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I'm David Pinsoff.

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And I'm David Petrozowski.

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Welcome to Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast.

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Actual evolutionary psychologist.

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Doing actual evolutionary psychology.

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All right, we'll try again.

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Try again.

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Okay.

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Boom, I shouldn't I could never be an actor.

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This is really hard.

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I know it's hard.

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It's hard.

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David, welcome to episode two of Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast.

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Really excited that I get to explain how

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I was bitten by a radioactive spider and became an evolutionary psychologist in this

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episode.

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Yeah.

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So uh I interviewed Dave in this episode, and we really go uh back into Dave's

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childhood.

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Like so this has some deep roots.

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Yeah, I um, you know, I think one of the things we want to do in this podcast is

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be sincere and genuine.

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And I think, you know, this I sort of opened the floodgates of that in this episode.

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Um, and David, your ability to ask questions concisely was an inspiration.

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I think the first episode I was a little bit nervous and hemming and hawing.

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And so um I think in this episode, um you were it's a it's a lovely example of your

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excellent questioning.

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And we cover a lot of ground, even though it's um deeply this is a a really deep one.

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We go into the the history of the discipline of psychology, um, how it how

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this discipline itself has been shaped by our evolved psychology, and how that has in some

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cases distorted it, um, and how we can correct for that as

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psychologists.

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We get into the mind, modularity, how we should carve up the mind into pieces,

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whether our intuitions about what's going on inside our heads are actually correct or not,

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in what ways they might be correct.

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I think we might have even had a disagreement about happiness.

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Was that this episode?

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I think it was.

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I think, yeah.

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In in uh yeah, I think we did disagree.

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This is the first moment we disagreed.

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And um and as the listeners will hear, um, it's actually one of the most fun things

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is to actually disagree on science.

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And so I think I think we ended up quickly resolving it, but it was there was a nice moment

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of of of of clashing perspectives there.

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I think, yeah, I think you will enjoy listening to it.

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Yeah.

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Exactly.

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So um yeah, so I think that's an excellent um summary.

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And without further ado, here is episode two.

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David interviews me about how I got into evolutionary psychology.

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All right.

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I think we're gone, sir.

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Yeah.

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All right.

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Well, Dave, um I see you as one of the most uh legit bona fide uh

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evolutionary psychologists on the planet, uh in terms of your your credentials.

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Um so you studied at the University of California Santa Barbara, uh under the

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tutelage of Leda Cosmodies and John Tuby, who uh literally invented the field of

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evolutionary psychology.

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So you studied under them, uh, you did a few postdocs, and then now you are a professor

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at Santa Barbara.

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At UCSP, that's right.

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At UCSP at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology.

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So um if anyone knows their shit about this field, it's you.

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Um so how did you get interested in this uh

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weird set of ideas.

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Um, presumably you weren't always interested in dedicating your life to the field of

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evolutionary psychology.

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Um what what moved you in that direction?

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Uh uh tell me about how you how you got into this.

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Yeah, I mean, I as we talked about, uh I think a lot of people um

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In certain areas of science, sort of have origin stories that are actual stories.

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You know, it wasn't just like kind of the next thing I moved into.

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And for me, um, evolutionary psychology was definitely something I didn't just sort

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of stumble into.

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Um, there was a very particular sort of moment where where I knew I wanted to do it.

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Um the acute event was I was actually in the library.

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So this was back in the days when dinosaurs roam dinosaurs roam the earth and um you had to

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go to the physical library to look up articles and books.

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Um and I was at the time, so I I thought originally in

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undergrad that I wanted to go into uh medical school.

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And um, but I didn't really like interacting with people

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as bodies.

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Um, right?

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I wanted to sort of I I that was not that wasn't as rewarding to me.

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Um, I didn't quite have the language of sort of levels of analysis where, you know, but I

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but kind of treating people as Dan Dana talks about as at the physical stance.

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I found the complexity of that interesting, but it wasn't rewarding.

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Um, and so I started taking psychology courses.

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I think I might have even been a psychology major at this point, but I was also taking a

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lot of anthropology courses.

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This was a small liberal arts college on the East Coast.

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It was a great education.

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I was able to basically do what typically grad students would do as an undergrad.

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Like I, you know, got to do like I measured single-celled neuron recordings

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and basically was, you know, like participating in research studies like a like a graduate

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student in my undergrad.

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Really good education, really happy with it.

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But uh, but it was in and it kind of gave me the the space to look at things other than

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just sort of psychology.

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And so I was actually an anthropology minor.

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Um and at the time in anthropology, um, again, this

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was when dinosaurs roamed the earth, you know, a really prevailing idea was this idea of

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cultural relativity.

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Um, this idea that sort of anything about humans, what they're like, what

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they need, their emotions, their feelings, sort of anything we experience, our values, is

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really culturally determined.

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And I remember reading ethnographies about places that where people are quite different.

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And that was really an impactful idea for me.

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And it's really interesting.

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I mean, the idea that, you know, you know, as you when you're a kid and you grow up, you

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sort of experience this thing of like, you know, you think your family is the way

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everything is, and then you start talking to kids when you're older and you realize, oh no,

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families are different, right?

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And this is sort of the next step up where you think, well, cultures are very different.

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Um and as a caveat, I want to say I know cultures are different.

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I just spent the last nine years living in Berlin, Germany.

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I'm having reverse culture shock, so culture is certainly a thing.

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But this this really strong idea that everything about

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sort of the way humans are is a function of culture.

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Um, again, I found that really interesting.

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Um, but it didn't quite jive with my um experience of life.

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Um I grew up in um sort of an interesting um I

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had a sort of interesting background where um I grew up in upstate New York.

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I had a pretty idyllic childhood.

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You know, everybody has different issues or struggles in their in their childhood.

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Um, I um um my mother is pretty religious, um,

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evangelical, um, but but even a level of evangelical that's sort of maybe one off of like

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attending basement like cults, um, sort of.

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Um and so I spent a lot of my um childhood sort of visiting various like kind

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of very evangelical almost cults in Western New York.

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And, you know, I'm not going to go into all the things that that you know

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that had an impact on me, obviously, but getting when I went to college and sort of

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coming out of that situation, the the idea that sort

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of um people could just sort of be whatever the local culture

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was telling you, um, it not only didn't sort of do seem to jive with

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um my experiences in that growing up, um, even though those were very different

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places th than sort of mainstream life.

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Um you know, So was it so was it that uh so you mentioned you were sort of found yourself

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on the periphery of religious cults.

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Um a cult is is, you know, presumably one of the best examples of the power of culture

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where you're literally willing to, you know, uh submerge your entire self and your identity

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uh into this uh worldview yeah and and sacrifice pretty much

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everything, you know, your your money, your time, your relationships in service of this I

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ideology.

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Um and so that would seem to be, you know, really powerful evidence that uh that

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that culture really is playing a constitutive role uh in in in

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our psychology.

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So was it was it more that you saw commonalities uh in in different

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cults that you know, even though the cult itself obviously had a lot of sway over people,

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that that you saw that it was the the sort of same mechanisms and themes were recurring uh

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in these different groups.

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Yeah, no, it's a good question.

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I mean, there's actually two answers to to that, and the short and simple

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answer is the beginning of it, of how you see a human

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nature in this context of why am I saying, you know, human nature, a view of human nature

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versus culture.

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Why am I saying human nature wins out based on this experience of being cults?

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Is that it was very personal, idiosyncratic to me, which was in me

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sort of um uh leaving that home environment, going to a normal college environment.

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I sort of struggled uh for various reasons to sort of just

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feel like a pretty like to just sort of like relax and just sort of be like a

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typical college student who didn't feel like um uh I had to,

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you know, be perfect.

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And if I wasn't perfect, um, bad things would happen, you know.

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And that was that was a function of sort of attending the the the the cults um or being

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very religious, but also sort of having to be very independent on my own, you know, like I

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was um uh I basically had to take care of myself from like middle school onward, my sister

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and I.

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So um okay and so the point, I think the for me, the experience was

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I'm going into this class, people are saying everything's just sort of there's no human

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nature.

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It's just malleable based on context.

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And it was sort of like, you know, I'm struggling with um

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figuring out sort of like how to be happy, basically.

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And uh that shouldn't be a struggle if sort of

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um uh the the way human nature works is that the

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people around you basically get to tell you what criteria to use to be happy, right?

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Like I was sort of miserable in the basement revival meetings.

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Um, you know, and then that was my own decision, you know, to sort of be like, I don't

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agree with what this person's saying.

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I think this person's a con artist.

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Like one of them actually even went to prison, I think, later.

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Um but um, but it but it it just I mean the simple answer is sort

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of people can't just choose to be happy based on any arbitrary

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criteria.

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And as a college student, that was sort of one of the that was sort of my my

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shorthand for there's a lot going on below the surface that uh

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if you don't respect it, it will kind of come back and bite you.

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Um, you know, and that there was something about sort of my intrinsic

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nature that didn't jive with um this religious experience.

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But then there was also something about that experience that was making me

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having to really adjust myself differently to like normal life, right?

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Um, and I think being aware that there was um this

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hidden human nature um that uh that wasn't just arbitrary

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and it wasn't as simple as sort of somebody tells you or coerces you into

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what you uh should be happy about.

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And it wasn't even as simple as like what I could tell myself rationally I should be happy

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about.

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I think for me personally, that um that was sort of what I was thinking about

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when I was walking through the library this one day, um, and uh

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thinking about cultural relativism.

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And I came across a book spine by called Human Universals.

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Um, and I just literally was like, you know, just walking past and I pulled it out.

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And what Human Universals was a book about exactly what

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it sounds like, human universals.

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These are um, and the and there's sort of more of a backstory we could go into in a second,

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but basically it's by an anthropologist, Don Brown, um, who happens to have been at UCSB.

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Um, and uh um his colleague Don Simons uh was uh is

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all was also an anthropologist here at UCSB and they were good friends.

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And Don Brown was coming from this very cultural determinism

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perspective.

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Don Simons was not, and they sort of had a friendly bet.

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And Don Brown said, I bet I bet there's really not very much that's universal.

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Don Simons thought there was.

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And so Don Brown, um, to his credit, you know, tested this idea and he looked into things.

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And he, to his surprise, you know, it wasn't one or two things.

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It it actually took up a book, right?

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And so um and that led to this book, Human Universals.

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And so when I just opened this book, looked at it, um, uh, I just sort of ate it up.

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And um, from that point on, it was this thing of uh, you know in in up

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to this point I would be reading articles and sort of making notes in margins and a lot of

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them were like no or why would this make you know this doesn't make sense and reading the

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Human Universals book was sort of I just felt this immediate sort of like oh yeah this is

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saying the things I couldn't articulate.

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And then I did the academic um typical thing of then you kind of read

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through the book, you look at the references, see who this person's citing.

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And I kept doing that.

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And that was when I um uh kept reading who people were citing, and then I eventually

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found um these people, um, Cosmedys and Tubi, Lita Cosmes and John Tubi, and

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um and especially reading their work.

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And and there there was also wonderful other work, um, Don Simons especially.

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Um, but but reading their work, it was it was not only that I wasn't not marking up the

235
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margins with negative things, it was just sort of it was I was marking up the margins with

236
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positive things and and um it just really spoke to um it was our

237
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it was spoke to what I was thinking about and feeling.

238
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Um and um in the fullness of time I have a much richer sort of vocabulary

239
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of exactly what what it was that I was sort of intellectually curious about and

240
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wanting to do.

241
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Um but uh but how I just described it was sort of the on the ground um

242
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feelings, and that was sort of how I discovered it.

243
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You know, it's it's worth reflecting on on Donald Brown's

244
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list of human universals.

245
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So I remember when I when I was first getting into evolutionary psychology and I was

246
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reading um Stephen Pinker's book, The Blank Slate, he had an appendix to the blank slate,

247
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Donald Brown's list of universals.

248
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Uh and he just lists all of them out in alphabetical order, all of the things that he found

249
00:17:04,390 --> 00:17:08,390
in all of the different cultures and ethnographic records that he looked at.

250
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And I remember looking at that list and feeling a kind of awe at um, you know,

251
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seeing you know the the essence of of human nature.

252
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Um and so I think it's worth just here.

253
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I'm just gonna go through the A's.

254
00:17:24,310 --> 00:17:25,590
I've pulled up the list right here.

255
00:17:25,750 --> 00:17:25,910
Yeah.

256
00:17:26,230 --> 00:17:31,360
Um, so starting with A, uh his list of human universals that he's found evidence for in all

257
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the ethnographic records he's looked at.

258
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Abstraction in speech and thought.

259
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Actions under self-control distinguished from those not

260
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under control.

261
00:17:45,440 --> 00:17:48,640
And I know you've actually written a lot about that, and we'll we'll get to that later on

262
00:17:48,640 --> 00:17:53,040
in the episode: this difference between whether an action is under control or not and what

263
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what this free will debate is all about.

264
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But it's interesting that that is one of uh Don Brown's universals.

265
00:17:59,290 --> 00:18:00,970
Uh aesthetics.

266
00:18:01,290 --> 00:18:04,410
All cultures have some idea of beauty.

267
00:18:04,570 --> 00:18:08,330
Um affection, expressed and felt.

268
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Seems pretty obvious, but it's kind of cool that it's it's

269
00:18:14,570 --> 00:18:18,970
presumably a good candidate for being a part of human nature or various affections.

270
00:18:19,130 --> 00:18:24,890
Uh age grades, age statuses, um, age terms.

271
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Age is a is a hugely important part of human social life.

272
00:18:29,640 --> 00:18:35,080
It makes sense that age would be important in a variety of different cultures.

273
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Ambivalence the concept of ambivalence

274
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anthropomorphism.

275
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So imputing human traits to uh you know plants or animals or artifacts

276
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antonyms, things being the opposite of one another.

277
00:18:53,130 --> 00:18:54,490
So I've just made it through the A's.

278
00:18:54,570 --> 00:18:54,730
Yeah.

279
00:18:55,050 --> 00:18:56,810
And there are there are many more on this list.

280
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And and just uh just going through them all and just taking your time and letting each one

281
00:19:00,730 --> 00:19:03,930
sink in is a kind of meditative experience.

282
00:19:04,410 --> 00:19:10,410
Um and I I found it so I I certainly sympathize with with this book sort of uh

283
00:19:10,570 --> 00:19:13,850
being a kind of paradigm changer for you.

284
00:19:14,490 --> 00:19:16,810
Uh it was for me as well.

285
00:19:18,640 --> 00:19:24,560
And uh so it seems like what I'm hearing from you is that having

286
00:19:24,560 --> 00:19:30,160
grown up around these really powerful cultural forces, these you know, these religious

287
00:19:30,160 --> 00:19:36,080
mythologies, these cults, um, and their failure to imprint themselves on you

288
00:19:36,160 --> 00:19:42,160
and and sort of make you into their image, that these failures sort of gave you

289
00:19:42,160 --> 00:19:47,710
an inkling that that there's really something more than these uh cultural ideas, that

290
00:19:47,710 --> 00:19:49,070
there's such a thing as human nature.

291
00:19:49,230 --> 00:19:54,750
There's something inside you that that isn't just these mythologies and these ideas,

292
00:19:54,910 --> 00:19:58,350
there's something in you that resisted them and that pushed back against them.

293
00:19:58,510 --> 00:19:59,230
What is that?

294
00:19:59,390 --> 00:20:00,670
Where does it come from?

295
00:20:01,150 --> 00:20:06,640
Uh and it seems like that was the question that sort of ultimately drew you to this this

296
00:20:06,640 --> 00:20:07,280
field of study.

297
00:20:07,360 --> 00:20:08,560
Is that a fair question?

298
00:20:08,640 --> 00:20:08,880
Yeah.

299
00:20:08,960 --> 00:20:14,480
And I think, I mean, at the time I was very, I think appropriately for my

300
00:20:14,480 --> 00:20:16,400
circumstances, very focused on myself.

301
00:20:16,480 --> 00:20:20,160
But I think it also having that experience did two other things.

302
00:20:20,400 --> 00:20:26,240
One was I was also looking at people who, you know, the people who

303
00:20:26,240 --> 00:20:32,150
were I to characterize it too, I mean, it was it what it what it really looked like

304
00:20:32,150 --> 00:20:38,150
was there was sort of there was typically like one sort of charismatic

305
00:20:38,150 --> 00:20:42,870
leader or preacher, you know, and this even involved like you know literally a basement

306
00:20:42,950 --> 00:20:48,870
religious services, um uh where but there were like maybe four

307
00:20:48,870 --> 00:20:54,790
to five or you know bigger numbers of people in the congregation.

308
00:20:55,430 --> 00:21:01,420
And the um The people in the

309
00:21:01,420 --> 00:21:06,940
congregation, they were clearly on board and affected by this.

310
00:21:07,180 --> 00:21:12,620
And I was looking at sort of the um the speaker or the pastor, this

311
00:21:12,620 --> 00:21:18,140
charismatic person, and I think you know, sort of almost if if to to get it an image of it,

312
00:21:18,220 --> 00:21:24,190
it would be sort of like you know, um televangelist sort of spittle throbbing temples

313
00:21:24,270 --> 00:21:25,950
sort of kind of thing, you know.

314
00:21:26,990 --> 00:21:32,830
And uh and it really it had sort of a scam feel to it, even for me at

315
00:21:33,230 --> 00:21:33,550
a time.

316
00:21:33,710 --> 00:21:38,590
And so I think it um but clearly people were getting something out of it.

317
00:21:38,670 --> 00:21:43,920
And I don't I don't have strong um I don't have a strong sort of

318
00:21:43,920 --> 00:21:45,840
anti-religious feeling.

319
00:21:46,080 --> 00:21:50,480
I think I did afterwards, but I think I've kind of come full circle around that.

320
00:21:50,560 --> 00:21:54,000
Um, and I think I've sort of made peace with that, and that's something to talk about

321
00:21:54,000 --> 00:21:54,400
later.

322
00:21:54,560 --> 00:22:00,000
But um uh but I think there were two things.

323
00:22:00,160 --> 00:22:06,030
One is it made me realize that what how people work is important because I was

324
00:22:06,030 --> 00:22:11,230
looking at people whose lives, like these were people who did not have a lot of money.

325
00:22:11,470 --> 00:22:16,430
They had rusty cars in Buffalo, New York, and they were giving their money to somebody who

326
00:22:16,430 --> 00:22:19,070
had a Porsche in the garage.

327
00:22:19,630 --> 00:22:22,510
Um, and that made a big impact on me.

328
00:22:22,590 --> 00:22:28,590
Like these things have consequences, and sort of what so so there was even at a young

329
00:22:28,590 --> 00:22:34,480
age, was this idea sort of that you really have to take seriously people's beliefs

330
00:22:34,560 --> 00:22:40,480
and sort of getting it right is not a um it's not a feckless

331
00:22:41,040 --> 00:22:41,520
thing.

332
00:22:41,680 --> 00:22:47,280
And so I think I really took seriously criticizing and thinking about ideas.

333
00:22:47,440 --> 00:22:53,440
And I think the one good skill it gave me, this is the second thing, is that um I

334
00:22:53,440 --> 00:22:54,560
got really good.

335
00:22:54,800 --> 00:23:00,430
What I basically spent my time doing was just sort of deconstructing what the

336
00:23:00,430 --> 00:23:01,790
preacher was doing.

337
00:23:02,030 --> 00:23:03,870
Because that's, you know, I was bored.

338
00:23:03,950 --> 00:23:06,830
I was sitting in this thing for hours at a time.

339
00:23:07,070 --> 00:23:08,670
There was nothing else to do.

340
00:23:08,910 --> 00:23:12,110
So I think it really honed my critical thinking.

341
00:23:12,590 --> 00:23:18,510
Um, and it was my freedom and independence and autonomy in

342
00:23:18,510 --> 00:23:24,460
power was, you know, my my mother wanted me to be

343
00:23:24,460 --> 00:23:24,700
there.

344
00:23:24,860 --> 00:23:26,860
I couldn't leave because I was a kid.

345
00:23:27,020 --> 00:23:32,220
But what I could do and what nobody could take away from me was my ability to sort of say,

346
00:23:32,460 --> 00:23:34,140
what is does this make sense?

347
00:23:34,380 --> 00:23:36,380
What do I actually think about this?

348
00:23:36,620 --> 00:23:42,460
Um and I think that that really honed my um my sort of critical

349
00:23:42,460 --> 00:23:43,100
thinking.

350
00:23:43,340 --> 00:23:49,210
Um and so I think um, you know I don't

351
00:23:49,210 --> 00:23:54,730
think it's the kind of thing that was a good experience, um, but there's

352
00:23:54,730 --> 00:23:57,130
always pluses and minuses to things.

353
00:23:57,210 --> 00:24:02,890
And I think it's certainly like um it gave there there were there were there were

354
00:24:02,890 --> 00:24:08,810
benefits to um in retrospect, um, you

355
00:24:08,810 --> 00:24:14,330
can see where sort of the combination of like it's important to get ideas right

356
00:24:14,730 --> 00:24:17,840
and um and I'm not saying my ideas are right.

357
00:24:17,920 --> 00:24:18,800
I don't think that's true.

358
00:24:18,960 --> 00:24:21,840
I think they're um, I'm just trying to make it more right.

359
00:24:22,000 --> 00:24:27,520
Um, um, but uh um, but but in honing that

360
00:24:27,520 --> 00:24:33,520
criticism skill um in a way that is not just about, and to bring it back to your thing,

361
00:24:33,600 --> 00:24:34,640
sort of about status.

362
00:24:34,800 --> 00:24:40,640
Like I wasn't concerned about, I wasn't looking at somebody using ideas and

363
00:24:40,640 --> 00:24:45,350
beliefs and rhetoric to improve their status and thinking that's what I want to do.

364
00:24:45,590 --> 00:24:49,590
I was looking at somebody doing that and saying, my God, that's horrible.

365
00:24:50,870 --> 00:24:54,630
And that's the that's almost the enemy.

366
00:24:55,030 --> 00:25:00,710
And so I think um and I actually think that's one of the things that attracted me to

367
00:25:00,710 --> 00:25:06,360
evolutionary psychology was um And there's a lot of,

368
00:25:06,520 --> 00:25:11,960
especially in popular presentations, there's a lot of sort of cynical

369
00:25:11,960 --> 00:25:13,160
evolutionary psychology.

370
00:25:13,240 --> 00:25:19,000
There's a lot of very superficial things, and it is often used to for for various

371
00:25:19,000 --> 00:25:24,280
purposes that I don't think are consistent with its core, but which is again something to

372
00:25:24,280 --> 00:25:25,880
talk about at another time.

373
00:25:26,120 --> 00:25:30,520
But I think ultimately what I was really appealing to

374
00:25:32,370 --> 00:25:38,210
to me about evolutionary psychology was not that it was controversial, not that

375
00:25:38,210 --> 00:25:43,330
it was cynical, um, not that it was patriarchal, like and I don't think it is.

376
00:25:43,410 --> 00:25:47,170
Um, and I would disagree with, I mean, I think people try to use it that way.

377
00:25:47,250 --> 00:25:51,970
I think people or people, you can be an evolutionary psychologist about how people are

378
00:25:51,970 --> 00:25:54,530
going to use science, and that falls out nicely.

379
00:25:54,690 --> 00:26:00,240
But but leaving that aside, what I really found appealing, especially about um

380
00:26:00,480 --> 00:26:06,320
Lita and John's work, was it was sort of courageous in the same way as it really spoke to

381
00:26:06,320 --> 00:26:12,320
this kid in these basement revival meetings, um, where it was sort of like it matters

382
00:26:12,320 --> 00:26:18,130
if something's true, even if everybody um thinks it's true, it might not

383
00:26:18,130 --> 00:26:18,930
be true.

384
00:26:19,810 --> 00:26:25,810
And uh and what's the argument and what's the logic and that

385
00:26:25,970 --> 00:26:31,890
sort of spirit of um being courageous even when everyone

386
00:26:31,890 --> 00:26:37,880
else around you is sort of saying something and is going along with something, but

387
00:26:37,880 --> 00:26:40,120
it doesn't quite make sense.

388
00:26:40,440 --> 00:26:43,640
Um that that was really appealing, I think.

389
00:26:43,720 --> 00:26:49,560
And that was a big part of um uh um of

390
00:26:49,560 --> 00:26:52,280
that approach um I think for me.

391
00:26:55,000 --> 00:27:00,030
Well I mean you you mention the prevailing ideas at the time, and they're still somewhat

392
00:27:00,030 --> 00:27:03,390
popular, these ideas about cultural relativism.

393
00:27:03,550 --> 00:27:08,110
Um Tubi and Cosmedys refer to them as the standard social science model.

394
00:27:08,270 --> 00:27:14,190
It's it's essentially a blank slate model of the mind or something quite close to it.

395
00:27:14,350 --> 00:27:20,120
Um that they're uh we we are we basically come into the world empty of

396
00:27:20,360 --> 00:27:26,040
instincts or intuitions or predispositions or drives or

397
00:27:26,040 --> 00:27:27,160
anything like that.

398
00:27:27,480 --> 00:27:32,840
And we basically absorb the entirety of who we are from our surroundings, in particular our

399
00:27:32,840 --> 00:27:35,000
cultural surroundings.

400
00:27:35,720 --> 00:27:41,570
And that idea, for whatever reason, has really been a powerful idea within

401
00:27:41,570 --> 00:27:43,410
academia and social science.

402
00:27:43,810 --> 00:27:47,650
And it's interesting why that way of thinking has been so appealing.

403
00:27:47,730 --> 00:27:52,850
I mean, you could do some evolutionary psychology to try to explain what is appealing about

404
00:27:52,850 --> 00:27:56,290
this idea of cultural determinism and blank sladism.

405
00:27:57,490 --> 00:28:03,300
I mean, maybe it is analogous to the kinds of cult-like mentalities that you were

406
00:28:03,300 --> 00:28:07,860
exposed to in the sense that all cults have an interest in social control.

407
00:28:08,340 --> 00:28:14,260
And what blank slatist ideology gives you is a reason to think that social control

408
00:28:14,260 --> 00:28:15,700
is going to be effective.

409
00:28:16,740 --> 00:28:20,420
It's a justification for social control at the end of the day.

410
00:28:20,820 --> 00:28:26,660
I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of totalitarian ideologies, uh, from you know

411
00:28:26,740 --> 00:28:32,650
uh Maoism to uh Stalinism, that they have a kind of blank slatist view of the mind

412
00:28:32,650 --> 00:28:38,490
at their core, that we can remake uh human beings into uh vessels of the

413
00:28:38,490 --> 00:28:39,050
state.

414
00:28:39,290 --> 00:28:44,970
Uh we can we can make them into you know perfect um citizens uh through

415
00:28:44,970 --> 00:28:50,010
indoctrination um and and re-education um

416
00:28:50,800 --> 00:28:56,240
so yeah, I'm curious about your thoughts on that, on the parallels between this so-called

417
00:28:56,240 --> 00:29:02,000
standard social science model and number one, uh your upbringing,

418
00:29:02,240 --> 00:29:07,360
uh and number two, your desire to

419
00:29:08,000 --> 00:29:12,320
cut through the bullshit and and retain a sense of autonomy.

420
00:29:12,800 --> 00:29:17,810
Yeah, and I and just to follow up on what you're saying, I mean I also think that um it

421
00:29:17,810 --> 00:29:23,410
reminds me a little bit about your uh political propaganda um work

422
00:29:23,570 --> 00:29:29,250
too, that you know, and then this is an idea um I've heard other people mention this is not

423
00:29:29,250 --> 00:29:34,770
my idea, but you know, it's no coincidence that people who work for a living

424
00:29:35,010 --> 00:29:40,800
making ideas are uh incentivized to sort of uh work

425
00:29:40,960 --> 00:29:46,880
in a rubric that says ideology or esoteric ideas are really important,

426
00:29:47,360 --> 00:29:47,680
right?

427
00:29:47,920 --> 00:29:53,520
Like um uh and so and I think if you look historically, I mean um

428
00:29:54,320 --> 00:30:00,080
I was just um you know talking about um the history of

429
00:30:00,080 --> 00:30:02,800
public relations in in an intro class.

430
00:30:02,880 --> 00:30:08,650
Um so Edward Renet's uh really interesting um person who basically started the

431
00:30:08,650 --> 00:30:14,490
field of public relations, although at the time it was called propaganda prior to uh or

432
00:30:14,490 --> 00:30:16,170
during the First World War.

433
00:30:16,410 --> 00:30:22,170
Um his um uh the the idea that sort of

434
00:30:22,890 --> 00:30:28,890
um there's an opportunity, uh, sets of people who say there's an opportunity to to

435
00:30:28,890 --> 00:30:34,660
use uh what we know about the design of the mind to um to essentially

436
00:30:34,660 --> 00:30:35,860
manipulate people, right?

437
00:30:35,940 --> 00:30:39,540
To like get them to buy product or to get them to think in a certain way.

438
00:30:40,100 --> 00:30:43,780
Obviously that's not reserved for totalitarian regimes.

439
00:30:43,860 --> 00:30:49,700
And it's um, you know, whether the people who are interested in doing it

440
00:30:49,700 --> 00:30:51,060
are can be horrible people.

441
00:30:51,140 --> 00:30:54,020
Like I mean, I think Edward Bernese by all accounts was that.

442
00:30:54,180 --> 00:30:59,300
I mean he one of his first jobs was to convince, figure out a way to convince women who are

443
00:30:59,300 --> 00:31:02,630
not smoking as a population to smoke.

444
00:31:02,710 --> 00:31:07,910
Um, you know, you could probably do some actuarial statistics on the consequences of that,

445
00:31:07,990 --> 00:31:12,870
but I don't think you would need to see that to know that's probably a bad idea for women

446
00:31:12,870 --> 00:31:15,110
and babies and lots of people.

447
00:31:15,350 --> 00:31:20,950
Um uh but um uh but there's an

448
00:31:21,190 --> 00:31:26,790
there's these just institutional structural s incentives for uh the use

449
00:31:27,110 --> 00:31:31,080
of ideas and psychology towards certain ends, right?

450
00:31:31,240 --> 00:31:37,160
And I think if you if you think there's basic funding for research, but then there's

451
00:31:37,160 --> 00:31:42,840
a lot of interest in sort of for-profit uses as well, um, it's not

452
00:31:42,840 --> 00:31:48,200
surprising that just from a purely sort of institutional selection pressure

453
00:31:48,200 --> 00:31:53,560
perspective, the ideas that um uh

454
00:31:54,470 --> 00:31:59,830
what you tell people will change what they do um

455
00:32:00,470 --> 00:32:06,470
will be selected for in the sense of if you're a corporation and you wanna have advertising

456
00:32:06,470 --> 00:32:11,350
and you want to pay people um and if you have a psychologist who says actually what you

457
00:32:11,350 --> 00:32:16,870
tell people isn't gonna affect um how they purchase things, they're not gonna have a job,

458
00:32:17,030 --> 00:32:17,270
right?

459
00:32:17,510 --> 00:32:22,220
Because they've just told the company that, you know, I'm useless to you.

460
00:32:22,380 --> 00:32:28,300
Um but if somebody says, you know, look, I can um I either know

461
00:32:28,300 --> 00:32:33,100
now or I have a method for determining um how to get women to smoke.

462
00:32:33,260 --> 00:32:35,180
You know, I'll get back to you, right?

463
00:32:35,500 --> 00:32:41,180
Um uh that the implicit in that or explicit in that is this idea that um

464
00:32:41,340 --> 00:32:46,780
the ideas that we have um and what we show to people will

465
00:32:47,050 --> 00:32:49,610
change them or determine what they do.

466
00:32:49,850 --> 00:32:55,370
And so if you just imagine what kind of institutional structure uh

467
00:32:55,610 --> 00:33:01,370
selection, what ideas sort of would follow from that, you would expect that a professional

468
00:33:01,370 --> 00:33:07,290
community of people who study the mind, um, uh, some subset of that, you're

469
00:33:07,290 --> 00:33:13,130
gonna probably likely get ideas around the idea that um people are pretty

470
00:33:13,130 --> 00:33:14,250
manipulatable.

471
00:33:14,650 --> 00:33:19,020
Uh um ideas are really important.

472
00:33:19,820 --> 00:33:25,820
And the ideas of the information we provide to people are is really powerful.

473
00:33:25,980 --> 00:33:28,780
And we are the powerful stewards of that.

474
00:33:29,500 --> 00:33:32,060
And that gives people status.

475
00:33:32,860 --> 00:33:38,540
It's a motivation or a justification for paying them or for giving them positions.

476
00:33:38,700 --> 00:33:44,650
And so so that's my take on why um why the uh

477
00:33:44,970 --> 00:33:50,650
why the idea of um any any idea that sort of people are malleable

478
00:33:50,890 --> 00:33:56,490
or people um are people need our ideas in order to be

479
00:33:56,490 --> 00:33:57,130
okay.

480
00:33:57,290 --> 00:34:01,610
Um you you can you can see why that would be a selected for idea.

481
00:34:01,690 --> 00:34:07,290
Um there's different translations of that core idea, but I think the idea that like um boy,

482
00:34:07,360 --> 00:34:10,240
you really need us or or you're not gonna be okay.

483
00:34:10,320 --> 00:34:15,680
Um I buy that 100%.

484
00:34:16,560 --> 00:34:22,160
Um it's a very self-aggrandizing way of thinking that if everything is

485
00:34:22,160 --> 00:34:27,440
determined by culture and ideas, uh, and we are the people who understand culture and

486
00:34:27,440 --> 00:34:32,490
ideas, well then we're by definition the most powerful people in the world.

487
00:34:32,650 --> 00:34:35,290
Um, listen to us, give us power.

488
00:34:35,450 --> 00:34:39,930
Um, we know what to do, we know how to sell your product, we know how to get people to

489
00:34:39,930 --> 00:34:44,650
behave how you want them to behave, we know how to design policy, you know, put us in

490
00:34:44,650 --> 00:34:48,090
government, uh, put us in positions of of influence.

491
00:34:48,410 --> 00:34:54,090
Um yeah, uh it's it's very sensible that the social science, the social

492
00:34:54,090 --> 00:34:59,980
sciences, in absence of a strong theoretical framework to constrain them, will tend to go

493
00:34:59,980 --> 00:35:01,900
in these self-aggrandizing directions.

494
00:35:02,060 --> 00:35:06,620
You could almost predict it from an evolutionary psychological perspective.

495
00:35:10,060 --> 00:35:12,940
The idea of evolutionary psychology is actually not new.

496
00:35:13,420 --> 00:35:19,020
Darwin himself, uh, in 1859 said that uh evolution is

497
00:35:19,090 --> 00:35:21,490
basically going to be a game changer for for psychology.

498
00:35:21,650 --> 00:35:25,250
He wrote, you know, psychology will be placed on a new foundation.

499
00:35:25,570 --> 00:35:31,170
Uh and yet, for some reason, and we could talk about the reasons why, uh, it took nearly

500
00:35:31,170 --> 00:35:37,010
two centuries for Darwin's vision to come to fruition, for the social sciences to actually

501
00:35:37,010 --> 00:35:41,970
adopt evolution as an organizing uh theoretical framework.

502
00:35:42,370 --> 00:35:47,900
Um, and well, what happens when you don't have an organizing

503
00:35:47,980 --> 00:35:53,580
theoretical framework that is correct to constrain uh your

504
00:35:53,580 --> 00:35:54,380
research?

505
00:35:54,700 --> 00:35:59,820
Well, it's going to go in the directions that we would expect, you know, humans to go in

506
00:35:59,820 --> 00:36:03,980
the absence of any constraints, which is namely self-aggrandizement.

507
00:36:04,540 --> 00:36:10,070
Um so it's it's a cynical way of of looking at uh

508
00:36:10,390 --> 00:36:12,230
the social sciences.

509
00:36:12,550 --> 00:36:18,230
Um and I think it's an argument in favor of

510
00:36:18,470 --> 00:36:22,790
uh bringing evolution or at least rigorous conceptions of evolution into the social

511
00:36:22,790 --> 00:36:23,030
sciences.

512
00:36:23,830 --> 00:36:27,750
Certainly there are ways of using evolutionary psychology in manipulative and

513
00:36:27,750 --> 00:36:29,990
propagandistic ways as well, as you mentioned.

514
00:36:30,230 --> 00:36:34,710
So it's not that it's impossible to run in these sort of self aggrandizing or

515
00:36:34,710 --> 00:36:38,150
propagandistic directions once you adopt an evolutionary perspective.

516
00:36:38,390 --> 00:36:40,680
Um the hope is that it will be harder.

517
00:36:41,480 --> 00:36:46,760
Um, that there are, you know, a few more con a few more constraints on ongoing in those

518
00:36:46,760 --> 00:36:48,200
kinds of of directions.

519
00:36:48,360 --> 00:36:53,320
And in particular, the hope is that the more rigorously you apply evolutionary principles,

520
00:36:53,480 --> 00:36:59,090
evolutionary game theory, um, the harder it will be to

521
00:36:59,490 --> 00:37:04,370
to move in erroneous, uh self-serving or self-aggrandizing directions.

522
00:37:04,610 --> 00:37:07,010
Um there's a wonderful quote, I forget who said it.

523
00:37:07,170 --> 00:37:13,090
Um uh it's it's easy to lie with statistics, but it's even easier to

524
00:37:13,090 --> 00:37:14,210
lie without them.

525
00:37:14,770 --> 00:37:17,890
Um I think the same is true uh with with good theory.

526
00:37:17,970 --> 00:37:21,570
You know, it's easy to lie with with a good theory or manipulate, but it's even harder to

527
00:37:21,570 --> 00:37:27,480
sorry it's even easier to lie um without a good theory, where you're just free to come

528
00:37:27,480 --> 00:37:30,040
up with ever what whatever ideas you want.

529
00:37:32,520 --> 00:37:38,520
So that is a long-winded way of saying we need more rigorous

530
00:37:38,520 --> 00:37:44,520
applications of evolutionary theory in the social sciences as a as a check on our

531
00:37:44,520 --> 00:37:49,800
all-too human tendencies toward self-deception, self-aggrandizement, et cetera.

532
00:37:51,320 --> 00:37:56,610
What we're getting into right now is a is a really interesting topic that that you call the

533
00:37:56,610 --> 00:37:59,570
evolutionary psychology of psychology.

534
00:38:00,370 --> 00:38:05,410
I know that has been an attractive topic for you uh in recent years.

535
00:38:05,570 --> 00:38:08,210
I think it's a fascinating topic.

536
00:38:08,450 --> 00:38:13,250
Uh I'd love to hear your thoughts about what the evolutionary of sorry, what the

537
00:38:13,250 --> 00:38:17,520
evolutionary psychology of psychology is and why it is important to study.

538
00:38:17,920 --> 00:38:18,640
Yeah, yeah.

539
00:38:18,800 --> 00:38:20,320
Um yeah, thanks.

540
00:38:20,480 --> 00:38:25,840
Um and I think I think there's sort of a there's sort of two ways to answer that.

541
00:38:25,920 --> 00:38:31,920
One is to say, well, what's the psychology people are using to um uh to study

542
00:38:31,920 --> 00:38:32,480
the mind?

543
00:38:32,720 --> 00:38:38,270
And a lot of the work that you're alluding to is work that addresses that issue, and we can

544
00:38:38,270 --> 00:38:38,990
sort of talk about that.

545
00:38:39,150 --> 00:38:43,470
I think there's a second related issue, which has to do with the history of psychology,

546
00:38:43,550 --> 00:38:46,430
which is sort of more related to what we were just talking about, right?

547
00:38:46,590 --> 00:38:51,870
Which was um why um this idea of self

548
00:38:51,950 --> 00:38:57,790
aggrandizement and what what sort of ends uh the science

549
00:38:57,790 --> 00:39:00,670
um is is sort of trying to achieve.

550
00:39:00,910 --> 00:39:06,860
Um and um and I think you can do the evolutionary psychology of both that

551
00:39:06,860 --> 00:39:12,860
history um with that additional issue of sort of self aggrandizement and then

552
00:39:13,020 --> 00:39:16,780
and then do this sort of more delineated thing.

553
00:39:16,940 --> 00:39:21,260
As an academic, what I'm doing right now is sort of that more delineated thing.

554
00:39:21,420 --> 00:39:27,180
Um and I just want to say um before I get to the to the psychology part, um

555
00:39:27,420 --> 00:39:32,330
the self aggrandizement thing, I want to be clear too, that like I think

556
00:39:32,970 --> 00:39:38,170
institutions and their selection pressures, if you want to put it that way, are different

557
00:39:38,170 --> 00:39:40,090
from the motivations of individual people.

558
00:39:40,250 --> 00:39:45,690
I think that most people don't uh really want to help people

559
00:39:46,090 --> 00:39:52,010
and are motivated to genuinely, and many people go into science and I do believe science

560
00:39:52,010 --> 00:39:57,860
generally helps people, but I think you can also be a very well

561
00:39:58,020 --> 00:40:02,740
intended therapist who believes in repressed memory

562
00:40:04,100 --> 00:40:09,860
ideas and their sort of cultural force reasons why or cultural

563
00:40:09,860 --> 00:40:15,460
epidemiological ideas for why something like repressed

564
00:40:15,460 --> 00:40:19,590
memory therapy became popular and became what therapists believed.

565
00:40:19,670 --> 00:40:24,470
And so individual people being very well intended can do really terrible things, for

566
00:40:24,470 --> 00:40:30,390
example, you know, because of the prevailing ideas that sort of just succeed for sort

567
00:40:30,390 --> 00:40:35,270
of dumb differential reproductive success reasons, right?

568
00:40:35,350 --> 00:40:41,190
And so I want to be clear in talking about sort of um the cynical approach to sort of the

569
00:40:41,190 --> 00:40:42,710
history of psychology.

570
00:40:43,030 --> 00:40:46,790
I think it's it's often sort of on the backs of well-intended people.

571
00:40:46,950 --> 00:40:52,320
Um the institutions may not the structure is sort of orthogonal to that so I just want to I

572
00:40:52,320 --> 00:40:58,000
want to be clear um um uh for that um in terms of the

573
00:40:58,000 --> 00:41:03,920
psychology um of psychology um there's really um

574
00:41:04,560 --> 00:41:10,320
uh boy there's a lot to say on that I mean the basic idea is that um

575
00:41:11,530 --> 00:41:16,810
almost all sciences go through a period of just

576
00:41:17,610 --> 00:41:19,770
kind of collecting data.

577
00:41:21,130 --> 00:41:26,570
You know, like the um uh you know, astronomy is a really good example of that, where you

578
00:41:26,570 --> 00:41:30,090
just sort of collect a bunch of data and you look out in the sky and you just sort of see

579
00:41:30,170 --> 00:41:34,170
like you know, dots of light and stars and planets and things moving.

580
00:41:34,410 --> 00:41:38,420
And of course, um, you know, there was no Netflix back then.

581
00:41:38,500 --> 00:41:43,300
So people got pretty good at knowing what was going on with all the stars and the planets

582
00:41:43,300 --> 00:41:44,020
and things.

583
00:41:44,260 --> 00:41:50,260
Um and uh there's a certain point where the data gets

584
00:41:50,260 --> 00:41:54,980
organized and you know, there are these things like planetary regressions, right?

585
00:41:55,060 --> 00:42:00,420
These little, so the the stars would sort of all move uniformly with respect to each other,

586
00:42:00,500 --> 00:42:06,350
but there'd be smaller objects that were moving at a rate each night across the sky, but

587
00:42:06,350 --> 00:42:07,950
then they would sort of do these regressions.

588
00:42:08,030 --> 00:42:10,110
And so there were these ellipses, right?

589
00:42:10,750 --> 00:42:16,350
Um and I went to Poland when I was in Berlin, and there was like a statue of

590
00:42:16,350 --> 00:42:18,430
Copernicus in Warsaw.

591
00:42:18,590 --> 00:42:22,830
Um and uh so it was sort of reflecting on what Copernicus did.

592
00:42:22,910 --> 00:42:26,750
And there's a really nice book called The Copernican Revolution by the historian of science

593
00:42:26,830 --> 00:42:30,670
Thomas Kuhn, who's famous for the um, what is the book called?

594
00:42:30,750 --> 00:42:34,300
I can't even think of the Kuhn book of scientific revolution.

595
00:42:34,540 --> 00:42:35,900
Structure of scientific revolutions, of course.

596
00:42:35,980 --> 00:42:36,380
Yeah, yeah.

597
00:42:36,540 --> 00:42:38,380
Excellent book if anybody hasn't read it.

598
00:42:38,460 --> 00:42:39,980
It's very well written.

599
00:42:41,020 --> 00:42:47,020
But the the thing Copernicus did, you know, everybody sort of knows that Copernicus shifted

600
00:42:47,180 --> 00:42:52,540
the um the geocentric model of the universe to the heliocentric, right?

601
00:42:52,620 --> 00:42:54,940
That the sun is the center and not the earth.

602
00:42:55,100 --> 00:43:00,670
Um and you know, part of that was um was because of these little uh planetary

603
00:43:00,670 --> 00:43:06,350
ellipses, like realizing that it wasn't that we were the center and the planets were

604
00:43:06,350 --> 00:43:08,670
actually doing these little ellipses.

605
00:43:08,910 --> 00:43:14,830
It was that if you're on a rotating body in orbit with another

606
00:43:14,830 --> 00:43:20,110
rote body rotating in orbit, and the orbit of one body is in

607
00:43:20,110 --> 00:43:26,060
different uh size than yours, then as you're traveling, there's

608
00:43:26,060 --> 00:43:27,980
basically apparent motion, right?

609
00:43:28,140 --> 00:43:32,940
It's a little hard to draw it, you know, over this, but basically as one, as one thing is

610
00:43:32,940 --> 00:43:37,660
moving past another, there'll be a point where the um it'll look like it kind of moves

611
00:43:37,660 --> 00:43:39,660
backwards as they're going through their different orbits.

612
00:43:39,740 --> 00:43:42,540
Like I, you know, there's nice animations you can look up.

613
00:43:42,780 --> 00:43:48,630
Um the so the conclusion was the center of of the

614
00:43:48,630 --> 00:43:50,070
universe per se, right?

615
00:43:50,150 --> 00:43:52,230
Was was sort of the sun versus the earth.

616
00:43:52,310 --> 00:43:54,550
That's sort of the textbook thing.

617
00:43:55,030 --> 00:44:01,030
But the bigger approach was um what Copernicus did is he contextualized

618
00:44:01,030 --> 00:44:03,030
the observations of the data.

619
00:44:03,270 --> 00:44:09,240
So he said, Look, um what you're looking at is not the

620
00:44:09,240 --> 00:44:11,800
way the universe is structured.

621
00:44:12,040 --> 00:44:17,400
What you're looking at is a particular perspective within the universe.

622
00:44:18,360 --> 00:44:23,640
So why it looks the way it does is not a direct readout of the way it is.

623
00:44:23,800 --> 00:44:27,080
It's that it's a per particular perspective within that.

624
00:44:27,400 --> 00:44:29,000
And that is the real insight.

625
00:44:29,080 --> 00:44:31,000
And the same thing happened with in physics.

626
00:44:31,160 --> 00:44:36,990
So the same thing with essentially the Einstein and the quantum

627
00:44:36,990 --> 00:44:42,350
and relative revolution, the post-Newtonian

628
00:44:42,350 --> 00:44:47,710
revolution, after the Newtonian revolution in physics, was that our

629
00:44:47,710 --> 00:44:53,560
experience of distance and time and space is

630
00:44:53,560 --> 00:44:56,680
not a description of actually the way things work.

631
00:44:56,760 --> 00:45:02,040
It's a description of a particular perspective of a particular range of spaces and times

632
00:45:02,280 --> 00:45:04,840
and macroscopic things.

633
00:45:05,080 --> 00:45:10,440
And so it contextualizes that perspective as well, that like what we experience as

634
00:45:10,440 --> 00:45:15,320
universal laws are actually only within a particular perspective.

635
00:45:15,480 --> 00:45:17,880
And it recontextualizes that.

636
00:45:18,090 --> 00:45:22,090
And this is all a long-winded way of saying that psychology.

637
00:45:22,650 --> 00:45:28,570
Um, and there's a very rich, and I've been very interested, I've been reading a lot of the

638
00:45:28,570 --> 00:45:32,890
history of psychology, and there's a lot of really good lost ideas in that history.

639
00:45:32,970 --> 00:45:38,970
But basically, to oversimplify it, um, psychology still is sort

640
00:45:38,970 --> 00:45:44,760
of hasn't had its what is the perspective dependence of our data collection

641
00:45:45,080 --> 00:45:45,400
moment.

642
00:45:46,120 --> 00:45:52,120
Um and I actually think that um the the perspective dependence,

643
00:45:52,280 --> 00:45:57,320
the geocentrism, if you will, of our psychology is

644
00:45:58,200 --> 00:46:03,960
that as a default, in the same way that as an astronomer, your default is a terrestrial

645
00:46:03,960 --> 00:46:09,160
perspective, our default, our way of thinking about the mind,

646
00:46:09,910 --> 00:46:15,910
is our intuitive everyday psychology delivered by

647
00:46:15,910 --> 00:46:21,910
natural selection, a series of systems for that allow us to reason about mental states in

648
00:46:21,910 --> 00:46:22,550
the mind.

649
00:46:23,030 --> 00:46:26,550
These are intuitive, as in jargon, ontologies, right?

650
00:46:26,710 --> 00:46:31,910
These are ontologies, is just a philosophical term for it's a description of sort of what

651
00:46:31,910 --> 00:46:35,030
exists and the rules that apply to what exists.

652
00:46:35,190 --> 00:46:39,280
And we have this intuitive ontology in physics, right?

653
00:46:39,360 --> 00:46:43,120
We have an intuitive physics that's different than our scientific physics.

654
00:46:43,760 --> 00:46:47,520
And we started with our intuitive physics and we still use it all the time.

655
00:46:47,680 --> 00:46:53,040
It helps, it's useful, but it fails and it's not exactly right, especially when you push

656
00:46:53,040 --> 00:46:53,200
it.

657
00:46:54,160 --> 00:46:59,930
And the idea is that psychology Really has been using, and

658
00:46:59,930 --> 00:47:05,930
psychologists in general, we are all, and even you and I to this day, we're using

659
00:47:05,930 --> 00:47:11,530
evolved minds that weren't designed to do science, whether it's physics or astronomy or

660
00:47:11,530 --> 00:47:16,890
psychology, we're using our evolved software to do psychology.

661
00:47:17,530 --> 00:47:23,530
And I think the perspective dependence of psychology is understanding how our

662
00:47:23,530 --> 00:47:29,160
evolved software for reasoning about different things that we did evolve to

663
00:47:29,160 --> 00:47:33,480
reason about, which includes, for example, con specifics.

664
00:47:33,640 --> 00:47:39,000
So our theory of mind system, our ability to represent and think about mental states.

665
00:47:39,400 --> 00:47:44,440
Everyone who doesn't have some impairment can do this to varying degrees.

666
00:47:44,760 --> 00:47:48,040
That system operates effortlessly and visibly.

667
00:47:48,280 --> 00:47:52,970
We didn't even know it existed until a couple, you know, decades ago to a first

668
00:47:52,970 --> 00:47:58,090
approximation, it's been in people for at least 60,000 years, if not, you know, much, much

669
00:47:58,090 --> 00:47:58,730
longer.

670
00:47:58,970 --> 00:48:04,890
Um that system colors the ideas we have about, well, what

671
00:48:04,890 --> 00:48:05,610
exists in the mind?

672
00:48:05,770 --> 00:48:06,410
What is a mind?

673
00:48:06,490 --> 00:48:07,450
How do we study the mind?

674
00:48:07,610 --> 00:48:08,890
What are the questions we ask?

675
00:48:09,210 --> 00:48:12,170
Then it's it's the water we swim in as fish.

676
00:48:12,410 --> 00:48:14,330
So that's our theory mind system.

677
00:48:14,730 --> 00:48:20,570
Um and if you look at the history of psychology, um, I think

678
00:48:20,880 --> 00:48:26,880
what you can see is sort of people reasonably enough starting with their theory of mind

679
00:48:27,200 --> 00:48:32,560
system, sort of adding in their folk physics system, because right, we know that there's

680
00:48:32,560 --> 00:48:33,200
like matter.

681
00:48:33,280 --> 00:48:38,000
And then people are sort of saying, well, like, you know, how do we have a science of the

682
00:48:38,000 --> 00:48:38,320
mind?

683
00:48:38,560 --> 00:48:40,880
Um, how do we think about things?

684
00:48:41,120 --> 00:48:43,280
And um what do we study?

685
00:48:43,360 --> 00:48:44,560
What are the questions we ask?

686
00:48:44,720 --> 00:48:48,640
What are what do we think are the elements or contained within the mind?

687
00:48:49,040 --> 00:48:54,650
Um, And I think to this day, as good as our data and

688
00:48:54,650 --> 00:49:00,650
method collection um techniques are, I

689
00:49:00,650 --> 00:49:06,650
still think that our our ideas of what exists in the mind are very

690
00:49:06,650 --> 00:49:11,290
much colored by our intuitive psychology, much more than

691
00:49:12,580 --> 00:49:18,020
we would want to in an objective way in the f in the in the sense of um

692
00:49:19,300 --> 00:49:25,300
uh we can have really good data but if we think um for

693
00:49:25,300 --> 00:49:30,820
example that um just take something like a belief right or or like just say memory right

694
00:49:30,900 --> 00:49:36,340
like let's say that memory is um um uh

695
00:49:37,690 --> 00:49:43,370
memory is overly broad, um, but you want if you just sort of have this intuitive idea about

696
00:49:43,370 --> 00:49:46,250
memory, and we can talk about why that may be an intuitive idea.

697
00:49:46,410 --> 00:49:52,090
Um uh if you think that there's some sort of

698
00:49:52,090 --> 00:49:57,930
circle in the mind that corresponds to memory, um then uh you collect

699
00:49:57,930 --> 00:50:00,650
lots of really complicated and sophisticated data.

700
00:50:00,810 --> 00:50:06,220
But if it turns out that memory isn't a unitary thing, then

701
00:50:07,740 --> 00:50:11,420
it doesn't matter how sophisticated your data are, you're not going to really get a

702
00:50:11,420 --> 00:50:12,140
coherent answer.

703
00:50:12,300 --> 00:50:18,220
I mean, a good analogy would be something like if you think that locomotion is a

704
00:50:18,220 --> 00:50:19,420
unitary system.

705
00:50:19,580 --> 00:50:22,620
Like you can maybe you can just be wrong about the kind of things something is, like

706
00:50:22,700 --> 00:50:26,370
Gilbert, philosopher Gilbert Ra called something being a category mistake.

707
00:50:26,450 --> 00:50:30,610
His example of a category mistake is that somebody's on a tour of university, they're shown

708
00:50:30,610 --> 00:50:36,610
the library, the the common area, the dining hall, um, you know, the psychology building,

709
00:50:36,770 --> 00:50:40,530
philosophy building, and the and the the tourist goes, you know, the person on the tour is

710
00:50:40,610 --> 00:50:42,690
like, that's great, but where's the university?

711
00:50:43,010 --> 00:50:43,570
Right.

712
00:50:43,760 --> 00:50:47,920
And the point is that, you know, well, that person's wrong about what kind of thing the

713
00:50:47,920 --> 00:50:48,480
university is.

714
00:50:48,560 --> 00:50:52,000
The university is not a specific building, it's the overarching thing, you know.

715
00:50:52,080 --> 00:50:55,680
But if you keep looking for the university, no matter how good your data collection is,

716
00:50:55,840 --> 00:50:56,800
you're just going to be wrong.

717
00:50:56,880 --> 00:50:57,120
Right.

718
00:50:57,200 --> 00:51:01,440
Like it's just if you start a science in an ill pose way, you're you're just in trouble.

719
00:51:01,680 --> 00:51:05,840
And the idea is the same with if you think memory is a unitary thing, it would be just the

720
00:51:05,840 --> 00:51:08,160
same as if you think locomotion is a unitary thing.

721
00:51:08,240 --> 00:51:09,280
It's a category mistake.

722
00:51:09,360 --> 00:51:10,800
So health.

723
00:51:11,070 --> 00:51:11,310
Yeah.

724
00:51:11,550 --> 00:51:14,910
So you study trains and you see how locomotion works in trains.

725
00:51:14,990 --> 00:51:17,390
You study birds, you see how locomotion works in birds.

726
00:51:17,550 --> 00:51:21,470
You study, you know, a number of things, and then you're sort of like, well, look, we're

727
00:51:21,470 --> 00:51:23,070
really getting inconsistent information.

728
00:51:23,230 --> 00:51:27,390
Like, look, I, you know, sometimes locomotion seems to be circular, sometimes it's sort of

729
00:51:27,390 --> 00:51:28,190
like up and down y.

730
00:51:28,350 --> 00:51:30,190
Sometimes it's soft, sometimes it's hard, right?

731
00:51:30,350 --> 00:51:34,510
Like if you don't understand that it's a broad overarching category, then you're sort of

732
00:51:34,510 --> 00:51:40,380
sticking feathers onto like the the um the like the st the the pneumatic

733
00:51:40,620 --> 00:51:43,580
like driving rods of the of the steam locomotive, right?

734
00:51:43,660 --> 00:51:45,980
It's just you're mashing things together that don't belong.

735
00:51:46,140 --> 00:51:51,980
And so I think our theory of mind system is not designed for the level of

736
00:51:51,980 --> 00:51:53,980
resolution that our science requires.

737
00:51:54,140 --> 00:51:59,900
And so when we're doing something like I'm looking for the neurocognitive signature of like

738
00:51:59,900 --> 00:52:05,590
a particular kind of memory, unless you have uh a really

739
00:52:05,590 --> 00:52:09,510
good converging mechanistic kind of software level description.

740
00:52:09,590 --> 00:52:11,510
And we can talk about that in a second.

741
00:52:11,590 --> 00:52:16,710
But basically, if you're just using intuitive constructs like memory, attention, reasoning,

742
00:52:17,030 --> 00:52:22,950
emotion, then it's very likely you're making the locomotion mistake and you're going to

743
00:52:22,950 --> 00:52:25,030
get a lot of inconsistent data.

744
00:52:25,270 --> 00:52:30,060
And more fundamentally the answer is not collect more and more data.

745
00:52:30,140 --> 00:52:35,900
It's because that answer is basically the equivalent of saying, well, that tourist uh on

746
00:52:35,900 --> 00:52:39,660
Gilbert Riles tour just needs to find more buildings.

747
00:52:39,820 --> 00:52:43,580
And then eventually um, you know, you'll find the right building.

748
00:52:43,740 --> 00:52:48,540
It's like, well, no, it doesn't matter how much data we collect, we'll never find the

749
00:52:48,540 --> 00:52:49,420
university, right?

750
00:52:49,500 --> 00:52:54,830
And so um so I think that um the theory mind

751
00:52:55,390 --> 00:53:00,670
system is has been producing category mistakes for a really long time.

752
00:53:00,910 --> 00:53:06,110
And I don't I'll I I'll just shut up in a second, but I think the so what we've alluded to

753
00:53:06,110 --> 00:53:11,790
is there's the theory mind system, there's the intuitive physical system, which is sort of

754
00:53:11,920 --> 00:53:16,240
an intuitive thing related to like the body, or if you like look at a brain, which

755
00:53:16,240 --> 00:53:21,920
certainly people had access to for a long time, that's the other kind of element of our

756
00:53:21,920 --> 00:53:22,640
psychology.

757
00:53:22,800 --> 00:53:24,720
We evolved to deal with physical objects.

758
00:53:24,800 --> 00:53:28,560
We can apply that to think about the mind, just like the body.

759
00:53:29,840 --> 00:53:32,240
But that was for a long time the two options.

760
00:53:32,320 --> 00:53:34,720
It was sort of our theory mind system and our physical system.

761
00:53:34,800 --> 00:53:39,360
And I think basically with the advent of what has come to be known as the cognitive

762
00:53:39,360 --> 00:53:45,270
revolution, um, with the ideas of people like Alan Turing and other people

763
00:53:45,270 --> 00:53:51,110
like um Marvin Minsky and uh other

764
00:53:51,910 --> 00:53:57,270
other historical people we can go into, but like Norbert Wiener and um the

765
00:53:57,270 --> 00:54:03,190
ethologists, basically we can add uh a functional or teleological approach where you

766
00:54:03,190 --> 00:54:07,190
think um, and this is the way we naturally think about the body now, because we did the

767
00:54:07,190 --> 00:54:12,800
science of this, but basically um the idea of function where and that's

768
00:54:12,800 --> 00:54:17,840
essentially that's what allows you to sort of do a software level description of what's

769
00:54:17,840 --> 00:54:19,040
happening in the mind.

770
00:54:19,360 --> 00:54:23,120
And that is a product of our evolved artifact psychology.

771
00:54:23,280 --> 00:54:29,280
And so the the answer or the idea is that what what's new in

772
00:54:29,280 --> 00:54:34,890
psychology in the 20th century and what computer ideas of computation,

773
00:54:35,050 --> 00:54:40,570
what it provided, and what the cognitive revolution was, was actually going

774
00:54:40,570 --> 00:54:45,050
beyond what people had long been doing, which was saying, Well, look, we have this

775
00:54:45,370 --> 00:54:48,730
intuitive theory mind system for reasoning about people.

776
00:54:48,970 --> 00:54:53,290
It's what gives us the idea that I'm a me, that you're a you, we have beliefs, desires.

777
00:54:53,720 --> 00:54:57,240
David sees rain, wants rain, believes it's raining, etc.

778
00:54:57,480 --> 00:55:03,480
This propositional structure, long big influence in philosophy and early ideas of how the

779
00:55:03,480 --> 00:55:05,800
mind works and still has influence today.

780
00:55:06,040 --> 00:55:07,880
That combined with this physical system.

781
00:55:07,960 --> 00:55:12,760
So we're trying to map physical systems and intentional or theory mind systems, the theory

782
00:55:12,920 --> 00:55:16,600
mind ideas, like where is attention in the brain, where is memory in the brain?

783
00:55:16,760 --> 00:55:17,480
That idea.

784
00:55:18,110 --> 00:55:22,990
the revolution was adding that middle level, the functional or software level description,

785
00:55:23,070 --> 00:55:24,990
and that was our artifact psychology.

786
00:55:25,070 --> 00:55:29,950
And so the idea is that uh psychology

787
00:55:30,430 --> 00:55:35,710
involves maybe uniquely in science, three evolved systems: our

788
00:55:35,710 --> 00:55:41,460
intuitive psychology, our theory of mind, our intuitive physics to the

789
00:55:41,460 --> 00:55:43,780
extent that we're looking at physical structures.

790
00:55:43,940 --> 00:55:49,220
And then it's also our intuitive artifact psychology, this idea that we can think about

791
00:55:49,220 --> 00:55:54,660
functional relationships, abstract, causal relationships that are not

792
00:55:54,660 --> 00:55:57,540
reducible just to the physical interaction.

793
00:55:57,780 --> 00:55:59,700
So yeah, I'll shut up.

794
00:56:00,150 --> 00:56:03,510
Yeah, I mean there's a lot you you put out there.

795
00:56:03,750 --> 00:56:09,590
I mean basically what I'm hearing is that it is not

796
00:56:09,590 --> 00:56:13,670
enough in science to answer questions and collect data.

797
00:56:13,990 --> 00:56:16,150
You must ask the right questions.

798
00:56:16,790 --> 00:56:22,630
You must know what questions are worth asking and worth investigating and are

799
00:56:22,870 --> 00:56:24,150
are promising.

800
00:56:25,520 --> 00:56:29,120
You must carve nature by the joints, as they say.

801
00:56:29,200 --> 00:56:31,840
You must divide things into the right categories.

802
00:56:32,080 --> 00:56:35,840
If you get the categories wrong, you're going to go down a lot of blind alleys.

803
00:56:37,280 --> 00:56:42,640
And what I'm hearing you say is that the history of psychology was very much

804
00:56:42,640 --> 00:56:45,360
relying on two mental systems.

805
00:56:45,610 --> 00:56:47,450
One was the theory of mind system.

806
00:56:47,530 --> 00:56:51,610
It's a system that evolved for reasoning about people, for you know, thinking about their

807
00:56:51,610 --> 00:56:54,010
thoughts and feelings and desires and intentions.

808
00:56:54,090 --> 00:56:58,090
They help us communicate with one another and coordinate with one another, cooperate,

809
00:56:58,410 --> 00:56:59,050
compete.

810
00:56:59,690 --> 00:57:02,010
They evolve by natural selection.

811
00:57:03,050 --> 00:57:08,890
And the other system was the what you call uh the physical stance or

812
00:57:08,890 --> 00:57:14,460
um intuitive physics, you know, billiard balls combining, or sorry, billiard balls bumping

813
00:57:14,460 --> 00:57:18,380
into each other, things dropping off of tables, those kinds of intuitions.

814
00:57:18,540 --> 00:57:22,620
Um two objects cannot be at the same place at the same time.

815
00:57:22,860 --> 00:57:26,540
Um if you apply force to one object, it will move the other object.

816
00:57:26,780 --> 00:57:31,660
Um if you shoot something through the air, it has a kind of impetus or oomph that depletes

817
00:57:31,660 --> 00:57:34,700
as it falls to the earth, those kinds of intuitions.

818
00:57:35,850 --> 00:57:40,730
And so basically a lot of our psychology has been like, well, you know, uh we know that

819
00:57:40,730 --> 00:57:43,290
beliefs are one thing, so let's study beliefs.

820
00:57:43,370 --> 00:57:46,250
You know, we know memory is one thing and it works like a video camera.

821
00:57:46,330 --> 00:57:49,290
So let's let's figure out what this memory thing is all about.

822
00:57:49,610 --> 00:57:54,410
Um we know that you know emotions are basically one thing, and you know, there's often

823
00:57:54,410 --> 00:57:57,370
conflict between you know our emotions and our rationality.

824
00:57:57,530 --> 00:58:01,820
So let's, you know, think, let's divide the mind into emotions and rationality and figure

825
00:58:01,820 --> 00:58:05,420
out, you know, when they conflict and when one wins and when the other one loses.

826
00:58:05,660 --> 00:58:11,260
This kind of folksy way of thinking about the mind has has predominated.

827
00:58:11,340 --> 00:58:16,060
Uh, and I use the word folksy deliberately because another term for intuitive psychology is

828
00:58:16,060 --> 00:58:17,420
folk psychology.

829
00:58:17,500 --> 00:58:22,380
Um, it's sometimes referred to as folk psychology, folk physics, uh, uh, folk biology.

830
00:58:22,460 --> 00:58:24,540
We have intuitions about the way animals work.

831
00:58:24,780 --> 00:58:28,710
So this kind of folksy view of of psychology has been the prevailing framework.

832
00:58:28,790 --> 00:58:32,390
And occasionally you might get some some physical metaphors as well.

833
00:58:32,630 --> 00:58:38,470
Um so we talk about power as if it were a force, um, that we're that you're pushing someone

834
00:58:38,470 --> 00:58:42,950
when you uh command them to do something or when you make a rule that that forces them to

835
00:58:42,950 --> 00:58:43,350
do something.

836
00:58:43,590 --> 00:58:47,670
You it's it's hard to avoid these physical metaphors when we're talking about you know

837
00:58:47,750 --> 00:58:49,190
leadership and power.

838
00:58:49,430 --> 00:58:54,800
Um And so it's a combination of this, you know, folk psychology and folk physics.

839
00:58:55,040 --> 00:59:00,960
And then we have the cognitive revolution where computers uh are invented, and uh, we

840
00:59:00,960 --> 00:59:04,000
start to think about the mind in a different way, using a different system.

841
00:59:04,160 --> 00:59:07,840
And that system would be something like folk engineering.

842
00:59:08,000 --> 00:59:10,400
You you refer to it as our artifact psychology.

843
00:59:10,480 --> 00:59:14,880
Um, it's probably the system that evolved for using uh and manipulating tools.

844
00:59:15,040 --> 00:59:17,600
So Homo sapiens famously uses tools.

845
00:59:17,680 --> 00:59:21,810
Uh, we need some way of thinking about tools and their functions.

846
00:59:22,450 --> 00:59:27,250
We uh intuitively recognize that the function of a chair is you're supposed to sit on it,

847
00:59:27,410 --> 00:59:30,690
the function of a hammer is for uh hammering nails.

848
00:59:30,930 --> 00:59:36,610
Uh uh, you know, uh physical objects uh that that have a particular structure were

849
00:59:36,610 --> 00:59:38,530
designed for a particular reason.

850
00:59:38,770 --> 00:59:44,720
Um and we sort of effortlessly and spontaneously uh get fixated on on those

851
00:59:44,880 --> 00:59:45,520
those reasons.

852
00:59:45,680 --> 00:59:47,280
This is called functional fixedness.

853
00:59:47,360 --> 00:59:52,160
There's a uh psychology literature on this, uh, where if we know that the function of a

854
00:59:52,160 --> 00:59:56,960
particular artifact or tool, it's very hard for us to ignore that and think of a different

855
00:59:56,960 --> 01:00:00,880
possible function for it, because we get fixated on on the function that we think it has.

856
01:00:01,200 --> 01:00:06,080
Um so we have this this artifact psychology, this folk engineering, and in the cognitive

857
01:00:06,080 --> 01:00:08,240
revolution, we start to make use of that.

858
01:00:08,730 --> 01:00:14,090
Um and uh so why why wasn't that enough?

859
01:00:14,250 --> 01:00:16,090
So we we we have the cognitive revolution.

860
01:00:16,250 --> 01:00:21,050
Um we start to think about the mind as a computational system, as a kind of tool uh that

861
01:00:21,050 --> 01:00:23,210
processes information and guides behavior.

862
01:00:23,450 --> 01:00:24,330
So we're done, right?

863
01:00:24,490 --> 01:00:25,050
That's that's it.

864
01:00:25,130 --> 01:00:27,130
We we we know how to understand the mind.

865
01:00:27,770 --> 01:00:30,720
Well, I mean I think that might be right.

866
01:00:30,800 --> 01:00:36,640
Uh, but I think that the artifact uh revolution is sort of still not underway because

867
01:00:36,640 --> 01:00:42,560
there's sort of I don't know if you ever saw the old like um old Batman, like the

868
01:00:42,560 --> 01:00:43,360
original one.

869
01:00:43,600 --> 01:00:48,960
Um the um uh um the one uh um uh who was it?

870
01:00:49,120 --> 01:00:49,920
Adam West?

871
01:00:50,240 --> 01:00:51,200
Was that who it was?

872
01:00:51,440 --> 01:00:52,640
That's that sounds about right now.

873
01:00:54,240 --> 01:00:58,730
Um but it was sort of the campy nineteen sixties uh Batman um

874
01:01:00,570 --> 01:01:04,490
yeah exactly and one of the things that was really I liked about that was like there'd be

875
01:01:04,490 --> 01:01:08,570
something where um it was very Chekhov's gun where there would be like you know if if uh if

876
01:01:08,570 --> 01:01:14,250
an air vent was important for the plot like because you know Batman wasn't gonna remove the

877
01:01:14,250 --> 01:01:18,730
grading from the air vent the air vent would be labeled you know I think it was an homage

878
01:01:18,890 --> 01:01:24,780
to cartoon you know to like graphic novels or um uh things like that um But

879
01:01:24,940 --> 01:01:29,100
but I like that view of sort of like things being cartoonishly labeled.

880
01:01:29,500 --> 01:01:35,340
And I bring that up because folk psychology, which I think most psychologists, you know,

881
01:01:35,420 --> 01:01:37,820
they're like, yeah, I know about folk psychology.

882
01:01:38,460 --> 01:01:43,340
I think there's an idea that's sort of when you're using your folk psychology, and I think

883
01:01:43,340 --> 01:01:47,660
we all have this, we sort of have this idea well, I know when I'm using my folk psychology.

884
01:01:47,740 --> 01:01:51,420
It's sort of like the Batman air vent where it's sort of like cartoonishly labeled.

885
01:01:51,500 --> 01:01:53,570
And the idea is that that's not true.

886
01:01:53,890 --> 01:01:59,410
So, for example, there's really sophisticated models in

887
01:01:59,410 --> 01:02:04,770
cognitive psychology of decision making, for example.

888
01:02:05,090 --> 01:02:08,370
Very complicated models, really data-rich.

889
01:02:09,650 --> 01:02:15,490
But the argument is that one of the things that's happening in the decision-making

890
01:02:15,490 --> 01:02:20,530
literature, and this is not just my criticism, this is happening with internal to that, is

891
01:02:20,530 --> 01:02:26,480
that there is an assumption of homogeneity of process, that decision making is a single

892
01:02:26,480 --> 01:02:27,120
process.

893
01:02:27,680 --> 01:02:32,720
And if you actually look and you take a step back and you say, well, where does the idea

894
01:02:32,720 --> 01:02:36,240
that decision making is a co is a unitary process come from?

895
01:02:36,480 --> 01:02:42,080
The idea is that that is from the ontology of our folk psychology.

896
01:02:42,570 --> 01:02:48,250
So, so so sort of famously, uh philosopher Bertrand Russell was

897
01:02:48,250 --> 01:02:54,010
talking about, and these ideas were already uh half a century old when Bertrand

898
01:02:54,010 --> 01:02:56,330
Russell was talking about this in the 1920s.

899
01:02:56,490 --> 01:03:01,610
This idea that from Franz Brontano, um, who wrote a really good book, Psychology from an

900
01:03:01,610 --> 01:03:07,400
Empirical Standpoint, um, in the mid-18 18 uh hundreds,

901
01:03:07,800 --> 01:03:12,440
right around the same time that Wilhelm Wont was was writing um his stuff.

902
01:03:12,600 --> 01:03:18,600
Um and and this idea is that um you know when when somebody is thinking about

903
01:03:18,600 --> 01:03:21,640
something so like if Smith is thinking about St.

904
01:03:21,960 --> 01:03:26,630
Peter's um versus I'm thinking about you know uh Mr.

905
01:03:26,870 --> 01:03:32,390
Brown, the content of what I'm thinking about, a church or a person is different,

906
01:03:32,630 --> 01:03:36,870
but the act, the thinking is the same.

907
01:03:37,270 --> 01:03:37,830
Right.

908
01:03:38,150 --> 01:03:44,150
That idea that the process is unitary has been more

909
01:03:44,230 --> 01:03:47,190
in more recent years been called sort of domain generality.

910
01:03:47,420 --> 01:03:48,060
I think it's a good idea.

911
01:03:48,700 --> 01:03:54,700
So if I'm thinking about a person or or a food or a building or uh a weather

912
01:03:54,700 --> 01:04:00,700
event or an animal correct or an emotion, the act thinking is the same no matter what

913
01:04:00,700 --> 01:04:01,260
I'm thinking about.

914
01:04:01,580 --> 01:04:01,820
That's right.

915
01:04:01,900 --> 01:04:03,900
There's actually the same Yeah, that's right.

916
01:04:04,140 --> 01:04:04,460
That's right.

917
01:04:04,540 --> 01:04:06,940
There's so there's an agent who's doing the thinking.

918
01:04:07,100 --> 01:04:11,980
So there's the Dav David, there's an agent slot, there's an act slot, and then there's sort

919
01:04:11,980 --> 01:04:13,420
of the content slot.

920
01:04:13,660 --> 01:04:18,410
And the idea is that that is an ontological commitment.

921
01:04:18,490 --> 01:04:19,770
That's just sort of a blind commitment.

922
01:04:20,010 --> 01:04:23,610
It's sort of we even weird to say it out loud, but it's an assumption the way things work.

923
01:04:23,770 --> 01:04:26,890
And the idea is that even it's never been tested.

924
01:04:26,970 --> 01:04:28,730
It's not we never like tested this model.

925
01:04:29,850 --> 01:04:30,410
It's an assumption.

926
01:04:30,490 --> 01:04:30,810
Yeah, yeah.

927
01:04:30,970 --> 01:04:32,650
Or to the extent we have, it doesn't work.

928
01:04:32,810 --> 01:04:36,970
I mean, so this is this is this is an idea that um, you know, and this is where compute the

929
01:04:36,970 --> 01:04:41,450
history of computer science is really interesting because people thought, well, how hard

930
01:04:41,450 --> 01:04:46,100
could it be to um to think or how hard could it be to remember something?

931
01:04:46,180 --> 01:04:48,020
You just need a memory system or a thinking system.

932
01:04:48,180 --> 01:04:54,100
And then it turned out that the firewall between

933
01:04:54,100 --> 01:05:00,100
process and content doesn't work because thinking, and by thinking,

934
01:05:00,180 --> 01:05:05,310
right, we're talking about, well, we can just leave it at thinking or for reasoning, right?

935
01:05:05,470 --> 01:05:11,150
Thinking about a person versus thinking about a church or thinking about food or

936
01:05:11,150 --> 01:05:16,830
thinking about what to do, the structure of sort of goals versus

937
01:05:16,830 --> 01:05:22,750
agents versus objects, those are just there's just intrinsically different um

938
01:05:22,910 --> 01:05:24,990
dynamics related to them.

939
01:05:25,310 --> 01:05:31,310
And um, if you try to build a robot or a computer um just with sort

940
01:05:31,310 --> 01:05:35,820
of uh a general thinking ability, it doesn't work.

941
01:05:35,980 --> 01:05:39,660
Like whenever there's this part is the David part, that's the self.

942
01:05:39,900 --> 01:05:43,260
And then you got, you know, there that is connected to the thinking stick, and then the

943
01:05:43,260 --> 01:05:48,220
thinking stick is connected to the to the whatever, to food, you know, people, plants,

944
01:05:48,300 --> 01:05:48,460
whatever.

945
01:05:48,700 --> 01:05:48,940
Exactly.

946
01:05:49,260 --> 01:05:49,500
Yeah, yeah.

947
01:05:49,660 --> 01:05:49,820
Yeah.

948
01:05:49,980 --> 01:05:52,380
And my robot's not gonna work if I if I build the robot.

949
01:05:52,700 --> 01:05:52,860
Yeah.

950
01:05:52,940 --> 01:05:56,380
And so one of the earliest attempts to do that was something with reinforcement learning,

951
01:05:56,460 --> 01:05:59,990
which is you know very popular in AI right now, but it was uh it was a checkers playing

952
01:05:59,990 --> 01:06:00,230
program.

953
01:06:00,310 --> 01:06:02,390
And it was like, well, reinforcement learning.

954
01:06:02,550 --> 01:06:07,910
If a general reinforcement learning system, why not just put it in a robot or a computer?

955
01:06:08,150 --> 01:06:13,190
And that is the way you solve a lot of problems, and uh great, it'll work.

956
01:06:13,430 --> 01:06:18,790
And the very first basically dissertation using reinforcement learning was um

957
01:06:19,030 --> 01:06:20,950
Samuel's checkers playing program.

958
01:06:21,190 --> 01:06:27,140
And he realized that in order to uh have a computer be able

959
01:06:27,140 --> 01:06:31,220
to use reinforcements, like a good thing happened, do more of this.

960
01:06:31,380 --> 01:06:33,620
A bad thing happened, do less of that.

961
01:06:33,940 --> 01:06:39,380
In order to actually even just have that trivial thing worked, required

962
01:06:39,700 --> 01:06:45,620
very domain-specific representations about checkers.

963
01:06:45,780 --> 01:06:51,780
And the reason is because of strategy selection and credit assignment stroke strategy or uh

964
01:06:51,940 --> 01:06:57,450
strategy selection is um of all the things to try to do,

965
01:06:58,090 --> 01:07:02,010
there's nothing in reinforcement learning that tells you what to do.

966
01:07:02,170 --> 01:07:07,930
So the robot or the computer needs some set of representations of

967
01:07:07,930 --> 01:07:11,530
things that it has either done or should try to do.

968
01:07:11,770 --> 01:07:15,930
So in and though that doesn't just come from nowhere.

969
01:07:16,570 --> 01:07:20,660
And then in addition to that, and that's specific to to checkers, right?

970
01:07:20,820 --> 01:07:25,140
You don't just get that for free with information from some other domain.

971
01:07:25,380 --> 01:07:29,380
And then in addition to that, there's the problem of credit assignment, which is that

972
01:07:29,620 --> 01:07:33,060
suppose you um uh something good just happened.

973
01:07:33,220 --> 01:07:36,500
Well, to what do you assign credit to that good outcome?

974
01:07:36,740 --> 01:07:40,900
Is it the fact that you just let go of the chess piece or the checker?

975
01:07:41,220 --> 01:07:43,510
Um, is it because you just sighed?

976
01:07:43,750 --> 01:07:45,430
Is it because of the move you just made?

977
01:07:45,590 --> 01:07:47,030
Is it the last four moves you made?

978
01:07:47,190 --> 01:07:48,550
Is it the last 10 moves you made?

979
01:07:48,630 --> 01:07:50,710
At what to what do you assign credit?

980
01:07:50,870 --> 01:07:56,870
And so this is all a long-winded way of saying that the structure of our theory

981
01:07:57,190 --> 01:08:02,950
mind system agent process content, which has historically been a long uh

982
01:08:03,190 --> 01:08:08,860
assumption, um, people were importing that folk psychology,

983
01:08:09,180 --> 01:08:14,860
ontology into systems, into mechanics, into the what they believed were like very

984
01:08:15,100 --> 01:08:16,940
sophisticated models.

985
01:08:17,660 --> 01:08:23,180
And realizing, well, look, you know, a general process like reinforcement learning

986
01:08:23,500 --> 01:08:27,580
divorced completely from content doesn't work.

987
01:08:27,740 --> 01:08:29,900
And that's something we've known for a really long time.

988
01:08:30,060 --> 01:08:35,710
But still to this day, people will talk about decision making and the rules that apply to

989
01:08:35,710 --> 01:08:41,470
decision making in a way that one is arguing, well, decision making is a unitary kind

990
01:08:41,470 --> 01:08:42,430
of process.

991
01:08:42,830 --> 01:08:45,070
What the decision making is about doesn't matter.

992
01:08:45,230 --> 01:08:47,870
We can make inferences about decision making.

993
01:08:48,110 --> 01:08:49,790
We can make inferences about a memory.

994
01:08:49,870 --> 01:08:51,710
We can make inferences about attention.

995
01:08:52,030 --> 01:08:57,340
And so my point is: even if people aren't using their folk

996
01:08:57,420 --> 01:09:01,580
psychology in a way that they think that it's not labeled in their mind's eye when they're

997
01:09:01,580 --> 01:09:07,420
doing their science, the assumptions of the theory-minded system or or

998
01:09:07,420 --> 01:09:12,940
the way that it colors what we study still show up to this day.

999
01:09:13,180 --> 01:09:18,990
For example, in this idea that processes independent of their content are sort of

1000
01:09:18,990 --> 01:09:21,230
coherent or sufficient.

1001
01:09:21,710 --> 01:09:27,310
And I think even up and through right now, when you'll read a paper, a lot of it is sort of

1002
01:09:27,310 --> 01:09:32,350
about, well, we designed this algorithm or this sort of strategy.

1003
01:09:32,990 --> 01:09:38,990
Um and the information about what was all required to up to make that algorithm

1004
01:09:38,990 --> 01:09:44,180
or strategy work for this particular problem is sort of not highlighted.

1005
01:09:44,260 --> 01:09:50,260
And I think that's still a byproduct of our folk psychology, where it's sort of one off

1006
01:09:50,260 --> 01:09:50,420
of.

1007
01:09:50,500 --> 01:09:55,620
It's a it's a superficial painting over of like Dave sees it's raining, you know, and that

1008
01:09:55,700 --> 01:10:00,260
and it's just that, well, now we've got reinforcement learning going into the C's slot,

1009
01:10:00,420 --> 01:10:00,580
right?

1010
01:10:00,740 --> 01:10:02,260
Like that's the process slot.

1011
01:10:02,420 --> 01:10:08,390
So so the idea is there's still a lot of um contamination by

1012
01:10:08,710 --> 01:10:14,150
our folk psychology system going on in our science, even when

1013
01:10:14,790 --> 01:10:19,670
we make a mechanistic or software level or functional level advance.

1014
01:10:19,830 --> 01:10:23,430
And so this is the answer to why haven't we succeeded yet?

1015
01:10:23,590 --> 01:10:28,870
I actually don't think that if you took seriously the idea that like the point of

1016
01:10:28,870 --> 01:10:33,430
psychology is to articulate all the problems that the mind solves and figure out the

1017
01:10:33,430 --> 01:10:38,120
mechanical systems that make that possible, mechanical in the sort of this abstract

1018
01:10:38,120 --> 01:10:39,080
software level way.

1019
01:10:39,240 --> 01:10:43,080
I don't think that is still being done very much to this day.

1020
01:10:43,160 --> 01:10:48,760
And there's I bec I have I have thoughts about why that is, but um but uh so I think

1021
01:10:49,160 --> 01:10:50,360
I think that's the answer.

1022
01:10:50,440 --> 01:10:55,960
I think we're still in the very beginnings of this revolution of switching from a pure

1023
01:10:55,960 --> 01:11:00,840
theory mind system over to both the artifact system and the theory mind system.

1024
01:11:00,920 --> 01:11:06,770
And I think we're we're watching the growing pains of not always being clear when

1025
01:11:06,770 --> 01:11:12,770
we're using the theory mind system still, um, and where to draw the lines between the

1026
01:11:12,770 --> 01:11:15,970
constructs that are results of one system versus the other.

1027
01:11:16,530 --> 01:11:16,850
Right.

1028
01:11:17,090 --> 01:11:22,690
So this folk psychology, this theory of mind system, is silently and

1029
01:11:22,690 --> 01:11:25,090
perniciously guiding our thinking.

1030
01:11:25,170 --> 01:11:28,020
And we have no idea that it's guiding our thinking.

1031
01:11:28,340 --> 01:11:33,060
Psychologists who are the most nerdy and the most technical, who who do rigorous

1032
01:11:33,060 --> 01:11:36,900
experiments and use computational models, still at the end of the day, they're being

1033
01:11:36,900 --> 01:11:42,580
insidiously guided by their folk intuitions about what is going on inside

1034
01:11:42,580 --> 01:11:43,380
people's head.

1035
01:11:43,540 --> 01:11:49,300
That there is an agent or a self, which is a unitary thing, and that agent or self

1036
01:11:49,300 --> 01:11:52,420
is uh ha has a verb attached to it.

1037
01:11:52,670 --> 01:11:57,150
you know, the agent or self wants or thinks or sees or remembers.

1038
01:11:57,390 --> 01:11:59,950
And uh all of those verbs are are unitary things.

1039
01:12:00,030 --> 01:12:04,110
So remembering is one thing, thinking is one thing, seeing is one thing, right?

1040
01:12:04,270 --> 01:12:08,430
And then there is the content, the thing that the verb is attached to.

1041
01:12:09,630 --> 01:12:13,230
You know, a piece of food, a person, a group, whatever.

1042
01:12:14,110 --> 01:12:19,400
That way of thinking uh has basically been at the core of

1043
01:12:19,640 --> 01:12:23,400
cognitive science correct for as long as it has been around.

1044
01:12:23,640 --> 01:12:28,520
And if you and it as evidence of this, you can just look at what the topics are within

1045
01:12:28,520 --> 01:12:29,160
cognitive science.

1046
01:12:29,320 --> 01:12:32,200
So you talked about this this wonderful idea of a category mistake.

1047
01:12:32,360 --> 01:12:36,120
Uh you know, uh carving up nature in the wrong ways.

1048
01:12:36,520 --> 01:12:40,600
Um well, what are the categories in cognitive science?

1049
01:12:40,920 --> 01:12:41,800
Memory.

1050
01:12:42,150 --> 01:12:44,150
I'm sure you could find a textbook on memory.

1051
01:12:44,310 --> 01:12:45,190
Decision making.

1052
01:12:45,430 --> 01:12:49,750
Decision making is literally a field of study in cognitive science.

1053
01:12:49,830 --> 01:12:55,510
There are people who study decision making as if they were studying one thing.

1054
01:12:55,910 --> 01:13:00,870
Um, if you if you just look, I mean, belief is a topic, attention is a topic.

1055
01:13:01,110 --> 01:13:07,000
Um Our science is silently guided by our folk psychology when we don't

1056
01:13:07,000 --> 01:13:07,960
even realize it.

1057
01:13:08,200 --> 01:13:12,520
Uh I mean, we didn't, I mean, nobody tested the idea that memory is one thing and we need

1058
01:13:12,520 --> 01:13:15,080
to have like a science of memory as if it were one thing.

1059
01:13:15,240 --> 01:13:18,680
Nobody tested the idea that decision making is one thing and we need to study

1060
01:13:18,680 --> 01:13:20,120
decision-making as a coherent topic.

1061
01:13:20,280 --> 01:13:23,080
This just happened silently without us discussing it.

1062
01:13:23,240 --> 01:13:24,360
It happened intuitively.

1063
01:13:24,520 --> 01:13:25,960
We just, oh, this is the way things are.

1064
01:13:26,040 --> 01:13:30,360
This is how we need to approach studying the mind by carving it into these different bins.

1065
01:13:30,600 --> 01:13:35,170
Um, but what you're saying is this whole way of thinking is is almost certainly wrong.

1066
01:13:35,330 --> 01:13:39,410
That decision making is not one thing, memory is not one thing, attention is not one thing,

1067
01:13:39,570 --> 01:13:41,010
belief is not one thing.

1068
01:13:41,730 --> 01:13:47,010
And these things are interconnected and dynamic and they influence each other in

1069
01:13:47,250 --> 01:13:48,450
myriad ways.

1070
01:13:49,970 --> 01:13:55,260
So if we are carving up the mind in the wrong way, if we're making all of these category

1071
01:13:55,260 --> 01:13:59,100
mistakes, what is the right way to carve up the mind?

1072
01:13:59,340 --> 01:14:04,460
So if we have if if we're looking at at having a correct cognitive science where we've

1073
01:14:04,460 --> 01:14:09,740
carved up nature at the joints, you know, we're recognizing the categories that that really

1074
01:14:09,740 --> 01:14:11,660
have some ontological significance.

1075
01:14:11,820 --> 01:14:15,090
What does a correct theory of of the human mind look like?

1076
01:14:15,170 --> 01:14:16,210
What are the different categories?

1077
01:14:16,530 --> 01:14:16,770
Yeah.

1078
01:14:16,850 --> 01:14:21,970
And I think the point about attention and memory and cognitive psychology is really

1079
01:14:21,970 --> 01:14:26,770
important to part of this answer, which is, you know, and I there's very dear friends of

1080
01:14:26,770 --> 01:14:29,730
mine who study attention and decision making.

1081
01:14:30,050 --> 01:14:36,050
And I think, and this is where this idea of different levels of analysis comes in.

1082
01:14:36,210 --> 01:14:39,200
So there's no question decision making exists, right?

1083
01:14:39,440 --> 01:14:40,720
Attention exists.

1084
01:14:41,440 --> 01:14:47,040
And I think there's even an argument where sort of um and this is an argument by like

1085
01:14:47,120 --> 01:14:51,920
people like more recently, it's nice to um it was nice to come across this work by people

1086
01:14:51,920 --> 01:14:52,960
like Wayne Wu.

1087
01:14:53,520 --> 01:14:58,480
And there's a BBS paper out pretty recently, Behavior on Brain Sciences, about this.

1088
01:14:58,560 --> 01:15:01,440
But basically like let's say take something like attention.

1089
01:15:02,480 --> 01:15:07,450
The idea is that attention, if you think about it as sort of if if the definition of

1090
01:15:07,450 --> 01:15:13,450
attention is it's the selection of something over something else for further processing,

1091
01:15:13,530 --> 01:15:13,690
right?

1092
01:15:13,770 --> 01:15:15,690
Which is sort of the standard textbook definition.

1093
01:15:15,770 --> 01:15:17,450
This is what Wayne Wu says.

1094
01:15:18,090 --> 01:15:23,770
That if you if you think about that definition, then uh the retina has

1095
01:15:23,770 --> 01:15:29,260
photoreceptors that are selective to particular, you know, wavelengths of electromagnetic

1096
01:15:29,260 --> 01:15:29,900
radiation.

1097
01:15:30,380 --> 01:15:36,380
Or uh, well, by the by the textbook account of attention, then the retina, retina,

1098
01:15:36,540 --> 01:15:39,020
retinal cells have it have attention, right?

1099
01:15:39,100 --> 01:15:41,180
They attend to certain things over others.

1100
01:15:41,420 --> 01:15:44,540
And his argument is that then everything in the mind is attention.

1101
01:15:44,620 --> 01:15:48,780
It's basically the input conditions of every system at every level of abstraction.

1102
01:15:48,860 --> 01:15:51,260
And his point is that's sort of an absurdity.

1103
01:15:51,420 --> 01:15:57,290
So his argument is that the way we talk about attention as the phenomenon to be explained

1104
01:15:57,610 --> 01:15:59,850
only applies at this agent-based level.

1105
01:16:00,010 --> 01:16:04,970
As in my language, it would be like this folk psychology or intentional level description.

1106
01:16:05,210 --> 01:16:06,810
And so Dave is paying attention.

1107
01:16:06,970 --> 01:16:07,370
Yeah, exactly.

1108
01:16:07,530 --> 01:16:07,770
To me.

1109
01:16:07,930 --> 01:16:08,330
So that's right.

1110
01:16:08,490 --> 01:16:09,610
Dave didn't see the lion.

1111
01:16:09,770 --> 01:16:10,570
The lion doesn't see me.

1112
01:16:10,650 --> 01:16:11,450
I'm a gazelle.

1113
01:16:11,530 --> 01:16:11,930
Like that.

1114
01:16:12,090 --> 01:16:16,900
That is so the study of attention and the fact that I can't I didn't notice something or

1115
01:16:16,900 --> 01:16:22,020
why I noticed something and the mechanical stuff underlying that is perfectly coherent.

1116
01:16:22,100 --> 01:16:26,180
So it's not that folk psychological constructs don't exist.

1117
01:16:26,340 --> 01:16:29,620
There's a there's an idea of sort of a limitative materialism.

1118
01:16:29,700 --> 01:16:34,500
Um and I I am not a limited eliminative materialist say that three times fast.

1119
01:16:34,660 --> 01:16:39,210
Um but the idea is that we shouldn't confuse folk

1120
01:16:39,530 --> 01:16:42,410
constructs for mechanisms.

1121
01:16:42,650 --> 01:16:48,090
So Way Mu's argument is that attention only makes sense coherently at the person level, at

1122
01:16:48,090 --> 01:16:53,770
the at the function or the intentional level, this folk psychology level.

1123
01:16:54,250 --> 01:16:59,820
We can talk about the mechanisms that make attention possible, the

1124
01:16:59,820 --> 01:17:03,980
software, using our artifact psychology.

1125
01:17:04,300 --> 01:17:09,820
And then we can even study the physical things that implement or make

1126
01:17:09,820 --> 01:17:12,700
possible those abstract functions.

1127
01:17:13,020 --> 01:17:13,500
Right?

1128
01:17:13,740 --> 01:17:18,380
But the idea is that attention lives at this one level of reduction.

1129
01:17:19,020 --> 01:17:24,300
And his claim, and I've made this claim in other contexts with

1130
01:17:24,300 --> 01:17:29,970
colleagues, is that one of the great errors of psychology and not paying

1131
01:17:29,970 --> 01:17:34,610
attention to this perspective dependence and the influence of our folks' psychology is not

1132
01:17:34,610 --> 01:17:40,450
that it's wrong, but it's being unproblematically imported into what we believe is the

1133
01:17:40,450 --> 01:17:43,810
mechanical level, what we believe is the software level thing.

1134
01:17:44,050 --> 01:17:47,970
And so this is the answer to the question: is well, how if if theory of mind is wrong,

1135
01:17:48,050 --> 01:17:49,330
what's the right way to do it?

1136
01:17:49,570 --> 01:17:55,010
And the idea is that theory of mind isn't wrong, theory of mind is the

1137
01:17:55,320 --> 01:17:59,000
highest level description, but it's not a description.

1138
01:17:59,160 --> 01:18:05,000
The entities that exist or the rules that exist, the Dave noticed something,

1139
01:18:05,160 --> 01:18:09,560
Dave has attention, Dave believes this, Dave feels this.

1140
01:18:10,360 --> 01:18:13,240
Those things all live at that top level.

1141
01:18:13,480 --> 01:18:15,080
You don't get rid of that level.

1142
01:18:15,160 --> 01:18:17,400
It's like an ice cream cone is a good example.

1143
01:18:17,480 --> 01:18:19,720
Like an ice cream cone can taste like vanilla.

1144
01:18:20,600 --> 01:18:25,430
You can talk about the chemistry, a vanilla molecule that makes the taste possible.

1145
01:18:25,910 --> 01:18:29,510
You don't get rid of the taste when you study the chemistry.

1146
01:18:29,750 --> 01:18:32,790
In fact, you lose something if you only talk about the chemistry.

1147
01:18:32,870 --> 01:18:36,950
You say, look, this chemical vanilla corresponds to the taste of vanilla.

1148
01:18:37,990 --> 01:18:41,270
All of those pieces of information are relevant and useful.

1149
01:18:41,350 --> 01:18:44,790
And then you can even do the physics of the chemical structure.

1150
01:18:45,580 --> 01:18:49,340
Just sticking to one level is not the right level.

1151
01:18:49,420 --> 01:18:50,780
There's no such thing as the right level.

1152
01:18:50,860 --> 01:18:52,700
It depends on what your goals are.

1153
01:18:53,580 --> 01:18:59,100
And a complete science uses all three and knows all three and understands that, you know,

1154
01:18:59,180 --> 01:19:03,180
the taste of vanilla is part of why we care about this stupid vanilla molecule.

1155
01:19:03,340 --> 01:19:06,300
And these are just two different ways of describing the same thing.

1156
01:19:06,460 --> 01:19:08,700
And the and the argument is, and this is not my idea.

1157
01:19:08,780 --> 01:19:12,550
I mean, I've written papers about this, but you can find this idea throughout history,

1158
01:19:12,710 --> 01:19:17,590
throughout philosophy, throughout science, and I think it's it's still not adequately

1159
01:19:17,590 --> 01:19:19,910
embodied, but it hopefully will be.

1160
01:19:20,230 --> 01:19:24,390
Is just that the answer is that no one level is the right answer.

1161
01:19:24,630 --> 01:19:26,230
It's just organizing them.

1162
01:19:26,390 --> 01:19:32,070
And I think the sh the the short answer is we have historically inherited

1163
01:19:32,310 --> 01:19:36,620
a very full folk psychological perspective.

1164
01:19:36,780 --> 01:19:40,700
Most of our ideas are from that perspective because we've only recently discovered and

1165
01:19:40,700 --> 01:19:41,980
thought about this system.

1166
01:19:42,780 --> 01:19:47,100
And most attention should be on

1167
01:19:47,420 --> 01:19:53,420
deconfounding or teasing apart what our ideas at a folk psychological

1168
01:19:53,420 --> 01:19:58,470
level, not to be pejorative, but to just say, where is it coherent?

1169
01:19:58,550 --> 01:19:59,670
It's like the taste of vanilla.

1170
01:19:59,750 --> 01:20:03,670
We're not saying it's the taste of vanilla is pejorative, it's saying it's not the

1171
01:20:03,670 --> 01:20:04,390
molecule.

1172
01:20:04,630 --> 01:20:09,750
If you try to plug the taste of vanilla into the molecule, it's a category mistake.

1173
01:20:10,550 --> 01:20:13,270
It's the same as the university as a building.

1174
01:20:13,510 --> 01:20:15,670
This is Wayne Wu's argument about attention.

1175
01:20:15,750 --> 01:20:19,270
It doesn't make sense to say attention is a subpersonal mechanism.

1176
01:20:19,510 --> 01:20:25,260
Attention is the phenomenon at the whole personal level or level of the whole person

1177
01:20:25,420 --> 01:20:27,180
that's made possible by systems.

1178
01:20:27,340 --> 01:20:31,660
So you can have a cognitive science of attention, but you can have two different versions:

1179
01:20:31,820 --> 01:20:33,020
one that works and one doesn't.

1180
01:20:33,180 --> 01:20:36,460
The one that works says attention is the phenomenon to be explained.

1181
01:20:36,620 --> 01:20:42,460
That Dave attends to things or doesn't is the thing to be explained by mechanisms that

1182
01:20:42,460 --> 01:20:42,860
works.

1183
01:20:43,020 --> 01:20:48,430
The one that doesn't work is the one that says attention is the mechanism, right?

1184
01:20:48,590 --> 01:20:50,110
It's part of the software.

1185
01:20:50,270 --> 01:20:52,350
And those sound very similar.

1186
01:20:52,590 --> 01:20:57,230
They're very different and they have very different um viabilities.

1187
01:20:57,310 --> 01:21:01,790
And the and essentially the argument is because they sound so similar, they're being

1188
01:21:01,790 --> 01:21:02,990
confused right now.

1189
01:21:04,990 --> 01:21:10,670
So maybe a completed science of the mind, if such a thing were possible, would correspond

1190
01:21:10,670 --> 01:21:11,150
to our folk.

1191
01:21:11,870 --> 01:21:12,510
Yeah, for sure.

1192
01:21:12,910 --> 01:21:14,910
I think any it would be crazy.

1193
01:21:15,070 --> 01:21:20,480
It it would in the sense that we wouldn't lose any of our folk constructs, but we would

1194
01:21:20,480 --> 01:21:24,720
understand those folk constructs with additional corresponding information.

1195
01:21:24,800 --> 01:21:27,920
This we already think about the body from the neck down this way.

1196
01:21:28,400 --> 01:21:33,920
On a on a physiological perspective, which we understand pretty well, you don't get rid of

1197
01:21:33,920 --> 01:21:39,670
pain, you know, you don't get rid of um uh of the the folk

1198
01:21:39,910 --> 01:21:45,350
construct of pain, but you understand physically how pain is made possible.

1199
01:21:45,510 --> 01:21:49,990
You understand the functional relationships, why it exists, you understand the physical

1200
01:21:49,990 --> 01:21:54,070
things that make it possible, you understand why somebody can have a limb removed and still

1201
01:21:54,070 --> 01:21:54,950
feel pain.

1202
01:21:55,030 --> 01:21:59,430
Um, we understand pain well enough to like fix pain, right?

1203
01:21:59,510 --> 01:22:03,270
To like change the inputs of the pain system to varying degrees.

1204
01:22:03,350 --> 01:22:04,950
I mean, not not not perfect.

1205
01:22:05,190 --> 01:22:11,040
But um so that's right, you don't you're not gonna lose this thing in the same way we don't

1206
01:22:11,040 --> 01:22:13,360
lose the planetary regressions, right?

1207
01:22:13,920 --> 01:22:19,840
We don't lose those at all, but we don't think this is actually

1208
01:22:20,320 --> 01:22:22,800
uh the only description.

1209
01:22:22,960 --> 01:22:28,800
It's contextualizes the folk psychological ideas in a broader account.

1210
01:22:28,880 --> 01:22:30,560
Um, that's much more complete.

1211
01:22:30,640 --> 01:22:34,640
So we're never gonna lose the folk psychology.

1212
01:22:35,190 --> 01:22:41,110
The idea is that a complete science contextualizes folk psychology and has

1213
01:22:41,110 --> 01:22:42,870
a lot more information attached to it.

1214
01:22:43,030 --> 01:22:48,710
And what we know is probably that the software level, the description of what actually

1215
01:22:48,710 --> 01:22:52,310
exists, how complicated we are, is so complicated.

1216
01:22:52,710 --> 01:22:57,430
I mean, I don't know how many functions exist in a word processing program or a modern

1217
01:22:57,430 --> 01:23:02,800
computer, but it's, you know, I know my cell phone, when it takes a pick picture, does at

1218
01:23:02,800 --> 01:23:05,200
least a million, if not a trillion things at once.

1219
01:23:05,440 --> 01:23:05,920
Right.

1220
01:23:06,240 --> 01:23:11,600
Now, the idea that you can do a trillion things at once seems absurd.

1221
01:23:11,760 --> 01:23:16,800
And I was asked questions about this when I've given talks about, you know, my model where

1222
01:23:16,800 --> 01:23:19,280
five things are happening in the mind at once, right?

1223
01:23:19,600 --> 01:23:24,240
So that's very much a idea from our folk psychology.

1224
01:23:24,320 --> 01:23:30,030
And so the idea is that our prejudice against thinking the mind

1225
01:23:30,270 --> 01:23:35,470
can do lots and lots of things and needs lots and lots of stuff to do it

1226
01:23:36,590 --> 01:23:38,430
is still strong.

1227
01:23:38,590 --> 01:23:41,550
And that's a prejudice we sort of have to work against.

1228
01:23:41,710 --> 01:23:46,990
And there are many, many people in many, many areas outside of evolutionary psychology who

1229
01:23:47,310 --> 01:23:48,270
make the same point.

1230
01:23:48,660 --> 01:23:52,420
Evolutionary psychology is one way to get to this, that you need a lot of stuff in a

1231
01:23:52,420 --> 01:23:52,740
system.

1232
01:23:53,060 --> 01:23:59,060
Um, and and uh there's a from the old Simpson the Simpsons uh TV show, there's this

1233
01:23:59,060 --> 01:24:04,660
um part where um they are visiting, I think what's the analog of like

1234
01:24:04,660 --> 01:24:09,460
Disneyland and one of the robots, the animatronic robots, like kind of fails and is like

1235
01:24:10,150 --> 01:24:11,990
breaks open what's inside.

1236
01:24:12,230 --> 01:24:16,790
And uh Marge, Homer's wife, looks at him and says, see that, Homer, that's why your robot

1237
01:24:16,790 --> 01:24:17,430
never worked.

1238
01:24:17,590 --> 01:24:17,830
Right.

1239
01:24:17,910 --> 01:24:23,270
And the idea is that, like, you know, Homer, kind of Oafish person was trying to make a

1240
01:24:23,270 --> 01:24:26,310
robot and didn't realize that it was actually hard to make a robot.

1241
01:24:26,470 --> 01:24:28,790
Um, you actually need a lot of stuff.

1242
01:24:29,030 --> 01:24:34,230
So, as simple as seeing seems, it's actually trillions of things happening at once and lots

1243
01:24:34,230 --> 01:24:35,430
of different systems.

1244
01:24:35,670 --> 01:24:41,120
Um and uh and I think that's sort of you if you wanted to say like there's one

1245
01:24:41,120 --> 01:24:47,040
deep historical prejudice of the mind is that, and this

1246
01:24:47,040 --> 01:24:53,040
is what uh Lita Cosmys and John Tubi called instinct blindness is this this idea that what

1247
01:24:53,040 --> 01:24:55,120
feels easy is easy.

1248
01:24:55,360 --> 01:24:57,390
What's easier than seeing, right?

1249
01:24:57,630 --> 01:24:59,950
And actually turns out there's a lot of complicated stuff.

1250
01:25:00,030 --> 01:25:03,310
And it's going to be uh true for for everything we do.

1251
01:25:03,390 --> 01:25:05,070
It's going to be a lot of answers.

1252
01:25:05,310 --> 01:25:07,230
It's very going to be very complicated.

1253
01:25:07,470 --> 01:25:12,910
Um, and if there's a deep prejudice of forcing simple unitary or

1254
01:25:12,910 --> 01:25:15,870
dichotomous, is it a what system one or system two?

1255
01:25:16,270 --> 01:25:17,950
Is it automatic or controlled?

1256
01:25:18,110 --> 01:25:20,270
Is it learned or uh innate?

1257
01:25:20,590 --> 01:25:23,070
Um, these are not gonna serve us well.

1258
01:25:23,630 --> 01:25:24,110
Mm-hmm.

1259
01:25:25,560 --> 01:25:26,440
Interesting.

1260
01:25:26,760 --> 01:25:32,200
So I might actually uh be inclined to disagree with you a little bit.

1261
01:25:32,520 --> 01:25:32,840
Good.

1262
01:25:33,080 --> 01:25:38,920
I I think uh I I'm a little bit more sympathetic to eliminative materialism than than

1263
01:25:38,920 --> 01:25:39,560
you are.

1264
01:25:39,960 --> 01:25:45,960
Um I think uh whether or not our folk psychology is correct or is a correct

1265
01:25:45,960 --> 01:25:50,360
description on on some level, um that is an open question.

1266
01:25:50,670 --> 01:25:54,830
It could very well be the case that it's wrong and that it's wrong in in serious and

1267
01:25:54,830 --> 01:25:56,030
significant ways.

1268
01:25:56,190 --> 01:26:00,430
Uh and there you know I could I could go on all day listing all of the ways in which it is

1269
01:26:00,430 --> 01:26:01,150
likely to be wrong.

1270
01:26:01,310 --> 01:26:05,470
We have all sorts of biases that are self serving or in the interests of our groups, we

1271
01:26:05,470 --> 01:26:10,190
have all sorts of bullshit and propaganda that are contaminating our our folk models of of

1272
01:26:10,190 --> 01:26:11,310
our mental life.

1273
01:26:11,550 --> 01:26:16,750
Um and uh I I don't think we should assume at the outset that our folk

1274
01:26:16,960 --> 01:26:18,480
categories are are correct.

1275
01:26:18,640 --> 01:26:20,720
I think we should do the science and find out.

1276
01:26:20,960 --> 01:26:25,760
Um if we do that we do good evolutionary psychology, we get the, you know, the good uh

1277
01:26:25,760 --> 01:26:29,280
adaptationist theories of what the functions are, what they're you know, what uh what

1278
01:26:29,280 --> 01:26:30,720
they're doing, uh how they're doing it.

1279
01:26:30,880 --> 01:26:36,640
Um and it turns out that that the best uh science we can do uh corresponds to our

1280
01:26:36,640 --> 01:26:38,240
folk descriptions, then great.

1281
01:26:38,400 --> 01:26:43,510
Uh but if it doesn't, then I think we have to be prepared to reject the folk descriptions.

1282
01:26:43,830 --> 01:26:49,510
Um, so a good example of this, uh, I've written about this on my blog, is this the this is

1283
01:26:49,590 --> 01:26:52,870
this idea that we are pursuing happiness.

1284
01:26:53,590 --> 01:26:58,950
That the reason we do things is it bec is because it feels good, it makes us happy.

1285
01:26:59,190 --> 01:27:03,350
Um, I I eat the ice cream because it gives me pleasure.

1286
01:27:04,220 --> 01:27:10,060
I uh want to start a podcast with Dave Petrozowski because it is rewarding, it is

1287
01:27:10,060 --> 01:27:14,140
fulfilling, and that is a coherent explanation for my behavior.

1288
01:27:14,300 --> 01:27:18,620
Um, a lot of evolutionary psychologists, to my chagrin, talk about this as the proximate

1289
01:27:18,620 --> 01:27:21,420
level of analysis, which is different from the evolutionary level.

1290
01:27:21,500 --> 01:27:26,460
That you know, it's it's perfectly valid to say that you know, I do uh I play the guitar

1291
01:27:26,460 --> 01:27:27,820
because I like it, because it feels good.

1292
01:27:27,980 --> 01:27:28,380
All right.

1293
01:27:28,540 --> 01:27:31,900
Um, or uh, you know, we we have sex because it feels good.

1294
01:27:32,140 --> 01:27:37,630
Um but I think that once we actually do the science of what

1295
01:27:37,630 --> 01:27:42,030
happiness is and what function it's serving and how it works mechanistically, it actually

1296
01:27:42,030 --> 01:27:44,110
makes no sense to say that we're pursuing happiness.

1297
01:27:44,270 --> 01:27:47,310
I don't think that anybody actually wants to be happy.

1298
01:27:47,470 --> 01:27:52,350
I don't think we want to feel the emotion of happiness as an end in itself.

1299
01:27:52,830 --> 01:27:54,990
Um why?

1300
01:27:55,230 --> 01:27:58,110
Well, we have to think about what happiness is.

1301
01:27:58,900 --> 01:28:04,900
We intuitively think about it as a mental substance of intrinsic uh goodness,

1302
01:28:05,380 --> 01:28:05,700
right?

1303
01:28:05,940 --> 01:28:09,540
And its purpose, what we think its purpose is, is to motivate us to do things.

1304
01:28:09,620 --> 01:28:14,340
In the same way that offering you ice cream uh will motivate you to come hang out with me.

1305
01:28:14,500 --> 01:28:19,700
Um offering us dopamine or the mental substance of goodness motivates us to do things.

1306
01:28:19,860 --> 01:28:24,740
And so uh happiness is evolution's way of dangling a carrot in front of us to motivate us

1307
01:28:24,740 --> 01:28:25,380
to do things.

1308
01:28:25,620 --> 01:28:26,980
What's wrong with this picture?

1309
01:28:27,140 --> 01:28:28,910
Well, it makes no sense.

1310
01:28:29,150 --> 01:28:32,750
Motivation does not need a goodie, right?

1311
01:28:32,990 --> 01:28:35,790
Our motivations are wired up to our hearts and our muscles.

1312
01:28:35,950 --> 01:28:38,430
Our motivations can get us to do things directly.

1313
01:28:38,590 --> 01:28:41,070
No goodie is required, right?

1314
01:28:41,230 --> 01:28:46,110
If you if you think that we need a goodie to motivate us, some you know substance of

1315
01:28:46,110 --> 01:28:47,230
dopamine, whatever.

1316
01:28:47,390 --> 01:28:50,990
If you think we need that, well then how does evolution get us to want the dopamine?

1317
01:28:51,390 --> 01:28:56,440
Does it have to give us another goodie to to motivate us to want the dopamine?

1318
01:28:56,680 --> 01:29:00,680
Do we have to have so we we've entered an infinite regress?

1319
01:29:00,840 --> 01:29:04,040
We need a goodie to motivate us to get the goodie, and then we need another goodie to

1320
01:29:04,040 --> 01:29:05,160
motivate us to get that goodie.

1321
01:29:05,240 --> 01:29:09,960
At some point, the buck has to stop and we have to say, motivation can just affect us

1322
01:29:09,960 --> 01:29:10,840
directly, right?

1323
01:29:10,920 --> 01:29:15,930
We can be motivated to get things in the world independent of the pleasure it gives us.

1324
01:29:16,170 --> 01:29:20,330
So motivation does not need happiness to do its job.

1325
01:29:20,970 --> 01:29:25,210
And the idea that it needs happiness to do its job, I think is wrong.

1326
01:29:25,530 --> 01:29:27,530
It's the wrong way of thinking about motivation.

1327
01:29:27,850 --> 01:29:32,890
The right way of thinking about motivation is that we're motivated to get ancestral fitness

1328
01:29:32,890 --> 01:29:36,970
proxies, the things that were reliably correlated with fitness in ancestral environments.

1329
01:29:37,210 --> 01:29:39,530
Real things in the world, not fake things.

1330
01:29:39,840 --> 01:29:44,880
Those of our ancestors who were mistaken or deceived or deluded about real things in the

1331
01:29:44,880 --> 01:29:50,560
world and were motivated to get fake things or or uh believe lies, those

1332
01:29:50,720 --> 01:29:54,800
uh those did people did not become our ancestors, right?

1333
01:29:55,120 --> 01:30:00,320
So we evolved to want real things in the world, not stuff in our heads.

1334
01:30:00,640 --> 01:30:06,070
So what I think happiness is doing mechanistically, um, and this is consistent with a lot

1335
01:30:06,070 --> 01:30:10,310
of neuroscience research, uh, it's consistent with the prediction error theory of dopamine,

1336
01:30:10,710 --> 01:30:15,190
the idea is that uh we're constantly making predictions about how good or bad things are

1337
01:30:15,190 --> 01:30:15,910
going to be.

1338
01:30:16,150 --> 01:30:21,750
And when we make an error and things turn out to be better than we expected, um

1339
01:30:22,440 --> 01:30:24,200
happiness kicks in.

1340
01:30:24,600 --> 01:30:30,200
And the job of happiness is to recalibrate us, to shift our priorities,

1341
01:30:30,440 --> 01:30:35,080
to shift our expectations, so that our predictions are more accurate the next time we

1342
01:30:35,080 --> 01:30:36,440
encounter this good thing.

1343
01:30:36,680 --> 01:30:39,480
So we're predicting the sensations of eating the ice cream.

1344
01:30:39,800 --> 01:30:42,440
If the ice cream is better than we expected, we're going to feel pleasure.

1345
01:30:42,520 --> 01:30:44,520
And that's going to recalibrate our expectations.

1346
01:30:44,680 --> 01:30:48,750
So we're going to expect the ice cream to be even better the next time we eat it.

1347
01:30:49,550 --> 01:30:53,070
Our model is going to be a little bit more accurate about what ice cream tastes like, and

1348
01:30:53,070 --> 01:30:54,270
we're going to shift our priorities.

1349
01:30:54,350 --> 01:30:59,230
We're going to upgrade the ice cream so that that's going to be higher in our list of

1350
01:30:59,230 --> 01:31:01,390
desired foods for next time.

1351
01:31:01,550 --> 01:31:02,990
That's the job of happiness.

1352
01:31:03,150 --> 01:31:08,830
It's recalibrating us, reorienting us when we stumble upon something that is higher value

1353
01:31:08,830 --> 01:31:10,030
than we expected.

1354
01:31:10,750 --> 01:31:15,020
If that's true, then we're not pursuing happiness so much as chasing it away.

1355
01:31:15,260 --> 01:31:18,540
Because the more we encounter something, the better we get at predicting it, the more our

1356
01:31:18,540 --> 01:31:24,380
prediction errors decline, and the less happy we feel when we uh get to have

1357
01:31:24,380 --> 01:31:24,620
it.

1358
01:31:24,860 --> 01:31:30,620
Um if you look at at uh at the scientific literature, one of the most uh powerful

1359
01:31:30,620 --> 01:31:35,170
findings we see is that happiness, the frequency of happy and joyful states declines with

1360
01:31:35,170 --> 01:31:35,490
age.

1361
01:31:35,650 --> 01:31:36,850
It's a massive effect size.

1362
01:31:36,930 --> 01:31:38,530
There was a recent meta-analysis that was published.

1363
01:31:38,610 --> 01:31:44,450
The effect size was 1.7 of the decline of the frequency and intensity of happy and joyful

1364
01:31:44,450 --> 01:31:45,730
states throughout life.

1365
01:31:45,970 --> 01:31:51,730
So it in terms of actually describing human

1366
01:31:51,730 --> 01:31:55,890
mental life, the idea that we're pursuing happiness is a spectacular failure.

1367
01:31:56,130 --> 01:31:59,810
Why would we get worse at pursuing the thing that we were pursuing as we aged?

1368
01:31:59,970 --> 01:32:01,410
That makes no sense.

1369
01:32:02,220 --> 01:32:05,340
So we're not pursuing happiness, we're chasing it away.

1370
01:32:05,580 --> 01:32:09,580
Um, the things, if we repeatedly encounter something that makes us happy, we're going to

1371
01:32:09,580 --> 01:32:11,660
feel less and less happy the more we encounter it.

1372
01:32:11,820 --> 01:32:14,140
Um, it doesn't mean we're going to stop wanting it.

1373
01:32:14,460 --> 01:32:20,140
Um, we can still want to be in a marriage long after we've gotten used to our

1374
01:32:20,140 --> 01:32:23,020
spouse and are no longer as excited by our spouse.

1375
01:32:23,180 --> 01:32:28,230
Uh, But the pleasure, the happiness is going to decline because there's less recalibration

1376
01:32:28,550 --> 01:32:29,110
to do.

1377
01:32:29,430 --> 01:32:35,350
You don't need to pay as much attention to the thing to figure out where you went wrong in

1378
01:32:35,350 --> 01:32:36,230
your predictions.

1379
01:32:36,470 --> 01:32:39,510
You don't need as much reinforcement because your motivations are already on track.

1380
01:32:39,590 --> 01:32:41,110
So your happiness should decline.

1381
01:32:41,350 --> 01:32:46,550
So this folk concept that we're there that we're creatures that are motivated by the carrot

1382
01:32:46,550 --> 01:32:50,710
of happiness and the stick of suffering, this model I think is just wrong.

1383
01:32:50,920 --> 01:32:56,200
Uh, and it has been a catastrophe for psychological science because we have used this model

1384
01:32:56,200 --> 01:32:59,080
of the mind as a replacement for good evolutionary theorizing.

1385
01:32:59,240 --> 01:33:02,280
We use, oh, this thing makes us happy, therefore that's the function.

1386
01:33:02,360 --> 01:33:03,880
The function is to make us happy.

1387
01:33:04,040 --> 01:33:08,280
And so psychologists often study things and say that the function of this or that, the

1388
01:33:08,280 --> 01:33:12,680
function of this political belief, is to make us happy, as if that were a coherent claim.

1389
01:33:13,240 --> 01:33:18,830
Um uh oftentimes you you

1390
01:33:19,230 --> 01:33:23,870
it seems as if the entire purpose of the mind is to achieve happiness.

1391
01:33:24,190 --> 01:33:24,590
Right?

1392
01:33:24,830 --> 01:33:27,470
That that is how it's described in the psychology literature.

1393
01:33:28,190 --> 01:33:33,950
Uh, that the mind is a machine for uh for getting stuff inside the mind,

1394
01:33:34,110 --> 01:33:38,110
for getting the the dopamine or the serotonin or whatever, which is a preposterous way of

1395
01:33:38,110 --> 01:33:39,470
thinking about the evolution of the mind.

1396
01:33:39,630 --> 01:33:42,430
Why would we evolve to get stuff inside of our heads?

1397
01:33:42,590 --> 01:33:43,950
It makes no sense at all.

1398
01:33:44,190 --> 01:33:48,500
It only makes sense that we evolved to get stuff in the world that would have enhanced our

1399
01:33:48,500 --> 01:33:50,260
ancestors' fitness.

1400
01:33:50,660 --> 01:33:55,940
Um so I think this this that's a long winded way of saying there's at least one very strong

1401
01:33:55,940 --> 01:34:00,740
candidate for folk psychology being bullshit, and that is this pursuit of happiness idea.

1402
01:34:00,900 --> 01:34:05,350
And if that's bullshit then there's likely to be much more bullshit where that came where

1403
01:34:05,350 --> 01:34:05,990
that came from.

1404
01:34:06,150 --> 01:34:11,510
And so maybe we should be a little bit more skeptical of folk psychology uh than we have

1405
01:34:11,510 --> 01:34:12,070
been in the past.

1406
01:34:12,310 --> 01:34:13,030
What do you think about that?

1407
01:34:13,350 --> 01:34:13,830
That's great.

1408
01:34:13,910 --> 01:34:15,190
Um I really appreciate that.

1409
01:34:15,350 --> 01:34:21,110
And I I um that was a really nice um um uh

1410
01:34:21,350 --> 01:34:26,150
description in a very condensed way of uh big literature, and that was great.

1411
01:34:26,390 --> 01:34:32,310
Um well let me ask you, um, do you think that so happiness, the

1412
01:34:32,310 --> 01:34:38,080
idea um the idea that happiness or people are

1413
01:34:38,080 --> 01:34:43,600
motivated to pursue happiness um there's two ways to think about the way in which

1414
01:34:43,600 --> 01:34:49,200
happiness is wrong um and this may clarify sort of my claim too um

1415
01:34:49,680 --> 01:34:54,960
one is to sort of say that you know happiness the folk

1416
01:34:55,200 --> 01:34:59,360
psychology of happiness is wrong the other way to think about it is

1417
01:35:01,770 --> 01:35:06,970
the folk psychology of happiness is a slightly different issue than using a folk

1418
01:35:07,290 --> 01:35:13,050
construct like happiness and a folk construct like motivation, and then plying

1419
01:35:13,050 --> 01:35:16,410
that to a scientific idea.

1420
01:35:16,810 --> 01:35:20,170
Um, and saying, like, look, the way that the software works.

1421
01:35:20,330 --> 01:35:26,090
So I think what you were describing was sort of uh of using

1422
01:35:26,570 --> 01:35:32,560
the the the faulty thing of using happiness and a motivation towards happiness, which

1423
01:35:32,560 --> 01:35:37,200
I agree are all outputs of our folk psychology in different ways.

1424
01:35:37,360 --> 01:35:43,120
Um, you know, that there's an agent who is sort of rationally pursuing a goal, that's one

1425
01:35:43,120 --> 01:35:43,440
element.

1426
01:35:43,600 --> 01:35:48,960
The other element is just the meant the mental thing of happiness and its intrinsic value.

1427
01:35:49,200 --> 01:35:53,250
Um those are sort of two constituent elements of what you said.

1428
01:35:53,490 --> 01:35:58,290
Those are being applied now to these scientific ideas that you don't think are right.

1429
01:35:58,690 --> 01:36:03,970
Um the question for you is do you think that that's a problem for the folk psychology, or

1430
01:36:03,970 --> 01:36:07,730
is it that the folk psychology is applying to a place where it doesn't belong?

1431
01:36:09,250 --> 01:36:11,810
So I think there is an emotion called happiness.

1432
01:36:12,920 --> 01:36:18,440
And I think it it it probably serves the function of recalibration in light of

1433
01:36:18,440 --> 01:36:22,440
prediction errors about how good things are going to be.

1434
01:36:22,920 --> 01:36:27,800
And so it updates our model of the world and it shifts our priorities accordingly.

1435
01:36:28,360 --> 01:36:29,880
So happiness is real.

1436
01:36:30,520 --> 01:36:36,520
The idea that we are pursuing it, and that is an explanation for human behavior, is what is

1437
01:36:36,520 --> 01:36:36,920
wrong.

1438
01:36:38,070 --> 01:36:43,190
Um, so yeah, I guess you could say that it's a misapplication of the folk psychology, but

1439
01:36:43,190 --> 01:36:47,670
um at the end of the day, you know, there are likely to be many such misapplications.

1440
01:36:48,070 --> 01:36:51,030
Yeah, and then and then in that case, we don't disagree at all.

1441
01:36:51,190 --> 01:36:55,910
I mean, I think what I was trying to say was that I wouldn't want to throw happiness out,

1442
01:36:56,070 --> 01:37:01,910
or the idea, like, or or what's the coherence of the belief that happiness is a thing,

1443
01:37:02,070 --> 01:37:06,600
um, Or uh or that agents rationally pursue goals, right?

1444
01:37:06,840 --> 01:37:12,360
Um, it's not that these things are, and even the idea that why are mental states, I mean,

1445
01:37:12,440 --> 01:37:17,400
one of the things I do in this paper, this difference detecting paper that um will be out

1446
01:37:17,400 --> 01:37:23,000
soon, um, is is explaining why an evolved organism would think

1447
01:37:23,640 --> 01:37:27,150
that thinking is a unitary thing, right?

1448
01:37:27,310 --> 01:37:33,310
This this agent process uh or process um content slot, so agent

1449
01:37:33,390 --> 01:37:38,990
process content idea that we were talking about earlier, that is wrong when it

1450
01:37:38,990 --> 01:37:42,750
comes to a scientific description of how the mind works.

1451
01:37:43,150 --> 01:37:46,110
What what would a coherent argument for that be?

1452
01:37:46,270 --> 01:37:48,590
Why would an organism think that's true?

1453
01:37:48,750 --> 01:37:54,000
Um, and the short answer that thinking is a reliable set of

1454
01:37:54,000 --> 01:37:57,120
co-occurring processes for an organism.

1455
01:37:57,280 --> 01:38:00,800
That's different than remembering, that's different than seeing.

1456
01:38:01,040 --> 01:38:05,200
So there's a big difference between you see a bear right now and you're remembering a bear,

1457
01:38:05,360 --> 01:38:09,120
especially if we're outside, especially if we're unarmed, especially if we're somewhere

1458
01:38:09,120 --> 01:38:10,960
where bears are really dangerous, right?

1459
01:38:11,200 --> 01:38:16,400
Um and so the uh the evolutionary affordances of these

1460
01:38:16,400 --> 01:38:22,330
categories um Are what caused them to distill down into unitary

1461
01:38:22,330 --> 01:38:22,810
things.

1462
01:38:23,050 --> 01:38:26,410
So there's a good reason why we think attention is a thing, right?

1463
01:38:26,490 --> 01:38:30,650
It's a placeholder for did I see something or not?

1464
01:38:30,890 --> 01:38:32,010
Did I make a mistake?

1465
01:38:32,330 --> 01:38:38,250
So it's exactly this, it's exactly like there is a coherent

1466
01:38:38,250 --> 01:38:41,450
argument for why happiness exists, right?

1467
01:38:41,530 --> 01:38:46,380
There's an idea that like the belief that attention exists, there's a coherent argument for

1468
01:38:46,380 --> 01:38:47,980
why that would be too.

1469
01:38:48,460 --> 01:38:53,980
But that's a different issue than is are all the assumptions about

1470
01:38:53,980 --> 01:38:56,140
attention or happiness right?

1471
01:38:56,380 --> 01:38:57,660
And no, I wouldn't.

1472
01:38:57,740 --> 01:39:01,820
So I'm so number one, I I I completely agree that there might be

1473
01:39:03,420 --> 01:39:09,100
things in the ontology of folk psychology that are just flat out

1474
01:39:09,100 --> 01:39:09,660
wrong.

1475
01:39:09,900 --> 01:39:14,470
But I I don't, in some sense, I think this is also sort of just this linguistic difficulty

1476
01:39:14,550 --> 01:39:16,390
of well, what does it mean to be wrong, right?

1477
01:39:16,470 --> 01:39:21,750
If I think that you know, I so the simplest thing you can think of, I'm unitary, right?

1478
01:39:22,150 --> 01:39:23,030
Is that wrong?

1479
01:39:23,190 --> 01:39:28,470
Well, from the perspective of an evolved organism in its evolved environment, yes, that's

1480
01:39:28,470 --> 01:39:28,630
right.

1481
01:39:28,790 --> 01:39:34,150
You can see the van the why does a why does why is the uh uh system in the mind for

1482
01:39:34,150 --> 01:39:38,020
representing the self think the self is a unitary enduring entity.

1483
01:39:38,180 --> 01:39:41,780
Well, it's because I'm different than you, I'm different than my child, I'm different than

1484
01:39:41,780 --> 01:39:44,260
the tree and the rock and the lion and everything.

1485
01:39:44,500 --> 01:39:50,500
And the things that I do today and tomorrow, and consequently, like where this

1486
01:39:50,900 --> 01:39:56,820
sort of in enclosed body is sort of a unique auto-correlated entity, and it

1487
01:39:56,820 --> 01:40:00,930
would make sense for it to represent itself as a unitary thing, right?

1488
01:40:01,170 --> 01:40:06,850
So, in that sense, if that's what you understand why the unitary representation is there,

1489
01:40:07,090 --> 01:40:08,450
it's correct.

1490
01:40:08,770 --> 01:40:08,930
Yeah.

1491
01:40:09,170 --> 01:40:15,090
But if you think that the unitary representation is for anything, or science, for example,

1492
01:40:15,330 --> 01:40:16,210
then it is wrong.

1493
01:40:16,370 --> 01:40:21,170
And so this is, I think, where there's a trip up where if you say, is the theory of mind

1494
01:40:21,570 --> 01:40:26,280
system right or wrong, there's a sense in which you can answer the question in two

1495
01:40:26,280 --> 01:40:26,760
different ways.

1496
01:40:26,840 --> 01:40:31,960
I'm sort of answering it from the perspective of is there a uh a coherent

1497
01:40:32,520 --> 01:40:37,960
account for why the theory of mind is structured the way it is, that it thinks thoughts are

1498
01:40:37,960 --> 01:40:41,160
unitary, that it thinks the agent is a unitary thing?

1499
01:40:41,400 --> 01:40:43,160
And the answer is yes.

1500
01:40:43,720 --> 01:40:47,960
But then your point, which I completely agree with, I think this is your point, and you can

1501
01:40:47,960 --> 01:40:53,670
tell me if not, is that there's a really very deeply a sense in

1502
01:40:53,670 --> 01:40:56,070
which those things are wrong.

1503
01:40:56,230 --> 01:40:57,430
Um, too.

1504
01:40:57,670 --> 01:41:02,870
And I think this is and this is where I think the language of sort of right or wrong is

1505
01:41:02,870 --> 01:41:08,550
hard because you can imagine nothing is right intrinsically.

1506
01:41:08,630 --> 01:41:11,750
It's sort of right in a place and wrong in a place, right?

1507
01:41:11,830 --> 01:41:17,100
And I think that's so I I I I would want to just clarify, I I don't disagree.

1508
01:41:17,340 --> 01:41:23,180
I mean, and if you if in practice, I mean, most of my time is spent really uh in a sense

1509
01:41:23,340 --> 01:41:25,100
railing against theory of mind.

1510
01:41:25,660 --> 01:41:31,580
But there is this sense in which I respect it and why it is coherent and right for

1511
01:41:31,580 --> 01:41:32,860
what it's for.

1512
01:41:33,260 --> 01:41:38,860
And I think um another way to put it is we've been wrong about what

1513
01:41:39,530 --> 01:41:45,050
what ideas are for, in some sense, like it's a it's an empirical question of like, you

1514
01:41:45,050 --> 01:41:50,330
know, what what uh why why do we think thinking is

1515
01:41:50,330 --> 01:41:51,210
unitary?

1516
01:41:51,530 --> 01:41:57,290
If we if we understand that that's for an evolutionary environment, then we can understand

1517
01:41:57,290 --> 01:41:58,410
why that's right.

1518
01:41:58,730 --> 01:42:03,690
But if we if we just take it as a blanket statement and we're not asking what it's for and

1519
01:42:03,690 --> 01:42:09,640
we're just saying is thinking unitary, well then sometimes in some sense yes in some

1520
01:42:09,640 --> 01:42:10,440
sense no, right?

1521
01:42:10,600 --> 01:42:14,120
And that's the that's the sort of confusing thing, I think.

1522
01:42:14,360 --> 01:42:18,040
Um but but anyway, the point is I don't think we disagree.

1523
01:42:19,080 --> 01:42:19,320
Cool.

1524
01:42:19,480 --> 01:42:25,480
Yeah, no, it's it seems like, yeah, it it's it's tricky to define what makes an idea true

1525
01:42:25,480 --> 01:42:26,040
or false.

1526
01:42:26,280 --> 01:42:29,160
I mean, we get into epistemology and philosophy of science.

1527
01:42:29,400 --> 01:42:33,960
You know, certainly Newtonian physics is true in a sense when applied to you know

1528
01:42:34,040 --> 01:42:35,730
medium-sized objects.

1529
01:42:35,890 --> 01:42:40,610
You know, when you look at galaxies or fundamental particles, Newtonian physics doesn't

1530
01:42:40,610 --> 01:42:40,850
work.

1531
01:42:41,010 --> 01:42:43,250
So is Newtonian physics correct?

1532
01:42:43,490 --> 01:42:44,290
I don't know.

1533
01:42:44,530 --> 01:42:49,730
Uh I uh we just have to, you know, use language in a way that is is good at for

1534
01:42:49,890 --> 01:42:54,850
communication, and you know, we can define true as predictively powerful, or we can define

1535
01:42:54,850 --> 01:42:57,970
true as predictively powerful in a in a wide range of cases.

1536
01:42:58,130 --> 01:43:01,570
Um I don't know that there's a correct answer to what is a correct answer.

1537
01:43:01,970 --> 01:43:02,290
That's right.

1538
01:43:02,370 --> 01:43:03,890
Is the man on the moon real?

1539
01:43:04,130 --> 01:43:04,450
Yeah.

1540
01:43:04,800 --> 01:43:06,400
There's a sense in which yes and no.

1541
01:43:06,560 --> 01:43:08,000
It depends on what you mean by the question.

1542
01:43:08,160 --> 01:43:09,280
Same with free will, right?

1543
01:43:09,360 --> 01:43:10,640
Is free will re real or not?

1544
01:43:10,800 --> 01:43:11,680
I mean, it's the same.

1545
01:43:12,640 --> 01:43:16,640
The idea is that, you know, the man on the moon is a real.

1546
01:43:16,720 --> 01:43:20,640
If you think that what you mean by that is there does it look like there's a face on the

1547
01:43:20,640 --> 01:43:20,880
moon?

1548
01:43:20,960 --> 01:43:21,840
Yeah, that's real.

1549
01:43:21,920 --> 01:43:25,440
The the things that lead that, but is it actually a person on the moon?

1550
01:43:25,520 --> 01:43:25,680
No.

1551
01:43:25,760 --> 01:43:29,520
You know, and if you don't clarify that's what you mean by the question, you could have

1552
01:43:29,520 --> 01:43:34,190
people arguing incessantly forever about is the man on the moon real?

1553
01:43:34,350 --> 01:43:38,670
Because that question itself is actually hiding two distinct questions with two distinct

1554
01:43:38,670 --> 01:43:39,310
answers.

1555
01:43:39,710 --> 01:43:40,110
Right.

1556
01:43:40,430 --> 01:43:45,790
But I do think once you start to think about um social strategizing,

1557
01:43:46,030 --> 01:43:51,390
status seeking, intergroup competition, it begins to become apparent that the stories we

1558
01:43:51,390 --> 01:43:56,960
tell about the mind are not merely going to be wrong in a way that, you know, it's it's

1559
01:43:56,960 --> 01:44:00,400
oversimplifying things or it's carving up nature in the wrong ways.

1560
01:44:00,640 --> 01:44:05,120
But it could be wrong in a more powerful way, which is that it is serving a strategic instr

1561
01:44:05,360 --> 01:44:05,680
interest.

1562
01:44:06,000 --> 01:44:06,320
Absolutely.

1563
01:44:06,640 --> 01:44:12,240
Um with the happiness idea, I think it is often used as an excuse uh for

1564
01:44:12,240 --> 01:44:17,150
covering up uh unsavory, self interested or or status seeking motives.

1565
01:44:17,230 --> 01:44:22,190
You know, I I'm pursuing this this career for me, for the sheer satisfaction of it, because

1566
01:44:22,190 --> 01:44:25,550
it's fulfilling or rewarding, uh, not because it gets me status or money.

1567
01:44:25,870 --> 01:44:26,030
Yeah.

1568
01:44:26,190 --> 01:44:26,270
No.

1569
01:44:26,670 --> 01:44:31,870
I'm I'm helping others uh not to virtue signal but but because it it is it makes me feel

1570
01:44:31,870 --> 01:44:32,110
good.

1571
01:44:32,350 --> 01:44:37,390
Um oftentimes this happiness myth is used as a kind of confabulation or rationalization uh

1572
01:44:37,470 --> 01:44:40,780
that that serves a reputational function.

1573
01:44:41,500 --> 01:44:45,980
And I think there are likely to be many intuitive ideas about the mind that are serving

1574
01:44:45,980 --> 01:44:49,020
those kind of strategic reputational functions.

1575
01:44:49,100 --> 01:44:52,940
Uh, and I think it is fair to call a lot of those ideas bullshit.

1576
01:44:53,260 --> 01:44:57,820
Uh and and as we do good science, we'll begin to discover more and more of them uh and and

1577
01:44:57,820 --> 01:45:01,580
why they're bullshit and and what fun what strategic functions they're serving.

1578
01:45:01,740 --> 01:45:07,610
Um this is a good segue into groups, which uh has been uh dominating the bulk

1579
01:45:07,610 --> 01:45:09,370
of of your academic career.

1580
01:45:09,450 --> 01:45:14,730
Uh we started out talking about, you know, your youth growing up uh on the periphery of of

1581
01:45:14,730 --> 01:45:17,290
cults and uh religious extremism.

1582
01:45:17,530 --> 01:45:23,450
Um certainly uh we can think about cults and religions as an extreme type

1583
01:45:23,450 --> 01:45:26,170
of groupishness or commitment to a group of people.

1584
01:45:26,410 --> 01:45:30,440
Um you've done research about the folk psychology of groups.

1585
01:45:30,600 --> 01:45:31,320
What is a group?

1586
01:45:31,480 --> 01:45:37,400
How does the mind categorize a collection of units as uh one thing, as a

1587
01:45:37,400 --> 01:45:42,120
group, as as something that could either be acting uh uh against me or with me?

1588
01:45:42,760 --> 01:45:48,520
Um So I wanna uh

1589
01:45:48,760 --> 01:45:52,040
join all these ideas into one grand question.

1590
01:45:52,280 --> 01:45:54,280
Uh and we won't have time to answer it.

1591
01:45:54,520 --> 01:46:00,190
Uh we'll probably probably won't get the right answer, but why are we so uh

1592
01:46:00,830 --> 01:46:03,630
divided into groups?

1593
01:46:03,870 --> 01:46:05,870
Why can't we all get along?

1594
01:46:06,030 --> 01:46:09,950
This question was posed by Rodney King after the LA riots.

1595
01:46:10,430 --> 01:46:15,150
Um tribalism seems to be a core feature of our species.

1596
01:46:15,390 --> 01:46:20,670
We cannot help but form tribes and compete with other tribes for power, status, and

1597
01:46:20,670 --> 01:46:21,230
resources.

1598
01:46:21,390 --> 01:46:23,470
Often the competition is violent.

1599
01:46:23,710 --> 01:46:29,420
Um do you see this tendency as unavoidable as a part of

1600
01:46:29,420 --> 01:46:31,340
human nature that we need to live with?

1601
01:46:31,580 --> 01:46:32,860
Are you more utopian?

1602
01:46:32,940 --> 01:46:34,780
Do you think world peace is possible?

1603
01:46:35,020 --> 01:46:39,020
Um why can't we all get along?

1604
01:46:40,220 --> 01:46:42,460
Uh 10 second answer, yeah.

1605
01:46:42,540 --> 01:46:42,780
No.

1606
01:46:43,020 --> 01:46:45,740
Um Yeah, no, I think that th that's that's great.

1607
01:46:45,820 --> 01:46:47,740
And and there's obviously a lot to say about that.

1608
01:46:47,900 --> 01:46:53,730
And maybe um this might also I'm gonna I'm gonna um sort of declare

1609
01:46:53,730 --> 01:46:58,610
uh somewhat like a rain check on some of this I think into our next session we might need

1610
01:46:58,610 --> 01:46:59,170
to do.

1611
01:46:59,490 --> 01:47:03,090
Um I'll I'll I'll start answering that.

1612
01:47:03,250 --> 01:47:08,930
I think just um b what we have what just to wrap up what we were

1613
01:47:09,010 --> 01:47:13,330
um saying, because yeah, no, it's it's a really good question and and I think we have to

1614
01:47:13,330 --> 01:47:15,250
unpack a few things to answer it.

1615
01:47:15,490 --> 01:47:21,280
Um the uh one of the it's funny you mentioned the the thing

1616
01:47:21,280 --> 01:47:27,280
about uh strategic reasons and group reasons for why um folk psychology is

1617
01:47:27,280 --> 01:47:28,800
bullshit, as you put it.

1618
01:47:29,360 --> 01:47:35,280
And I think this actually swings back to um the beginning of our conversation,

1619
01:47:35,520 --> 01:47:41,470
which is I also think that was part of my attraction to

1620
01:47:41,630 --> 01:47:47,310
psychology and evolutionary psychology was that I saw the same thing in these basement

1621
01:47:47,310 --> 01:47:48,110
cults, right?

1622
01:47:48,190 --> 01:47:54,190
In these evangelical, where the superficial idea was not at all what was

1623
01:47:54,190 --> 01:47:54,590
going on.

1624
01:47:54,750 --> 01:48:00,750
You know, clearly these were people who wanted feeling of belongingness, needed

1625
01:48:00,750 --> 01:48:01,710
social support.

1626
01:48:02,000 --> 01:48:07,440
um, the content about what was talked about, you know, like the devil and Jesus and eternal

1627
01:48:07,440 --> 01:48:11,520
life was this superficial thing, and there was clearly like other stuff going on.

1628
01:48:11,680 --> 01:48:17,680
And I think um the the I think the beauty

1629
01:48:17,680 --> 01:48:23,200
and the respectfulness of an evolutionary approach or this mechanical approach to the mind,

1630
01:48:23,280 --> 01:48:26,480
and we talked about the human universals, Don Brown's human universals.

1631
01:48:26,560 --> 01:48:28,000
I'll get to groups in a second.

1632
01:48:28,240 --> 01:48:34,150
Um I think um if you take a really simple view of how

1633
01:48:34,150 --> 01:48:37,350
people work, David knows it's raining.

1634
01:48:37,510 --> 01:48:42,310
Whatever David thinks or believes is sort of malleable and we can do whatever we want with

1635
01:48:42,310 --> 01:48:42,630
it.

1636
01:48:43,030 --> 01:48:49,030
Um it it doesn't it doesn't really give the um it's not

1637
01:48:49,030 --> 01:48:51,910
a dignified way to treat people in the following respect.

1638
01:48:52,070 --> 01:48:57,960
If people actually need things to be okay, you know, you you need to feel safe,

1639
01:48:58,120 --> 01:48:59,960
you need resources, you need friends.

1640
01:49:00,120 --> 01:49:03,880
You know, as a kid, you need to play, you need to feel empowerment, you need to have some

1641
01:49:03,880 --> 01:49:08,440
autonomy, you need to be able to take risks and not kill yourself, but maybe skin your

1642
01:49:08,440 --> 01:49:09,000
knee.

1643
01:49:09,160 --> 01:49:14,360
Um, if you want to learn something, you need to be able to like be okay and not afraid to

1644
01:49:14,360 --> 01:49:17,320
ask questions or lose your status because you look dumb.

1645
01:49:17,480 --> 01:49:23,430
Um, you know, people are complicated, but we're really

1646
01:49:23,430 --> 01:49:24,230
fragile.

1647
01:49:24,310 --> 01:49:26,470
Um, and we need a lot.

1648
01:49:26,550 --> 01:49:30,630
We're very altrucial, you know, and we both appreciate that as parents right now.

1649
01:49:31,030 --> 01:49:36,950
And I think a view of people as sort of not very complicated and not very not a

1650
01:49:36,950 --> 01:49:38,150
lot of nature.

1651
01:49:38,630 --> 01:49:43,180
Um it's very easy to sort of not think it really matters.

1652
01:49:43,260 --> 01:49:47,580
Like I can put somebody in a room for 20 hours and not give them windows or proper

1653
01:49:47,580 --> 01:49:50,380
nutrition and just sort of do whatever, it doesn't matter.

1654
01:49:50,460 --> 01:49:52,380
They're alive, they're fine, you know?

1655
01:49:52,780 --> 01:49:58,540
Um if you think that there's a sort of intrinsic complicated nature to people, um

1656
01:49:59,260 --> 01:50:05,050
then if you want people to be okay, if you want to be okay, um, if you want to treat

1657
01:50:05,050 --> 01:50:10,890
people well, if you want people to not suffer, um, you have to be a

1658
01:50:10,890 --> 01:50:12,970
student of what is that nature.

1659
01:50:13,130 --> 01:50:18,970
Um and um and you have to provide you know things for yourself or your children or

1660
01:50:19,050 --> 01:50:24,970
or your employees um uh or as institutions um if

1661
01:50:24,970 --> 01:50:28,410
you want to respect people um and treat them well

1662
01:50:30,700 --> 01:50:33,260
There's a complicated set of things you have to do.

1663
01:50:33,420 --> 01:50:39,020
And so I think just just to to and then I'll go get to groups, I think um even

1664
01:50:39,180 --> 01:50:44,860
though the idea of a human nature and it being complicated um and

1665
01:50:45,180 --> 01:50:51,180
um innate um you know historically there have been things done

1666
01:50:51,180 --> 01:50:57,130
with that idea very pernicious but it's exactly right that um the the flip

1667
01:50:57,130 --> 01:50:58,810
side can be quite pernicious too.

1668
01:50:58,890 --> 01:51:04,650
And I I I think um there's a there's a way to really think about people being

1669
01:51:04,970 --> 01:51:10,570
um human nature being very valuable and good and precious um because it's so

1670
01:51:10,570 --> 01:51:15,770
complicated and because we have intrinsic things that we need or desire or want.

1671
01:51:16,170 --> 01:51:20,890
Um and so I I think um uh

1672
01:51:22,280 --> 01:51:28,280
I think it's a very humanitarian view to understand that there are universals and

1673
01:51:28,280 --> 01:51:32,040
that um and that there is structure to human nature.

1674
01:51:32,440 --> 01:51:33,080
Yeah.

1675
01:51:33,560 --> 01:51:35,720
Um now to groups.

1676
01:51:36,360 --> 01:51:42,360
Um I mean I think I think the short answer is related to what I just said, which is

1677
01:51:42,360 --> 01:51:47,560
that um you know uh groups are

1678
01:51:48,590 --> 01:51:52,270
an answer to the question of well, what do we do now?

1679
01:51:52,750 --> 01:51:58,670
And what do we do now sometimes involves making things

1680
01:51:58,670 --> 01:52:03,790
for the better and sometimes making things for the worst, and there's finite resources,

1681
01:52:04,510 --> 01:52:05,950
um, or not.

1682
01:52:06,350 --> 01:52:12,270
So uh, you know, I can take your berries, or you and I can work together

1683
01:52:12,270 --> 01:52:15,790
to make more berries uh exist, right?

1684
01:52:16,030 --> 01:52:22,000
And so um I think when we talk about our groups inevitable

1685
01:52:22,080 --> 01:52:25,600
or what is a group, you know, it's a folk construct.

1686
01:52:25,840 --> 01:52:29,440
We understand that there's lots of different meanings of the word, and we can talk about

1687
01:52:29,440 --> 01:52:32,720
that now or in a little bit or next time or whenever.

1688
01:52:33,280 --> 01:52:38,240
But I think the bottom line thing is that we are

1689
01:52:39,520 --> 01:52:45,490
really um privileged to be an organism that

1690
01:52:45,810 --> 01:52:51,650
is not just stuck swimming together with other fish or crossing rivers with

1691
01:52:51,650 --> 01:52:54,290
other gazelles and then just kind of eating side by side.

1692
01:52:54,370 --> 01:52:58,530
We can decide, well, what's the basis of our organization and how are we all going to get

1693
01:52:58,530 --> 01:52:59,650
together and do things?

1694
01:52:59,890 --> 01:53:05,570
And that ability gives us the ability to make more berries or to help people, help

1695
01:53:05,570 --> 01:53:06,450
ourselves.

1696
01:53:07,010 --> 01:53:11,780
And as a consequence or externality help other people, but it also allows us to gang up on

1697
01:53:11,780 --> 01:53:12,100
people.

1698
01:53:13,060 --> 01:53:17,780
And that can be a good thing if those people did something bad, but it can also be a bad

1699
01:53:17,780 --> 01:53:18,100
thing.

1700
01:53:19,940 --> 01:53:25,940
So I think the the the short answer is that a group is a rough cut

1701
01:53:26,660 --> 01:53:32,500
folk psychological level description of this ability of organisms, particular

1702
01:53:32,500 --> 01:53:38,070
people to um to to work cooperate c cooperate yeah that's a word

1703
01:53:38,310 --> 01:53:43,190
collaborate cooper cooperate you know compete with one another it's this idea that they're

1704
01:53:43,190 --> 01:53:48,790
sort of like software for allowing alliances and cooperation and

1705
01:53:49,030 --> 01:53:54,870
the content of that is not infinite but it's well it is infinite it's

1706
01:53:54,950 --> 01:54:00,660
um it's not um it's not unconstrained but those constraints um uh

1707
01:54:00,740 --> 01:54:06,500
in terms of sort of what what would be a basis of cooperation um is cre is

1708
01:54:06,500 --> 01:54:09,620
creative and uh and that's part of our nature.

1709
01:54:09,940 --> 01:54:15,220
So um uh so I don't think group conflict is

1710
01:54:15,860 --> 01:54:20,020
when you say if something is inevitable or not, that's an outcome in the world.

1711
01:54:20,100 --> 01:54:25,490
And I think that's um you know, I don't think a psychologist, even if we knew everything

1712
01:54:25,490 --> 01:54:29,810
about the software, could predict everything about what outcomes would occur because things

1713
01:54:29,810 --> 01:54:30,370
are complicated.

1714
01:54:30,530 --> 01:54:32,530
We know how the weather works, we can't predict the weather.

1715
01:54:32,690 --> 01:54:36,450
There's an idea called methodological individualism, right, where you just sort of study

1716
01:54:36,450 --> 01:54:41,410
the individual, but there's all other, other higher level questions like for sociology,

1717
01:54:41,730 --> 01:54:47,010
that are even harder, even when psychology is done and we can go home and we're done with

1718
01:54:47,010 --> 01:54:47,330
our work.

1719
01:54:47,490 --> 01:54:48,930
So I don't know if it's inevitable.

1720
01:54:49,010 --> 01:54:53,680
I mean, there are principled answers to it, but was that does that start to answer your

1721
01:54:53,680 --> 01:54:55,040
question about groups?

1722
01:54:55,600 --> 01:54:56,720
It begins to.

1723
01:54:58,240 --> 01:55:03,840
The way I like to think about this question, and I think you know it's an underrated

1724
01:55:03,840 --> 01:55:04,160
question.

1725
01:55:04,240 --> 01:55:08,160
It sounds kind of sentimental, and why can't we all get along?

1726
01:55:08,240 --> 01:55:12,160
But I actually think it's a really important question that social scientists really need to

1727
01:55:12,160 --> 01:55:16,640
think about, especially uh in the 21st century when we have nuclear weapons.

1728
01:55:16,880 --> 01:55:22,110
Um my tentative answer to the question is I think we're asking the wrong question.

1729
01:55:22,190 --> 01:55:26,510
So a repeating theme of this conversation is that it is very bad to ask the wrong

1730
01:55:26,510 --> 01:55:29,630
questions, and it is very important to ask the right questions.

1731
01:55:29,790 --> 01:55:34,110
And one thing that an evolutionary perspective allows you to do is ask the right questions.

1732
01:55:34,590 --> 01:55:38,030
So I think why can't we all just get along is asking the wrong question.

1733
01:55:38,110 --> 01:55:43,340
I actually think a better question would be, why can we all get along?

1734
01:55:43,580 --> 01:55:49,260
Because if you think about it, conflict and competition are endemic to the biological

1735
01:55:49,260 --> 01:55:49,740
world.

1736
01:55:50,220 --> 01:55:53,900
There's conflict and competition at all levels of biological organization.

1737
01:55:53,980 --> 01:55:55,500
We see it all throughout the animal kingdom.

1738
01:55:55,740 --> 01:55:57,100
Resources are limited.

1739
01:56:00,220 --> 01:56:01,660
We can't both have the mate.

1740
01:56:01,820 --> 01:56:03,820
We can't both be on this territory.

1741
01:56:04,220 --> 01:56:07,420
We need some way of figuring out who gets the goodie.

1742
01:56:07,710 --> 01:56:13,470
And uh one of the most common ways of figuring that out is fighting uh physical

1743
01:56:13,470 --> 01:56:14,190
violence.

1744
01:56:14,350 --> 01:56:18,750
Um physical violence is very costly and we've evolved to avoid it when we can.

1745
01:56:18,990 --> 01:56:22,910
But when we can't avoid it, you know, things get bloody.

1746
01:56:24,910 --> 01:56:30,030
Certainly uh conflict is a part of the Darwinian process.

1747
01:56:30,190 --> 01:56:35,920
You can't have Darwinian natural selection without conflict and competition, at least

1748
01:56:35,920 --> 01:56:41,680
in some sense, to for for a trait to be selected for, to evolve, it has to

1749
01:56:41,680 --> 01:56:46,320
win out in the competition for some fitness enhancing resource.

1750
01:56:46,480 --> 01:56:49,360
And it has to displace some other trait.

1751
01:56:49,520 --> 01:56:49,840
Right?

1752
01:56:50,000 --> 01:56:52,400
So some trait has to win and some trait has to lose.

1753
01:56:52,480 --> 01:56:57,130
If you think about it in terms of individuals, one lineage has to win and another lineage

1754
01:56:57,130 --> 01:57:00,730
has to lose in order for an adaptation to be produced.

1755
01:57:01,690 --> 01:57:06,250
A desire to uh benefit the entire species cannot evolve.

1756
01:57:06,330 --> 01:57:12,010
We've known this since the 1970s, when uh Wynne Edwards-style group

1757
01:57:12,010 --> 01:57:17,930
selection uh became uh out of fashion and uh Dawkinsian selfish gene theory rose

1758
01:57:17,930 --> 01:57:18,810
to preeminence.

1759
01:57:18,970 --> 01:57:23,140
We know that a desire to benefit the entire species cannot evolve.

1760
01:57:23,300 --> 01:57:28,340
Organisms don't act for the good of the species, they act for the good of their genes.

1761
01:57:30,260 --> 01:57:35,780
Organisms that act in ways that benefit themselves and their kin,

1762
01:57:36,020 --> 01:57:41,780
well, uh genes for doing that will tend to proliferate uh at the expense of genes that

1763
01:57:41,780 --> 01:57:42,900
don't do that.

1764
01:57:43,620 --> 01:57:49,510
Um given all that, I don't think it's a mystery why we have conflict and competition.

1765
01:57:49,990 --> 01:57:53,830
Um, really, what is the mystery is why we have cooperation.

1766
01:57:53,990 --> 01:57:56,070
That's the puzzle that we need to solve.

1767
01:57:56,310 --> 01:57:57,990
Why do we sometimes work together?

1768
01:57:58,150 --> 01:58:02,150
Why do we sometimes resolve our conflicts and avoid killing each other?

1769
01:58:02,470 --> 01:58:05,830
Um why do we form trading networks?

1770
01:58:06,630 --> 01:58:10,630
Why do we often help each other and trade favors?

1771
01:58:11,520 --> 01:58:15,360
This in evolutionary biology is known as the problem of altruism.

1772
01:58:16,080 --> 01:58:20,640
This is a great example of evolutionary biologists asking the right questions.

1773
01:58:20,880 --> 01:58:24,160
And the right question they asked is: what is the deal with altruism?

1774
01:58:24,400 --> 01:58:30,240
Why are organisms kind to one another, given the uh Darwinian struggle for

1775
01:58:30,240 --> 01:58:33,360
existence that we believe to be true?

1776
01:58:34,010 --> 01:58:38,810
It turns out there are a variety of beautiful explanations for altruism, a variety of

1777
01:58:38,810 --> 01:58:40,730
beautiful solutions to this problem.

1778
01:58:40,970 --> 01:58:45,770
They involve reciprocity, they involve kinship, and the theory of inclusive fitness, that

1779
01:58:45,770 --> 01:58:51,610
is, a gene for helping kin uh is uh likely to be helping a copy of itself, and

1780
01:58:51,610 --> 01:58:54,010
such genes will therefore proliferate.

1781
01:58:54,660 --> 01:58:58,420
We have uh more recently theories of uh interdependence.

1782
01:58:58,660 --> 01:59:03,300
If I depend on you uh for survival, if I depend on your skills and knowledge, then your

1783
01:59:03,300 --> 01:59:05,700
survival is good for my fitness.

1784
01:59:05,860 --> 01:59:09,140
And so you you become intrinsically valuable to me.

1785
01:59:09,220 --> 01:59:14,260
Um I have a reason to keep you alive independent of uh any favors you might give to me,

1786
01:59:14,420 --> 01:59:19,430
because just the way you act in the world, um, the way you might oppose my enemies or

1787
01:59:19,430 --> 01:59:21,190
support my friends, that's that's good for me.

1788
01:59:21,350 --> 01:59:23,190
So interdependence is another pathway.

1789
01:59:23,350 --> 01:59:25,990
Reputation is a huge one in our species.

1790
01:59:26,230 --> 01:59:31,190
We can um help each other because it uh benefits us reputationally.

1791
01:59:31,270 --> 01:59:35,430
We look virtuous, we look like an attractive partner, an attractive leader, an attractive

1792
01:59:35,430 --> 01:59:37,110
mate, an attractive friend.

1793
01:59:37,350 --> 01:59:42,470
Um so there are all sorts of beautiful explanations for uh why altruism exists.

1794
01:59:43,190 --> 01:59:48,860
Um conflict and competition, however, uh that's the part that

1795
01:59:48,860 --> 01:59:51,660
doesn't really need a special explanation.

1796
01:59:51,900 --> 01:59:55,900
It's it's it's Darwinism incarnate, survival of the fittest.

1797
01:59:56,300 --> 02:00:02,300
Um insofar as um fitness is a uh

1798
02:00:02,540 --> 02:00:07,180
is relative, it's zero sum, the higher my fitness, the lower your fitness, if we have

1799
02:00:07,180 --> 02:00:11,020
different genes, then you will get conflict and competition.

1800
02:00:11,500 --> 02:00:14,630
Um so that's my answer to the question.

1801
02:00:14,710 --> 02:00:16,230
I'm curious what you think of it.

1802
02:00:17,030 --> 02:00:20,870
Um I think um

1803
02:00:22,790 --> 02:00:24,630
I might disagree a little bit.

1804
02:00:24,790 --> 02:00:30,550
Um so I think um I think when people are asking, well, why can't we get along?

1805
02:00:30,710 --> 02:00:35,270
They're they're doing exactly what their evolved psychology should be doing, which is

1806
02:00:35,270 --> 02:00:39,590
saying, Well, why can't there be uh why can't we do something different than what we're

1807
02:00:39,590 --> 02:00:39,830
doing?

1808
02:00:39,940 --> 02:00:40,180
right?

1809
02:00:40,260 --> 02:00:45,380
And I think that is part of the way that the software is designed.

1810
02:00:45,780 --> 02:00:51,700
Um, so um whenever given an

1811
02:00:51,700 --> 02:00:57,300
intrinsic thing, is that um currently um you know, at a

1812
02:00:57,300 --> 02:01:00,980
macroscopic level, you know, a thing can't be in two places at once.

1813
02:01:01,140 --> 02:01:04,740
If I have, if I drink water, you can't drink the same water.

1814
02:01:04,900 --> 02:01:10,370
Um so there is there are rival goods, there are just and there are conflicts of interests.

1815
02:01:10,530 --> 02:01:13,970
So, and then there are also interests that overlap.

1816
02:01:14,290 --> 02:01:16,770
And as you mentioned, you know, there's all this literature.

1817
02:01:17,010 --> 02:01:21,170
There's a really great paper about the serial rediscovery of inclusive fitness theory.

1818
02:01:21,330 --> 02:01:26,290
This question about why is there cooperation, you know, things like dispersal

1819
02:01:27,090 --> 02:01:27,810
versus not.

1820
02:01:27,970 --> 02:01:33,940
So an organism can be selected to like benefit the group per se, if

1821
02:01:34,020 --> 02:01:37,220
it's a non-dispersing thing like bacteria, right?

1822
02:01:37,300 --> 02:01:39,460
Because you know, like they're just non-dispersing.

1823
02:01:39,540 --> 02:01:44,260
Um, but it's because it's actually helping the next generation of copies of itself.

1824
02:01:44,340 --> 02:01:46,100
It's like probistically copies of itself.

1825
02:01:46,180 --> 02:01:50,660
So even if they're not technically related, if it's non-dispersal, um, but it's just sort

1826
02:01:50,660 --> 02:01:54,660
of it's affecting its the design's differential reproductive success, right?

1827
02:01:54,820 --> 02:02:00,390
So um this in, you know, there's this nice paper by Stu West and other people talking about

1828
02:02:00,390 --> 02:02:01,910
like what she talked about, like mutualisms.

1829
02:02:02,070 --> 02:02:07,750
There's sort of a deep structure of differential reproductive success explaining why people

1830
02:02:07,750 --> 02:02:11,510
or organisms do things that look weird or altruistic, right?

1831
02:02:11,670 --> 02:02:16,790
And this sort of language of altruism was was a bit um confusing for a long time.

1832
02:02:16,870 --> 02:02:18,960
And I think it's been pretty cleared up.

1833
02:02:19,120 --> 02:02:21,280
Um when people say, well, why can't we get along?

1834
02:02:21,440 --> 02:02:24,800
I do think, I do think that's a a perfectly valid question to ask.

1835
02:02:24,880 --> 02:02:27,200
And I think that, or why can't we all get along?

1836
02:02:27,360 --> 02:02:30,560
I think that I think it's a perfectly valid question in the in the two senses.

1837
02:02:30,720 --> 02:02:36,320
One is you can still ask what's the mental software that makes um conflict possible, right?

1838
02:02:36,480 --> 02:02:40,320
So I don't I think it still requires an explanation in that sense of the proximate

1839
02:02:40,320 --> 02:02:41,040
psychology.

1840
02:02:41,200 --> 02:02:45,760
I don't think it's a Darwinian uh mystery why conflict would occur.

1841
02:02:46,000 --> 02:02:51,990
Um But even still, how why conflicts of interest happen in certain places

1842
02:02:51,990 --> 02:02:54,070
and not others is not as always straightforward.

1843
02:02:54,150 --> 02:02:55,590
And why not cooperate?

1844
02:02:55,750 --> 02:02:58,070
Um is a straightforward thing.

1845
02:02:58,310 --> 02:03:03,830
So there's there's that, and then just the the answer of um or the the the

1846
02:03:04,230 --> 02:03:10,060
the the question on its own of well, why can't we all get along is

1847
02:03:10,060 --> 02:03:15,340
the right question to ask from the sense of um each

1848
02:03:15,340 --> 02:03:21,020
individual organism has a set of represented interests about the

1849
02:03:21,020 --> 02:03:25,740
current state of the world, what benefits me, what costs me,

1850
02:03:26,300 --> 02:03:31,660
representations of what could be exist that don't exist yet, counterfactuals, and then also

1851
02:03:31,740 --> 02:03:33,900
like what's likely to happen in the future.

1852
02:03:34,140 --> 02:03:39,770
And each individual in interacting with other individuals is coordinating, negotiating,

1853
02:03:39,930 --> 02:03:42,330
well, what do we do going forward?

1854
02:03:42,970 --> 02:03:46,090
And our interests are going to overlap to some degree.

1855
02:03:46,250 --> 02:03:47,530
They won't in other ways.

1856
02:03:47,770 --> 02:03:52,970
And all of these ideas about sort of like, well, who what groups exist?

1857
02:03:53,610 --> 02:03:55,050
How do we treat one another?

1858
02:03:55,210 --> 02:03:56,090
What are the rules?

1859
02:03:56,250 --> 02:03:58,810
What are the assumptions about how we're going to treat another?

1860
02:03:59,210 --> 02:04:00,250
Give resource flows.

1861
02:04:00,330 --> 02:04:01,770
Who are we going to hurt?

1862
02:04:02,600 --> 02:04:07,560
That narrative is very powerful, and that agreement is very powerful.

1863
02:04:07,640 --> 02:04:12,280
It determines who's and what who is supported by who, who hurts other people.

1864
02:04:12,520 --> 02:04:17,880
And the question, well, why can't we get all get along is I think a very

1865
02:04:17,880 --> 02:04:23,850
reasonable insertion of why it's

1866
02:04:23,850 --> 02:04:29,850
a it's a challenge to given what's currently happening, why can't it be that we

1867
02:04:29,850 --> 02:04:33,290
have a different basis of socially discriminating?

1868
02:04:33,370 --> 02:04:38,010
And I don't mean discriminating in like a discrimination sense, but like in a like uh just

1869
02:04:38,010 --> 02:04:40,730
behaving differently, which could include like cooperating.

1870
02:04:40,970 --> 02:04:46,940
So if there are we currently are imposing costs on a set of people, well, why

1871
02:04:46,940 --> 02:04:47,660
are we doing that?

1872
02:04:47,820 --> 02:04:48,860
Who's benefiting that?

1873
02:04:48,940 --> 02:04:50,700
Do you and I really benefit from that?

1874
02:04:50,860 --> 02:04:53,900
Or does somebody else who's telling us that we do, who's in our group?

1875
02:04:53,980 --> 02:04:55,660
Like, are we actually all in a group together?

1876
02:04:55,740 --> 02:05:00,940
Like let's say there's a third party and um like Bob, I don't know.

1877
02:05:01,100 --> 02:05:01,820
Sorry, Bob.

1878
02:05:02,140 --> 02:05:07,580
And Bob is actually getting a lot out of all three of us being belligerent towards a group

1879
02:05:07,580 --> 02:05:10,060
of people, but maybe you and I aren't at all, right?

1880
02:05:10,860 --> 02:05:15,870
You know, it makes sense for us to represent that and say, well, why can't we all get

1881
02:05:15,870 --> 02:05:16,190
along?

1882
02:05:16,270 --> 02:05:19,870
And maybe question Bob and maybe question the fact that we should all be in a group

1883
02:05:19,870 --> 02:05:23,630
together, maybe question the fact that the people we've been belligerent towards, you know,

1884
02:05:23,710 --> 02:05:25,470
we've been belligerent towards them.

1885
02:05:25,630 --> 02:05:29,950
Um, and of course, it's in Bob's interest, if if it's in his interest to have us be

1886
02:05:29,950 --> 02:05:32,190
belligerent towards him, to obscure that.

1887
02:05:32,350 --> 02:05:35,550
So I think there's a lot of negotiation that goes on.

1888
02:05:35,840 --> 02:05:41,760
And I think one of the great tragedies of sort of group identities generally is if you

1889
02:05:41,760 --> 02:05:46,400
look historically or you look at any case study that's been well studied at international

1890
02:05:46,720 --> 02:05:52,560
or interpersonal levels, the sort of um the projection of group

1891
02:05:52,560 --> 02:05:58,560
boundaries or treating a set of agents as a group as

1892
02:05:58,560 --> 02:06:03,600
opposed to individuals who who uh produce behaviors, um,

1893
02:06:04,400 --> 02:06:06,890
a lot of so like retaliation, you know.

1894
02:06:06,970 --> 02:06:12,410
So like a small number of people do something and then but they're members of a group.

1895
02:06:12,890 --> 02:06:16,730
Um, well, w who do we retaliate against?

1896
02:06:16,890 --> 02:06:21,770
Do we retaliate against the specific people or do we retaliate against the group that they

1897
02:06:21,770 --> 02:06:22,250
represent?

1898
02:06:22,410 --> 02:06:23,850
Well, what group do they represent?

1899
02:06:24,010 --> 02:06:29,370
And then uh different agents with different interests might say, Well, actually that's an

1900
02:06:29,370 --> 02:06:31,930
instance of this group or another group or another group.

1901
02:06:32,090 --> 02:06:37,620
And those identities are then the basis of the retack, the attack or

1902
02:06:37,620 --> 02:06:38,500
revenge.

1903
02:06:39,380 --> 02:06:45,300
And in the case of like modern large scale violence, uh this can

1904
02:06:45,540 --> 02:06:48,660
affect millions of people and kill millions of people.

1905
02:06:48,740 --> 02:06:54,500
Um and it's not always clear that it's rationally um the the the best way to

1906
02:06:54,500 --> 02:06:58,660
actually address the the initial problem in the first place.

1907
02:06:58,980 --> 02:07:04,430
Um so um so so yeah, that's sort of my long winded way of of saying that.

1908
02:07:04,590 --> 02:07:09,870
I think it is a fair question to ask in in the in these at least these two respects of the

1909
02:07:09,950 --> 02:07:12,830
um it makes sense why an individual would ask it.

1910
02:07:12,910 --> 02:07:15,070
And then that we can also just ask about the software.

1911
02:07:15,150 --> 02:07:18,590
But I agree that the Darwinian question is sort of straightforward.

1912
02:07:19,150 --> 02:07:19,710
Yeah.

1913
02:07:19,950 --> 02:07:23,390
I mean, yeah, it seems like there's a different there are different perspectives we could

1914
02:07:23,390 --> 02:07:24,110
take on the question.

1915
02:07:24,190 --> 02:07:25,710
You know, one is a Darwinian question.

1916
02:07:25,790 --> 02:07:27,390
Is there a Darwinian mystery here?

1917
02:07:27,630 --> 02:07:28,110
Right.

1918
02:07:28,740 --> 02:07:34,740
And the other is, well, is there a socially intelligible reason why someone would pose

1919
02:07:34,740 --> 02:07:35,060
the question?

1920
02:07:35,140 --> 02:07:40,580
And is there a sensible response that we could give knowing everything we do about the

1921
02:07:40,580 --> 02:07:41,700
individuals involved?

1922
02:07:42,980 --> 02:07:48,820
And again, we're we're back to this distinction between the Darwinian

1923
02:07:48,950 --> 02:07:54,550
level of understanding and the folk psychology level of understanding and the uh

1924
02:07:54,710 --> 02:07:59,510
endless ways in which they conflict with one another sometimes and complement each other

1925
02:07:59,750 --> 02:08:00,710
sometimes.

1926
02:08:01,110 --> 02:08:07,110
Uh and we're still trying to figure out uh the resolution between these two ways of

1927
02:08:07,110 --> 02:08:07,750
thinking.

1928
02:08:07,990 --> 02:08:13,360
Um, and I look forward to continuing to resolve these

1929
02:08:13,360 --> 02:08:18,880
contradictions and explore the ways in which our folk understanding of the world is right

1930
02:08:19,120 --> 02:08:25,120
or bullshit or incomplete, and the ways in which evolutionary

1931
02:08:25,120 --> 02:08:30,640
theory can illuminate and shed insight on the human

1932
02:08:30,640 --> 02:08:34,640
condition and on questions like why we can't all get along.

1933
02:08:35,040 --> 02:08:35,360
That's right.

1934
02:08:35,520 --> 02:08:40,630
I think that the thing I learned from this is that uh uh it's instead of asking if

1935
02:08:40,630 --> 02:08:43,510
something's right or wrong, it's uh is in which way.

1936
02:08:44,070 --> 02:08:44,710
Yes.

1937
02:08:45,110 --> 02:08:45,670
Yes.

1938
02:08:45,910 --> 02:08:46,550
Yeah.

1939
02:08:46,790 --> 02:08:49,510
Well, on that note, uh thank you, Dave.

1940
02:08:49,590 --> 02:08:50,710
This was a really fun conversation.

1941
02:08:50,950 --> 02:08:51,350
Yeah, thank you.

1942
02:08:51,670 --> 02:08:53,830
And I look forward to yeah, I look forward to many more.

1943
02:08:54,070 --> 02:08:55,030
Sounds good.

1944
02:08:58,630 --> 02:09:00,550
We have finished up another episode.

1945
02:09:00,710 --> 02:09:01,510
Good job.

1946
02:09:01,880 --> 02:09:02,280
Thank you.

1947
02:09:02,440 --> 02:09:03,320
Good job as well.

1948
02:09:03,400 --> 02:09:05,960
And thank you, uh, listener for listening.

1949
02:09:06,120 --> 02:09:11,000
Um, if you like what we're doing here, uh don't be afraid to tell other people that you

1950
02:09:11,000 --> 02:09:11,480
like it.

1951
02:09:11,560 --> 02:09:12,760
Um, it means a lot to us.

1952
02:09:12,840 --> 02:09:16,440
We're a new podcast, we're starting out, we'd love to spread the word about what we're

1953
02:09:16,440 --> 02:09:16,840
doing.

1954
02:09:17,000 --> 02:09:21,160
Um please leave us a kind review or if you're inclined to throw us some money, uh, you can

1955
02:09:21,160 --> 02:09:22,920
check out our Patreon page.

1956
02:09:23,160 --> 02:09:26,930
Um and other than that, stay tuned for the next episode.

1957
02:09:27,010 --> 02:09:28,290
We'll be doing one of these every week.

1958
02:09:28,450 --> 02:09:29,570
See you soon.