WEBVTT 00:00:00.160 --> 00:00:02.880 David, this is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. 00:00:03.120 --> 00:00:04.480 I'm David Pinsoff. 00:00:04.720 --> 00:00:06.320 I'm David Petrozowski. 00:00:06.800 --> 00:00:08.640 This is Actual Evolutionary Psychology. 00:00:08.880 --> 00:00:10.080 By Actual Evolutionary 00:00:10.080 --> 00:00:23.360 Psychologists, 00:00:25.250 --> 00:00:30.530 David, today we have a weird episode where we are uh I'm outside. 00:00:30.690 --> 00:00:31.490 You're inside. 00:00:31.810 --> 00:00:37.490 Uh we have a medium uh length episode today because uh people were sick for after H 00:00:37.650 --> 00:00:37.810 bus. 00:00:38.210 --> 00:00:39.650 I'm still getting over a cold. 00:00:39.810 --> 00:00:42.050 So we're sort of doing a medium length episode. 00:00:42.130 --> 00:00:46.290 We're just talking a coup about a couple issues like design and good or bad adaptationism. 00:00:47.380 --> 00:00:52.500 I think, you know, we we covered some interesting topics about this this concept of design 00:00:52.500 --> 00:00:56.100 and why it's so important important to evolutionary psychology, what it means to be design 00:00:56.180 --> 00:00:58.900 minded, why it is a defensible stance to take. 00:00:59.060 --> 00:01:00.900 So and just some misunderstandings. 00:01:00.980 --> 00:01:04.180 We're going to cover in year two, we're going to also talk about just some topics and 00:01:04.180 --> 00:01:05.540 issues, not just interview people. 00:01:05.620 --> 00:01:07.220 And this is a good uh intro of that. 00:01:07.380 --> 00:01:10.660 But we'll we'll uh we'll end here and we'll see everybody next week. 00:01:11.060 --> 00:01:11.330 All right. 00:01:11.490 --> 00:01:12.050 Sounds good. 00:01:12.290 --> 00:01:12.610 Okay. 00:01:17.490 --> 00:01:17.810 All right. 00:01:17.890 --> 00:01:19.170 We're recording David. 00:01:19.490 --> 00:01:23.490 Today, David, how are you after HBus? 00:01:24.610 --> 00:01:25.570 I'm doing great. 00:01:26.130 --> 00:01:26.610 Yeah. 00:01:27.250 --> 00:01:28.930 Recharged intellectually? 00:01:29.490 --> 00:01:29.890 Yeah. 00:01:32.610 --> 00:01:35.810 And uh yeah, lots of food for thought that I'm still digesting. 00:01:35.890 --> 00:01:37.250 It was a wonderful HBAS. 00:01:37.490 --> 00:01:37.970 Fantastic. 00:01:38.050 --> 00:01:38.370 Yeah. 00:01:39.320 --> 00:01:45.080 and today is uh also a special episode because uh uh a lot 00:01:45.080 --> 00:01:47.000 of people are recovering from HBS. 00:01:47.160 --> 00:01:51.160 We've had we had uh a couple of people pull out of scheduled interviews because they 00:01:51.160 --> 00:01:52.280 weren't feeling well. 00:01:52.440 --> 00:01:55.960 Um I'm actually getting over a cold as well. 00:01:56.200 --> 00:02:02.120 Um uh we're gonna talk to Josh Schnodgrass soon about lassitude, which is the emotion of 00:02:02.120 --> 00:02:03.080 feeling not well. 00:02:03.160 --> 00:02:05.560 So Oh yeah, that that paper's awesome. 00:02:05.640 --> 00:02:06.200 I love that paper. 00:02:06.440 --> 00:02:09.080 Yeah, it's counterintuitive that that's an emotion. 00:02:09.490 --> 00:02:14.450 It is counterintuitive, uh, but also very enlightening to to view feeling sick as an 00:02:14.450 --> 00:02:14.770 emotion. 00:02:15.890 --> 00:02:21.890 Um, but so I thought we would just uh today uh we're gonna just do a sort of 00:02:21.890 --> 00:02:27.810 in-between episode where we're gonna cover a couple topics maybe that um people 00:02:27.970 --> 00:02:32.600 have questions about that we've had people submit uh questions about or or sort of common 00:02:32.600 --> 00:02:38.120 misunderstandings uh to catch people up who might um want to have those 00:02:38.120 --> 00:02:39.560 issues addressed. 00:02:41.240 --> 00:02:41.880 Yeah. 00:02:42.280 --> 00:02:44.040 I realize that's very abstract. 00:02:44.120 --> 00:02:46.600 Um, but uh but yeah, let's get into it, David. 00:02:46.680 --> 00:02:52.570 Uh one thing is um, and I can hear everybody uh ending listening because we don't 00:02:52.570 --> 00:02:53.450 have a guest this week. 00:02:54.410 --> 00:02:57.210 That's an old bit, but um, but it doesn't get old. 00:02:57.370 --> 00:03:02.170 Um, one question um I heard people talk about is the idea of design. 00:03:02.330 --> 00:03:08.170 Um, and uh here's a good uh let me pull up my um here 00:03:08.330 --> 00:03:08.570 we go. 00:03:08.730 --> 00:03:12.810 Okay, here's here is a comment from somebody who is I don't believe in evolutionary 00:03:12.810 --> 00:03:17.130 behavioral scientists, but I've heard this sentiment expressed before, which is why is it a 00:03:17.130 --> 00:03:22.660 common statement that natural selection designs traits when it literally doesn't. 00:03:22.820 --> 00:03:27.540 It's just a passive filter changing relative frequencies of genes. 00:03:27.780 --> 00:03:32.020 It doesn't design or create any gene or phenotype. 00:03:32.900 --> 00:03:34.260 Thoughts about that, David? 00:03:34.740 --> 00:03:36.180 Uh it's a really great point. 00:03:36.340 --> 00:03:39.780 Uh there is, I think it's a misleadingly simple question. 00:03:39.860 --> 00:03:44.570 It's actually hugely complicated, touching on many different things. 00:03:44.810 --> 00:03:50.730 So, why do we use design language when we're not intelligent design theorists? 00:03:51.370 --> 00:03:57.050 Uh I think the answer is that um 00:03:57.610 --> 00:04:01.210 it is a useful and insightful way of thinking. 00:04:01.530 --> 00:04:07.040 So um the philosopher Dan Dennett talks about the design stance as a kind of uh 00:04:09.040 --> 00:04:10.960 intuitive way of understanding the world. 00:04:11.600 --> 00:04:16.880 He argues that natural selection is a design process without a 00:04:16.880 --> 00:04:17.840 designer. 00:04:18.160 --> 00:04:21.200 That is, it creates the appearance of design. 00:04:21.920 --> 00:04:27.910 And he thinks that that is the best most insightful way to understand 00:04:27.910 --> 00:04:33.670 the products of natural selection, that uh you do not actually need a designer to have the 00:04:33.670 --> 00:04:39.030 appearance of design or the improbable functional organization of matter. 00:04:39.190 --> 00:04:44.470 So if you think about our tools, you know, hammers, cars, these are uh 00:04:44.630 --> 00:04:50.500 non-random organizations of matter, and they are improbably well 00:04:50.660 --> 00:04:53.540 organized for solving a particular problem. 00:04:54.500 --> 00:04:59.620 And Dennett has argued that natural and and Richard Dawkins and others has have ar argued 00:04:59.620 --> 00:05:04.580 that natural selection is the only process that can give rise to that 00:05:04.900 --> 00:05:08.340 improbable fit between form and function. 00:05:09.220 --> 00:05:14.830 There are other psychological aspects to this question, which is why do we use the design 00:05:14.830 --> 00:05:18.510 stance when we're trying to understand the mind? 00:05:18.750 --> 00:05:23.790 We have systems in the head for thinking about people, for thinking about artifacts, for 00:05:23.950 --> 00:05:28.270 thinking about tools and the proper functions of tools. 00:05:28.430 --> 00:05:32.430 We have systems in the head for thinking about foraging, mating, whatever. 00:05:32.640 --> 00:05:37.200 And so the question is if we're minds trying to understand the human mind, which part of 00:05:37.200 --> 00:05:39.840 our mind should we use to understand the human mind? 00:05:40.080 --> 00:05:44.960 And in traditionally in psychology, we've used our folk psychology to do psychology. 00:05:45.120 --> 00:05:49.840 We've used the system in the head that evolved for understanding people to understand 00:05:49.840 --> 00:05:50.160 people. 00:05:50.480 --> 00:05:54.640 But you, Dave, have argued that we should that's actually the wrong system in the head to 00:05:54.640 --> 00:05:54.880 use. 00:05:55.040 --> 00:05:58.000 Or or we shouldn't use that system primarily. 00:05:58.320 --> 00:05:59.040 Yeah, exactly. 00:05:59.360 --> 00:05:59.920 Or even primary. 00:06:00.080 --> 00:06:00.640 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 00:06:00.960 --> 00:06:01.120 Yeah. 00:06:01.710 --> 00:06:05.150 Um, it's better for us to to use the design stance. 00:06:05.390 --> 00:06:07.070 And so maybe I'll put it to you, Dave. 00:06:07.150 --> 00:06:12.990 So w why do you think that we should not use folk psychology to do psychology 00:06:13.070 --> 00:06:19.070 and and we're better off using the design stance, the artifact stance to understand 00:06:19.070 --> 00:06:19.630 psychology? 00:06:20.190 --> 00:06:26.030 Well, I think the folk psychology is fine, uh, but it doesn't get you what we 00:06:26.030 --> 00:06:32.020 want, which is a scientific understanding, because it's the folk psychology system is 00:06:32.020 --> 00:06:34.100 not designed for a scientific understanding. 00:06:34.260 --> 00:06:37.460 So scientific understanding has sort of two components. 00:06:37.620 --> 00:06:40.980 One is understanding how the thing works. 00:06:41.220 --> 00:06:44.420 And then the other one is prediction. 00:06:44.820 --> 00:06:50.660 What it means how something works is roughly speaking, that uh you understand the 00:06:50.660 --> 00:06:55.780 subsystems and then you understand their relations, such that you can do a counterfactual 00:06:55.780 --> 00:07:01.730 and sort of say if I change this part or this piece has this piece of 00:07:01.730 --> 00:07:06.050 information or is in this setting, this will then lead to this outcome. 00:07:06.130 --> 00:07:09.010 And that leads to the second part, the prediction part. 00:07:09.890 --> 00:07:15.810 And the idea is that natural selection, the theory of mind system, it's good at prediction, 00:07:15.970 --> 00:07:17.410 but it's a very rough cut. 00:07:17.490 --> 00:07:22.530 So, like if I know that David likes France, I know he's going to tend to go to France, but 00:07:22.530 --> 00:07:25.650 it's not anything like a how does the system work? 00:07:25.900 --> 00:07:29.100 And it's not going to be very predictive, right? 00:07:29.260 --> 00:07:33.740 And actually, how my theory of mind system even generates that prediction is sort of all 00:07:33.740 --> 00:07:34.220 black box. 00:07:34.380 --> 00:07:35.660 Like I don't know how that works. 00:07:35.820 --> 00:07:41.180 So, in the same way, like I can anticipate that David's room will um 00:07:41.500 --> 00:07:42.940 obey the laws of physics. 00:07:43.020 --> 00:07:46.300 And if I see a violation of the laws of physics, I'll be surprised. 00:07:46.620 --> 00:07:48.700 But that system is doing all the work. 00:07:48.780 --> 00:07:54.460 And if I was a physicist, I would have to flesh out what are the rules that my expectations 00:07:54.460 --> 00:07:55.260 follow, right? 00:07:55.470 --> 00:07:59.230 So basically that's just a way of saying that we have this intuition. 00:07:59.550 --> 00:08:04.190 It doesn't get us what are the subcomponents and how do they work bit. 00:08:04.670 --> 00:08:10.670 And that's where we need to come up with new pieces of design for lack of a better way of 00:08:10.670 --> 00:08:11.070 putting it. 00:08:11.150 --> 00:08:15.230 Like David, as you mentioned, like you know, a lines tracking system or visual system or 00:08:15.230 --> 00:08:15.550 whatever. 00:08:15.630 --> 00:08:18.830 And then the issue of how you carve those up is a separate issue. 00:08:18.910 --> 00:08:24.880 Um, but then the other part is the prediction part, and that it's hard to predict outcomes, 00:08:24.960 --> 00:08:28.640 even like weather or you know, the performance, like what a car will do per se. 00:08:28.720 --> 00:08:33.520 But in some sense, for a scientific understanding, we're at least more interested in 00:08:33.520 --> 00:08:39.440 narrowing the scope to here's a more mandatory style rule that a 00:08:39.440 --> 00:08:42.720 complex system should follow, like a computational system. 00:08:43.120 --> 00:08:48.990 And then if we know how the algorithms or the functions work, then we can know how 00:08:49.550 --> 00:08:52.750 one setting, a change in a setting should produce a certain outcome. 00:08:52.830 --> 00:08:54.990 And that's sort of the logic of experimental design. 00:08:55.150 --> 00:09:00.990 So a lot of experimental studies in psychology are not often framed this way, but you can 00:09:00.990 --> 00:09:05.470 think of them as if you think of them below the level of the whole agent, what you're doing 00:09:05.470 --> 00:09:10.270 is you're saying if if this theory of function is correct, there should be a system that's 00:09:10.270 --> 00:09:16.020 sensitive to this part of the world, and that if our stimuli make that system in 00:09:16.180 --> 00:09:20.260 into one state, then we should get some general outcome, which is what we measure in our 00:09:20.260 --> 00:09:20.660 study. 00:09:20.820 --> 00:09:21.380 So I don't know. 00:09:21.540 --> 00:09:22.100 I don't know, David. 00:09:22.180 --> 00:09:23.380 Does that answer your question? 00:09:24.260 --> 00:09:24.980 Um, sort of. 00:09:25.060 --> 00:09:30.420 So is the idea that our folk psychology system is really good at predicting things, even a 00:09:30.420 --> 00:09:36.070 year in advance, you can predict my physical location, uh, and that wherever 00:09:36.070 --> 00:09:39.110 HBS is, you can predict that I'm going to be there next year. 00:09:39.350 --> 00:09:42.070 And that's a really powerful prediction if you think about it. 00:09:42.150 --> 00:09:46.550 Like uh not even ph physicists can predict you know what's gonna happen. 00:09:46.630 --> 00:09:49.990 Uh well I mean th astronomers can in terms of the position of the planets and stuff like 00:09:49.990 --> 00:09:53.430 that, but yeah, um it's very hard to predict something a year in advance. 00:09:53.590 --> 00:09:53.750 Yes. 00:09:53.910 --> 00:09:58.230 And yet our folk psychology can do that, uh very precisely, it can predict the location of 00:09:58.230 --> 00:09:58.950 my body. 00:09:59.190 --> 00:10:01.270 And that's really impressive. 00:10:01.510 --> 00:10:07.500 But what you're arguing is I what I think you're arguing is that that's not enough, is 00:10:07.500 --> 00:10:09.740 that we also want explanation. 00:10:09.980 --> 00:10:10.140 Yeah. 00:10:10.300 --> 00:10:14.940 And so folks' psychology can tell you, you know, why I'm gonna be at HBES, or it can it can 00:10:14.940 --> 00:10:16.940 tell you that I'm going to be at HBES next year. 00:10:17.100 --> 00:10:23.100 But it cannot tell you what what it means for my mind to have a belief about HBES, 00:10:23.500 --> 00:10:29.370 what it means for for me to want to go there, why I want to go there, what goals am 00:10:29.370 --> 00:10:30.330 I trying to achieve? 00:10:30.490 --> 00:10:31.850 Uh what is a goal? 00:10:32.090 --> 00:10:37.690 The processes that are involved that that that got my body to HBAS, none of that is in the 00:10:37.690 --> 00:10:39.050 folk psychology system. 00:10:39.210 --> 00:10:43.050 And that's ideally what we want if we want to fully understand the human mind. 00:10:43.130 --> 00:10:48.490 We don't just want intuitions that can make certain predictions but are sort of lack any 00:10:48.490 --> 00:10:49.370 kind of foundation. 00:10:49.530 --> 00:10:51.210 We want to know what the foundation is. 00:10:51.370 --> 00:10:53.380 Is that one way of putting what you're saying? 00:10:53.700 --> 00:10:54.340 Yeah, I think so. 00:10:54.420 --> 00:10:57.620 I mean, I think to just put it concretely, I think this is what you said. 00:10:57.780 --> 00:11:03.540 I'm just gonna restate it is that if I'm using my intuition to predict that you'll be at 00:11:03.540 --> 00:11:09.380 HBES next year, if we want to be scientists and not just ourselves, um 00:11:09.940 --> 00:11:15.860 uh pre scientifically, we would want to have a scientific account of well, what does it 00:11:15.860 --> 00:11:18.420 mean that I predict that you're gonna go to HBES? 00:11:18.580 --> 00:11:24.030 Like what's going on in me that leads to the prediction that you're gonna go to 00:11:24.030 --> 00:11:27.950 HBus wherever it is, um, Arizona, for example. 00:11:28.430 --> 00:11:33.310 Um and once you start thinking about well, what is how do you explain Dave's ability to do 00:11:33.310 --> 00:11:33.550 that? 00:11:33.630 --> 00:11:35.710 Then you're starting to get scientific. 00:11:35.950 --> 00:11:41.310 There's a separate question, which is then how do you get scientific about the fact that 00:11:41.310 --> 00:11:46.110 you, David, independent of my representation of you, um, want to go to HBus? 00:11:46.350 --> 00:11:48.910 And what does how does how would you build a robot to do that? 00:11:49.020 --> 00:11:53.980 So I think you know, it comes back to this thing of uh you don't understand something if 00:11:53.980 --> 00:11:55.180 you can't sort of build it. 00:11:55.420 --> 00:12:00.540 And the goal of scientific psychology is to figure out how 00:12:01.180 --> 00:12:05.420 our folk psychology works and to not just use it. 00:12:05.660 --> 00:12:10.540 We don't have to not document what its outputs are or its contents are. 00:12:10.620 --> 00:12:12.380 That's sort of the thing to be explained. 00:12:12.750 --> 00:12:16.910 if you're just using that, then you're just not doing science, I would say. 00:12:16.990 --> 00:12:22.990 Or you're doing a a kind of science where you're cataloging the outputs 00:12:22.990 --> 00:12:28.750 of intuitive psychology, but you're still you still need principles, right? 00:12:28.830 --> 00:12:34.350 Like you can't just, I think it was Carl Popper who said if a scientist just collected data 00:12:34.350 --> 00:12:39.860 all their lives in a notebook or observations all their lives in a notebook, nobody would 00:12:39.860 --> 00:12:44.580 think, oh, this should be like in a science museum, because it's just, you know, like today 00:12:44.660 --> 00:12:48.820 I woke up and I had an egg for breakfast, and it was there was a bluebird. 00:12:49.060 --> 00:12:54.980 And, you know, uh, science is not just about cataloging arbitrary outcomes, it's 00:12:54.980 --> 00:13:00.900 an attempt to apply principles that are generalizable, rules, to make some inferences, 00:13:00.980 --> 00:13:02.740 uh, to have a framework. 00:13:03.060 --> 00:13:09.050 And if I just say David's gonna go to HBest next year, with a unless you're trying to infer 00:13:09.050 --> 00:13:14.970 some principle, um, then uh then you're not really trying to do, to do science. 00:13:15.130 --> 00:13:19.210 And once you start asking, well, what are the principles, then you start getting into, 00:13:19.530 --> 00:13:24.010 well, David has a desire, so that's sort of a principle, but that's a principle of our 00:13:24.010 --> 00:13:25.450 intuitive psychology. 00:13:25.610 --> 00:13:26.890 Is that a theory? 00:13:27.130 --> 00:13:27.800 I don't know. 00:13:28.040 --> 00:13:29.880 But then how does a desire work? 00:13:30.120 --> 00:13:33.800 And that's where you get into the to the weeds of science. 00:13:33.880 --> 00:13:36.680 So but that's the the basic idea is that it's just not enough. 00:13:36.840 --> 00:13:42.120 There's not enough um uh not enough structure in the explanation. 00:13:42.600 --> 00:13:45.640 David wants to go to HBus, even though it works really well. 00:13:46.360 --> 00:13:51.270 Yeah, that's an another interesting point, which is that the fact that you are able to 00:13:51.270 --> 00:13:55.510 predict my behavior a year from now itself is the thing we want to explain. 00:13:55.670 --> 00:14:00.230 Like that's a really impressive ability to emerge uh from nature. 00:14:00.470 --> 00:14:02.310 And we want an explanation of that. 00:14:12.940 --> 00:14:15.340 year are infinitesimally small, right? 00:14:15.580 --> 00:14:20.060 Insofar as you are a hunk of matter that can predict where I'm going to be in a year, we 00:14:20.060 --> 00:14:21.260 need an explanation for that. 00:14:21.420 --> 00:14:26.380 And the only explanation we know of that can explain that kind of non-random organization 00:14:26.380 --> 00:14:28.300 is natural selection, right? 00:14:28.540 --> 00:14:29.980 Entropy is really powerful. 00:14:30.060 --> 00:14:35.020 It prevents matter from accumulating these kinds of functional organizations. 00:14:35.340 --> 00:14:40.300 And insofar as we see a departure from entropy toward a system that can make 00:14:40.590 --> 00:14:43.470 predictions a year in advance, we want to explain that. 00:14:43.630 --> 00:14:46.990 We want to explain the selective process that created that system. 00:14:47.310 --> 00:14:50.990 Another way of putting it is that, you know, let's say I have a black box and every now and 00:14:50.990 --> 00:14:52.750 then it just it spits out a prediction. 00:14:52.910 --> 00:14:54.990 You know, tomorrow it's it's gonna rain. 00:14:55.150 --> 00:14:57.950 You know, a year from now Dave's gonna be at HBES. 00:14:58.110 --> 00:15:00.670 And I have no idea how the box works. 00:15:01.120 --> 00:15:02.640 I could just say, I don't want to do science. 00:15:02.720 --> 00:15:06.240 I'm just gonna listen to the box and uh go about my life. 00:15:06.400 --> 00:15:09.600 Or you could say, I want to do science and I want to figure out how the box works. 00:15:09.840 --> 00:15:15.680 And it seems like using folk psychology is just kind of taking the outputs of the of 00:15:15.680 --> 00:15:21.120 the box and reifying them and trying to spin them as as theories or as explanations when 00:15:21.120 --> 00:15:23.120 they're not, they're just outputs of a of a black box. 00:15:23.280 --> 00:15:27.270 But when we want to do science, we want to actually get in there and see how the system 00:15:27.270 --> 00:15:27.590 works. 00:15:27.990 --> 00:15:28.230 Yeah. 00:15:28.390 --> 00:15:34.150 And I think like this comes back to the issue of design and looping back to that, and 00:15:34.150 --> 00:15:35.910 there's still a lot to say about that. 00:15:36.150 --> 00:15:41.910 But I think the alternative to just saying like this neuron bumps into this or this 00:15:41.910 --> 00:15:47.110 molecule bumps into this, you know, it's hard to do that for David's going to end up in 00:15:47.110 --> 00:15:48.390 Arizona next year. 00:15:48.550 --> 00:15:53.620 So the middle ground is something like the design stance where you it's 00:15:53.620 --> 00:15:57.780 teleological to say, look, there's some system that has some function. 00:15:57.940 --> 00:16:03.860 Like the plant grows towards light, and we don't know exactly or worry so much 00:16:03.860 --> 00:16:05.540 about exactly how it's implemented. 00:16:05.700 --> 00:16:11.140 There's different ways to implement it physically, but we can roughly predict that the 00:16:11.140 --> 00:16:12.900 plant will grow towards light. 00:16:13.060 --> 00:16:15.460 There's a sort of a functional system that does that. 00:16:15.620 --> 00:16:20.510 And so trying to decompose desires and beliefs into more specific 00:16:21.790 --> 00:16:27.070 systems, it makes it harder because now you have lots of characters in your story, but it's 00:16:27.070 --> 00:16:30.270 not as many characters as physical interactions. 00:16:30.510 --> 00:16:33.390 And it's abstract means-ends. 00:16:33.550 --> 00:16:34.590 This has this function. 00:16:34.750 --> 00:16:38.270 And you have to sort of posit them, like, you know, there's a foraging system, it cares 00:16:38.270 --> 00:16:43.550 about calories, it cares about macronutrients, it cares about search time and handling time 00:16:43.630 --> 00:16:45.070 and costs and benefits. 00:16:45.480 --> 00:16:50.040 These are still abstractions, but they're more concrete than beliefs and desires. 00:16:50.200 --> 00:16:52.360 So I think it's just sort of this middle ground. 00:16:52.520 --> 00:16:53.080 Yeah. 00:16:53.960 --> 00:16:58.520 Another argument you could give is that what we're ultimately looking for is a unification 00:16:58.520 --> 00:17:04.280 of knowledge, of a bridging of the gap between psychology and biology and physics. 00:17:04.360 --> 00:17:08.010 That this this is all part of the same reality. 00:17:08.170 --> 00:17:13.290 There are different levels that we can look at, but ultimately we want an explanation of 00:17:13.290 --> 00:17:17.530 our minds that is concilient with and consistent with our understanding of the natural 00:17:17.530 --> 00:17:19.930 world and the physical world in general. 00:17:20.170 --> 00:17:24.970 Simply relying on our our folk psychology intuitions is not going to get us there. 00:17:25.450 --> 00:17:25.690 Yeah. 00:17:25.930 --> 00:17:30.570 I mean, one question for you, David, is I mean, like the the original email or the original 00:17:30.570 --> 00:17:36.260 comment that we read is this concern that like we're not positing that there's actually a 00:17:36.260 --> 00:17:39.460 designer, and we're sort of talking metaphorically. 00:17:39.700 --> 00:17:44.420 I wonder though, there's another argument, which is that accepting that design requires a 00:17:44.420 --> 00:17:49.700 designer is the wrong step, and that natural selection literally does design things. 00:17:49.940 --> 00:17:53.860 Maybe this is definitional because it depends on what you mean by design, but there is an 00:17:53.860 --> 00:17:59.250 argument that changes in gene frequencies are the reason 00:17:59.250 --> 00:18:04.610 why certain means-ends proximate systems exist. 00:18:04.770 --> 00:18:10.290 The reason why there's a bit of flesh that acts as if it cares about calories or that 00:18:10.290 --> 00:18:16.210 cares about something abstract like the expected reproductive success 00:18:16.210 --> 00:18:19.020 of a morph in a con specific, you know. 00:18:19.180 --> 00:18:24.060 Um, the reason why that chunk of matter does that and not the infinite number of other 00:18:24.060 --> 00:18:29.740 things it might do, like play table tennis or calculate pi to the infinite 00:18:29.740 --> 00:18:34.780 decimal place, is because those things had an effect on fitness, and 00:18:34.940 --> 00:18:40.250 fitness uh changes is what can design uh 00:18:40.490 --> 00:18:41.610 flesh, right? 00:18:41.770 --> 00:18:47.530 So I mean there's an argument that if you strip out the idea that there is a intelligence 00:18:47.530 --> 00:18:53.450 to begin with and you need to explain intelligence, then design a 00:18:53.450 --> 00:18:59.290 non-intelligent design, uh a non a design created by a pro dumb 00:18:59.290 --> 00:19:02.810 process is the original design. 00:19:03.960 --> 00:19:08.600 And there's an argument then that, you know, lateral selection literally does design, is d 00:19:08.680 --> 00:19:14.360 actually does design things insofar as what you're describing as design is a 00:19:14.360 --> 00:19:20.360 means-ends system that's acting as if it's for producing a particular kind of outcome. 00:19:20.840 --> 00:19:21.080 Right. 00:19:21.320 --> 00:19:26.350 I mean there's you could even make the argument that human design doesn't even exist to a 00:19:26.350 --> 00:19:26.670 certain extent. 00:19:26.830 --> 00:19:30.590 I mean, you can think about the the idea of an intelligence that designs something, that 00:19:30.670 --> 00:19:33.390 that itself is a folk psychology intuition. 00:19:33.710 --> 00:19:39.230 And that itself is probably a misleading description of how the process works. 00:19:39.390 --> 00:19:43.150 If you take, you know, the example of a human designing a tool to perform a particular 00:19:43.150 --> 00:19:47.900 function, even there, probably there is some kind of quasi Darwinian process going on 00:19:47.900 --> 00:19:52.860 inside that human's brain where they're thinking and considering different possibilities 00:19:52.860 --> 00:19:53.820 and possible ideas. 00:19:53.900 --> 00:19:57.980 And you know, the the ideas that make sense are going to rise to the top, and the ones that 00:19:57.980 --> 00:19:59.740 don't are going to get filtered away. 00:19:59.900 --> 00:20:02.700 And then they're going to and the ones that they try out, they're going to try some things 00:20:02.780 --> 00:20:06.220 that's not going to work, and those get discarded, and the things that actually do work are 00:20:06.220 --> 00:20:07.420 going to stick around. 00:20:07.690 --> 00:20:12.410 And then if you zoom out past that particular human and you look at the process of cultural 00:20:12.410 --> 00:20:17.530 evolution or cultural change, the design aspects that that work are probably going to be 00:20:17.530 --> 00:20:21.450 favored by cultural evolution if you're taking a cultural evolutionary perspective. 00:20:21.690 --> 00:20:25.610 It may be the case that it's just Darwinism all the way down, that there isn't even a clear 00:20:25.610 --> 00:20:29.930 case of human design, that there's a is there's a Darwinian whittling process within that 00:20:29.930 --> 00:20:34.730 human's mind, there's a Darwinian whittling process within cultural evolution that filters 00:20:34.730 --> 00:20:37.260 out the cultural variants that don't work. 00:20:37.420 --> 00:20:42.700 And it may be that, you know, there really is no quote unquote designer. 00:20:42.780 --> 00:20:45.980 And that's just a kind of folk psychological simplification. 00:20:46.140 --> 00:20:49.980 So maybe all design is without a little homunculus designing it. 00:20:50.300 --> 00:20:51.420 Yeah, it would have to be, right? 00:20:51.500 --> 00:20:56.710 And I think even within the individual, that stuff's being done by systems that are 00:20:56.710 --> 00:20:57.750 probably doing something like this. 00:20:57.830 --> 00:20:59.990 I like to say that everything is trial and error. 00:21:00.070 --> 00:21:01.670 You just don't always see the error, right? 00:21:01.830 --> 00:21:05.510 So the trial and error can be over evolutionary time. 00:21:05.670 --> 00:21:08.150 So let's say we take our artifact psychology. 00:21:08.310 --> 00:21:12.790 There were alternate versions of our artifact psychology that were selected out. 00:21:12.950 --> 00:21:14.790 Um, so that's some trial and error. 00:21:14.870 --> 00:21:19.510 And then within an individual existing, so if David wants to build a better mousetra, that 00:21:19.510 --> 00:21:24.070 system, I mean, more precisely, it's not David is designing a mousetrap. 00:21:24.150 --> 00:21:29.200 I mean, you can say that, but precisely and more more precisely, there's a bunch of systems 00:21:29.200 --> 00:21:34.560 in David that are doing this generate, evaluate, 00:21:34.880 --> 00:21:40.080 select, refine process that eventually leads to David being like, oh, I have an idea. 00:21:40.320 --> 00:21:45.680 And so, yeah, so in that sense, um it's it's mechanism all the way down. 00:21:45.760 --> 00:21:51.520 And to sort of say, start off by saying, look, natural selection doesn't design anything 00:21:51.600 --> 00:21:56.410 because it's not an intelligence, and you need an intelligence to design something, it's 00:21:56.410 --> 00:22:02.010 sort of ironically it's using the mechanistic outcome to 00:22:02.490 --> 00:22:05.450 like sort of reject that it's all mechanistic in a way. 00:22:06.410 --> 00:22:08.010 Yeah, totally. 00:22:08.650 --> 00:22:14.090 So so I I would say, you know, I mean, Brett Beheim alluded to this, you know, the the 00:22:14.090 --> 00:22:18.570 synthesis between population genetics and the design in the organism. 00:22:18.650 --> 00:22:22.570 I mean, Lita alluded to this too, that what George Williams would was doing was saying, 00:22:22.730 --> 00:22:28.300 look, it's changes in gene frequencies and populations wedded to changes in 00:22:28.300 --> 00:22:32.700 organism design, those are the two things that are that are hooked up together. 00:22:33.100 --> 00:22:36.060 That's really the uh modern synthesis. 00:22:36.220 --> 00:22:39.260 In that sense, it it literally is design. 00:22:39.340 --> 00:22:42.460 And I think it's fine to talk about design. 00:22:42.620 --> 00:22:47.820 I think, I think maybe the kernel of truth, my thought is that if you say, well, there's 00:22:47.820 --> 00:22:51.970 design for fitness, and you say fitness teleology, right? 00:22:52.130 --> 00:22:53.170 This is Letus point. 00:22:53.330 --> 00:22:57.410 If I know I'm in an economic scheme and I know I'll never see David again again, I should 00:22:57.410 --> 00:22:58.370 sort of screw him over. 00:22:58.530 --> 00:23:04.450 Or if I know that uh, you know, pornography is not gonna lead me to differential 00:23:04.450 --> 00:23:08.530 to have like more babies, I shouldn't care about pornography because like I know. 00:23:08.770 --> 00:23:14.770 So the idea of there's sort of this um rationality that's sort of ideal and 00:23:14.770 --> 00:23:15.650 knows everything. 00:23:15.890 --> 00:23:16.130 Yeah. 00:23:16.370 --> 00:23:20.920 I mean, the other point to make is that using the design stance or the folk artifact 00:23:20.920 --> 00:23:25.160 system, whatever you want to call it, has been tremendously successful in biology. 00:23:25.320 --> 00:23:29.160 Like it it, you know, it's been said that nothing in biology makes sense except in light of 00:23:29.160 --> 00:23:29.560 evolution. 00:23:29.720 --> 00:23:33.000 I think you could also say that nothing in biology makes sense except in light of the 00:23:33.000 --> 00:23:33.800 design stance. 00:23:34.040 --> 00:23:39.960 You think about our knowledge of how the molecular machinery work, proteins, uh RNA DNA, 00:23:40.200 --> 00:23:42.650 all the different parts of our morphology. 00:23:42.810 --> 00:23:47.770 We have organs and within them cells and different molecular structures. 00:23:48.090 --> 00:23:52.970 If you just try to understand how parts of different animals work, how parts of the body 00:23:52.970 --> 00:23:58.330 work, you really cannot understand any of that without availing yourself of a design 00:23:58.330 --> 00:24:02.810 metaphor that this thing has this particular function, and that's why it's shaped this way, 00:24:02.890 --> 00:24:05.610 and that's why the process works this way and not some other way. 00:24:05.850 --> 00:24:10.320 This little mole piece of molecular machinery does this, this piece does that. 00:24:10.480 --> 00:24:14.800 Like it it's kind of inconceivable to even think about what biology would look like if we 00:24:14.800 --> 00:24:18.320 could not avail ourselves of functional design thinking. 00:24:18.480 --> 00:24:22.960 And so the argument would just be it's been so successful in biology in general. 00:24:23.120 --> 00:24:27.920 Uh, why don't we try to leverage that success and see how s successful it can be when we 00:24:27.920 --> 00:24:29.280 apply it to the mind? 00:24:30.150 --> 00:24:32.870 Yeah, and I think my point, uh, I agree with that. 00:24:32.950 --> 00:24:38.950 And I think my point is that the design stance, it's refracted through the constraints of 00:24:39.110 --> 00:24:40.710 it's not going to be a perfect system. 00:24:40.870 --> 00:24:44.150 It has to use cues that were available over evolutionary time. 00:24:44.470 --> 00:24:50.070 And it's not just uh an ideal design from the perspective of any any 00:24:50.230 --> 00:24:55.300 outcome that would be that would produce uh fitness benefits under any environmental 00:24:55.300 --> 00:24:57.460 circumstances would be selected for. 00:24:57.700 --> 00:25:00.020 And um yeah, I think I think that's right. 00:25:00.100 --> 00:25:03.700 But yeah, I I think the bottom line is that I think it's fine to talk about natural 00:25:03.700 --> 00:25:09.140 selection designing things as long as you understand that it's not a foolproof 00:25:09.460 --> 00:25:12.580 process that's literally driven by a person. 00:25:13.220 --> 00:25:19.170 And if you give them the information, um, like oh yeah this is a one shot 00:25:19.170 --> 00:25:24.130 encounter or in a modern environment this won't lead to fitness you know the mechanisms 00:25:24.290 --> 00:25:30.210 it's not real time fitness teleology it's just that there's a design that was designed for 00:25:30.210 --> 00:25:36.130 a particular set of environmental circumstances that's the design um and that's sort of 00:25:36.130 --> 00:25:41.730 fixed and you can't if you take the design out of a it's an evolutionary relevant 00:25:41.730 --> 00:25:44.660 context then you might get weird results. 00:25:44.980 --> 00:25:50.180 With if you keep that caveat of the notion of an EA, then I think it's fine to be design 00:25:50.260 --> 00:25:50.580 minded. 00:25:50.740 --> 00:25:55.700 If you don't do that, then yeah, I can see how being design minded would would mislead you. 00:25:56.260 --> 00:25:56.420 Right. 00:25:56.580 --> 00:26:00.820 So th there's a bad way to be design minded where you could say that the function of the 00:26:00.820 --> 00:26:02.820 mind is to maximize fitness. 00:26:03.060 --> 00:26:03.300 Yes. 00:26:03.540 --> 00:26:03.780 Right. 00:26:03.860 --> 00:26:08.020 We want the the reason why we have brains is just to figure out how we can have the most 00:26:08.020 --> 00:26:08.420 babies. 00:26:08.650 --> 00:26:08.810 Right. 00:26:09.290 --> 00:26:12.170 That would be a bad uh design stance. 00:26:12.570 --> 00:26:17.210 The right design stance is, well, yes, in some sense, minds are designed to maximize 00:26:17.210 --> 00:26:20.970 fitness, but within a very specific environment, that the environment is crucial. 00:26:21.130 --> 00:26:27.050 And so once you recognize that our minds are designed to promote fitness in a very specific 00:26:27.050 --> 00:26:32.980 set of ancestral environments and ecologies, then you have the right design 00:26:32.980 --> 00:26:36.740 stance and you can begin to make predictions about how the mind works that make sense. 00:26:36.980 --> 00:26:41.940 But if you strip away the environment and the and the ecology and you just use your design 00:26:41.940 --> 00:26:45.940 stance to think about what a fitness maximizing computer would do, you're just going to go 00:26:45.940 --> 00:26:46.500 astray. 00:26:46.580 --> 00:26:51.700 Uh and so I think another piece of the design stance is it has to be ecology and 00:26:51.700 --> 00:26:52.820 environment focused. 00:26:53.060 --> 00:26:53.220 Yeah. 00:26:53.620 --> 00:26:58.340 And without an understanding of of of the environment in which the phenotype was selected, 00:26:58.420 --> 00:26:59.940 you have no understanding of the phenotype. 00:27:00.330 --> 00:27:00.810 Yeah, that's right. 00:27:00.890 --> 00:27:05.450 And I think the environment and ecology go together with actually being design minded 00:27:05.530 --> 00:27:10.890 because if you say people are designed to maximize their fitness and you understand that it 00:27:10.890 --> 00:27:14.970 sounds like you're saying a design stance thing, but if you if you think of it from an uh 00:27:14.970 --> 00:27:18.970 intentional theory mind level, then you just say people are motivated to maximize their 00:27:18.970 --> 00:27:19.610 fitness. 00:27:19.850 --> 00:27:23.930 And so whether or not it incurred in an ancestral environment or not, you just sort of say, 00:27:24.010 --> 00:27:28.140 well, people look around and look at what maximizes their fitness, and they just do it. 00:27:28.460 --> 00:27:34.380 So I think a lot of misunderstanding happens where people think they're talking at a 00:27:34.380 --> 00:27:38.300 design level stance, and they're saying, look, there's a system that's for maximizing 00:27:38.300 --> 00:27:38.780 fitness. 00:27:38.940 --> 00:27:43.340 But all they're really doing is they're just that's the agent who has an intention or a 00:27:43.340 --> 00:27:45.340 goal to maximize their fitness. 00:27:45.870 --> 00:27:50.990 The way you know if somebody's being design minded is you're forced to have 00:27:51.630 --> 00:27:57.630 deterministic cues where the cues are what are the inputs, what are the processes, 00:27:57.790 --> 00:28:01.390 what are the outputs, and these things are are mechanistic or deterministic. 00:28:01.550 --> 00:28:07.550 That's even if you take an ancestral versus modern perspective, if you're 00:28:07.550 --> 00:28:13.420 actually just using your theory mind, the theory of mind system might still lead you to 00:28:13.420 --> 00:28:16.620 think, well, it was ancestrally good to be maximize your fitness. 00:28:16.700 --> 00:28:18.300 Let's do it in modern environments too. 00:28:18.380 --> 00:28:18.620 Yeah. 00:28:18.940 --> 00:28:19.260 Right. 00:28:19.500 --> 00:28:20.460 And it's important. 00:28:20.540 --> 00:28:22.300 I mean, a lot of people get tripped up on this. 00:28:22.540 --> 00:28:28.060 They think that um the mind is is for maximizing fitness and that we're calculating, you 00:28:28.060 --> 00:28:32.860 know, the how many babies we can make if we if we take option A versus option B. 00:28:33.180 --> 00:28:33.580 So yeah. 00:28:33.660 --> 00:28:38.630 So I think design, as long as you know it's not a person doing it, it's fine to talk about 00:28:38.630 --> 00:28:40.710 it in the context of natural selection. 00:28:41.910 --> 00:28:42.390 For sure. 00:28:42.710 --> 00:28:47.350 Should we talk about bad ways to do design thinking? 00:28:47.510 --> 00:28:53.190 So we already talked about one, which is fitness teleology, the idea that the mind is 00:28:53.190 --> 00:28:57.510 designed to maximize fitness independent of what the environment is and what the 00:28:57.510 --> 00:28:58.390 constraints are. 00:28:58.550 --> 00:29:04.280 Uh are there other bad ways that this way of thinking has 00:29:04.280 --> 00:29:04.680 gone? 00:29:05.400 --> 00:29:10.600 I mean, I think I think one of them is sort of an oversimplification, uh short-term versus 00:29:10.600 --> 00:29:16.520 long-term meeting, or like genetic quality, um, things like that, where there's this idea 00:29:16.520 --> 00:29:22.520 that um there's an essence of there's a design looking for something like genetic quality, 00:29:23.160 --> 00:29:26.920 and not thinking about, well, that has to be a Q-based system. 00:29:27.080 --> 00:29:29.310 What does genetic quality mean? 00:29:29.390 --> 00:29:35.390 Well, it would be things like, well, there's variation in uh how injured or prone 00:29:35.390 --> 00:29:39.630 to disease an organism is, and what cues would those be? 00:29:39.870 --> 00:29:45.790 And that doesn't necessarily mean genes per se, but it's just cues of like on the 00:29:45.790 --> 00:29:50.270 ground, which robots are in better condition versus others, you know, and that and that 00:29:50.270 --> 00:29:52.510 changes the way you sort of start thinking about it. 00:29:52.590 --> 00:29:58.040 And leaving it at the level of genetic quality, I think essentializes it sort of conflates 00:29:58.120 --> 00:30:00.120 selection pressures with the design. 00:30:00.360 --> 00:30:06.360 And it sort of leads to shorthands that I think lead one not to look into, well, what is 00:30:06.360 --> 00:30:08.040 the exact design? 00:30:08.200 --> 00:30:10.440 I think short-term and long-term mating is another one. 00:30:10.600 --> 00:30:15.080 Well, you could invest a little bit in a lot of offspring or a lot in a few offspring. 00:30:15.240 --> 00:30:18.520 And so maybe males are more designed for short-term mating. 00:30:18.690 --> 00:30:22.290 And then you just get this idea of, well, well, let's just look at short-term mating versus 00:30:22.290 --> 00:30:23.970 long-term mating motivations, which is fine. 00:30:24.050 --> 00:30:29.570 And, you know, like that's that's data and that's maybe an insight compared to what existed 00:30:29.570 --> 00:30:30.210 before. 00:30:30.450 --> 00:30:36.130 But then work through the logic of, okay, so I'm a male and I have a short-term mating 00:30:36.130 --> 00:30:36.770 preference. 00:30:36.930 --> 00:30:39.730 How does that play out in a real world ecology? 00:30:40.210 --> 00:30:45.100 Do I do differentially better if you're investing in your offspring social political 00:30:45.100 --> 00:30:46.060 capital, and I'm not. 00:30:46.140 --> 00:30:50.860 So like Brooke Shelza and that and uh the other people we've talked to have sort of argued 00:30:50.860 --> 00:30:56.620 that um there's a lot more to investing in the offspring than just uh conception, and uh 00:30:56.700 --> 00:30:57.900 as as people put it. 00:30:58.060 --> 00:31:04.060 And so I think thinking about selection pressures or mechanisms in these slogan y ways 00:31:04.140 --> 00:31:10.140 of like short-term, long-term, or good genes, it's a shorthand that prevents people 00:31:10.140 --> 00:31:11.980 from actually fleshing out the design. 00:31:12.060 --> 00:31:18.010 And I think it leads to just a cottage industry of studies that in some 00:31:18.010 --> 00:31:23.930 way resemble or sound like they're consistent with that slogan, but it's 00:31:23.930 --> 00:31:29.850 not fleshing out a design or even asking what would the design look like given 00:31:29.850 --> 00:31:33.690 that it has to naturally evolve in a real environment. 00:31:34.900 --> 00:31:35.140 Right. 00:31:35.380 --> 00:31:41.220 I guess the pitfall there is not thinking of the design in terms of the ecology 00:31:41.300 --> 00:31:47.060 again, where um the mind is by design an organ that uh 00:31:47.700 --> 00:31:53.220 processes information from the ecology and uses that information to guide 00:31:53.220 --> 00:31:54.100 behavior. 00:31:54.420 --> 00:31:55.860 That's why we have a mind. 00:31:55.940 --> 00:32:01.540 It it's it it processes information, it makes behavior contingent on that information. 00:32:01.780 --> 00:32:05.810 I think probably where people are going wrong is that they're sort of viewing the mind as 00:32:05.810 --> 00:32:07.250 analogous to any other organ. 00:32:07.410 --> 00:32:13.010 So like a liver just detoxifies poisons from the blood and it doesn't it doesn't do that 00:32:13.010 --> 00:32:16.290 conditional on some kind of environmental uh information. 00:32:16.370 --> 00:32:17.730 It just it just naturally does that. 00:32:17.890 --> 00:32:19.730 The heart just pumps blood throughout the body. 00:32:19.890 --> 00:32:25.890 It doesn't do that conditional on, you know, uh whether your uh mate is flirting 00:32:25.890 --> 00:32:26.530 with someone else. 00:32:26.690 --> 00:32:28.370 It just always pumps blood throughout the body. 00:32:28.450 --> 00:32:31.640 It's not con contingent on anything in the environment. 00:32:31.720 --> 00:32:34.120 The same thing goes with the lungs, any other part of the body. 00:32:34.200 --> 00:32:36.840 These are not information contingent adaptations. 00:32:37.080 --> 00:32:39.400 Their job is to do one thing and they do that thing. 00:32:39.960 --> 00:32:41.320 You could quibble with that. 00:32:41.400 --> 00:32:45.480 Maybe in some sense, some organs are contingent on some types of information, but the 00:32:45.480 --> 00:32:48.920 degree of contingency is way lower than it is in the brain, which is that's that's the 00:32:48.920 --> 00:32:50.120 whole reason why it's there. 00:32:50.280 --> 00:32:55.240 You know, we have these elaborate sense organs to pick up information from the environment 00:32:55.370 --> 00:32:59.530 and use it to guide behavior, our other organs of the body don't have sense organs, or at 00:32:59.530 --> 00:33:03.770 least not ones that are as elaborate uh as our eyes and ears. 00:33:04.010 --> 00:33:08.650 And so I think when people do kind of lazy theorizing, like, oh, men just they want to 00:33:08.650 --> 00:33:13.210 pursue short-term mating in the same way that the heart pumps blood, and they just do that 00:33:13.290 --> 00:33:15.930 that's it that's not in any way contingent on anything in the environment. 00:33:16.010 --> 00:33:17.130 That's just what that's what men do. 00:33:17.210 --> 00:33:21.930 They they pursue short-term mating and the heart pumps blood and and and it's uh sort of 00:33:22.500 --> 00:33:27.460 devoid of any kind of e ecological thinking that I think is necessary for the design 00:33:27.460 --> 00:33:27.860 stance. 00:33:28.180 --> 00:33:30.100 That might be where where people are going wrong there. 00:33:30.420 --> 00:33:30.740 Yeah. 00:33:31.060 --> 00:33:32.100 Yeah, I like that a lot. 00:33:32.180 --> 00:33:32.580 Yeah, yeah. 00:33:32.740 --> 00:33:37.220 I think it also it comes back to like Lita's point of like it's a depth psychology where 00:33:37.220 --> 00:33:42.580 it's if you take an intentional perspective, it's people really are motivated because they 00:33:42.580 --> 00:33:44.660 want to maximize their genetic interest. 00:33:44.900 --> 00:33:47.220 You know, that's the real reason why they're doing something. 00:33:47.300 --> 00:33:53.150 And so that's why it's deflationary to talk about genes when we're talking about falling 00:33:53.150 --> 00:33:58.270 in love or caring about your children or caring about social partners and being altruistic. 00:33:58.430 --> 00:34:03.390 If you view those as opposed, I think that's a good mark that you're probably operating at 00:34:03.390 --> 00:34:04.350 the wrong level. 00:34:04.430 --> 00:34:10.110 Um, and you're understanding genes in design, not at the level of design, but 00:34:10.350 --> 00:34:14.670 but at the intentional level, such that there's some rivalry between the two. 00:34:15.380 --> 00:34:15.620 Right. 00:34:15.780 --> 00:34:20.100 And I think it gets you greater purchase on the variation that does exist across cultures 00:34:20.100 --> 00:34:21.620 and between individuals. 00:34:21.940 --> 00:34:26.900 If you focus your analysis on how the mind is interacting with the environment to produce 00:34:26.900 --> 00:34:30.900 the behavior and what kinds of information it's using from the environment to adjust 00:34:30.900 --> 00:34:31.620 behavior. 00:34:32.740 --> 00:34:37.540 For example, if you if you ignore that, then you might predict just uh naively more 00:34:37.540 --> 00:34:41.460 universality than in fact exists among people. 00:34:41.990 --> 00:34:46.150 Whereas if you view the mind as an organ that is designed to pick up information from the 00:34:46.150 --> 00:34:50.470 environment and strategically use it, then you would predict a lot of variation insofar as 00:34:50.470 --> 00:34:53.990 there's variation in different environments, different affordances, different constraints, 00:34:54.150 --> 00:34:55.590 different ecologies, et cetera. 00:34:55.910 --> 00:34:56.550 Yeah, that's right. 00:34:56.630 --> 00:35:02.630 And I think, you know, the uh the the sort of trope that um evolutionary psychologists 00:35:02.630 --> 00:35:04.710 don't study cross-cultural differences. 00:35:05.360 --> 00:35:10.560 I'm of two minds with that, because on the one hand, like a lot of theorizing is based on 00:35:10.560 --> 00:35:14.080 weird populations, and that's you know, that is a problem. 00:35:14.320 --> 00:35:18.080 I mean, that said, a weird population is still a human being, right? 00:35:18.160 --> 00:35:21.680 Um and it's easy to sort of poo-poo that. 00:35:21.840 --> 00:35:27.430 But on the other hand, the kernel of truth is that if you're taking the design stance, 00:35:27.590 --> 00:35:33.590 cross-cultural variation or no cultural being a default is useful if you're taking 00:35:33.590 --> 00:35:38.950 the design stance because exactly as you said, all the variation and outcomes tell you 00:35:38.950 --> 00:35:40.790 about the underlying design, right? 00:35:41.030 --> 00:35:46.310 Um, but if you're if you're sort of not operating at the design stance, then you sort of 00:35:46.310 --> 00:35:50.630 have this idea well, like there's some outcome that's evolved or genetic or innate. 00:35:50.710 --> 00:35:52.840 Like, is theory of mind innate. 00:35:53.000 --> 00:35:55.000 Well, theory of mind has to be universal. 00:35:55.160 --> 00:36:00.200 So looking at universals, um, it could there's a good smart way to do it, and there's sort 00:36:00.200 --> 00:36:01.080 of a dumb way to do it. 00:36:01.160 --> 00:36:05.800 The smart way, I mean, dumb is too strong, but the smart way is to say these are all 00:36:05.800 --> 00:36:08.520 outcomes that are diagnostic of design. 00:36:09.080 --> 00:36:14.760 Um, or the attempt to describe universals is getting at a level of abstraction that 00:36:14.760 --> 00:36:16.360 isn't just outcomes. 00:36:17.270 --> 00:36:23.030 But the other version is to say, do men always prefer sexual 00:36:23.030 --> 00:36:24.390 variety over women? 00:36:24.630 --> 00:36:29.030 What I think we're kind of describing as sort of fast and loose design stance that might 00:36:29.030 --> 00:36:30.710 not even be design stance thinking. 00:36:31.190 --> 00:36:31.430 Yeah. 00:36:31.910 --> 00:36:37.430 Another way to think of it is that uh the universality is what produces the variation. 00:36:38.160 --> 00:36:38.480 right? 00:36:38.960 --> 00:36:43.120 We have a universal design that responds strategically to certain types of information that 00:36:43.120 --> 00:36:44.720 vary across different ecologies. 00:36:44.880 --> 00:36:48.960 And insofar as that information varies across ecologies, you're going to see different 00:36:48.960 --> 00:36:50.560 outcomes across ecologies. 00:36:52.000 --> 00:36:54.000 But what is universal is not the output. 00:36:54.080 --> 00:36:55.600 The output is going to change. 00:36:55.840 --> 00:37:01.200 What's universal is the information processing structure that responds to that information. 00:37:01.410 --> 00:37:03.330 Uh, and that and that's the important part. 00:37:03.490 --> 00:37:06.690 That's that's the the human nature that that we're interested in as evolutionary 00:37:06.690 --> 00:37:07.250 psychologists. 00:37:07.410 --> 00:37:11.170 Not necessarily the stuff that is the same across cultures, although that's that's part of 00:37:11.170 --> 00:37:12.930 it and that gives you some clues. 00:37:13.090 --> 00:37:16.770 Uh what we're interested in is, you know, what is that machinery doing? 00:37:17.010 --> 00:37:21.810 Uh and you would expect a machine, a really complicated machine, to produce different 00:37:21.810 --> 00:37:23.890 outputs in response to different situations. 00:37:24.050 --> 00:37:29.880 And that is indeed why the brain exists is to, you know, produce uh adaptive behavior in 00:37:30.040 --> 00:37:34.840 in response to particular situations and contexts and ecologies. 00:37:35.160 --> 00:37:40.360 Yeah, I I don't think you can overestimate how much misunderstanding evolutionary 00:37:40.360 --> 00:37:46.280 psychology is understanding the words and concepts through the lens of just 00:37:46.280 --> 00:37:47.320 the intentional level. 00:37:47.480 --> 00:37:52.920 So if you have this idea that uh evolutionary psychologists are interested in genes and 00:37:52.920 --> 00:37:57.130 universals, and you understand that from the intentional level, then you would think that 00:37:57.130 --> 00:38:01.530 people's underlying motivations are genes, not the surface level things. 00:38:01.690 --> 00:38:05.370 So it's this depth psychology, as Lita talked about, and thus you get all this stuff of 00:38:05.370 --> 00:38:08.330 like, well, people are they really altruistic, or is it just their genes? 00:38:08.410 --> 00:38:10.890 Or do people really love their family or not? 00:38:11.050 --> 00:38:12.010 Or is it just their genes? 00:38:12.090 --> 00:38:14.250 Or do you really care about other people or is it just your genes? 00:38:14.410 --> 00:38:17.500 That's the wrong way to think about it, because it's in opposition. 00:38:17.740 --> 00:38:22.540 The other one is if it's universal, if if what evolutionary psychologists think is 00:38:22.540 --> 00:38:28.140 universal is just sort of the desires and beliefs of of people, then everywhere people 00:38:28.140 --> 00:38:31.820 should believe the same thing, desire the same thing, act the same way. 00:38:31.900 --> 00:38:33.180 Um I don't think that's true. 00:38:33.260 --> 00:38:35.500 So evolutionary psychology is clearly wrong. 00:38:35.660 --> 00:38:39.020 Um and that's not what evolutionary psychologists say, but I think again, that's like a 00:38:39.020 --> 00:38:43.180 symptom of taking the design not taking the design stance, which is a weird way to think. 00:38:43.330 --> 00:38:48.130 And but I think the the defaults of taking the intentional theory of mind approach to 00:38:48.130 --> 00:38:53.970 psychology, that's that is sort of well, most of the misunderstandings of evolutionary 00:38:53.970 --> 00:38:58.850 psychology, I think, are a consequence of treating it from that perspective and 00:38:58.850 --> 00:39:00.850 misunderstanding it from that perspective. 00:39:01.250 --> 00:39:01.410 Right. 00:39:01.810 --> 00:39:05.890 I I think there is a defensible version of that, which is that you can say that human 00:39:05.890 --> 00:39:08.120 motivations are are universal. 00:39:08.280 --> 00:39:12.440 Like every human wants physical safety and health, and, you know, they they want their 00:39:12.440 --> 00:39:18.200 offspring to be safe and well fed, and they want status and support and 00:39:18.280 --> 00:39:20.360 uh coalitional strength. 00:39:20.440 --> 00:39:24.840 You know, yeah, I think there's a defensible reading of that, which is that, you know, the 00:39:24.840 --> 00:39:29.110 underlying things we're striving for and we evolved to strive for the the things that 00:39:29.110 --> 00:39:35.030 natural selection picked up on as fitness proxies to strive for, those things 00:39:35.030 --> 00:39:35.990 are universal. 00:39:36.310 --> 00:39:42.150 But the strategies that people pursue to to get those fitness proxies, to get those those 00:39:42.150 --> 00:39:45.590 goals, those motivations, are going to be different from place to place. 00:39:45.670 --> 00:39:50.310 You know, just the simplest possible example, you know, every human everywhere has fear of 00:39:50.310 --> 00:39:52.630 being in in physical danger, right? 00:39:52.710 --> 00:39:57.430 And there are systems in the mind that monitor the environment for signs of physical 00:39:57.430 --> 00:39:57.830 danger. 00:39:58.020 --> 00:40:01.300 And you could say that, you know, that is a universal part of human nature. 00:40:01.460 --> 00:40:05.540 But what is dangerous in one place is going to be very different from what is dangerous in 00:40:05.540 --> 00:40:06.260 a different place. 00:40:06.500 --> 00:40:10.100 You might have snakes in one place and not in another place, you know, poisonous spiders in 00:40:10.100 --> 00:40:11.300 one place and not in another place. 00:40:11.540 --> 00:40:16.820 You might have warfare that is intense and ubiquitous in one place and not so intense and 00:40:16.820 --> 00:40:18.820 ubiquitous in another place. 00:40:19.220 --> 00:40:24.290 So just because the underlying fear system is the same across humans doesn't mean that the 00:40:24.290 --> 00:40:28.930 outputs of that fear system and the strategies that people take to pursue the goal of 00:40:28.930 --> 00:40:30.370 safety are going to be the same. 00:40:30.530 --> 00:40:31.410 They're going to be very different. 00:40:31.810 --> 00:40:32.690 Totally agree, David. 00:40:32.770 --> 00:40:34.770 David, maybe should we just end here? 00:40:35.410 --> 00:40:35.970 That's fine. 00:40:36.130 --> 00:40:37.090 I think this is good. 00:40:37.330 --> 00:40:41.330 Um we'll we'll uh we'll end here and we'll see everybody next week. 00:40:41.650 --> 00:40:42.530 All right, sounds good. 00:40:42.770 --> 00:40:43.090 Okay. 00:40:44.220 --> 00:40:45.260 Hey everybody. 00:40:45.500 --> 00:40:49.660 Uh we're doing provisional recording, so thanks for bearing with our abrupt ending. 00:40:49.740 --> 00:40:55.420 Uh on our way out here we'll hear from Greg Bryant, who we ran into at HBS in Robot 00:40:55.500 --> 00:40:56.380 Morocco as well. 00:40:56.540 --> 00:40:57.820 Thanks everybody for listening. 00:40:57.980 --> 00:40:59.260 We'll see you next week. 00:40:59.980 --> 00:41:00.940 Here maybe I'll get on this side. 00:41:01.100 --> 00:41:02.140 Yeah, because David, you have to say something. 00:41:03.180 --> 00:41:04.700 So David Oh okay. 00:41:04.850 --> 00:41:06.050 Uh how's it going, Greg? 00:41:06.290 --> 00:41:06.930 I'm doing well. 00:41:07.090 --> 00:41:08.370 Yeah, did you have a good HPAS? 00:41:08.530 --> 00:41:10.690 Yeah, both both conference both conferences were good. 00:41:11.010 --> 00:41:12.530 Yeah, oh you went to CES and HPS. 00:41:12.610 --> 00:41:13.490 Yeah, I did the whole spiel. 00:41:13.650 --> 00:41:14.290 Oh wow, okay. 00:41:14.370 --> 00:41:15.170 Which one was better? 00:41:16.450 --> 00:41:17.090 No way, man. 00:41:17.330 --> 00:41:17.650 No way. 00:41:17.810 --> 00:41:18.770 You're not touching that one. 00:41:18.850 --> 00:41:19.410 Nope. 00:41:19.650 --> 00:41:21.010 Um, I like them both, you know. 00:41:21.090 --> 00:41:26.400 Uh actually it's been inspiring me to think about what kinds of factors would um 00:41:26.720 --> 00:41:31.280 cause the divisions we see and what kinds of things could we do to increase the um 00:41:31.680 --> 00:41:32.720 community overall. 00:41:33.040 --> 00:41:33.360 For sure. 00:41:33.600 --> 00:41:37.680 And um I'm thinking about that right now and I think people need to write about it and 00:41:37.680 --> 00:41:38.400 think about it. 00:41:38.720 --> 00:41:39.440 Totally agree. 00:41:39.520 --> 00:41:43.520 Yeah I think that was a common theme I saw here at at HBES at least. 00:41:43.680 --> 00:41:48.880 I didn't go to CDS, but uh the desire to have greater unification uh within the 00:41:48.880 --> 00:41:50.000 evolutionary social sciences. 00:41:50.400 --> 00:41:50.800 Absolutely. 00:41:50.880 --> 00:41:56.010 Yeah yeah I mean the old version of HBES included um all these different people. 00:41:56.170 --> 00:41:56.570 Yeah. 00:41:56.730 --> 00:42:02.330 And now, you know, the community's fracturing a little bit for reasons that are good too 00:42:02.490 --> 00:42:07.130 because people are specializing, but I think we need to figure out how to come together as 00:42:07.130 --> 00:42:13.050 evolutionary behavioral science or behavioral scientists and uh and see 00:42:13.050 --> 00:42:17.530 each the value in each other's work and then recognize where there may be empirical 00:42:17.530 --> 00:42:19.050 differences that are resolvable. 00:42:19.300 --> 00:42:19.700 Yeah. 00:42:19.940 --> 00:42:23.860 It was really great they were able to do like organize the two back to back too. 00:42:24.340 --> 00:42:30.100 Yeah, I mean like uh Clark mentioned, uh that was a uh difficult uh thing to get 00:42:30.100 --> 00:42:30.420 going. 00:42:30.900 --> 00:42:34.900 But um hopefully people appreciated that and then you can do it again. 00:42:35.140 --> 00:42:35.380 Yeah. 00:42:35.540 --> 00:42:35.940 Yeah. 00:42:36.180 --> 00:42:42.100 Uh any uh any big any takeaway findings, talks, things that stuck with you from 00:42:42.100 --> 00:42:42.980 the conference? 00:42:43.220 --> 00:42:44.500 Oh, that's a tough one. 00:42:44.980 --> 00:42:46.770 Um what did you talk about? 00:42:46.850 --> 00:42:47.490 Either any of that? 00:42:47.730 --> 00:42:49.970 Yeah, yeah, what your talk could be your favorite talk. 00:42:50.290 --> 00:42:50.450 Exactly. 00:42:50.530 --> 00:42:50.930 That was definitely. 00:42:51.410 --> 00:42:52.210 I saw Greg's talk. 00:42:52.290 --> 00:42:52.690 It was very good. 00:42:52.850 --> 00:42:54.690 It was about laughter. 00:42:55.250 --> 00:43:01.250 You want to give the Yeah, well I'm um I just talked about um just kind of an 00:43:01.250 --> 00:43:07.170 incremental um uh finding in my own research program that was in 00:43:07.170 --> 00:43:11.860 collaboration with the folks I work with at the Bioacoustics Research Lab in France looking 00:43:11.860 --> 00:43:16.180 at um how volitional laughter functions as an effective signal and there aren't really 00:43:16.180 --> 00:43:20.740 laugh types that are associated with different meanings but instead laughter works on the 00:43:20.740 --> 00:43:25.860 dimension of valence in particular that allows people to communicate different kinds of uh 00:43:25.860 --> 00:43:27.940 meanings in their discourse. 00:43:28.260 --> 00:43:34.210 So like a evil laugh versus a happy laugh or well that those were two of the eight 00:43:34.450 --> 00:43:40.290 contexts we looked at and evil laugh which doesn't really happen in normal um 00:43:40.610 --> 00:43:41.170 conversation. 00:43:43.010 --> 00:43:48.770 Yeah it was kind of we included that to really see how a real category that we know exists 00:43:48.930 --> 00:43:51.330 how that would manifest in the data. 00:43:51.490 --> 00:43:51.730 Uh-huh. 00:43:51.890 --> 00:43:55.010 Um and that one was the only category that was highly recognizable. 00:43:56.380 --> 00:44:02.300 But yeah, it's uh just trying to figure out the puzzle of how nonverbal um vocalizations 00:44:02.460 --> 00:44:05.820 are you know perceived and what the acoustic features are. 00:44:06.300 --> 00:44:12.060 Do whales laugh not that I know of but I'm assuming they have play vocalizations of some 00:44:12.060 --> 00:44:12.300 sort. 00:44:12.540 --> 00:44:12.860 Right. 00:44:13.100 --> 00:44:14.540 Or play signals. 00:44:15.020 --> 00:44:15.180 Yeah. 00:44:15.650 --> 00:44:16.210 That makes sense. 00:44:16.690 --> 00:44:21.250 Yeah, but pro probably probably it wouldn't be how a how to cocoa has got me thinking about 00:44:21.250 --> 00:44:21.490 whales. 00:44:21.890 --> 00:44:21.970 Yeah. 00:44:22.130 --> 00:44:22.530 Yeah, no. 00:44:23.490 --> 00:44:23.890 Yeah, no. 00:44:24.050 --> 00:44:25.250 I would bet they'd have a place signal. 00:44:25.410 --> 00:44:30.130 But the odds of it being uh that there being convergence evolution toward the lap in 00:44:30.130 --> 00:44:32.610 particular is a place signal seems unlikely. 00:44:33.170 --> 00:44:33.570 Definitely. 00:44:33.730 --> 00:44:33.810 Yeah. 00:44:34.050 --> 00:44:34.210 Yeah. 00:44:34.370 --> 00:44:39.170 But I mean it th there could be some place signal that is um sort of appears within the 00:44:39.170 --> 00:44:40.690 repertoire that they already have. 00:44:40.850 --> 00:44:41.010 Yeah. 00:44:41.250 --> 00:44:44.700 Or it co evolves with their own localizations Yeah. 00:44:44.780 --> 00:44:48.300 Yeah, it would be cool to see if there's a particular vocal signature that happens at the 00:44:48.300 --> 00:44:49.660 onset of play behavior. 00:44:50.140 --> 00:44:50.540 Yeah. 00:44:50.780 --> 00:44:51.180 Yeah. 00:44:51.340 --> 00:44:53.340 Uh they probably have visual signals as well. 00:44:53.420 --> 00:44:54.220 I don't yeah, yeah. 00:44:54.300 --> 00:44:56.140 I don't know about whale play, have to say. 00:44:56.300 --> 00:44:56.780 Yeah. 00:44:57.100 --> 00:44:58.140 A little hard to measure. 00:45:01.420 --> 00:45:01.580 Yeah. 00:45:01.820 --> 00:45:03.100 Yeah, I don't want to dominate the podcast. 00:45:03.660 --> 00:45:04.490 No no, that's great, Frank. 00:45:04.650 --> 00:45:05.050 Thank you so much. 00:45:05.210 --> 00:45:05.610 Good to see you. 00:45:09.370 --> 00:45:09.930 Awesome. 00:45:10.890 --> 00:45:12.250 Yeah, two whales left.