Maps of Meaning 03 (Harvard Lectures) (E8snndiBY80)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=E8snndiBY80

You should have read by now, well, that little book that, what’s it called? Not emotion and memory, you should have read the three or so papers in here, maybe there’s four of them? Yeah, four. And also the first, well, the chapters in this book up to the end of the neuropsychology section, which is basically to page 80. So that’s what we’ve covered to date. So, I showed you a simpler diagram of this sort last week, and that’s the model of the known normal adaptation. Let me show you a little cartoon here that I think is kind of funny. Alright, so as far as I can tell, that’s a decent but simplistic model of what it is that you know when you say that you know something with regards to its implications for behavior or its meaning, because remember that’s what we’re trying to specify in this class, right? The initial introductory discussions hinged on the notion that when we map our environments as a consequence of active exploration, we map them for two reasons. We want to specify the sensory nature of the things that we encounter, and we also, but more importantly, more fundamentally, perhaps not more importantly, but more fundamentally, we really want to keep track of where the meanings reside. Now, this is complicated by something that we’ll discuss to some degree today, which is that things aren’t simply given in the environment. I mean, that’s the case with sensory things even, although there’s a lot of dispute about this. I mean, that was Kuhn’s fundamental point, as far as I can tell in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and what constitutes the objective object seems to shift as we shift our techniques of exploration, which is why we have new scientific theories. I mean, theoretically, there’s something at the bottom of it all towards which our ideas are approximating, but anyways, it’s a difficult idea. But it’s much more clear in the case of our maps of meaning, because how you approach something really does determine in large part its affective significance, right? You can all see this. Fire for animals is dangerous, pure and simple, but fire for people has been liberating. I mean, that’s the most, sort of the most dramatic example I can think of, right? You switch the motivational category of the object by altering your approach to it. It’s dangerous if you let it burn you. If you control it, then it cooks your food and it heats your cave, etc., etc., and it’s something, by an alteration in your action, you’ve completely transformed the nature of the object, at least with regards to its utility. And that’s a big part of what we consider creativity. Anyways, one of the things I’ve been trying to figure out is what is the structure of our knowledge when we say that we know something, and that’s this, the known. And it’s a bounded domain, basically, that’s characterized by specification of the emotional significance of what’s going on in the present, at least as far as that’s interpreted, and specification of what we would like to happen in the future, and then the construction of motor plans to turn one into the other. Now, I’ve updated this diagram somewhat from its original, simpler form to show that while you’re attempting to transform this into this, things that you don’t expect might happen, which is, and that’s pretty obvious if you think about it, because if unexpected things didn’t happen, that would mean that you knew everything and you don’t know everything, so that means unexpected things are always happening. If you’re undertaking a behavior that’s designed to meet a certain end and something unexpected happens, well, that activates a chain of phenomena that I described later that we’re going to discuss today as the orienting reflex. But basically, the bottom line is that anything unexpected is in and of itself intrinsically meaningful. That’s really, really important. We don’t assign meaning to things so much as we do restrict the meaning that they already offer us to a specified domain. If you think about that, that kind of reverses, as I’ve mentioned before, that reverses many normal psychological presuppositions, which is that we have to, that things are neutral until we discover a use for them. Okay. So I told you this story, or you read the story perhaps, about the guy who’s thinking about his performance at some meeting. He’s thinking about how well he’s going to do and how he’s going to dominate the meeting and so on. He runs into a number of obstacles on his way to the meeting, including an elevator that won’t function and people who get in his way. The reason I told this story in the book is just to show you how this sort of thing operates in day-to-day life. It’s a pretty boring story. I mean, nothing particularly exciting happens, I suppose, until the end. Nothing exciting happens means only trivial, unexpected things occur. Nothing exciting happens means no emotion is released in the course of the story until the end, because all of the things that are unexpected are trivial, unexpected things that all occur at the level of mind. So, this is a minor league plan. So the guy is upset by the fact that the elevator doesn’t come, but that’s not such a catastrophe because he can always take the stairs. And if someone’s ahead of you on the sidewalk and you’re in a hurry, well, you can always go around them. These are pretty minor deviations, and they’re interesting, and they do inspire a certain amount of emotion. But all they mean is that you have to shift from one sub-goal to another. Well, events of a different magnitude occur, and the idea there is that, well, the protagonist of the story that’s outlined in the book, he’s expecting a commendation for his performance in the recent meeting, and instead he gets fired. And in a sense you could say, well, all hell breaks loose as a consequence of that, because that information, which can’t be easily denied, blows his whole world. It isn’t something as simple as an event that interferes with a particular planned sequence of behavior. It’s something that demonstrates, incontrovertibly, that his whole notion of the ideal future is impaired in some non-trivial manner, and that his viewpoint of himself in relationship to the world is dramatically and drastically flawed. Well, the thing is, you don’t need to know a lot of the things that we’ve been talking about to start to make sense out of this thing. You know that if you get fired from a job, that’s a catastrophe, or something occurs to make you really question your own abilities, or where you’re going, or where you’ve come from, that people find that very emotionally disruptive. Well, the answer to, well, what does it mean by the fact that people find that emotionally disruptive is to say that, well, things that aren’t predictable have their own affective valence, and you render things predictable using a schema of this sort. And if something comes along to blow your schema, then all those things that you’ve rendered predictable with regards to your current patterns of behavior are all of a sudden unpredictable, and if they’re unpredictable, most particularly, they’re frightening. That’s the first thing that comes up. There seems to be a qualitative difference in his reaction to the elevator and the traffic than to getting fired. Absolutely. And it seems to be, to me, it seems to be like a distinction between losing, not the scenario now, working anymore, like losing confidence in the scenario, and losing confidence in himself as a scenario maker. I mean, there seems to be… Perfect, yes, that’s perfectly reasonable. Is that a useful way to distinct? Because I was trying to… Oh, yes, like… …so qualitatively distinctive because it was really different. No, no, that’s a perfectly reasonable comment. Exactly. Think about punishments. We know that punishments produce pain, for example, they produce hurt, that’s the affective state. I mean, formal punishments, we’ll define what they are later. The thing about people, though, is that we can generalize. In animals, you can punish out particular patterns of action. In human beings, you can punish out hierarchies of action, right down to the level of the action that generates action, and that’s basically what… or the action that generates patterns of action, and that’s what you’re talking about. If you really punish someone, then they lose faith in their ability to adapt. And well, when that happens, while you’re depressed, while you’re not just depressed, depressed doesn’t… …you’re not just hurt. Depressed doesn’t just mean you’re hurt. Depressed means, well, you’re in pain. This is literal, by the way. It’s not metaphorical. About 70% of people who are chronically depressed have chronic pain syndromes, low back pain, migraine, etc. The two things look very closely related phenomenologically. You also lose all hope. Well, what does that mean? Well, we’re going to talk about that a little later, but these aren’t metaphors. Look, whatever you put in this box is a consumatory reward. It’s a satisfaction, by definition. I want to talk about this a little bit more in the neuropsych section. We know about satisfactions. There’s four classes of motivationally relevant phenomena. There’s punishments, and there’s satisfactions. Those are primary positive and negative reinforcers in somewhat archaic behavioural language. Punishments and satisfactions. And then there’s cues of punishments and cues of satisfactions. And cues of satisfactions give you hope. But they’re always conceived of in relationship to some goal. You lose the goal. Well, you lose hope. That’s exactly what happens, literally. So if your goal has come tumbling down… …and the other thing you have to realise is that your goal is always conceived of in relationship to your conceptualisation of yourself. Because you always view possibility in relationship to what you think you can accomplish. So these two things can’t… That’s why this is a system. This cannot be conceived of except in relationship to this and vice versa. You always construe where you’re going with regards to your conceptualisation of your current level of abilities and possibilities and so on. And you evaluate the utility and desirability of what you have currently in relationship to the best that could possibly be. So it’s a system. It’s a system. This is the known. As long as you’re operating in this territory, you’re where exploration has already taken place fundamentally. So you’re protected by your culture. That’s one way of looking at it. You’re protected by your particular story, anyways. That’s assuming nothing really dramatically unpredictable has gone wrong. So you refer to scenarios. Would it be right to say that that whole thing is a scenario? That’s a story. Absolutely. If that’s something that we have a representation of, then that’s abstract. So in that sense, we are scenario makers. Yes. And this is the thing that’s interesting, I think. One of the things that’s interesting about that is that the scenario from the mythological perspective, that’s the world. That’s like myth from the mythological perspective, which is concerned with meaning and not with sensory qualities. The world is what you know, what you don’t know, and the mediating process between the two. And the mediating process, by the way, is what you were referring to, because the mediating process is the thing that creates order out of chaos. Or, upon occasion, that turns chaos into order, or order into chaos as well. It’s the transformative process. Anyways, if you lose faith in that transformative process, that’s the end of you, fundamentally. I mean, life comes to a halt. And that’s why, well, as we’ll find out, many, many, many religious systems, if not all religious systems, attempt to catalyze identification with the transformative process as their aid to the good life. Anyways. Okay, so this is a story. It’s a story. The story is, well, things aren’t so good now, but they’re going to be much better in the future, and this is how we’re going to bring it about. That’s just your straight, linear story. That’s a scenario. And you have your particular story, and you have your particular story. To the degree that you share cultures, there are sub-elements of your stories that are identical. So I was thinking about this other day, you know, like, if you read in the newspaper that Congress is going to cut off funding to cognitive psychologists who specialize in vision, then all of the cognitive psychologists who specialize in vision, to the degree that they share that story, are going to be threatened by that particular piece of news because it’s interfering with their scenario. They’re going to band together as a group, and they’re going to do whatever they can to parry the threat. Now, if you read that all cognitive psychologists’ funding is going to be cut, then your reference group is all of a sudden expanded because you’ve pulled in a larger number of people who share the presuppositions of your story, and you can say, well, if it was all psychologists, that would be a larger group, and if it was all academics, that would be a larger group, and so on. And you can see that as the threats are more and more fundamental, the groups that are affected get larger and larger. Anyways, because you’re including more and more people under the rubric of the same story. If your country is under attack from foreign forces, then it’s the Constitution, in a sense, that’s at risk, and everything, that’s kind of the trunk of the presupposition tree. And everyone is going to unite against that threat. Or virtually everyone is going to unite against it. This is like a shared map of the experience for normal adaptation. We’re going through this scenario, it couldn’t help but thinking, it’s like people with anxiety disorders, who like, the ideal future would be to get on the elevator, and that it would come and it would go down and there would be no problem with that. And that’s the unpredictable, that’s the big problem. So if the elevator never comes, or they get stuck in the elevator or something, that’s chaos. That’s the unpredictable. So I was just wondering, on this chart, how would you map that? Oh, well, okay, the thing is that any phenomena have ambivalent meanings, and this is something that I refer to in the chapter of neuropsychology, is that an event that can be construed with a particular motivational relevance from one frame of reference can be construed from a different frame of reference in a completely different manner. So let’s say you’re on your way to the meeting, and you have an anxiety disorder, so you’re afraid of elevators. Okay, so the elevator doesn’t come. Well, with regards to the story that says, I want to go to the meeting, then the fact that the elevator hasn’t shown up is very anxiety-provoking and perhaps frustrating and punishing. But with reference to the frame of reference that says, well, I’m the kind of person who can’t tolerate taking elevators, it’s relief that the elevator not showing up brings about. And then your net motor output, so to speak, is a function of the competition between those two frames of reference. I don’t know exactly how that competition plays out, but virtually everything that you can possibly conceive of has motivational significances that vary with the frame of reference. And you do this to yourself. Look, this is really not complicated enough, unfortunately. And I’ll draw the map that we’ll use later. This is just the note. Well, anyways. This is actually more like how this diagram should look. You get the picture. Okay. Now, these are more or less comprehensive stories. And damage to the story can take place at any level of analysis. The higher up on the, or the more inclusive the place at which the damage takes place, the more behavioral adaptation is rendered useless. And the more phenomena are transformed once again back into chaos from whence they came, from the mythological perspective, as you’ll find out. Because the next thing you’re going to do is read the Sumerian creation myth. And I tried to map it onto the kind of descriptions that we’ve been talking about. The Sumerian creation, I had a good dream about this last night, I’ll tell you about it in a minute. The Sumerian creation myth is particularly relevant because, well, it’s been said that history began in Sumer. So in a sense, it’s the most ancient of creation stories that we have extant, that has been transmitted down into our culture along the line that our culture came from, basically. I dreamt last night that I told this class, although the class was slightly different than my dream, that we all have Sumerian skeletons. Which is kind of a weird way of looking at it. But the point is, it’s only about 5,000 years that separate us from the Sumerians, and you might think, oh, that’s a long time, we have nothing in common with them. But there’s a bunch of ways to look at that. That’s only 60, 80-year-old men. So, if you think about that, 80 years old men, another 80-year-old man, and so on, that’s only 60 entire moderately long lifespans. It’s nothing, you know. And it’s nothing on the evolutionary perspective because we’ve been around as a species exactly like we are for 150,000 years, and something similar to what we are for at least 2 million. So, like 5,000 years. That’s yesterday. We’re still Sumerians. When you read that creation myth, you want to think about it in relationship to the things we’ve been talking about, the Sumerians say, well, everything emerges from chaos. What the hell does that mean? Well, it means that it means most basically that everything that you understand comes from the domain that has not yet been explored. That’s a chaotic domain because you can’t say anything about it. There’s no distinctions drawn. Plus, it has infinite motivational relevance. You can’t specify it. That’s very chaotic. Those things that you haven’t yet explored are simultaneously punishing, satisfying, and threatening, and promising all at once, and none of those as well, anyways. So anyways, when I say things like, well, interference with a structure of this sort reduces everything to chaos, and that chaos is in some sense equivalent to the chaos that existed before the creation of things. That’s what all that means. It’s kind of a, you know, just think about it as a metaphorical language, I guess. Anyways, this is a better model. So, you know, to use the university example, all cognitive scientists specializing in vision would be here, and all cognitive psychologists would be here, and then all psychologists would be here. That’s one way of looking at it anyways. Okay, so… Professor Peterson? Yes? When you’re talking about how much anxiety is caused by the absence of the elevator, you’re referring to it as a function of what your interpretive schema is. But also, how much of it has to do with sort of more basic biological function of how much tolerance any given individual has for unknown? That’s a tough question. I mean, it looks like there are all these four systems, so to speak. Well, that’s the satisfaction, punishment, promise, and hope systems from the subjective perspective. They all seem to have thresholds for activation. So, if your threshold for activation of your incentive reward system is low, it looks like you’re likely to be extroverted, you’re very happy in social situations, you smile easily, you talk a lot, etc. And that’s something that’s biologically determined, and the same with regards to your response to threat. You could have a high level, a high threshold or a low threshold in the amygdala. Well, but then it really gets complicated because the problem is that what you construe as threatening or promising depends on your framework of interpretation. Nobody knows how that plays into the biology. So what I was asking was whether those two things can be separated because… Well, I think in principle they can be because I think it would be possible, say, if you and I both went into the lab, a lab, you could say, well, we’re under the same, more or less the same set of precepts. We’re governed by the same set of presuppositions in that laboratory circumstance. So say they give us both a goal-directed task that’s very bounded and a set of phenomena occurs and I get more anxious by physiological measures than you do. Well, assuming that we’ve held the framework of reference constant, we might be able to say something about the intrinsic biological differences. But it strikes me as very difficult. But isn’t the interpretation we attach to that going to be dependent on what we match and how we naturally react anyway? I would suspect so, yeah. So I don’t know, like I really don’t know the answer to your question. I mean, it’s obviously the case that you can modulate the motivational significance of phenomena merely by shifting frameworks of reference. Like you can say, well, if you’re very upset, say, just a relationship you had has just broken up and you think, you know, well, this is finally going to kill me. And so you have very temporally bounded interpretation of this. This is absolutely catastrophic. And what am I going to do tomorrow? And then you think, well, is this really going to mean anything in five years? And, you know, from that perspective, like how relevant is this phenomena with regards to my five-year plan, for example? Its relevance is going to shrink dramatically. And you might say, well, how much is it going to mean to me in 40 years? And you think, well, under those circumstances, it dwindles to absolute triviality. And you can say, well, what is any of this going to mean in a thousand years? And then you have an existential crisis. But the thing is, you can, that’s an, it’s very interesting because you can modulate the motivational relevance of phenomena by shifting your framework of reference. It looks to me that paper by John Duncan, the first paper in here, in a sense, that’s what he says the frontal cortex does, at least in part, is that I think, well, back to the neuro site, I think the frontal cortex has hijacked our motivational systems to give us increased adaptive flexibility. Like animals, oh, this gets us into a big argument, a big disagreement about what constitutes an unconditioned stimulus, you know. Like lots of behaviors think there are such things as unconditioned stimulus, which are just those things that you will respond to automatically, like electric shock. You know, that’s bad. It’s anxiety-provoking, while more particularly it’s punishing, if it’s of sufficient intensity. It hurts. But the problem with that is that, you know, you can take a dog, and if you give it food just after you shock it, soon when you shock it, it wags its tail. And that means that the affective relevance of the unconditioned stimulus is at least modifiable by learning. And almost all unconditioned, so-called unconditioned stimuli have that property. So, and we know that, you know, people have an immense amount of disagreement about what constitutes good. Goods, for example. Like anorexics don’t like food, and they starve to death, so it’s a bad decision. But the point is that even something as fundamental as food, the motivational relevance of that can be shifted by a shift in the framework of reference. So you could say, well, the anorexic is caught in a situation where, well, her unbearable present is, you know, my terribly fat body. Although no one else might construe it in that matter. That’s hers. And her ideal future is, I’m thin, thinner than anyone else. And that, there’s an associative network around thin, so to speak, that includes beautiful, well-liked, admired, rich, you know, whatever the hell you want to throw in there. And in relation, that makes food in relationship to the movement from here to here something punishing and threatening, because it interferes with it. So then it takes on the motivational significance of a threat or a punishment. And of course, well, she still gets hungry. So there’s going to be a heavy dose of internal conflict. That’s what internal conflict means in part, is you’re internally conflicted about a stimulus if it has one significance for one of your plans and an alternate significance for another plan. And you haven’t integrated the two plans into something that’s into a higher order construction where there’s no conflict. So that’s a problem. You were saying how if you’re too ruled by your ideal future, it creates anxiety, which is the American story. Or if you don’t have this sense of an ideal future, that you don’t move, you don’t have motivation. Is there some kind of, and then you’ve been talking about relativity, like the perspective a year, four years, four years. Is there such a thing as a balance? Is there such a, what, for universally, what is enough of just to move you on? Yeah, well, you know, this is one of the things we’re going to hope to answer over the course of the whole course. I mean, I said, well, in a sense, I said everything is relative because you can shift the motivational significance of phenomena by shifting your frame of reference. But I also said that if you think food is evil, you’ll starve. So obviously, there’s, those two arguments in a sense are in conflict. I mean, it is possible for you to believe that food is a punishing item. But if you do believe it, there will be certain consequences, like you won’t be able to pursue any other plans because you’ll be dead. So I’m interested in trying to resolve the argument that those two arguments, or resolve the problem that those two arguments set up. On the one hand, well, we need to eat, although people can regard food as a punishment. On the other hand, you can switch the motivational valence of things by, with an act of will, so to speak. So it strikes me that there’s a high probability that certain phenomena will be regarded as satisfactions and will take on the aspects of consumatory rewards. One of those high probability items, for example, is food. Now, that’s why I have a quote here. I’ll show you this quote from Nietzsche. He said, The basic drives of man. It’s a very sophisticated idea. It’s a hundred years old. We’ll find that all of them have done philosophy at some time. And that every single one of them would like only too well to represent just itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and as the legitimate master of all the other drives. For every drive one is to be master, and it attempts to philosophize in that spirit. So I’ve been trying to resolve this, all these dilemmas that I’ve been posing. The dilemma, for example, that shock has this significance of an unconditioned stimulus but can be shifted. It looks to me that what happens is that these underlying biological systems, like the one that governs hunger, has the capacity to grip, to gain access to the representational system that constructs these futures. So, for example, you say, well, you’re busily doing your homework, and you haven’t eaten for a long time. So now you’re cooperating within a particular frame of reference. So the action of doing your homework is a motor program that’s part of a larger series of goals and sub-goals, right? Graduation, career, and all that. That’s what you’re busily pursuing. But you haven’t eaten, well, so what happens is that your attention starts to get diverted, which basically means that the system that’s responsible for ensuring that you get enough calories has started to take control of the representational system that constructs your ideal futures. So you start thinking about food. It’s like that’s another fantasy that’s making itself known in the theatre of your imagination. And if you keep doing your homework and don’t eat long enough, well, you’re going to start feeling conflict because you’re switching between these two control systems, basically. And sooner or later, in all likelihood, the system that mediates food intake is going to get the upper hand, and you’ll say, well, to hell with it, because that’s your interpretation from the perspective of finishing your homework, and you’ll go to the fridge and get something to eat. So when Nietzsche says all our drives attempt to philosophize, basically, see, this is the way, the reason I’m trying to tell you this is because it gets away from the notion of stimulus response, because it’s not, your hunger isn’t driving you towards the fridge. It’s not like it’s gripping your behavioral output. What it’s doing is positing a potential future towards which you can plan, and it has the capacity to grip that future. That’s Nietzsche’s attempts of the drives to philosophize. So you’d say, well, and you think about this, we define pathology in this way often. Say, well, if everything in your life boils down to food, that’s your god. That’s your ideal future, you eating as much and as often as possible. Well, then we would say something is pathological about your scheme of representation or your behavior, something is pathological about your personality. Well, part of the reason we say that is because food is a good sub-goal, it’s a necessary sub-goal, but it’s a bad ultimate master. Well, the question in part that we’re going to try to address in this class is, well, given that food, say, and sex and water and heat and shelter and all these other things are necessary sub-goals, what would constitute the ideal master? Well, you read this, you want to read this Sumerian creation myth with this in mind. So I say these are gods, that’s one way of looking at it. It’s a little bit more complicated than that. They, well, here’s another quote, this is quite funny, I think, too. This is from Eliade with regards to Sumerian mythology. It is true that man was created in order to serve the gods who first of all needed to be fed and clothed. Not such a, you know, not such a foreign conception really. Well, the gods are construed as transpersonal processes that are eternal fundamentally. And man, mortal man, is created in order to ensure that their needs are fulfilled. Well, anyways, of course, you’re going to think, at least some of you are going to think that’s a bit of a leap. But it’s quite interesting, you read the Mesopotamian creation myth, and part of what it entails is hierarchical competition between the gods and the eventual victory of one god who’s, that’s part of the movement towards monotheism. Marduk, by the way, is the one god who reveals himself as at the top of the hierarchy. And what Marduk represents is the capacity to explore. So the Mesopotamian creation myth base, because Marduk, it’s very interesting. Marduk carves Tiamat up. Tiamat is a dragon and she represents chaos. She’s also the mother of all things. Marduk carves Tiamat up and makes the world out of her. Makes the sky, makes the earth, makes the zodiac. He makes, in fact, one of, this is very amusing, one of Marduk’s names, because he has like 200 names, because actually he’s a mixture of gods. Mesopotamian culture was made up of a whole bunch of subcultures that melded over a long period of time, and all those subcultures had their own gods. And they all got sort of mixed together to make Marduk, so Marduk had a whole bunch of names, and one of his names, for example, was the maker of ingenious things from the combat with Tiamat, which is very, very interesting. But anyways, the Mesopotamians figured out, although they didn’t know they had figured it out, they figured out that the thing to which all these other drives should be made subordinate was the thing that was Marduk, and Marduk was the thing that carved new territory out of unexplored territory, because basically they managed to presume that if you didn’t arrange your life so that you could constantly generate new information, everything would come to a halt. So everything should be made subordinate to this capacity to encounter the unknown and generate new information out of it, because all of the other drives were necessary, dependent for their fulfillment on that particular function. So it’s very interesting. If you understand that, I think you understand something that’s unbelievably important. That’s part of the reason why I think I dreamt last night we had Sumerian skeletons, because now there’s more to it than this, of course, because Marduk was also the ritual model of emulation for the Mesopotamian emperor, which basically meant that the Mesopotamian emperor was emperor because in a sense he was Marduk, and only to the degree that he was Marduk was he granted any sort of divine status, and the emperor is the embodiment of the state, and of course our state now is a body of laws and not a human body, because we don’t have a monarchy anymore, but the point is that states only work too if they recognize that the property that Marduk incarnated is the thing of most central importance, which is the capacity for exploration. Anyways, that was a good digression from neuropsychology, but you have to bounce around these things in order to get a picture of them. Now, a question. So you can modulate your frame of references and address the compromises, but not all of it is relative, because you’re saying that they’re still subordinated to your sense of exploration. Well, that’s the ideal solution, at least as far as the Sumerians were concerned, and we’re going to explore the consequences of that solution as a solution, because it has a whole series of important implications. It’s a solution. Now, I happen to think it’s really a good solution, but we’ll see how that plays out. But yeah, the thing is, you’re not determined, so to speak, because the stimulus doesn’t control your behavior. Nonetheless, there are certain things that you are constrained, which is to say you have boundaries, and I can say with a high probability in a broad variety of conditions what you are likely to consider a consumatory reward. And I can say that because you’re composed in part of specialized subsystems, each of which have their own job, plus a stake in maintenance of the whole unit, which is you. So they want what they want, but they also want you to stay around, so to speak, because without you, nothing happens. And that’s what the Sumerians meant when they said that men were created to serve the gods. So the relativity is modulated by the fact that you have a number of competing tasks constantly to perform. So, well, that’s one way of construing it anyways. So, question. So, these subsystems or these drives, can they ever, in cases of really extreme, severe deprivation, can they directly grab control of the motor output, or must they always go, must they always affect behavior through their… I don’t know. I suspect that there’s probably, there’s both operating. Like, in situations that are so extreme that thought would be an interference rather than an aid, then I suspect there’s direct output. But I can’t say any… because that’s the problem with trying to reduce the brain to one system of operations. There’s evolutionary redundancy in the brain, and often for a given type of response, there’s more than one system that has the capability for that response. And there’s some circumstances under which I suspect behavior is directed, directly controlled. But I think this is more relevant when you’re trying to weigh potential alternatives. Like, let’s say if you’re hungry and thirsty, and you haven’t been engaged in a romantic relationship for like a year, and your job is under pressure, and you’re not getting along well with your children, well, then you have a whole nest of problems to solve, and an almost infinite number of potential solutions to those problems. And I think the role of the higher-order cortical systems is to modulate the fantasies that all of these underlying systems, so to speak, might produce in order to construct the optimal outcome. And that’s what, here you’d say, again, this is a story. I keep telling you, this is a story. Well, that’s a vision of paradise. That’s what’s up here as the archetypal ideal future. And a vision of paradise is, well, that’s the land of milk and honey, right? Where everything is bountifully provisioned, where every motivational system is properly addressed. Well, there’s a problem with that viewpoint that Dostoevsky pointed out, though, that is that, well, if everything’s perfect, everything’s predictable, and everything’s predictable, then you’re bored. And boredom is not part of perfection, so perfection is not perfection. That’s a big problem. And that’s another problem, hopefully, that we’ll be able to address. It’s a big problem, because incentive reward, which is what the unknown produces, that’s a cue for reward. Incentive reward is a more potent driving force for people, I think, than satisfaction. And you think about this with regards to your own behaviors. Like, often, those things, say you have a goal in mind, and you attain sub-goals with relationship to that goal, you’re very, very excited you actually attain the goal, and it’s nowhere near as exciting as participation in the process that led up to the goal, which is to say you’re more activated by incentive reward than you are by satisfaction. And that’s the thing about people, that’s what we’re like. That’s why we like novelty. So, static conceptions of the ideal future have an intrinsic problem. Well, the problem is that getting what you want is not enough to make you content. Because contentment is something that transcends the attainment of determinant satisfaction. There’s more to the story than the attainment of a goal that’s conceived of as a final goal. And that has something, well… Well, doesn’t contentment mean also accepting that you always want to keep on wanting more and desiring more, even though at this point you have what you want, haven’t you reached contentment? Well, no, I think you’re making a valid point. And fair enough. I mean, I guess what I’m talking about are systems that postulate, like political utopian systems, that postulate that there is a particular manner of organizing society that will provide a final, static solution to all our problems. A lot of more or less simplistic utopian notions do in fact promise that, like Marxism I think would be a system that fits well into that sort of conceptualization. So if you just reorganize the essential building blocks of society, you’ll inevitably produce a future that everyone will find ideal, and that will be the final solution, so to speak. So, yeah, I mean, if you know that incentive reward is one of the things that motivates you, and in a really profound way, again, as I’ve pointed out before, cocaine activates our incentive reward systems. People really like cocaine. So do animals for that matter. They’ll self-administer cocaine until they die. They like incentive reward. We like incentive reward. Money is an incentive reward, for example. Once you realize that, a lot of weird things start to happen, because you say, well, for example, a perfect world therefore would have to contain novelty. Now that’s a strange thing to say, because novelty also induces anxiety. So you’ve instantly said, in a sense, that a perfect world is also one that makes you anxious, which is, of course, not really in accordance with the kinds of things that we would normally consider perfect. So… Are you making the claim that an ideal future is a world of unlimited exploration? No, not entirely, Daniel, because, see, I kind of thought that in the past, but it’s more a matter of balance. You say, well, if this, if you can represent this as the known, which is the thing that’s transformed necessarily by the appearance of novelty, it’s also a precondition for the capacity to assimilate novelty. So you have to know something, which is to say that part of what makes you capable of exploring and assimilating new information is the fact that you’re already composed of static structures of knowledge. So you could say the ideal has to therefore be composed, at least in part, of a balance between what’s static and what’s novel. So it isn’t just exploration, it’s also the security that makes non-terrifying exploration possible, and the security that gives rise to the skills that make creative exploration possible. So you get someone like Einstein, I think it was Einstein, who said he could see so far because he stood on the shoulders of giants, and that’s a good mythological image, because basically what Einstein said was that he stood on the ground that was prepared by his dead ancestors, and that’s why he could see so far. So it’s a matter of balance, and that’s what the Oriental and Yang symbol basically states too, is that order is necessary, and chaos is necessary, and ideal is some balance between them, that’s where you’re supposed to walk. But that’s an ideal mode of adaption. Yeah. So when you say ideal in that context, you’re not talking about the box at the top right of the box. Oh, well then, okay, fine, absolutely. That’s why I said, well, in the little story, that there’s a simple grammar of the story, which is this. Which is, you know, this is your kingdom, why is that? Or your culture. Well, you’re part of the same culture as someone else if you share their story. It’s as simple as that, and their story is the manner in which they have fixed motivational significance to ongoing events, including you as an ongoing event, and to the degree that you share that scheme of interpretation. They are, you are part of that culture, and that’s because, well, it’s quite straightforward, I guess. If you and I share the same vision with regards to the value of a goal and the means for getting there, I can predict your behavior and you can predict mine. No, no, you can rely on me and we can cooperate. So we’ve just drawn a magic circle around ourselves, so to speak, that eliminates the unpredictable and novel from our interactions, except in a very constrained manner. So, you’re defined territory as far as I’m concerned, and vice versa. We are from the same culture. And you can make very, you know, you can make very trivial distinctions within cultures, for example. For both psychologists, but if we’re practicing in different domains, that could easily mean we could split into subcultures, depending on the event that’s going on. Because if something threatened your group, a subgroup, and benefited mine, instantly we’d fragment because our stories would have switched. So, anyways, this is the more comprehensive story, because you have a story, but then there’s a story about how to transform your stories when that becomes necessary. And so this is a fixed story, and this is another fixed story. You notice I’ve structured it so that this, well, it’s a square here and a circle here, which is the idea that the meta structure remains the same, but the details shift. And that’s a stage transition from the Piaginian perspective, or a revolution from the Cunian perspective. And this is blown apart by the appearance of anomalous information, and you can think of anomalous information as the agent of chaos. It’s a particularly weird way of looking at it, but anyways, it’s anomalous information that blows this structure apart. In initiation rituals, for example, they catalyze this sort of transformation. I face you with something anomalous, I blow apart your story, you’re reduced to chaos. What does that mean? Well, it means that you have all of the determinant motivational significances that you’ve affixed to events, including yourself and other people, that’s all up for grabs again. So you’re, by turns, depressed, anxious, elated, etc. Your emotional systems are in flux, and the reason they’re in flux is because the meta structure that kept them integrated has been destroyed. So you’re now subject to the war of competing emotions, basically. So that’s a descent into chaos. If it’s an initiation ceremony, the members of your culture will give you a new story. These things usually happen to men, but not always. This is your story for being a man. Bang! Well, that’s a new framework of reference that makes your new position now determinate. So then you’re up here, and you can say, well, there are different ways of construing the ideal. If you’re a patriot, you say, to the degree that I identify with this, I’m perfect, I’m moral. If you’re identifying, that’s one form of perfection, and you can see the utility to that, and people do that all the time, even when they’re identifying with football teams, for example. But there’s a more profound type of identification, and that would be identification with the process, with the capability to undergo this process. That’s identification with the capacity for transformation. And that again, that ties back with your earlier comment about viewing yourself as someone who’s capable not only of adhering to stories, but of generating and modifying them. That’s a much, and again, well, I want you to read this next section on Marduk with this sort of thing in mind, because again, that’s what the Mesopotamians pause it as ideal. In fact, the emperor of Mesopotamia, every new year, when the year is regenerated, you can view this as the year, by the way, from the Mesopotamian perspective anyways, the king was ritually reduced to chaos and reconstituted at the beginning of every new year, from the Mesopotamian perspective. That was equivalent to reduction of the world, the cosmos, to its constituent elements, and then renewal. That’s the most common of mythological themes, by the way. Okay, if exploration is necessary because you and everything else is going to change whether you like it or not, then wouldn’t the ideal be not necessarily active exploration, but exploration when you need to explore? Yeah, yeah, fair enough. You’re talking about the ideal state, or the ideal future, is one in which you’re always actively exploring. No, no, no, you’re right. Your alternative reformulation is more accurate. It’s exploration when it’s necessary, which is to say that you need to know what you know. So you don’t have to go looking for trouble necessarily or be an agent of change for the sake of being an agent of change, but if you detect an anomaly, which you do involuntarily, that’s the thing about how your brain is set up. If something anomalous happens, you notice it. Once you notice it, then it’s incumbent on you to alter your story, but it’s not necessarily the case that you have to be actively going about that while it would exhaust you. In fact, I think in some ways that’s what happens to paranoid schizophrenics. You might think that this is another leap, but if you read Gray’s article in this book, Gray has a theory of the neuropsychology of schizophrenia, what happens to schizophrenics is that novelty starts appearing all over where it shouldn’t, which is to say that the inhibitory structure that stops meaning from being experienced has been disrupted. So for the poor schizophrenic, meanings are popping up everywhere, and meaning means this signifies something, usually something threatening and something promising, that attracts your attention. The poor schizophrenic, his attention is always attracted. It’s part of the reason that paranoid schizophrenics are hypervigilant. And what happens to them is that I think, well, if something appears as meaningful to you, that activates your exploration system, and that’s dopaminergically mediated. Well, that explains in part the hyper dopaminergia that’s characteristic of schizophrenia and the hypervigilance. But the problem with that is that if you’re on all the time, you’ll kill those systems. I think that’s what happens to schizophrenics when they go into second stage schizophrenia, which is characterized by no flat affect and Parkinson-like symptoms. So it’s not so good to be on all the time. Right, because a common mythological ideal is peace, and that would seem to be specifically not explained, except maybe when you needed to, to maintain peace. Yes, but then there’s the contrary argument. That’s a perfectly valid point, but there’s the contrary argument, and I think this is an argument that the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland made to Alice. She said, you have to run as fast as you can just to stay where you are. Which is to say that a static mode of adaptation is no adaptation at all. Systems age all by themselves, so you have to stay very active in order just to maintain things the way they are. But you don’t necessarily have to be running all the time. Right, absolutely. I’m saying you come to a peaceful existence with yourself, and you’re living in the woods or something, and you’re completely happy with it. Well, you’re not going to have to do a lot of active change unless your situation changes or you change. Yeah, I think that… I mean, it’s a complex issue, because you can also, by expiration, you can also produce anomalies. It’s not necessarily the case that they just happen to you. So, but, you know, I’ve got no argument at all with what you say. It’s a matter of balance. I mean, the point is that, well, Egypt, for example, stayed stable for about 3,000 years, which is to say that as far as modern archaeologists are able to determine, there was a 30th century period where the fundamental substructures of Egyptian society stayed exactly the same, and the Egyptians were convinced, as are many traditional societies, that change meant death. And you can understand that, because any cultural innovation is all… Cultural innovations have the capacity to undermine the cultures that produce them, so many cultures opt for stasis. But the problem is, and because they think, well, we have a good thing, let’s not play around with it, it’s like biological mutations. It’s a good analogy. Most biological mutations kill you, and you think every innovation is, in the cultural sphere, an analogy to a mutation, but the one in every thousand mutations that doesn’t kill you is necessary for the survival of the species. So, it’s a very strange balance. Does that argument make sense? Does that analogy make sense? If being bored makes you miserable, then how do you explain things like marriage? Like, why isn’t the divorcee going to be said? I’m serious. Or even if you have a favourite song, or are married to the same person for decades, that’s got to be boring after a while. Well, maybe it does. I don’t know if it has to be. I mean, you also have the capacity to shift frameworks of reference. It’s also right. So, especially with something as complex as another person, if you think you know someone else, that’s only a delusion that you have about the extent of your knowledge. So, if what you see is what you have habituated to, then what you see is what you have habituated to, not what’s there. Because you don’t know what that other person is like, and perhaps they’ve fallen into the same damn game, which is they play out the rule you specified for them, but that’s your tough luck. So, that’s a good answer with regards to marriage anyways. So, with regards to simpler phenomena, well, you can move from thing to thing, and people do that, but part of the human capacity for exploration is also to see what hasn’t been mapped, where people think everything is understood. But her point brings up something interesting to me. When you fall into chaos, and then you go to a new place, can you take part of the old system? Oh, absolutely. Look, look, this is another thing you want to read when you go through this next chapter, because part of the pharaoh, the Egyptian pharaoh, for example, who’s a nice Mesopotamian emperor analog, although a little later down the historical chain, he was simultaneously the pharaoh who had died and the new pharaoh, always. And that meant basically that he was both Osiris and Horus, is how the Egyptians construed it, and Osiris was the old pharaoh who basically was confined to the underworld, and Horus was the process that gave new life to the pharaoh Osiris who was confined in the underworld. So the new pharaoh was simultaneously everything that had already been learned plus the process that allows you to make use of everything that’s already been learned in a creative manner. So, of course, that’s why the structure is the same. So this is composed of this plus this, which is to say that when there’s a revolution in your thought, what you use is everything you already knew plus the information that has been engendered by your contact or your assimilation of the anomalous information. So here, I’ll just give you, this is kind of funny, I think, this is often represented as a serpent, the serpent of chaos. For the Egyptians, that was Adam, and Adam was the most primordial of gods who ruled at the beginning of time and who will once again rule at the end of time. So he’s sort of the place that everything came from. It’s a serpent, anyways. But you can see, for example, the structure of the story and genesis of Adam and Eve in this little picture as well. Well, anomalous information, maybe I’m jumping ahead a bit, I’ll tell you anyways, anomalous information is often given a feminine form. So you’ll see when we go through, because, well, because anything anomalous, this is a hypothetical state, this chaos, you could say. It’s all the unknown that you haven’t encountered. You can’t say anything about that because it’s not actually part of your experience. It’s just a hypothesis about the source of all those things you don’t understand. It’s not those things themselves. When something anomalous actually makes itself manifest, which is to say that you’re following your story and something unexpected happens, then something actually unexpected has happened to you. Well, it’s in exploring that unexpected thing that you generate new information. So you could think of the unexpected that you experience as the matrix of everything that you know, because it’s the source of everything that you know. You have to explore it, but it’s still the place where information comes from. And matrix, I use that word because it’s etymologically related to mother, in many ways. This is often given feminine form. Yeah, the matrix of things absolutely matter as well. But anyway, so, well, it’s a complicated thing. The serpent gives the fruit to Eve in the story of Genesis, and that produces a complete collapse. That’s the rise of self-consciousness in the Genesis story. And Christian morality is the attempt to get from here back to here. Well, in a sense, that’s it. Anyways, that’s just another example of how these sorts of things tie together. Let me just show you this cartoon, because I might otherwise forget it. This is quite funny. This is just a cartoon that sort of illustrates how we do respond to things that we understand, things that we don’t. Now, the reason this cartoon is funny, of course, is because you don’t sit around a campfire at night and talk about things you understand. They don’t have any motivational significance. That’s why you think you understand them. Tales of the known. Well, embedded in this is also the notion that the things you have explored don’t have a lot of affective valence anymore, so they’re not very interesting. It’s unknown things that are interesting. Right, right, absolutely. Sure, Pan rules around the campfire at night. Pan’s the god who lives in the forest and who causes panic, basically. He’s the god that inhabits the forest, because the forest is unknown territory, and unknown territory produces a seizure of ongoing activity and is associated with anxiety. So… Yeah, yeah. Right, right, absolutely. Sure, you just did it in that example. That’s exactly what happens. Sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. Sure, and then it doesn’t provoke that much anxiety. That’s why… Happens all the time. Absolutely. Right, absolutely. And that’s a tree. That’s the thing that’s so neat about this. And a tree, by the way, is a very, very, very common figure in mythology. The Tree of Life, for example. I really believe that’s what it’s referring to. It’s the tree-like structure that holds your motivational systems in check. So you can lose, like, minor league branches, or you can lose things that are close to the trunk, which is… that’s a very big catastrophe. Then you lose whole schemas of actions and interpretations that hold entire sections of your experience in motivational check. So given that they have any prior significance, you’re trying to restrict that significance to some useful domain. It’s always what you’re trying to do. So can you only adapt to things that affect sub-goals on some level? I mean, because if you… if something happens that draws into question, like, let’s say, your most fundamental, like the trunk of the tree, can you adapt from that, or do you just… That’s part of what we’re trying to address in this class. See, because you could say, well, the best story is the one that addresses the widest range of potential phenomena, right? Say, well, mythologies collect… mythologies distill the best story. So what we’re going to try to do is to understand what the best story is, because the best story is the one that has the largest domain of potential relevance. So you could say, well, what’s the big problem? Well, the big problem, for example, might be the fact of human mortality, because that would be the anomalous phenomena, which puts the determinant significance of everything into dispute. So how can you adapt to that? Well, again, that’s the question, say, that’s at the bottom of Christian morality, if you view it… well, I’m using Christian morality just as an example. If you view the rise of self-consciousness, for example, one of the concomitants of the rise of self-consciousness is the knowledge of death. I mean, the two things are very closely linked. If you’re self-conscious, that means you can conceive of your boundaries. That’s what it means. And you have spatial boundaries, and, you know, they kind of bother you, but you can move from one place to another, so that’s not such a big deal. It’s the temporal boundary that’s the big problem. So the question is, well, can you adapt to the fact of a temporal boundary? Well, obviously, this is a very difficult question, but it’s the sort of thing that will… See, part of what I’m interested in trying to understand is why people get so horribly twisted as they mature. I mean, there’s lots of reasons for it. They’re pretty much plainly evident. In many ways, the world is a terrible place, and there’s sufficient reason all the time for people to get twisted off the path. In fact, I think often it’s more surprising that that doesn’t happen all the time than it is surprising that it sometimes happens. Well… If you’re looking, though, if you’re growing up in a family that maybe doesn’t have this normal adaptation, you know, of seeing these things, or, you know, you get caught up in the circles, or maybe something traumatic happened that affects one of your fundamental schema, then that could definitely create a twisted individual. Yeah, but that in itself is not enough. I think that’s a necessary but not sufficient precondition. So you could say, well, some people never…if you’re lucky, you at least start here. Some people never bloody well even get here. They’re born and this is where they stay, and that’s terrible for them. Is it possible to stay there without being entirely insane? I mean, because anyone who functions at all has a schema. Good question. Because you have to have a…I mean, you are working toward something even if you have no idea what it is. Not necessarily. Not necessarily. You have to allow yourself the possibility that there may be something that you’re working towards even if you don’t understand what it is. And that’s the thing that you can hold on to in the darkness, so to speak. That’s faith from the religious perspective. You might…I’ll get to you right away. You might say, well, what’s that faith in? And the answer to that in a sense is possibility. Even if you don’t know…like, this revolutionary adaptation, that’s what this model represents. You could say, well, this is an image of the hero from the mythological perspective. You may identify with that figure even if you don’t know you’re doing it, which is to say that when you’re here you may say to yourself, well, it’s possible that if I pay attention, better things will come about. Well, in a sense, that’s what you’re doing, whether you know it or not, is identifying with the capacity to undergo this process. So, then you’d say, well, even when you’re in chaos, you still have a story. Well, that’s true, you do, but you don’t have to. Like, people…this is the problem with notions like Joseph Campbell, for example, most New Age philosophy. They say, well, you know, follow your interests. Well, there’s a lot of anomaly wherever your interests take you. That’s perfectly fine. They say, follow your interests and you’ll get to here. That’s loath…what would you say? A very oversimplistic and naive conception of development. Because if you follow your interests and you hit a big anomaly, which you will, you’ll end up here. And this is by definition the most unpleasant place that you can imagine to be. And so it isn’t just a matter of, well, things are pretty damn good now and if you’re just real good, they’ll get a lot better. It’s, well, things are, you know, however they are right now, I don’t know how that…each person determines that personally. And if you do what you should do, they’re going to get a lot worse before they get better. So, that’s part of it. Because you need an explanation, you know? It’s like, why don’t people do this? Why don’t people pay attention to anomalous information when it doesn’t take that much cognitive work to realize that if you ignore something that’s real, sooner or later it’s going to cause you trouble. Well, why do people ignore it then? There must be a reason. Because some interpretation is better than none. That’s for sure. Even a bad one. That’s for sure. That’s for sure. Yeah, that explains a lot of the persistence of forms of psychopathology. It’s like you say, well, you know, someone has a real cockeyed story and it’s obvious to them that it’s cockeyed because their story transforms almost everything into the determinant significances of anxiety and pain. But they’ll still hang on to that like a lifeline when you offer them an alternative story that would allow the motivational states of hope and satisfaction to emerge because even though this is terrible, this is worse. And to get to the new one, they’d have to go there. Right. Isn’t that also though because they’re not being a hero? Like they’re escaping and escaping just perpetuates the anxiety so if they’re stuck in the anxiety and pain, then… Yeah. Well, this is why I want you to read Paradise Lost because Milton’s Paradise Lost is a description of the feedback process that refusal to admit to anomaly necessarily produces. So, question. Is there a qualitative difference or a difference of degree between damage to the branch and damage to the trunk? Well, it depends on how you look at it. Like if you look at it from this perspective, there’s a qualitative difference because damage to a branch would be damage in here. It’s just a matter of means. And then the qualitative difference, the qualitative shift would be damage here or here. But if you look at it this way, it’s really quantitative. And I think this is actually a more act… By the way, Daniel Higgins helped me with Substantial Loan developing this particular representation. But this makes it appear quantitative. And then the thing is you can say, well maybe there’s a qualitative difference between damage here and here. But there’s a qualitative difference between damage here and here. Because anyways, that’s how I look at it. So, it’s a quantitative process that has the appearance of qualitative shift from time to time. So… Okay. Confusion is a lot more frightening and difficult to handle than just pain. But I’m wondering why that is. If part of what a leap of faith is… Simply accepting that even if you don’t understand what you’re doing, you’re doing it for something that the possibilities that will open up to make you feel better. How exactly does confusion maybe fit in there? Well, often pain is bounded. So, let’s say you’re operating under a system of presumptions that always interferes with your interpersonal relationships. So they always end in catastrophe. But it’s very predictable. Remember, the point of having a story is to render things predictable. Now, predictable pain is a hell of a lot better than unpredictable pain. And it is possible, depending on your attitude towards anxiety, that predictable pain is better than unpredictable pleasure. Because the unpredictable aspect of the pleasure means anxiety. And then, of course, whether you would prefer anxiety to pain, in a sense, depends on how you construe your potential relationship to anxiety. But isn’t unpredictable pleasure a pleasure, but otherwise gambling or whatever stuff where you get the enforcement that you don’t really know when you’re going to get sensitively involved? And that’s, I think, one of the most powerful open enforcements. It’s an intrinsically ambivalent stimulus. The thing is novel stimulus are not really stimuli. They’re a class of stimuli. And they produce both anxiety and incentive reward. So the circumstances of the problem, like the gambling, determine in large part whether it’s incentive reward or anxiety that predominates. And that’s very situationally dependent. So in the case of gambling, this situation is set up so that at least for those who gamble, the incentive reward outweighs the anxiety. But they both produce it while a heightened state of arousal, for example. But lots of people won’t gamble, too. So that would have something to do partly with schema of interpretation and partly with biological differences. So similar to what you were saying, it seems that biologically we respond more to incentive than to actual reward? Well, I think that you can make an argument to that end, yeah. So would you say the same thing for anxiety versus punishment? What would you say? Like, look, it’s a lot easier for us to adapt to the fact of punishments. We just eliminate them. Like, it’s very rare that any of us are in pain. But it’s not rare at all that we’re anxious. We haven’t been able to do much about that at all, partly because there’s the existential aspect of anxiety. But whether anxiety is more motivating than pain is kind of a moot point because it’s situationally dependent. But it is certainly more difficult to rid ourselves of anxiety on any permanent basis. So for people who have already solved the problem of subjugation to pain and also the problem of most basic satisfactions, and that’s the case in our culture, we’re still very much governed and almost entirely governed, I think, by anxiety and incentive reward. So it’s funny because they’re secondary reinforcers, so to speak, but they’re in many ways more fundamental than the primary reinforcers. I wanted to go back to boredom for a second. I was thinking about this the other day, and boredom just doesn’t make sense to me except in terms of not moving toward some goal or other. Because I was just thinking about this. If boredom is essentially results from being in a monotonous situation, but if in that situation you didn’t have any other goals, you’d be perfectly happy just sitting there. I was just thinking, if I’m just sitting around, I’m sitting alone in a room in a chair with nothing going on, it’s only if that doesn’t conflict with some other drive, like to go get food or something more complex, but only if it conflicts with some other drive am I going to be unhappy sitting there. Am I going to feel what people refer to as boredom? Because otherwise, if I don’t want anything in particular at the time, I’ll be perfectly happy just sitting there. If it doesn’t conflict with movement toward whatever ideal future I have, I’m not going to be bored, per se. Don’t we seek out novelty, sir? Yes, we do seek out novelty, absolutely, and that’s partly because it ties back with what I was describing earlier, is that if you have nothing better to do, seeking out some more information is useful, per se. So not only for any goal that you actually have, but for all conceivable goals that you could have. So if you’re sitting around doing nothing, then that’s worse in a sense than doing something new and generating new information. In other words, one of the most fundamental drives is simply to look for novelty, so that maybe you’ll be able to take sitting around for a while because that drive hasn’t really kicked in, but eventually you’ll get restless. Or because you need a rest. But eventually you’ll get restless and you’ll go cruising around even if it’s aimless, even if you have nothing particularly to do, just simply because that drive is there. Just to cause trouble even often. And not to produce novelty. Yeah, well actually it’s to produce new information. I guess you could say that’s the final explanation. So you feed on information, just like food. So it’s not so much a question of not being bored, it’s how long you can wait before you get bored, because you will necessarily. Yeah, and there seems to be individual differences in that too. But novelty is very motivating. And well it’s also anxiety provoking. So, okay. Are there other issues? I have a question. If I asked you what was the ideal future in the middle of the last century, you might have said that the ideal future at the cultural level, was that the trunk of the tree, the all-encompassing story, the ideal future of that story. The answer might have been that it would have been identification with Christ, or else it would have been getting to the New Jerusalem. Both of those things. And the first one is the identification with Christ is the ideal as the way. And the New Jerusalem would be ideal as a static state which may be prolonged over time. And I came onto this because I was wondering what’s the implications for the ideal future if you throw away the five unconditioned stimuli as the unconditioned stimuli. Because the New Jerusalem is the five unconditioned stimuli, optimally dealt with, always taken care of. Whereas the Christ is, well that’s a different one, that’s a more sophisticated ideal future. So, what is the ideal future then? Are there two? It’s still a reasonable way of conceptualizing things. You can look at it from a within the system perspective. There’s anthropological terms for this that I always forget. Emic and etic. One means a within the system perspective and the other means a between the system perspective. Well, so that you can construe your ideals either from within the confines of a particular story if you accept the story or you can construe it in terms of always being able to update the story if necessary. But the story with identification with Christ as the ideal future is not surrounded by chaos. No, no, that’s not exact. Well, yeah, that’s a complicated issue. It’s surrounded by belief in the capacity to deal with chaos if it arises and in a sense that’s what gets rid of it. Or at least gets rid of the negative aspect of it. So, it doesn’t eliminate it permanently, it just transforms it in a sense into something that can always be dealt with. It internalizes it. It’s internal. So if you draw, if you construct the story with identification with Christ as the ideal future, and you put a circle around it, chaos is inside the circle. Yeah, okay, I see what you mean. Yeah, well, okay, that’s a good point, Daniel. Well, that has to do with the… Well, that has to do with the… If you take this as your model, if you take Christ as the ideal future, then that would put that whole diagram in yet another diagram. Okay, yes, yes. Okay, hang on a second. First of all, with regards to boredom, which we talked about earlier, is the thing is that we know that the problem with a perfect static state is that there’s no novelty, and that’s a problem because all the incentive reward disappears. But if you want novelty, then you necessarily take anxiety. So you could say, okay, so that’s part of the argument. Then the other idea here is, in part, how do you deal in the final analysis with the fact that there are anomalous events to which you can’t adapt, like death. Well, the point that you’re driving at, in part, is that if you think about… One way of looking at the ideal future is it’s a place where there is no chaos, which that means it’s permanently eliminated. Okay, everything’s predictable, everything’s rendered predictable and theoretically perfect. The other way of looking at it is to say, well, no, because that wouldn’t be perfect. For things to be perfect, there has to be some chaos. So, and the chaos might be the type, for example, of the anomalies that we can’t solve. So then the ideal type of adaptation would be the construction of a mode of being in which the fact that there are permanent anomalies, even of very terrifying sort, makes sense and is acceptable. So, and that’s again, that’s part of what we want to drive at in this course. I mean, people find, with regards to being twisted, people find the fact that very unfair and threatening and hurtful things constantly happen to them, that turns them against life because they think, well, there can be no possible story, there can be no possible justification in which that category of events can attain an acceptable, determinant meaning. Therefore, life is cruel and unreasonable in its intrinsic aspects and deserves, well, under those conditions I can take revenge against it, which I think is what… That’s a non-simplistic explanation for antisocial behaviour, because as psychologists we tend to think of antisocial people as they like novelty and they like to break rules, but we never really get at the fact that they’re very hostile and very revengeful and they like hurting other people and so on because we don’t understand that category of emotions. To stop that sort of thing from happening, you need a story that says, well, yeah, unreasonable things always happen, but in some sense they’re absolutely necessary, and a story that’s believable so that their affective valence is shifted. So we’ll talk about… there’s a section later in this manuscript that talks about Ivan… there’s a section in the Grand Inquisitor or in the Brothers Karamazov, Ivan, who’s an atheist, is talking to his younger brother, Alosha, who’s saint-like and wants to be a priest, and Ivan is a committed atheist and he says… He tells a bunch of stories about torture of children in Russia at the turn of the century and he says, there can be no god in a world like this, and basically what he’s saying is that if you look around you, the valence of things is such to demonstrate unequivocally that things are meaningless in the final analysis. And some people regard that particular section of the Brothers Karamazov as the most potent argument for atheism that’s ever been constructed. And, well, that’s the kind of argument that you have to address if you want to deal with phenomena that twist people up. You know, if you beat someone and torture them when they’re a child, it’s not that surprising that they might turn against the world and regard it as something that should be obliterated. So that might be the moral thing to do. So you need a story that can address those sorts of possibilities. Would it be fair to say that you’re asking us to modify our current state, our current view of the world, from one where we will do absolutely anything to avoid chaos, into one where we posit an ideal future which has the thing that we will do absolutely anything to avoid? As a necessary constituent element of it. And hopefully also that you will come to understand from the rational perspective why the existence of that is a precondition for the fact that there is existence. Because that’s another thing that these mythological stories are very good at outlining. They say the cosmos is actually constructed of the division between chaos and order. If you obliterate that dividing line, then everything returns to this hypothetical state of nonbeing in which there is no pain. But there’s nothing. There’s nothing. So then the question is, is the fact that there is something, despite all its negative motivational implications, preferable to nothing? Of course, that’s the… I think it was Camus. Didn’t Camus say that the only question worth considering is whether or not to commit suicide? Well that’s the question. That’s the same question. Is life, with its intrinsic limitations, preferable to a state where there’s nothing? Well, that is the bottom line. That’s the bottom line question. I’d like to address this because I’ve been listening for the past hour to it seems like a lot. Many attempts to reconcile an ideal future, which is like a utopia, a perfect society, or a box, an Hispanic sense, if I just sit in the chair while I get bored, with an ideal life, which is identification with the process, or identification with Christ, which is not the same thing as an ideal society. Right? And somehow those are not the same thing. Right. But that’s what I hear people trying to do, is to make an ideal society the same thing as an ideal life. Well, people constantly confuse the state with the process. And this is also true, as we’ll see, with regards to conceptualizations of evil, because people presume that evil is a state rather than a process, and the state might be aggression, or cruelty, or jealousy, or you know, we can list a whole bunch of motivational statements. That people tend to value negatively. So I’d say, well, you know, people fight, people produce social conflict because they’re aggressive, and therefore if we can socialize boys in particular to not be aggressive, then the capacity for war will vanish, which I think is like truly an idiotic theory. But that’s what happens when you confuse the process of evil with, well, you make an idol of evil fundamentally, and you say, well, it can be identified as this set of phenomena, which basically turns it into an idol. Well, it’s just as bad a, it’s just as significant a philosophical error as doing the same thing to good in the reverse, saying, well, peace is good, or happiness is good, or contentment is good. Those are all context-dependent evaluations. Sometimes happiness is very bad, so to speak, like if you’re experiencing it while torturing someone else, for example, which is certainly a possibility. So what we’ll come to at the end of the lectures is, Mrs. Talepa had slightly, is a conceptualization, well, if the conceptualization of good is the capacity to admit to the existence of an anomaly when it manifests itself, and then to act accordingly, then evil is the precise opposite of that, which is not aggression or hostility or jealousy or anything that people normally sort of label evil, but the process of that is the opposite of that. Of refusing to admit that something has changed. So, and you can say, well, that leads to aggression in situations where it might not be desirable, it leads to hostility, and so on, fine, but it’s still a process, not a state. So, question. The limitations of life and the suicide in America, could that explain why stories that are about the ideal future is not better off, but actually worse off, with some of the novels or movies, are both at once disconcerting and still have something attractive in them? Sure. That’s why they, like you see this in American movies very, very often. It’s like the anti-hero, the gangster, for example, is actually viewed as a hero, although his paths of action produce disruption and chaos, there’s still something very, very attractive about that. So, that’s one example of that as a possibility. It’s also the case that the agent that produces the disruption of this system can be viewed as something positive from this perspective, but as something entirely negative from within here, which is part of the reason, you know, people don’t like geniuses very much, for example, in science. There’s a lot of resistance to truly novel theoretical formulations, to truly creative activity. Well, we all presume, like if we’re evaluating how those in the past responded to creative genius, say like the Catholic priesthood responding to Galileo, we always make the presumption that we would have been on Galileo’s side had we been there, because viewing the past we can take sort of a higher order viewpoint. But the point is that for the Catholic priests who were stuck in this story, Galileo’s discovery was the anomaly of the highest order, it had catastrophic consequences. I think that’s primarily because they actually misunderstood the import of the information, but still, from in here, Galileo looked like an agent of the devil. Now we would say, well no, in actuality, he was providing the kind of anomalous information that leads to this, but you know, I think, at least in part, think about this, is that the excesses of the Soviet Union could be regarded as the inevitable historical consequence of the process that Galileo set into motion. Because the Russians lost their orthodox Christianity around, you know, in the late 1800s, that laid them wide open for the invasion of rationalistic utopian notions and the death of, consequent death of 66 million people. And it wasn’t as if the Catholic priests were entirely wrong. What Galileo had to say was dangerous in the highest order. It’s taken, well how long since Galileo made his discovery? 300 years? Something like that? Does anybody know? Anyways. 400 years, I guess, eh? Yeah. Yeah. Well, we all think that was just perfectly positive, and understandably so. I mean, it set the… But the real danger was not in his information, but in the… Well, yeah, but you know, it’s more complex than that, because the Catholic priesthood and religious people in general, ever since then, have not been able to figure out what to do with Galileo’s information. The perceived motivational significance was, this is a death blow to everything that we believe in. And this is not trivial, because, as Nietzsche points out clearly, in Western society at least, our morality, which is our behaviour, has Judeo-Christian roots. It has a Judeo-Christian trunk, so to speak. If you chop off the trunk, then the rationale for the morality disappears. Now, you might not know that, and you might not accept it at a cognitive level, but that doesn’t stop it from being true. Now, I would say that the religious of Galileo’s time, and of modern times, for that matter, misconstrued the motivational significance of Galileo’s discovery. I mean, because they were under the presumption that their religious theories of the nature of the universe described the same universe that Galileo was describing, and I don’t think that’s true. The religious stories were trying to describe how the world was constructed with regards to its implications for action, which is absolutely vital. You have to know that. Whereas Galileo was doing something related, but different. So a conflict, a deathly conflict, was seen where one did not actually exist in the sense… But they could scarcely avoid it, since the two had been combined previously. Right. Absolutely. It was inevitable. There never was any need to separate them before. No, and no methodology for doing so. So, it’s not surprising, but it’s worthwhile to consider that some of the intelligence was in fact on the side of the Catholic priesthood, which is something we tend not to think about. I mean, they were at least, for all of their flaws, which are the flaws of any organized system, they were on the side of a certain amount of stability, which is also necessary. So, you can say what you want about the kind of stability that they provided, but the thing is, stability always comes at a cost. Always. Always. So, okay. I want to show you a couple of things. This is, like, I would rather have the class go like this, actually, than for me just to outline during the lectures what you’re going to be reading anyways. So, I would rather use this as a forum for discussion of the issues that the reading brings up. That would make it a much more participatory enterprise. So, what I would hope is that, you know, we could, as a group, get immersed in the material that we’ll be discussing and hack away at it critically during the course of these classes. I just want to end with a very brief summary of what I was going to discuss in part today. It looks to me like your brain is organized to react to the universe as if it’s constructed of three things, and these are things that constantly are described in mythological stories of the nature of the world. And one of the things is the territory that you have explored, and the other is the territory that you haven’t explored, and the third is the process of exploration itself. And those three things you can regard as environmental constants. They’re always there. As long as there’s been human beings, those three things have always been there. And as far as we can tell, as long as there are human beings, those three things will continue to be there. That’s right, because there’s always things that you’ve mapped and things that you haven’t, and there’s always the process of doing the mapping. That’s the world from the mythological perspective, and it appears to me also from the neuropsychological perspective. I want to show you a picture, say, from the neuropsychological perspective you could construe us as specialized primarily for exploration and for the communication of the things, of the knowledge that we’ve generated as a consequence of exploration. And to buttress this, I want to show you some diagrams of the representation of the body and the brain. Now, okay. Here, that’s… let me just show you where it is first. This is the motor unit of your brain, and this is the sensory unit. The motor unit is about half your brain, and it’s also the part that we haven’t been able to figure out what does… we haven’t been able to figure out what it does very well. Lesions in this part of your brain produce no decrements in static IQ, as you will know if you read that paper by John Duncan that’s in the collection of papers. For a long time, people weren’t sure what this part of the brain does. Anyways, what it does is sequenced, abstractly sequenced motor activity, at least in part. That’s a big part of its role. This is the motor strip right there, and damage to that part of the brain interferes with your ability to actually move your body. And you can… this part, which is the prefrontal cortex, grew out of the motor strip during evolution, and that provides a clue to its essential function. As evolution progressed and that part of the brain gained in size, which it did in a tremendous… to a tremendous degree, much more in humans, by the way, than any other form of animal, we became able to abstractly act. And abstract action is very useful because if you can act abstractly, you can think your way out of novel situations without actually having to put yourself in them. And obviously that’s useful because then you can get the damn information without getting killed. And you can also watch other people, for example, and imitate them, which means you can get their behavioural wisdom without actually having to go through all the aggravation of learning what it was that they… or encountering what it was they had to while they were formulating those patterns of motor behaviour. Anyways, we’re specialized for exploration, and well, let’s take a look at that. This is how your body is represented in the motor and the sensory cortex. I want you… it’s pretty similar, really, but I want you to pay most attention to the motor cortex, alright? It’s quite interesting because this is what your brain thinks of your body, in a sense, from the perspective of you being a thing that can do things, alright? And as you’d suspect, well, what’s a human being? Well, first of all, we’re all thumbs. Now look at that. I mean, the thumb is bigger than the rest of the body by a substantial margin, while thumb and hand, eh? That’s what we are. And also tongue, that’s the tongue there, and face. Well, that’s what we’re like, alright? Let me show you kind of a better representation of this. Oh, there he is. This isn’t quite right because this is the sensory homunculus, but you still get the basic idea. Okay, that’s… now, the motor homunculus is even more exaggerated than this, which is to say that the motor representation throws even more weight on the hands and the face. Well, that’s our capacity to pick things apart and put them back together to manipulate the world, and this is our capacity, essentially, to communicate. You can’t see the tongue representation in here, but we’re creatures who are specialized to encounter things that we don’t understand and to make of them something that we want, which is not the same as exploring them, by the way, precisely, that we have another kind of a cockeyed notion about what exploration means. We tend to think that when we explore something unknown, we discover its properties, but that’s a strange notion because usually what we’re trying to do when we explore something is not so much discover the sensory properties of something, but to turn something that has indeterminate significance, which means it could be threatening or promising, into something that we can either ignore or use. And, well, you’ll have to think through that argument, I guess, on your own because we don’t have enough time to discuss it, but the point is that the universe that we inhabit is not entirely given. It’s also something that we erect as a consequence of our actions, which is to say that it’s the process of exploration, which is in large part linguistically mediated, that brings into being the world that we regard as familiar and the world that we inhabit, and that’s why, for example, in the Sumerian, most primordial of Sumerian creation myths, there’s a goddess of indeterminate sexuality that represents chaos, who’s divided into the male sky and the female earth, and who is separated, these two deities are separated by the god of the atmosphere, so you could say, well, again, from the Sumerian perspective, the universe is composed of the primordial chaos, then a masculine principle that in this mythology is represented by the sky, and a feminine principle that’s represented by the earth, and the process that separates them or distinguishes between them, and that’s the god of the atmosphere, and that’s a holy triad, basically, father, mother, and divine son. In Christianity, there’s the doctrine of the logos, which is the word, and the word is the thing that engendered creation, and the derivation of the logos, well, the idea of the logos goes all the way back through Egyptian society into Mesopotamian society, and reflects people’s intuition that there was some integral relationship between the nature of the world as we inhabit it, and the process that generates that world in the context of exploration, so the myths say the capacity for exploration is a function of that which already existed, and simultaneously the thing that brings both chaos and order into being, so it’s both the offspring of chaos and order, and the thing that creates them, now we’re not used to thinking in causal loops like that, but mythology could care less whether you can understand it, that’s basically the bottom line, it’s just a representation of, in a sense, of the way that things are, so that, except even more exaggerated, that’s what we are from the perspective of our brain, and you say, well, this might be a trivial statement, for example, you know, I just picked the motor strip and the sensory strip, that’s not a very big part of the brain, but you have to realize that the prefrontal cortex is the thing that provides abstract programming for the motor strip, so the prefrontal cortex is concerned with the programming of movement, and the sensory cortex is mostly taken up by the visual system, so this is a good picture of who we are, and I’ll extend that argument by pointing out that people have made much of the supposed intelligence of dolphins and whales, and the reason they’ve done this is because, well, your intelligence is dependent on part on the area of the grey matter of your cortex, and we have about a meter of grey matter if you spread it out on a sheet, the more grey matter, the more intelligence, roughly, and you could say the ratio of brain tissue to body weight, that’s the encephalization quotient, is a rough estimate of animal intelligence, and dolphins have very high encephalization factors and tremendously convoluted cortexes, and so people think, well, they’re extraordinarily intelligent, but this is simplistic thinking as far as I’m concerned, unless dolphins are doing something that we just can absolutely have no conception of, they don’t have hands, and that’s a non-trivial difference because it’s the hand that makes us in large part who we are, it’s a primary exploratory tool, right, it’s the thing by which we construct the worlds that we live in, and I don’t mean this in a mythological sense, I mean it just makes us able to build tables and houses and so on, and to modify the environment to suit us, and dolphins, whatever else you might want to say about them, they don’t do that, and that’s a non-trivial difference, and the difference is immense, and all you have to do is think about it for a few minutes to realize that. Does anybody have any idea what the hell they’re doing with all that brain? Not a lot, they sing very complex songs, and they also seem to use some sort of, well I don’t know how that’s attached to intelligence, no is the answer as far as I can tell, so they are very intelligent, there’s no doubt about that, you can teach dolphins to do lots of things, but you have to realize that your brain is not a disembodied spirit, I mean it’s integrally attached to your body, in fact you might even regard it as part of your body, and by the same token your body is the environment to which your brain has adapted, and vice versa, and the fact of the structure of your body is very relevant to how your brain functions, and it’s obvious that a dolphin and a human being are very different in terms of morphological structure, it’s not like they just have two brains that are the same that could easily be transposed, at the structural level the organs are much, much different, so we’re specialized to tear things apart and put them together, and to tell other people what we’ve done, that’s what we’re like, so you say well that’s the process of exploration, and that’s the thing, well in a sense that’s also the thing that mythology tells us that we should be doing, at least when it’s necessary, now there’s another reason why I brought this up, and that’s because part of the question that sort of analyzed this course is, is it possible to come up with a definition of what constitutes the good life, the source of stable across different cultural presuppositions, but one of the things that’s quite interesting as you know is that novel phenomena are cues for satisfactions, which makes them incentive rewards, and incentive rewards make us feel as good as we can feel fundamentally, they also have very analgesic properties, which is quite interesting, cocaine is a profound analgesic, and that basically suggests that while you’re involved in the voluntary exploration of novelty, from the affective perspective, your brain is functioning in a sense at its optimal level, at least from the affective perspective, you’re interested in things and you’re also relatively immune to pain, so you can make of that what you want, but I mean we can just lower this down to a more pragmatic level of discussion, you know perfectly well from your own experience that if you’re involved in something you really find interesting, that’s about as good a feeling as you can possibly hope to generate, I mean basically what people tend to do, I think, is arrange their lives so that everything else feeds the possibility of them doing something that they really want to do, although people will sacrifice that often because they’re afraid, but well the reason I’m bringing up this discussion is because it has implications for all sorts of things, it’s also curious and this is something you might want to think about because it really, it’s very strange for me, I think that the world that myth describes, so people would say, look, if you had to make a distinction in terms of the description of reality, between the scientific description and the mythological description, well there’s no context, the scientific description is the description of the world, and there’s lots of evidence to that end, I mean science is a very powerful technique, but the peculiar thing is that you would also say as an evolutionary biologist, that the world to which your brain has adapted is the real world, and from my perspective the world that your brain has adapted to is the mythological world, because your brain construes things as the territory that you’ve explored, the territory you haven’t, and the process that mediates between the two, and you can see why that might be if you think about where danger exists for example, I’ll close this with one interesting fact that I learned long after I had figured out that people identify those from different cultures as agents of the unknown, the Egyptians, the ancient Egyptians would not let foreigners into their temples, because foreigners were agents of chaos, and the temples were microcosms of the entire state, and they didn’t want the state disrupted by the presence of foreigners in the temples, now lots of religions still construe the world in that manner today, I mean think of marriage restrictions for example, but that’s one interesting thing, the other interesting thing is that the Egyptians, it wasn’t just the Egyptians, Iliad actually identified five cultures that did exactly the same thing, they used the same symbol for the dragon that ate the sun at night, and for foreigners, for barbarians that inhabited unexplored territory, and the dragon that ate the sun at night by the way was the dragon of chaos, the deity that ruled prior to the division of the cosmos into chaos and order, so you could say the human mind has a natural category, and that category is the category of all things that have yet to be explored, that’s the unknown, and the unknown has a prior motivational significance, it’s frightening but it’s also interesting, and it’s natural to us to not to associate foreigners with that category, but to presume that they occupy the same domain, which is even more fundamental, it’s not like the Egyptians thought foreigners, chaos, equivalent, what the Egyptians thought was that these two things were the same thing, they hadn’t yet been distinguished, it’s more fundamental than a mere association, is that the foreigner is the agent of chaos, and that basically means that your response to the foreigner is going to be integrally tied into the manner in which you approach chaos, as part of the nature of your being, so your attitude towards the terrible unknown is the same as your attitude towards the stranger, that’s something to think about alright, questions? You talked about the paper next to it? Oh, okay what exactly do you want to know? I’ll tell you about it generally, I want you to pick something that is interesting to you, and that’s relevant to the topics that we’ve discussed in the course, and those are the two major criteria, I don’t just want a summary of what we’ve discussed, I want you to take what we’ve discussed and apply it to a problem that you find compelling, yeah, that’s basically the bottom line, This is doing the next class? Yes, the dates are screwy on the syllabus, but the class times when they’re supposed to be handed in, that’s right, so next class is class four. So can I summarize really quickly what you just said in like two sentences, the world is set up into for us as the known, the unknown and the process which mediates between the two, and what we do after this process then is to label things as something we use in that process and things that we don’t use for that process, Well the latter part of that isn’t quite right, basically what we’re trying to do when we explore the unknown is to manipulate the things that we encounter, so that they take on the affective significance that we want, which is now what people would normally say is well when we explore something we discover their properties, but that’s not exactly right because the properties of something depend very much on how you approach it, which is the example I used with fire, and you say before people had mastered fire it was something unknown and dangerous, mastering fire means erecting a sequence of behaviors in the presence of fire that allow the fire to shift motivational category from intrinsically interesting and threatening to useful in some determinant manner, so that’s what we do when we explore it, we’re assigning a fixed domain of motivational relevance to something that only exists as possibility, and we’re doing that by rearranging our behaviors, that’s what adaptation means, so you can see this too for example if you’re trying to adapt to the presence of another person, another person is very complex and you can say well you explore someone else, you get to know them, but really what you’re doing when you explore someone else is in large part matching your behaviors, if you like the person, matching your behaviors to their expectations so that in your presence they only manifest those phenomena that you want, that’s exploration, it’s not mere evocation of all possibilities, like if I want to get to know you for example, one of the things I probably won’t want to know is how you react if I put a knife in your foot, that’s one category of the phenomena that compose you that I’m not interested in eliciting, so it’s not random exploration, our exploration is not random, we’re attempting to transform what has indeterminate significance, which means meaning, into something that we want, not something we expect, something we want, that’s what adaptation means, so… Most things I just try not to be neutral. That’s true, but that’s I would say in a sense, well that’s also a failure, because it’s better to transform something into a satisfaction or a promise than into something irrelevant, although that’s the way that most things end up, so it’s the best kind of failure, but it’s still a failure, you know that, because it’s often the case, for example, if you’re conducting an experiment, you define something as irrelevant, and ten years later someone else comes along and says, oh no, that’s not irrelevant, if you treat it this way, it has this set of possibilities, and well, you know, so irrelevant is a dangerous categorization as well, because it probably may mean that you’ve overlooked something important, so I know that’s how things turn out, and you can understand why, but still, really successful adaptation means you turn possibility into desired actuality, and you do that by rearranging your behavior, or your schema of representation, that’s… Okay, in one of the other classes you told us a story about, it was talked about the drive that we have to explore new things, and you said babies will fight for the chance to explore a toy on the floor that they’ve never seen before, so they’re not fighting for the toy, they’re fighting for the chance to be the one to explore it, and I was wondering how does that kind of change when you get to a level of an adult or a culture or something, and how is that affected by, well, I guess you’d have to, this is a presumption, but if it seems that we’re running out of objects and things to explore, like aside from space, I mean we don’t have… No, I would say that’s a presumption, we’re not running out of things to explore. Like objects and things, though? No, I think the nature of the things that we have to explore is changing in some way, I mean, it’s like what we can explore now is more like the, I don’t know, properties of the ocean or, like, we can fight about… I think it appears… More specialized to explore it now. Well, it appears to us that that’s the case. It’s more of an idea, I mean, we recognize it as more of an idea, like, let’s say that, you know, if Russian psychologists are studying one thing and American psychologists are studying another, we’re not as likely to physically fight over that as if we’re fighting over a country or a territory or something that we conceive as an object, it’s like we’re running out of objects and we’re thinking of more ideas, and even in the case of space, it seemed that we saw space as more of an abstract idea because space is something that it’s not very likely to be a dangerous unknown to us unless we go into it, so as long as we stay where we are, we can think of it as an idea rather than as a place, and so we had, you know, this little space race, but it didn’t seem to be as… we didn’t get as involved in it as we did in previous conflicts. Well, okay, there’s a lot of… sorry, go ahead. It’s true that our environment is much more constructed than it is, much less that we have to worry about. Doesn’t that mean we’re exploring more of our own constructions? Is that an insult to your sense of worry? Because you don’t know all the implications of anything you build. Well, okay, I think that changes from time to… I mean, you have to look at your lifespan, and the position that you’re in right now, you’re in a position where people try very hard to make everything as predictable for you as possible so you can focus on ideas, but that may not be what your life is like in practice. And it also may seem that in comparison to things that have been discovered in the past, the things that we’re exploring right now are more subtle, but I think that’s only because we have the advantage of viewpoint on the past. To us, because those things have already been explored, they seem obvious, but to the people that were exploring them when they were still undefined territory, they were as obscure to them as the things we explore are to us. Just as mysterious. So yeah, yes, which is to say that if you answer a question, you answer a question, but you generate two new problems as a consequence. It’s like the introduction of the computer. But it seems like the things that we’re exploring now are things that we’re not as likely to see as a competition for resources. Like, if I want to study something, it doesn’t mean that the other person can’t study it. It’s sort of like, if you want to own America, you have to fight the other countries and keep them away from it, otherwise you can’t be the one to explore it. But if you want to explore some kind of psychology, you don’t have to keep other people from doing it, is what I’m saying. You have to keep other people from doing it. Oh yeah, I have to stand with you. What about the resources committed here to your education? No, I mean like other countries though. I don’t think academics is extremely competitive because you don’t want somebody else to publish your idea. You want to be the one to define the terms, to set the area of knowledge, to say what the questions are, to describe it in a way. But does that translate into conflict? Do you actually try to keep them from studying it, or is it just that you hope that they don’t so that you can be the one? Depends. We have a cross-generational conversation. But the fact is you’re also just talking about culture. We’re not babes, so we don’t fight each other, but we speak. Yeah, but we do fight too. But also these are cultural generalizations, which actually takes place at the level of the individual. Some people are babes. Would we have a war with another country over those things, or just over oil?