the hero. And in terms of systems that are stable over time, an authoritarian system says this is not necessary. So it decays as things change. A system that’s properly balanced said, well, we need this. But we also need this. And therefore, we’re going to have to allow a certain amount of disorder into the system so that flexibility can be maintained. And the trick is balance. It’s like too much novelty, everything degenerates. Too much order, everything petrifies. You want to be right on the proper edge. And the way that you can tell you’re on the edge when you’re interested in something. That’s the sign that says, well, there’s an affective signpost that tells you when you’re here. If you’re here, you’re interested. If you’re here, you’re terrified. If you’re here, you’re bored. You want to be right in the middle of that. And then that means your brain is on in an optimal manner. Because your sensory systems are probably heightened because you’re a little bit anxious. You’re doing a lot of exploration. And you find that pleasurable. That’s left frontal activation. People like that. That’s incentive reward pleasure. That’s what cocaine does to you. When you’re here, you’re on. It’s analgesic too, which is kind of interesting. Is that like flow? Yeah. It’s not quite though. Because the problem with things like flow, and this is Joseph Campbell’s thing too, is they’re always talking about following your happiness. This is not right. To get here, what you have to do is look at things that you hate. The problem is no one will buy a book that tells them that. It’s flow. No, but this is a major problem. A problem with New Age philosophy in general. It’s the anomaly that you have to face. And the a priori motivational significance of an anomaly is terror. Because otherwise people would be in flow all the time. And they’re not. Could you get this out of here? Yeah. Sure. Is there a problem? Yeah. I think I may just… Yeah, okay. The book’s expensive. Yeah. I mean… Okay, that’s fine. That’s fine. It is a good book. And I didn’t put the name on it. Oh, okay. Can I get a slow-mo? Yeah.