This podcast is brought to you and made possible by generous financial aid from Peter kanzler K. Ay n z l-- e-- r-- you can buy his Amazon books at your favorite Amazon Branch, for example, the original texts of lock Hobbs and the US Constitution of Pennsylvania put together into one book for only $15. Thanks for listening. So the first thing. First thing I'm going to do is to tell you what to do when you start speaking to an audience because some of you will do that in your life. So this is a hint. When you stand up in front of people do not talk to her all absolutely silent weight because they'll quiet down. Everybody will quiet completely down. Then you want to wait until just before it becomes awkward and then you've got everyone's attention. And if you speak before then you're giving permission to people to speak while you're speaking and you shouldn't give them that permission because the hypothesis is that you have something reasonably important to say because otherwise Whole setup is a lie, right? So just so you know, it's a good thing to know and it also I can tell you one more thing about speaking in front of people that's extremely useful to because it frightens people right to do that. I never talked to the group, you know, because you might think well I'm speaking in front of all these people you might think that when you're afraid that's not really true you're speaking to people in the group and you can move your attention from one person to another if you speak to the group, you're basically you're going to be terrified because the group doesn't give you Any feedback, but if you look at individuals and talk to them then it's not that much different from having a conversation it is because you have to be prepared and so on but you can judge when you're looking at someone you can tell whether they understand what's going on whether they're hooked in or anything like that. And as long as you're paying attention, then you're going to utilize your natural skills as a communicator, which you've been practicing since you were born. So anyways, that's two hints and they're useful hints. So and I guess the other thing to remember is if you three hints is that it's really a dialogue right? Even though I think I told you this before most of the response from the people in the audience is nonverbal that doesn't mean it's not a dialogue. So if you're paying attention to people you keep the dialogue going and generally that'll keep everybody's interest reasonably High. Well anyways so I want to bring up some mysteries about words. now The first question might be well, what exactly is a word now? I'm talking about words because I'm really interested in Concepts but a word is like a unit of conception. So I'll focus on Words and will broaden out to Concepts. And the reason I want to talk to you about Concepts is because I want to talk to you about ideological and group identification and such identification is based in part on shared Behavior, but also in part on shared conceptions and the reason that I'm interested in group identity is because I'm interested in what it is that motivates people to retain their group identity and also to to defend their group of identity or expanded often at the cost of warfare, and then finally because I'm interested in why people will do horrific things to one another In order hypothetically to facilitate that process so that's the linkage. So let's think about words for a minute. And so the first question you might ask is well, what is a word and st. Augustine from what I understand? Formerly posited that the word was a label for a thing and I would say that that's mostly what people think when they think about Words which they don't do very often they use them but they don't think about them. So a word to be a label for a thing. All right now that's a that's a funny concept because the thing is often defined by words. And so there's a bit of circularity in there right because For that argument to be exactly true. The thing would have to be self-evident sort of independent of any verbal formalization and then you could just slap a label on it and it's pretty clear that our conceptual abilities also influence the manner in which we perceive things. So there's a reciprocal interplay. So, okay. So anyways, that's one definition and you can see that it has some utility. So here's another definition. This is from Vic enstein that can Stein said a word. Like a player in a chess game one of the pieces and what he meant by that in part was that you're engaged in an activity when you're using language and the activity has a vaguely game like structure. And the reason that you're using words is to move ahead in the game. You're a player in the game. And so then you can think about well, so that's another analogy that a word is got a tool like structure and you use it to to attain certain ends in to operate in the world. And so that's of an interesting way of thinking about it. Then I was thinking about this is a more visual analogy. And so imagine that you have a toy train and there's Freight cars on it and you fill the freight cars with all sorts of different things. Maybe one is full of screws and Legos and another one is full of erasers and coins and so on and There's a little tunnel. So that the train track goes underneath it. And then the train is continually running underneath it and that thing stays in the same place and that's like a word to now that's a trickier thing because a word encompasses things that are the same and things that are different right it has to because everything that you try to categorize as an entity isn't homogeneous. It's not homogeneous. It's its internal structure varies. So and that means that insofar as you're treating it as if it's only one entity it might do things that will surprise you, you know, so it's especially true with complex. Thing so you might say well this is my wife. Okay, and that there's a certain set of assumptions that go along with that label. But and as long as those assumptions are met which basically means that as long as the relationship you have with that person stays within that definitional box, then you can use the term and you can get somewhere with it. But because people are full of snakes you never know when they're going to jump out of the category that you put them in and manifest something that's completely Lee unlike the word that you've been using to describe them and many things are full of snakes or you could say to some degree everything is full of snakes and that's why it's useful to think of a word as a place where multiple things move through. So another example that you might think about is say a stock. because the stock market's kind of a good model of the environment as such you know, a stock is like a thing so you can think of it like a thing and people do think of it like a thing, but the problem is is that the stock itself is that absolutely Dynamic entity and what it contains at any given moment is Far Beyond Your Capacity to comprehend because the if you think about how a company is operating in the economic and then the biological environment, I mean it's subject to Any number of factors? So for example, you know, maybe it's a coffee company stock and then there's some weird blight in one of the coffee growing countries because I don't know maybe because people have been using water in properly. And so then the coffee dies and their crops bad and then the price goes up. It's like that that the stock as an entity in some sense contains the whole world and you can treat it like it's one thing for certain operations, but most of the time that's really going to trip you up. It's going to trip you up in a serious. sway, so Now I thought I had one more. Well, that'll do for now. There's three different so I mentioned three different kinds of Concepts and there is another one but I can't bring it to mind at the moment. So, okay. So here's another way of looking at it. The world is extraordinarily complex. Like it's insanely ridiculously complex and part of the complexity is the fact that this is a hard thing to grasp. Although it's sort of self-evident once you think about it everything that you see exists at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously right in this is sort of like the train metaphor, so You know for you to be you for a person to be a person there's an incredible number of micro structures that make up that person that have to be functioning in no, unpredictable manner whatsoever, you know, so you exist at a at a Quantum level and we're not going to talk about that because there isn't anything to say about it. That's intelligible you exist at an atomic level and a molecular level and then the molecules make organs and then the organs interact to me. You and then your nested in a family and then that family is nested in a city in the city's nested in a state and the state is nested in an economy. And the economy is nested in a biosphere and every single one of those levels of analysis. It isn't that it's relevant to you. It's actually that it is you now, you only figure that out when something goes wrong because as long as things aren't going wrong, they're invisible now, that's an important thing to realize so one of the things that one of the determining factors With regards to your capacity to regulate your own emotion, including anger and fear disgust in a variety of other things we'll talk about is the fact that a million invisible things are doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing all the time. Now the problem with that is that at any time any of those things can go wrong. So and that's a that's the problem of finite mortality in a sense know that you're you're the sort of being that can be plagued by unexpected events at multiple levels of analysis and it's by no means obvious, which of those levels of analysis is most real. I think they're all equally real. It's also no small feat to pick the level of analysis at which you should be approaching a given problem that's people argue about that all the time, you know, when they might say something like what's the greatest problem facing Humanity today? It's like even conceptualizing where the problem is in that entire tree of being is something that you can argue about. Forever and not get anywhere. So so part of what I'm what I want to point out to you by all these examples is that a lot of what human beings are doing in their perceptual and cognitive operations is constraining the complexity of life to limits that enable them to stay alive. But also within limits that enable them to Bear staying in life alive both of those at the same time because you want to keep existing. Leslie and hypothetically you want to propagate and but also hypothetically want to do both of those things. Well, not suffering yourself absolutely to death. And so that that's a set of constraints and it's necessary to know how much of the world is invisible to you because unless you have some understanding of how much of the world is invisible. You can't understand. How many things might be going wrong when something goes wrong? And so here's here's a here's a hint in some sense. If something interferes with the Integrity of your categories all the snakes that are inside those categories come out and then you have to deal with all those snakes and that's a big problem. And so you don't like having your categorical systems the adequacy of your categorical systems challenged in any way and it's no wonder and it seems to me that this is particularly relevant with regards to social conflict between different ethnic groups or between groups that have been historically isolated from one another to some degree because The group's come at the world with different conceptual structures and they're not necessarily isomorphic. Some of the more fundamental assumptions might not be the same from one place to another and that means the validity of the categories that both of those groups use to organize their existence in the world come under assault when they meet So it's a big problem and you know, you might say well why do people engage in Conflict all the time and part of the reason is is because there is conflict like if you believe one thing and I believe in other and we happen to occupy the same territory and those beliefs have implications for how we're going to behave we're just going to be conflict. There's going to be conflict. And as far as I can tell there's a very limited number of ways that that conflict can be resolved one is I can become a tyrant or you can which one of us is a tyrant one of us is a slave and that you know, the Logical endpoint to that is one of us is alive and one of us is dead. And the other possibility is that we can negotiate and see if we can figure out how to cohabit in this territory behaviorally and conceptually simple taneous lie for a long time, but that's extraordinarily difficult because it means you have to take your Concepts apart where they conflict and then you have to figure out how to put them back together in a manner that actually works. So when you might say, well you should be tolerant. It's like yeah you better be tolerant because you'll never get along with anybody if you're not but you should be tolerant is no answer to this question because the question is well how tolerant should you be and under what conditions and believe me? You can be too tolerant. That's easy. Sure. I mean I gave you an example last week. I think it's one that I really like you're in a relationship with someone and they betray you your category is not adequate now, which category whole well, there's a big problem, you know, the the answer is you don't know which category right because you don't know where they are is now obviously there's an error of assumption but at what level and with what category so the problem is is that an anomaly of any seriousness. Cole's the validity of the conceptual system as such into question at some unspecified double degree. You actually don't know and that's a big problem because what it means is that it's it's very difficult not to react catastrophically to anything that's unexpected because the unexpected thing could have virtually infinite consequences now, usually it doesn't but what good is usually usually is not that helpful. So, okay so fine. So the world's very very complex place and it's doing unpredictable things and it's doing unpredictable things at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously and your problem is how do you act in that environment? And how do you constrain it conceptually so that it doesn't kill you or overwhelm you it doesn't cause you physiological or psychological damage. So that's a big problem. So and it's sort of a reflection of the idea that you don't have to learn to be afraid or on guard you start that way because the world is an incredibly complicated and unpredictable and dangerous place and then with a tremendous amount of effort both individually on socially you can construct up environments that are physical and conceptual within which you can have some degree of safety security and the the hope of some progress during your life. So we're going to dispense completely with the idea. It's secure stable and promising is the normal condition of a human environment. It's not and to keep an environment like that requires a tremendous amount of collective effort and individual effort. So we're reversing the propositions to some degree chaos is the underlying reality an order emerges from that with difficulty and then it's also maintained with difficulty. You know, I can give you one example, I think if I remember correctly to keep a military helicopter in the air so that it just doesn't plummet to the ground like the piece of metal. It actually is requires something like 35 hours of maintenance for 1 hour of flight. And the reason for that is that thing is barely a helicopter. Like it's just holding together by nothing and then you have to work like a mad dog to stop that thing from falling prey to instantaneous entropy and just not functioning and a lot of our elements of civilization are like that, you know, they're in place so to speak but to keep Them doing what they're doing which basically means to keep them inside the category that we placed them in. It takes a takes a tremendous amount and almost incalculable amount of continued input of energy and time and while it's counter in Tropic being right so and things have to be stable at multiple levels of of differentiation for anything complex to maintain itself for any length of time. So it's by no means entropy is the standard. The standard reality complex things Decay towards their simpler forms. That's the rule of existence and we're very complex forms and so are chronically trying to stop entropy from Tearing us into our constituent elements. So okay now some of you have seen this before but I'm going to show it again. Maybe you haven't seen precisely this version of it. But this line of research wasn't piloted by Dan Simon, although he's done a tremendous amount to popularize it his demonstrations have become some of the most famous demonstrations that psychologists have ever put together and this particular line of Investigation. Although it might be old hat to you guys. Perhaps was an absolute standard. Green shocked everyone when it was first revealed because the the hypothesis was that first of all that we see the world pretty. Well, you know that we and when we look at the world, we're seeing it in a relatively comprehensible Manner and that's wrong and then the second hypothesis, which is Which was a deeper hypothesis. Is that even if we don't see the world that well if something that's unexpected conceptually happens. We will our attention will be automatically drawn to it and that also turns out to be wrong. So we're going to look at this video and So the rule is here because it probably won't be able to hear the sound you're going to see two teams one white and one black and the teams are going to move around. They have a basketball each of them. They're going to move around and throw the basketball back and forth to the other members of their team. So the white dressed people in the black dress people and your job is to count how many times the basketball is thrown back and forth successfully. So you're going to be looking at the white dress the players. Justin white and you just count the basketballs. And so if you've done this before, well don't spoil it for those who haven't but you may not have seen this variation in any case. Okay, so there's the grill of one person leaves. And then the curtain changes color. Right, right, right. So it's brilliant. It's brilliant really is it's amazing in fact, so all right. So, you know you look at that and you think what do you think if I'm concentrating on one thing? There's a lot of other things I'm missing and some of those might be unbelievably massive and then it's even worse as Simon Just demonstrated which is if I'm concentrating on one thing and I'm paying Tension for the possibility that something strange might happen. Well, I'm watching for the strange thing other strange things that I don't expect will happen and I won't see them. All right. So I like I like that demonstration because it's such a concrete. Presentation of the fact that we're dealing with something complex with relatively limited resources now it's kind of obvious if you think about it because there's you and then there's the entire rest of reality including the reality that's within you that you don't understand but it's still something completely different to have that pushed in your face like that. Now one of the as I mentioned before one of the propositions basically up until the time this line of research started was that you operate in the world with a certain set of assumptions you see the world and you interact with it and the things that you're interacting and that you see are real and it's relatively straightforward matter to perceive them because they're they are like things and You can interact with them in a manner that produces a predictable outcome. And if something radical happens, you will automatically attend to it. So that was the proposition of psychological theory psychophysiological theory for a very long period of time and it had a huge influence on fields, like artificial intelligence before they discovered that it was virtually impossible to perceive the world. It's so complex that we can't really figure out how we do it. Although, you know in the last five years tremendous strides have been made in having machines that can actually operate In the real world, which is something new and absolutely remarkable and amazing. So but what what the bottom line for this turned out to be that no, no. No, you don't see the world. You see a subset of the world and which subset you see depends on your intent. Now, of course that's obvious from this video, right? Because your intent when you're watching the video is to count the number of balls that are being passed back and forth and that intent intent occurred merely because I I asked you to do that. And so one of the things that that indicates is how easy it is for you to shift what your goal is, you know, when human beings are unbelievably good at that now for most animals goals are driven in some sense by the operation of of underlying fundamental biological systems. They're not just goals their whole schemes of perception and action. They're like little subpersonalities. I would say in that their embodied perceptual cognitive and emotional solutions to class. Biological problems so they're like, it's like an animal's head is full of little robots and it's not like they're driven by a motivational system. The motivational system is a sub-element of the animal that participates in the entire animals being so if an animal is hungry, then it sees the things that hungry animals see and it responds emotionally to the cues that are associated with food or its absence and it thinks insofar as an animal thinks in strategizes and some of them do like the hunters in particular the pack Hunters then it's strategizes from within that framework. And so you can't think about it as a drive. You have to think about it as an entire way of looking at the world and then you kind of have to think of the animal as a collection of different ways of looking at the world in accordance with the different problems that the animal has and then you're like that to accept as your cortex grew radically over the last several million years you underwent this stems. Transformation where your time span got extremely Broad and your capacity for abstraction increased and one of the consequences of that was that you learned how to replace what you might regard as purely biologically determined relatively immediate goals. Although they're really personalities with unbelievably abstract goals that could be manifested in a social environment and that might work over very long periods of time. And that's a whole different thing. And so what what the upshot of that is is you can pretty you have a system. That's that that allows you to formulate virtually any frame of reference imaginable and then to look through the world and act on the world in accordance with that frame of reference so that I can just say to you your task. Now this is going to be something you value your task is to turn yourself into a personality for whom counting the basketball. Rose for the next five minutes is the price is your primary aim in life. And you do that. No problem. You reconfigure your entire perceptual system so that you feel inadequate to some degree. If you can't perform the task You're motivated to do it you focus your perceptions. You're pleased if you can track the balls, you're pleased if you get the right answer and you do that at the drop of a hat, so so that's one of the consequences of human cognitive transformation. So now What that also means is that from moment to moment as a consequence of the varied goals that you're pursuing you also make a determination of what you have to attend to and what you can ignore and the answer to the question. What should you attend to and what can you ignore is you should attend to the minimal number of entities necessary for you to produce. the outcome that you desire Okay. Now if you read Classics cybernetic accounts of motivation the ones that are cognitive if you look at the behavioral theories of motivation, they're mostly Drive motivations. So there's a deterministic element to them. You're in a you're in a state of deprivation. And as a consequence, you're driven down a certain behavioral Rogue. Okay, so that's the behavioral idea and there's some truth in that because some of your biological subsystems are Fast and ancient enough so they do kind of operate as chain deterministic systems. And in fact before you act in any complex way, you actually set up a system of chained deterministic events so that you can implement the action so I can show you an example of that. So, all right, so well you watch what my arm does. Okay. So you see that I accelerated it very rapidly and then just before it hit the surface. I stopped it now. It turns out that I can. My hand so fast that a new signal from my brain can't get to my hand during the time. I'm going like this. And so what that means is that I have to set that entire system of operations up as a ballistic movement and then release it and you're doing that all the time when you're when you're dealing with the world you have systems that are automated and that run into the deterministic manner and what you're doing in part when you act on the world is your disinhibited them one after the other so you do that when you're diving for example, where do you look when you're driving? You don't look right in front of the car. Why? That's because you're going to run over what's there? So what what good is looking there? If it's something's there you're going to run over there is nothing you can do. So what you do is you look far enough down the road so that you can sequence automated actions as a consequence of your perception and then they run in some sense. They run ballistically you can't control them. Once they've once they've been implemented and you're doing that all the time like you're wandering around on a platform of semi automated systems and your choice in some sense is the choice. Which of those semi automated systems you're going to implement at any given time? Okay, so you throw up a frame of reference we're going to talk more about them in a minute you throw up a frame of reference and then you attend to anything that gets in the way if it interferes with the desired outcome. So that's not the same as merely responding to anything unexpected. As you can see with the grillet. Now if that gorilla would have jumped in front of one of the players in white and grab the ball. There's a high probability that you would have seen them. Especially if it would have held on to it for some length of time because what happened there was that the anomalous event turned out to be a relevant factor in your pursuit of the goal that you deemed appropriate so you could say that you respond. To the world as if it's a predictable place as long as it's doing what you want it to do and then you respond to the world as an unpredictable place when anything happens that stops you from reaching the goal that you've determined to be relevant at this point in time. And so those are in some sense. You're two modes of operation. Then you could also add that if you're pursuing a goal or embodying a little goal-directed personality then things that facilitate movement towards that goal or going to be positive and things that interfere with movement. Is that goal are going to be negative and when you understand that then you've got some sense of how the fundamental emotional systems work. So, all right, so All right. So this little diagram is designed to show you what the relationship between conception and and actuality might be and even what the relationship between conception and a word might be so the theory behind this little diagram is that there's a set of phenomena in front of you that's too complex to deal with and so what you do is you generate a low-resolution representation of it and that low-resolution representation is actually what you see. It's not a concept or you could say it's a percept. It's what See when you look at something. So for example, and then what you do with your words as you label the percept of the thing and so it's like a it's like a double. Compression that's in some sense what you're doing. So you have a complex reality you perceive it in a in a in a low-resolution form and then you label the perception and that gives you a word and so what you're doing basically is taking the world that you can understand and your make putting it in smaller and smaller and Tighter boxes until you have a box that small enough and tight enough so that you can actually manipulate it and that's a fine plan except when it doesn't work. And so then the question is, well, what do you do when it doesn't work and that is the question Okay, so Could say if you look at the top left hand corner. I called that the thing in itself, which is a phrase from its translated phrase from German philosophy in the old idea was that well, you never really have contact with the thing in itself because you're not capable of perceiving it or comprehending it. So what you see are elements of it. So we're going to say well that's the thing in itself. It's it's a schematic representation of it. It's quite complex. And then hypothetically you can see that thing in all the other ways that are Illustrated in the diagram, right? Right. So if I asked you what that was you could say. Well it's a rectangle or you could say it's a rectangle with four rectangles as sub elements or you could say that it's I think that's what 24 rows which it also is or you could say it's a bounded rectangle that's made out of two paths and and four sub rectangles, or you could say that it's I don't remember how many are in there but you know, that's the most differentiated representation object five and then you might Well, which of those is the real object and answer first would be well, none of them are and then the second answer would be it depends on what you want to do with the representations and you actually it's not really obvious that you can make things more real than that. It's like how real is what you're perceiving. It's real enough for certain operations and not real enough for others. And so it's validity. It's a pragmatic approach is its validity is determined by its applicability in this situation in which you want to apply it. Okay, and then at the bottom there are words and the words are basically labels for those percept. So, you know, the first one you could sum up as 432 because I guess there's 432 little circles there and the second one you could on the bottom you could summarize as a cross or a rectangle and The one at the top you could summarize as a flag and you get the point. So the word is representing a percept. It's already simplified and that's representing something. That's more complex underneath it. Okay, so Here's another way of looking at it. So if you're looking at a computer, your computer crashes will say so. You're working on your computer and then you might think well, are you actually working on your computer? And the question that the answer to that is it depends on exactly what you mean by computer and exactly. What is this thing? That's a computer. So actually when you're working on a computer what you generally see is only the screen and you don't even see the screen. You see that tiny sub element of the screen that contains those representational entities that are directly relevant to the area of the world that you're focusing on right now because you want something to happen, okay. Really when you're interacting with the computer. You're just interacting with this tiny little part of it. And then the problem is in order for that tiny little part to maintain its validity as a representational entity all the things that you don't see about the computer have to work right and then you might think well what don't you see about the computer? Well, that's what this diagram is supposed to be showing. So the first thing is you don't see the elemental properties of the computer and that would be its existence set of quantum level and that It actually turns out to be increasingly relevant for computer designers because you know, you cannot specify the location and momentum of a particle at a Quantum level with a hundred percent accuracy and what that means is it actually has a it actually has relevance. The little wires in computer chips are getting so small now that there's some reasonable probability that an electron you think will be in the wires outside the wire and that means they'll short out. So at some level of interaction the quantum properties actually matter. Okay. So that's part of the computer. You don't see and then well the computer itself is made out of all these little parts that are as complex as little cities and it's just packed with that and you what you don't know about that could fill hole volumes and any of those things can you know malfunctioned at any moment. So that's a big problem. And then those micro parts are arranged into subcomponents with a desktop. Maybe your sound card is gone or your video card is gone or something that you could take out and replace it. You could only specify the proper level of analysis or you know, maybe you bought a lousy brand and that's the problem. You bought some cheap computer that's made in a dismal Factory and the probability that it's going to be reliable is zero and then you might ask well, why is it that that brand is not reliable and you might say well the economic system within which it was produced is corrupt and so is the political system and so as a consequence of that people can get away with shoddy manufacturing and that manifests itself as the fact that your computer. Crashes in the middle of an essay and then you might say well what's the right level of resolution to solve that problem? And the answer to that is that's not obvious. It depends on what you mean by solvent now. Usually what you mean is do the minimum necessary to get the system back online so that you can return to your activities, but it's by no means obvious that that's always the right solution and sometimes it isn't because at some point you're going to say Well, I should just throw the computer away. And you know, if you own computers that win to throw them away is actually a complicated problem. How many of you have like three or four old laptops lying around the house? Right? Right. So like why well, they still work well. Do they really and then a deeper question is what makes you think that they're still laptops? And the answer to that is well, they looked like laptops and that's also wrong. They look like laptops if you think that a box is a laptop and it's not and with computers. You can really see this a because you can have an entity that's fully functional a laptop and then if you just leave it on your desk and don't touch it for five years or let's say 10 years. What is it then? Well, it's become so disconnected from the ecosystem that it's a part of that. It might not be useful for anything anymore. You might not even be able to get it to work and you know, most things around us don't change that fast so we can we can perceive them in relatively simple forms and they don't transform so quick that that shows us that our perception is gone astray, but computers aren't like that. They transform so rapidly you probably spend one-fifth of your time. Just trying to Just trying to keep up with the transformations. Sure. Well, it does to some degree. You know, the question is do you actually use it? That's the first question so and that's actually the manner in which you test the validity of your perceptual Theory because I would say that a laptop that you don't use is actually not a laptop. It's just a hypothetical laptop now because you see I mean I'm being picky picky about these sorts of things, but I'm doing that because we're trying to understand exactly how categories work and it is not obvious. It's not obvious at all. So the problem is is that the laptop actually transforms into a brick relatively slowly and deciding when it's a laptop and when it's a brick is not obvious because it doesn't announce that. You know, it just doesn't stop working all of a sudden. It just works in a manner that's completely counterproductive, you know, and one of the things that's quite interesting is there's not a lot of evidence that the electronic revolution has increased productivity and I think the reason for that is How much time during the week do you suppose you spend just keeping your computer updated and making sure that you understand how it works. I could that be 10% of the time that you use the computer. Is that is that a unreasonable estimate? Like what do you think? I mean I think for me it's like 20% of my time. It's horrified because I have quite a few computers and you know, they're always doing weird things of one form or another even when I just leave the be they'll update and then they won't work or you know, I have a new computer and it's got such a high resolution screen that you can't use Photoshop on it because he can't see the menu items anymore. And Adobe is known about that for a whole year and hasn't fixed it. And so like there's all these weird little snakes popping up all over the place with something as complex as your computer and battling them off I think. Destroys all the potential productivity that the tool was actually designed to produce. So I don't know if that's true or not, but it certainly seems that way to me. So, okay. So the laptop it's a funny entity to because you can certainly see that it's connected directly to a very large Network quite then that's the internet clearly, but partly that's an information portal but partly the the thing stays alive because of its connection to the internet right? It's continually updating its continually being modified. Ed because it's plugged into something that's essentially a living system and when you think about it as a laptop you just ignoring all of that and you really can't because you can't ignore all that because it's there it's even more real than I kind of think of these things like leaves on a tree the trees the real thing. These are just leaves and you know, they fall off and then you have to then and then and then they're dead so and that's a good indication of the way that our perceptions deceive us and you know, one of the things you might notice is What kind of emotional reaction do you have when your computer ceases to be a laptop? Well, you're working on something important. What's your response? Frustration and anger mostly. Yeah, and there'd be some anxiety in that too and probably some contempt, you know, because he might say well this stupid bloody thing or something like that which is an expression of contempt which is associated with disgust and then there's the anxiety which is oh my God, what am I going to do with this now, and then there's the anger and that as a consequence of something interfering with your goal directed with your goal directed Pursuit. And so one of the things that's really worthwhile to note is to note that panoply of emotions now there might also be a little excited possibly because you could say oh, well, I wanted to get rid of this piece of junk anyways and get a new computer right because so when it collapses into its sub-elements this massive sub elements, there's all sorts of possibilities that immediately arise that your nervous system is attuned to and the way your nervous system response to that is it gets frustrated and angry it gets afraid it gets disgusted and it gets curious about what's going to happen next and all of that happens at the same time and I I would say that that response which is an embodied response and an instinctive response. Although there's cognitive elaborations on it. That's the response you have when you actually see the actual world or as close as you're going to get to it because I don't think that you see the world at all until the things you're doing don't work. And as soon as they don't work bang you see the world now. C is a weird way to think about that but then we could say well that's the closest you ever get to having contact with the thing in itself and it's very very stressful to have contact with the thing in itself because God only knows what it's going to do. So your conceptual systems protect you from contact with reality in the same manner one of the things young said, which I think is extraordinarily funny said the purpose of religious systems is to stop people from having religious. Variances it's an extraordinarily remarkable and intelligent claim because you know, do you really want to have a religious experience that will carry you into bits? Yeah. Well, think about how we do it, you know, like say something collapses on you like your car breaks down mean. Do you actually solve that problem? Well, generally you don't write what you do is you parse off the problem to someone else whose knowledge about the multi-level reality of the automobile is much more detailed and differentiated than yours. And so partly the way we deal with the complexity of the Old is that we set ourselves up as a distributed supercomputer and we can we can call on elements of that super Computing process that says at any given time to increase our level of resolution of the world and to solve the problem. And so partly we solve it as individuals but a huge chunk of it is that we solve it as a consequence of continual communication and that's also become increasingly obvious since the rise of the internet because now I don't care what problem you have. There's a high probability that someone somewhere merely as as a consequence of the innate altruism of human beings has put together an extraordinarily detailed video on exactly how to solve this little micro problem that's beset you which is really a fascinating and unexamined phenomena because I'm sure you guys are all familiar with that. I I wanted to change the stereo. I have an old card. I wanted to change the stereo. So the search was how to replace a stereo in a 2005 Hyundai Sonata, you know in some guy down in the US for summer. Isn't videotaped himself doing it and there it was and it's really quite cool that that happens because you know psychologists and evolutionary psychologists and biologists always argue about whether there is such a thing as actual altruism and you know, it's hard not to see someone taking the time to post, you know to post an observation of them undertaking a complex task for no Financial reward whatsoever. It's hard not to see that as a form of, you know, spontaneous altruism. It's a very very cool. Cool. Yeah. Yeah, well, we'll get we'll get to the relationship between your conceptual systems and how Things Fall Apart here right away. So, all right. So I've run you through a couple of examples of the complexity that you're faced with that's invisible. That's the thing. That's really most worth considering is that your stability is dependent on the maintenance of a Conditions the maintenance of a million conditions that could go wrong at any particular time, but generally don't at least not in a functioning Society. All right, so Now look at this, so I mentioned frames of reference. And so You cannot look at the world without a frame of reference. And the reason you can't do that is because it's too complex to see so that means that a frame of reference is actually a necessity for perception itself, which is quite interesting. So you cannot perceive at all unless you perceive locally and pragmatically that's what it looks like and then you might ask yourself. Well, what are these frames of reference look like and this is where I think neuro psychology and cognitive science meets narrative psychology and psychoanalysis because I think This just as the smallest units of your semi robotic subsystems. The ones you share with animals are personality, like when they manifest themselves, so the concepts that you use to build the frame of reference that you Orient yourself with our narrative like because you can say well what's a narrative and the answer to that is it's a description of a personality in action. That's what a narrative is. And so if the actual problem solving subcomponents of your psyche are subpersonalities than the description of those is going to be Basic narratives and so the hypothesis here is that because we're tremendously imitative creatures. First of all, I can pull your personality out of you at any given time by just watching what you do and matching it with my body and we're doing that all the time. If you're a reasonably social person and you're talking to someone one-on-one you're going to match your behavior to there's in all sorts of ways mean one of the experiments we did once was we brought undergraduates into the lab and we just put like a you know, Bowl of chips between them and basically what we found is that each of the undergraduates eight exactly the same amount of chips as the other so sometimes a diet would settle into no chips. And so neither of them would eat anything and then another diet would settle somehow into well, we'll eat all the chips. And so then each of them would eat half and the correlation was like .9, it was unbelievable and these Were Strangers, you know, and so you're mirroring the other person's embodiment like a mad dog all the time, and it's A great thing to be able to do because it means that you can you can unite your being within the same within the same Locale and that means you don't have to have conflict plus it also means that you can learn very rapidly from someone else just by doing what they're doing. I don't know if you guys have seen this but there's computers now that that take advantage of this idea. And so what happens is like let's say you have a computer that it's a robot and you want it to do this task. So pick something up here move it up here pull it over here and put it down. All you do is you take the robots arm and you put it down and you close it and then you lift it up and you move it over and down and then the robot will do it by itself. And so that's you know, that's the beginnings of robotic imitation and that's actually real imitation is mind-boggling because once it kicks in as soon as one thing learned something then all the other things that are exactly like it can learn something and so what I think will happen in the next five years is will finally get robots that are fairly autonomous and there are really man. They're really on their way and then we'll get ones that are good at imitating each other and then the thing will just explode because if there's a say there's say there's 10 million of those robots that are reasonably complex then as soon as one of them learns anything all the other ones will immediately know it and well that's not that's that's exponential growth on a scale that we can't even imagine and that's coming very very rapidly. But anyways, you already do that and that's part of the reason people are so damn smart, but then you're also Capable of a different kind of imitation and that imitation is when I watched myself do something and then I formulated into a concept and then I tell you the concept and you decompose it so that you can use it in your own body. And that's basically what we're doing when we're telling stories. So now it's kind of low resolution communication, but it doesn't matter it's unbelievably powerful communication. And as far as I can tell the basic unit of that narrative or that frame of reference, is this your somewhere because your localized in I'm in space and that isn't as good as it could be for one reason or another so you're trying to improve it. And then you have some Notions about what you have to do in order to improve it and you act them out you implement them and I think you're doing that all the time and I can't see how you can not do it because you have to have a technique for simplifying the world. And so as far as I can tell this is the technique and so a basic story was while I was here and then I went there and that was better and here's how It and so that's a pretty good story. It's not great. But it's good enough. You might listen to that or you might watch it as it on a video like I did when I was trying to figure out how to fix my car stereo, right? So it's a story about how to fix a car stereo and you might say well that's not a very good story. It's like I didn't say it was a very good story I said it was the basic element of perception and also of narrative communication and and to make that those two things United is a tremendously exciting possibility because One of the things that you may have noted about psychology, this is something we talked a lot about my personality class is that there's a real disjunction between narrative psychology which generally tends to be quasi psychoanalytic and and Neuroscience for example and psychometrics. Which tend to be well, they're not narrative. Anyways, you know, they that we haven't been able to bridge the gap and so part of the reason I'm telling you the things I'm telling you right now is so that you can bridge the gap so a not so a notch. Out of this and that's when we go to this next this next diagram here. Sorry, I have so many diagrams. It's hard to keep track of the monsters. Yeah this one. Okay. Now you've seen this before but I want to walk through it again because it's important and it's it allows you to do reconceptualization that unites things that can't otherwise be United Okay. So the one of the issues might be well What is an abstraction composed of and I would say well it depends on the domain in which the abstraction is being implemented. So an abstraction about the world is slightly different than an abstraction about you. I think what they have in common is that when you make abstract representations of the world, you're making abstract representations of the world as a place to act and that's a critically important thing to understand because we're scientific in our explicit cognitive presuppositions. We I think that world models our world our models of the world as a place of things. So we're kind of taking a page from st. Augustine in some sense. The world is made out of objectively existing independent material entities. And when you develop understanding about the world what you're doing is producing a map of those entities and the thing is that's true in a narrow sense in that that is what you're doing when you're doing science, but science itself is nested inside a narrative structure as we talked about before. So then the question is what's the nature of the more comprehensive narrative structure, and I don't think that you can understand. You cannot understand profound narratives, unless you understand this this this underlying these this underlying set of assumptions. You're not naturally predisposed to view the world in objective terms. Now we talked about that from a darwinian the Newtonian point of view last time. So when I told you what I thought about that, but here's here's the idea, you know, so let's say we'll talk about the domain of morality. And the reason that I put this under the debate of morality is because it has to do with You do act and how you should act. So that's a moral domain and then I would say most of the time when we're communicating information that we find relevant to one another what we're communicating is moral information. And the moral information is how to perceive and act in the world such that things work now, obviously you can have a debate about what those things are. But that's still what we're trying to do and you can debate about what work means and so on and so forth and we're doing that all the time because it's complex. So if I say well You're a good person. Then we can unpack that I can say okay. Well, what are the snakes inside being a good person and we can say well that's a higher it's actually good person is a representation of a complex hierarchy. And so I've outlined some of the hierarchy here if you're a good person one element of being a good person, although maybe not a necessary element, but one element is that you're a good parent and then a sub element of that is that you can take care of your family and a sub L an element of that might be that you can play with the baby or that you can cook a meal now you don't Have to hit a home run on every single one of the constituent sub elements of the entire category in order to qualify as a good person, but you can see that there's a shared structure. You know that people recognize. That's characteristic of a good person that's actually composed of action patterns and perceptions has nothing to do in some sense with the objective world. It's a completely different way of looking at it. So if you're going to play with the baby, well, then you think well, what do you have to do to play with the baby? And so you you know, we might make a goofy face at the baby because babies respond to that sort of thing sometimes by crying but often by smiling, you can tickle their feet you can kind of poke them. You can play with their arms, you know, you can rock them back and forth. There's and you watch the baby. So you find out if it's having fun too. And now the thing that's interesting about actually playing with the baby is that the the phenomena that you're manifesting is no longer abstract and conceptual. It's embodied play decomposes into movement patterns of movements like the dance. In fact, if you take a mother and she's getting along with her baby and you videotape them interacting what you see is that the mothers who get along with her baby are doing a dance with them and the baby is harmonized with the mother. So there's this sort of melodic and fluid dance. Whereas the baby that's not getting along with its mother. It's more like having a conversation with someone who disagrees with absolutely everything that you say in random ways. No, so you start off an invitation to the conversation and they nail you with a non sequitur. So that's a non-starter and then you try it again and they nail you with something else that seems completely irrelevant and and so it's jerky and and discontinuous and you see that with people in Acting with children all the time. I think that's part of the reason why people use dance as a mating strategy. It's like, you know, is this person capable of mutual harmonious imitation now, it's not a perfect test but That's not too bad. It's got its got some use utility and it's so the abstraction the abstract narrative representation. You're a good person that is not an object of category the the abstract representation. You're a good person decomposes at the highest level of resolution to a sequence of actions and Piaget for example would say that what you learn those basic actions as you're putting your nervous system together from from birth until now, so you're building yourself up at the bottom because so When you dance, you know, there's certain movements you have to make and those are movements that you could make in other circumstances. That would also be useful and so your for Piaget you build yourself from the bottom of this hierarchy towards the top. Okay, so then you know, one of the things that you might note is that as you go up the chain of abstraction arguments about what those categories contain become more and more likely, you know, and so you might say for example to your to your to your mate that being able to prepare a decent meal is such an important sub element of being a good person that if you fail to do it or can't that actually means you're a bad person and you can see right away why that would provoke all sorts of arguments. And so part of the reason that I'm bringing this up is because we're always worried engaged in a constant process of mutual exploration to determine how these hierarchies are probably arranged and what are necessary subcategories of them and how Those subcategories should be hierarchical e instantiated with regards to one another and we have to have some agreement about that or we actually can't communicate. So like if my stance is you burn the vegetables you're a bad person and your stance is I burned the vegetables and who the hell cares about that. Then the fact that are hierarchies of values are structured completely differently means we're going to have a very difficult time communicating and there's going to be a lot of conflict about how that conceptual structure should be reorganized and that's actually what you're doing. When you arguing with someone about something important, it's like you're trying to say, okay, we need to get our hierarchies are narrative hierarchies synced so that what you want and what I want can happen at the same time. And so that we understand each other and we can partly do that by talking we can also do it by suppressing the other person which we tend to do an awful lot or suppressing ourselves in favor of the other person and so forth and so on but the thing is there's that those Those places of non agreement are are like, they're like tunnels into a the complex underlying reality that we have to deal with and places where the nature of that. The nature of the complexity of dealing with that become apparent and part of what happens as a consequence of that is people just don't have those discussions. They don't know how to do it. They can't decompose the situation, you know, and I can give you an example of that which you're going to face. Let's say you're in a family you married to someone or whatever the equivalent happens to be you both have a career whose career is more important. You think well, it doesn't matter. It's like it matters because there will be times when you have to make a choice between the two. Career paths. It's like, okay. Well, how do you do that? The answer to that is you don't know and neither does anyone else and worse. There are no rules for having a discussion. You have to come up with all the rules and everything about the discussion because you can't even tell when you're being reasonable, you know, because you might say well the person who makes the most money their careers the most important it's like Are you going to accept that would do you think that's valid and if you don't okay, fine, what are you using as an alternative criteria? It's very very difficult. It's very very difficult. You know, when most of the way we solve this as collectives as we have standard hierarchies of narratives that we just all adopt. That's the our identity with our history. That's a role. If you adopt your rule and I adopt mine and my hierarchy is structured to take your roll into account. And the reverse is also true. We don't have to have a conflict now you might have a conflict as an individual with your role. That's a whole different story. But if you pop out of your role and I pop out of mine, we're in no man's land and in no man's land three things happen, tyranny slavery or negotiation and most people can't negotiate. And the reason for that is it's too damn complicated. What time is it? today after two Yes, let's take a break. Okay for 15 minutes. This podcast is brought to you and made possible by generous financial aid from Peter kanzler K. Ay n z l-- e-- r-- you can buy his Amazon books at your favorite Amazon Branch, for example, the original texts of lock Hobbs and the US Constitution of Pennsylvania put together into one book for only $15. Thanks for listening.
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