Basement Cults
2025-05-27 12:00:00.000 +00:00

I'm David Pinsoff. And I'm David Petrozowski. Welcome to Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast. Actual evolutionary psychologist. Doing actual evolutionary psychology. All right, we'll try again. Try again. Okay. Boom, I shouldn't I could never be an actor. This is really hard. I know it's hard. It's hard. David, welcome to episode two of Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. Really excited that I get to explain how I was bitten by a radioactive spider and became an evolutionary psychologist in this episode. Yeah. So uh I interviewed Dave in this episode, and we really go uh back into Dave's childhood. Like so this has some deep roots. Yeah, I um, you know, I think one of the things we want to do in this podcast is

be sincere and genuine. And I think, you know, this I sort of opened the floodgates of that in this episode. Um, and David, your ability to ask questions concisely was an inspiration. I think the first episode I was a little bit nervous and hemming and hawing. And so um I think in this episode, um you were it's a it's a lovely example of your excellent questioning. And we cover a lot of ground, even though it's um deeply this is a a really deep one. We go into the the history of the discipline of psychology, um, how it how this discipline itself has been shaped by our evolved psychology, and how that has in some cases distorted it, um, and how we can correct for that as psychologists. We get into the mind, modularity, how we should carve up the mind into pieces,

whether our intuitions about what's going on inside our heads are actually correct or not, in what ways they might be correct. I think we might have even had a disagreement about happiness. Was that this episode? I think it was. I think, yeah. In in uh yeah, I think we did disagree. This is the first moment we disagreed. And um and as the listeners will hear, um, it's actually one of the most fun things is to actually disagree on science. And so I think I think we ended up quickly resolving it, but it was there was a nice moment of of of of clashing perspectives there. I think, yeah, I think you will enjoy listening to it. Yeah. Exactly. So um yeah, so I think that's an excellent um summary. And without further ado, here is episode two.

David interviews me about how I got into evolutionary psychology. All right. I think we're gone, sir. Yeah. All right. Well, Dave, um I see you as one of the most uh legit bona fide uh evolutionary psychologists on the planet, uh in terms of your your credentials. Um so you studied at the University of California Santa Barbara, uh under the tutelage of Leda Cosmodies and John Tuby, who uh literally invented the field of evolutionary psychology. So you studied under them, uh, you did a few postdocs, and then now you are a professor at Santa Barbara. At UCSP, that's right. At UCSP at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology. So um if anyone knows their shit about this field, it's you. Um so how did you get interested in this uh

weird set of ideas. Um, presumably you weren't always interested in dedicating your life to the field of evolutionary psychology. Um what what moved you in that direction? Uh uh tell me about how you how you got into this. Yeah, I mean, I as we talked about, uh I think a lot of people um In certain areas of science, sort of have origin stories that are actual stories. You know, it wasn't just like kind of the next thing I moved into. And for me, um, evolutionary psychology was definitely something I didn't just sort of stumble into. Um, there was a very particular sort of moment where where I knew I wanted to do it. Um the acute event was I was actually in the library. So this was back in the days when dinosaurs roam dinosaurs roam the earth and um you had to

go to the physical library to look up articles and books. Um and I was at the time, so I I thought originally in undergrad that I wanted to go into uh medical school. And um, but I didn't really like interacting with people as bodies. Um, right? I wanted to sort of I I that was not that wasn't as rewarding to me. Um, I didn't quite have the language of sort of levels of analysis where, you know, but I but kind of treating people as Dan Dana talks about as at the physical stance. I found the complexity of that interesting, but it wasn't rewarding. Um, and so I started taking psychology courses. I think I might have even been a psychology major at this point, but I was also taking a lot of anthropology courses.

This was a small liberal arts college on the East Coast. It was a great education. I was able to basically do what typically grad students would do as an undergrad. Like I, you know, got to do like I measured single-celled neuron recordings and basically was, you know, like participating in research studies like a like a graduate student in my undergrad. Really good education, really happy with it. But uh, but it was in and it kind of gave me the the space to look at things other than just sort of psychology. And so I was actually an anthropology minor. Um and at the time in anthropology, um, again, this was when dinosaurs roamed the earth, you know, a really prevailing idea was this idea of cultural relativity.

Um, this idea that sort of anything about humans, what they're like, what they need, their emotions, their feelings, sort of anything we experience, our values, is really culturally determined. And I remember reading ethnographies about places that where people are quite different. And that was really an impactful idea for me. And it's really interesting. I mean, the idea that, you know, you know, as you when you're a kid and you grow up, you sort of experience this thing of like, you know, you think your family is the way everything is, and then you start talking to kids when you're older and you realize, oh no, families are different, right? And this is sort of the next step up where you think, well, cultures are very different.

Um and as a caveat, I want to say I know cultures are different. I just spent the last nine years living in Berlin, Germany. I'm having reverse culture shock, so culture is certainly a thing. But this this really strong idea that everything about sort of the way humans are is a function of culture. Um, again, I found that really interesting. Um, but it didn't quite jive with my um experience of life. Um I grew up in um sort of an interesting um I had a sort of interesting background where um I grew up in upstate New York. I had a pretty idyllic childhood. You know, everybody has different issues or struggles in their in their childhood. Um, I um um my mother is pretty religious, um, evangelical, um, but but even a level of evangelical that's sort of maybe one off of like

attending basement like cults, um, sort of. Um and so I spent a lot of my um childhood sort of visiting various like kind of very evangelical almost cults in Western New York. And, you know, I'm not going to go into all the things that that you know that had an impact on me, obviously, but getting when I went to college and sort of coming out of that situation, the the idea that sort of um people could just sort of be whatever the local culture was telling you, um, it not only didn't sort of do seem to jive with um my experiences in that growing up, um, even though those were very different places th than sort of mainstream life. Um you know, So was it so was it that uh so you mentioned you were sort of found yourself

on the periphery of religious cults. Um a cult is is, you know, presumably one of the best examples of the power of culture where you're literally willing to, you know, uh submerge your entire self and your identity uh into this uh worldview yeah and and sacrifice pretty much everything, you know, your your money, your time, your relationships in service of this I ideology. Um and so that would seem to be, you know, really powerful evidence that uh that that culture really is playing a constitutive role uh in in in our psychology. So was it was it more that you saw commonalities uh in in different cults that you know, even though the cult itself obviously had a lot of sway over people, that that you saw that it was the the sort of same mechanisms and themes were recurring uh

in these different groups. Yeah, no, it's a good question. I mean, there's actually two answers to to that, and the short and simple answer is the beginning of it, of how you see a human nature in this context of why am I saying, you know, human nature, a view of human nature versus culture. Why am I saying human nature wins out based on this experience of being cults? Is that it was very personal, idiosyncratic to me, which was in me sort of um uh leaving that home environment, going to a normal college environment. I sort of struggled uh for various reasons to sort of just feel like a pretty like to just sort of like relax and just sort of be like a typical college student who didn't feel like um uh I had to,

you know, be perfect. And if I wasn't perfect, um, bad things would happen, you know. And that was that was a function of sort of attending the the the the cults um or being very religious, but also sort of having to be very independent on my own, you know, like I was um uh I basically had to take care of myself from like middle school onward, my sister and I. So um okay and so the point, I think the for me, the experience was I'm going into this class, people are saying everything's just sort of there's no human nature. It's just malleable based on context. And it was sort of like, you know, I'm struggling with um figuring out sort of like how to be happy, basically. And uh that shouldn't be a struggle if sort of

um uh the the way human nature works is that the people around you basically get to tell you what criteria to use to be happy, right? Like I was sort of miserable in the basement revival meetings. Um, you know, and then that was my own decision, you know, to sort of be like, I don't agree with what this person's saying. I think this person's a con artist. Like one of them actually even went to prison, I think, later. Um but um, but it but it it just I mean the simple answer is sort of people can't just choose to be happy based on any arbitrary criteria. And as a college student, that was sort of one of the that was sort of my my shorthand for there's a lot going on below the surface that uh if you don't respect it, it will kind of come back and bite you.

Um, you know, and that there was something about sort of my intrinsic nature that didn't jive with um this religious experience. But then there was also something about that experience that was making me having to really adjust myself differently to like normal life, right? Um, and I think being aware that there was um this hidden human nature um that uh that wasn't just arbitrary and it wasn't as simple as sort of somebody tells you or coerces you into what you uh should be happy about. And it wasn't even as simple as like what I could tell myself rationally I should be happy about. I think for me personally, that um that was sort of what I was thinking about when I was walking through the library this one day, um, and uh

thinking about cultural relativism. And I came across a book spine by called Human Universals. Um, and I just literally was like, you know, just walking past and I pulled it out. And what Human Universals was a book about exactly what it sounds like, human universals. These are um, and the and there's sort of more of a backstory we could go into in a second, but basically it's by an anthropologist, Don Brown, um, who happens to have been at UCSB. Um, and uh um his colleague Don Simons uh was uh is all was also an anthropologist here at UCSB and they were good friends. And Don Brown was coming from this very cultural determinism perspective. Don Simons was not, and they sort of had a friendly bet.

And Don Brown said, I bet I bet there's really not very much that's universal. Don Simons thought there was. And so Don Brown, um, to his credit, you know, tested this idea and he looked into things. And he, to his surprise, you know, it wasn't one or two things. It it actually took up a book, right? And so um and that led to this book, Human Universals. And so when I just opened this book, looked at it, um, uh, I just sort of ate it up. And um, from that point on, it was this thing of uh, you know in in up to this point I would be reading articles and sort of making notes in margins and a lot of them were like no or why would this make you know this doesn't make sense and reading the Human Universals book was sort of I just felt this immediate sort of like oh yeah this is

saying the things I couldn't articulate. And then I did the academic um typical thing of then you kind of read through the book, you look at the references, see who this person's citing. And I kept doing that. And that was when I um uh kept reading who people were citing, and then I eventually found um these people, um, Cosmedys and Tubi, Lita Cosmes and John Tubi, and um and especially reading their work. And and there there was also wonderful other work, um, Don Simons especially. Um, but but reading their work, it was it was not only that I wasn't not marking up the margins with negative things, it was just sort of it was I was marking up the margins with positive things and and um it just really spoke to um it was our

it was spoke to what I was thinking about and feeling. Um and um in the fullness of time I have a much richer sort of vocabulary of exactly what what it was that I was sort of intellectually curious about and wanting to do. Um but uh but how I just described it was sort of the on the ground um feelings, and that was sort of how I discovered it. You know, it's it's worth reflecting on on Donald Brown's list of human universals. So I remember when I when I was first getting into evolutionary psychology and I was reading um Stephen Pinker's book, The Blank Slate, he had an appendix to the blank slate, Donald Brown's list of universals. Uh and he just lists all of them out in alphabetical order, all of the things that he found

in all of the different cultures and ethnographic records that he looked at. And I remember looking at that list and feeling a kind of awe at um, you know, seeing you know the the essence of of human nature. Um and so I think it's worth just here. I'm just gonna go through the A's. I've pulled up the list right here. Yeah. Um, so starting with A, uh his list of human universals that he's found evidence for in all the ethnographic records he's looked at. Abstraction in speech and thought. Actions under self-control distinguished from those not under control. And I know you've actually written a lot about that, and we'll we'll get to that later on in the episode: this difference between whether an action is under control or not and what

what this free will debate is all about. But it's interesting that that is one of uh Don Brown's universals. Uh aesthetics. All cultures have some idea of beauty. Um affection, expressed and felt. Seems pretty obvious, but it's kind of cool that it's it's presumably a good candidate for being a part of human nature or various affections. Uh age grades, age statuses, um, age terms. Age is a is a hugely important part of human social life. It makes sense that age would be important in a variety of different cultures. Ambivalence the concept of ambivalence anthropomorphism. So imputing human traits to uh you know plants or animals or artifacts antonyms, things being the opposite of one another. So I've just made it through the A's.

Yeah. And there are there are many more on this list. And and just uh just going through them all and just taking your time and letting each one sink in is a kind of meditative experience. Um and I I found it so I I certainly sympathize with with this book sort of uh being a kind of paradigm changer for you. Uh it was for me as well. And uh so it seems like what I'm hearing from you is that having grown up around these really powerful cultural forces, these you know, these religious mythologies, these cults, um, and their failure to imprint themselves on you and and sort of make you into their image, that these failures sort of gave you an inkling that that there's really something more than these uh cultural ideas, that

there's such a thing as human nature. There's something inside you that that isn't just these mythologies and these ideas, there's something in you that resisted them and that pushed back against them. What is that? Where does it come from? Uh and it seems like that was the question that sort of ultimately drew you to this this field of study. Is that a fair question? Yeah. And I think, I mean, at the time I was very, I think appropriately for my circumstances, very focused on myself. But I think it also having that experience did two other things. One was I was also looking at people who, you know, the people who were I to characterize it too, I mean, it was it what it what it really looked like

was there was sort of there was typically like one sort of charismatic leader or preacher, you know, and this even involved like you know literally a basement religious services, um uh where but there were like maybe four to five or you know bigger numbers of people in the congregation. And the um The people in the congregation, they were clearly on board and affected by this. And I was looking at sort of the um the speaker or the pastor, this charismatic person, and I think you know, sort of almost if if to to get it an image of it, it would be sort of like you know, um televangelist sort of spittle throbbing temples sort of kind of thing, you know. And uh and it really it had sort of a scam feel to it, even for me at

a time. And so I think it um but clearly people were getting something out of it. And I don't I don't have strong um I don't have a strong sort of anti-religious feeling. I think I did afterwards, but I think I've kind of come full circle around that. Um, and I think I've sort of made peace with that, and that's something to talk about later. But um uh but I think there were two things. One is it made me realize that what how people work is important because I was looking at people whose lives, like these were people who did not have a lot of money. They had rusty cars in Buffalo, New York, and they were giving their money to somebody who had a Porsche in the garage. Um, and that made a big impact on me.

Like these things have consequences, and sort of what so so there was even at a young age, was this idea sort of that you really have to take seriously people's beliefs and sort of getting it right is not a um it's not a feckless thing. And so I think I really took seriously criticizing and thinking about ideas. And I think the one good skill it gave me, this is the second thing, is that um I got really good. What I basically spent my time doing was just sort of deconstructing what the preacher was doing. Because that's, you know, I was bored. I was sitting in this thing for hours at a time. There was nothing else to do. So I think it really honed my critical thinking. Um, and it was my freedom and independence and autonomy in

power was, you know, my my mother wanted me to be there. I couldn't leave because I was a kid. But what I could do and what nobody could take away from me was my ability to sort of say, what is does this make sense? What do I actually think about this? Um and I think that that really honed my um my sort of critical thinking. Um and so I think um, you know I don't think it's the kind of thing that was a good experience, um, but there's always pluses and minuses to things. And I think it's certainly like um it gave there there were there were there were benefits to um in retrospect, um, you can see where sort of the combination of like it's important to get ideas right and um and I'm not saying my ideas are right.

I don't think that's true. I think they're um, I'm just trying to make it more right. Um, um, but uh um, but but in honing that criticism skill um in a way that is not just about, and to bring it back to your thing, sort of about status. Like I wasn't concerned about, I wasn't looking at somebody using ideas and beliefs and rhetoric to improve their status and thinking that's what I want to do. I was looking at somebody doing that and saying, my God, that's horrible. And that's the that's almost the enemy. And so I think um and I actually think that's one of the things that attracted me to evolutionary psychology was um And there's a lot of, especially in popular presentations, there's a lot of sort of cynical

evolutionary psychology. There's a lot of very superficial things, and it is often used to for for various purposes that I don't think are consistent with its core, but which is again something to talk about at another time. But I think ultimately what I was really appealing to to me about evolutionary psychology was not that it was controversial, not that it was cynical, um, not that it was patriarchal, like and I don't think it is. Um, and I would disagree with, I mean, I think people try to use it that way. I think people or people, you can be an evolutionary psychologist about how people are going to use science, and that falls out nicely. But but leaving that aside, what I really found appealing, especially about um

Lita and John's work, was it was sort of courageous in the same way as it really spoke to this kid in these basement revival meetings, um, where it was sort of like it matters if something's true, even if everybody um thinks it's true, it might not be true. And uh and what's the argument and what's the logic and that sort of spirit of um being courageous even when everyone else around you is sort of saying something and is going along with something, but it doesn't quite make sense. Um that that was really appealing, I think. And that was a big part of um uh um of that approach um I think for me. Well I mean you you mention the prevailing ideas at the time, and they're still somewhat popular, these ideas about cultural relativism.

Um Tubi and Cosmedys refer to them as the standard social science model. It's it's essentially a blank slate model of the mind or something quite close to it. Um that they're uh we we are we basically come into the world empty of instincts or intuitions or predispositions or drives or anything like that. And we basically absorb the entirety of who we are from our surroundings, in particular our cultural surroundings. And that idea, for whatever reason, has really been a powerful idea within academia and social science. And it's interesting why that way of thinking has been so appealing. I mean, you could do some evolutionary psychology to try to explain what is appealing about this idea of cultural determinism and blank sladism.

I mean, maybe it is analogous to the kinds of cult-like mentalities that you were exposed to in the sense that all cults have an interest in social control. And what blank slatist ideology gives you is a reason to think that social control is going to be effective. It's a justification for social control at the end of the day. I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of totalitarian ideologies, uh, from you know uh Maoism to uh Stalinism, that they have a kind of blank slatist view of the mind at their core, that we can remake uh human beings into uh vessels of the state. Uh we can we can make them into you know perfect um citizens uh through indoctrination um and and re-education um so yeah, I'm curious about your thoughts on that, on the parallels between this so-called

standard social science model and number one, uh your upbringing, uh and number two, your desire to cut through the bullshit and and retain a sense of autonomy. Yeah, and I and just to follow up on what you're saying, I mean I also think that um it reminds me a little bit about your uh political propaganda um work too, that you know, and then this is an idea um I've heard other people mention this is not my idea, but you know, it's no coincidence that people who work for a living making ideas are uh incentivized to sort of uh work in a rubric that says ideology or esoteric ideas are really important, right? Like um uh and so and I think if you look historically, I mean um I was just um you know talking about um the history of

public relations in in an intro class. Um so Edward Renet's uh really interesting um person who basically started the field of public relations, although at the time it was called propaganda prior to uh or during the First World War. Um his um uh the the idea that sort of um there's an opportunity, uh, sets of people who say there's an opportunity to to use uh what we know about the design of the mind to um to essentially manipulate people, right? To like get them to buy product or to get them to think in a certain way. Obviously that's not reserved for totalitarian regimes. And it's um, you know, whether the people who are interested in doing it are can be horrible people. Like I mean, I think Edward Bernese by all accounts was that.

I mean he one of his first jobs was to convince, figure out a way to convince women who are not smoking as a population to smoke. Um, you know, you could probably do some actuarial statistics on the consequences of that, but I don't think you would need to see that to know that's probably a bad idea for women and babies and lots of people. Um uh but um uh but there's an there's these just institutional structural s incentives for uh the use of ideas and psychology towards certain ends, right? And I think if you if you think there's basic funding for research, but then there's a lot of interest in sort of for-profit uses as well, um, it's not surprising that just from a purely sort of institutional selection pressure

perspective, the ideas that um uh what you tell people will change what they do um will be selected for in the sense of if you're a corporation and you wanna have advertising and you want to pay people um and if you have a psychologist who says actually what you tell people isn't gonna affect um how they purchase things, they're not gonna have a job, right? Because they've just told the company that, you know, I'm useless to you. Um but if somebody says, you know, look, I can um I either know now or I have a method for determining um how to get women to smoke. You know, I'll get back to you, right? Um uh that the implicit in that or explicit in that is this idea that um the ideas that we have um and what we show to people will

change them or determine what they do. And so if you just imagine what kind of institutional structure uh selection, what ideas sort of would follow from that, you would expect that a professional community of people who study the mind, um, uh, some subset of that, you're gonna probably likely get ideas around the idea that um people are pretty manipulatable. Uh um ideas are really important. And the ideas of the information we provide to people are is really powerful. And we are the powerful stewards of that. And that gives people status. It's a motivation or a justification for paying them or for giving them positions. And so so that's my take on why um why the uh why the idea of um any any idea that sort of people are malleable

or people um are people need our ideas in order to be okay. Um you you can you can see why that would be a selected for idea. Um there's different translations of that core idea, but I think the idea that like um boy, you really need us or or you're not gonna be okay. Um I buy that 100%. Um it's a very self-aggrandizing way of thinking that if everything is determined by culture and ideas, uh, and we are the people who understand culture and ideas, well then we're by definition the most powerful people in the world. Um, listen to us, give us power. Um, we know what to do, we know how to sell your product, we know how to get people to behave how you want them to behave, we know how to design policy, you know, put us in

government, uh, put us in positions of of influence. Um yeah, uh it's it's very sensible that the social science, the social sciences, in absence of a strong theoretical framework to constrain them, will tend to go in these self-aggrandizing directions. You could almost predict it from an evolutionary psychological perspective. The idea of evolutionary psychology is actually not new. Darwin himself, uh, in 1859 said that uh evolution is basically going to be a game changer for for psychology. He wrote, you know, psychology will be placed on a new foundation. Uh and yet, for some reason, and we could talk about the reasons why, uh, it took nearly two centuries for Darwin's vision to come to fruition, for the social sciences to actually

adopt evolution as an organizing uh theoretical framework. Um, and well, what happens when you don't have an organizing theoretical framework that is correct to constrain uh your research? Well, it's going to go in the directions that we would expect, you know, humans to go in the absence of any constraints, which is namely self-aggrandizement. Um so it's it's a cynical way of of looking at uh the social sciences. Um and I think it's an argument in favor of uh bringing evolution or at least rigorous conceptions of evolution into the social sciences. Certainly there are ways of using evolutionary psychology in manipulative and propagandistic ways as well, as you mentioned. So it's not that it's impossible to run in these sort of self aggrandizing or

propagandistic directions once you adopt an evolutionary perspective. Um the hope is that it will be harder. Um, that there are, you know, a few more con a few more constraints on ongoing in those kinds of of directions. And in particular, the hope is that the more rigorously you apply evolutionary principles, evolutionary game theory, um, the harder it will be to to move in erroneous, uh self-serving or self-aggrandizing directions. Um there's a wonderful quote, I forget who said it. Um uh it's it's easy to lie with statistics, but it's even easier to lie without them. Um I think the same is true uh with with good theory. You know, it's easy to lie with with a good theory or manipulate, but it's even harder to

sorry it's even easier to lie um without a good theory, where you're just free to come up with ever what whatever ideas you want. So that is a long-winded way of saying we need more rigorous applications of evolutionary theory in the social sciences as a as a check on our all-too human tendencies toward self-deception, self-aggrandizement, et cetera. What we're getting into right now is a is a really interesting topic that that you call the evolutionary psychology of psychology. I know that has been an attractive topic for you uh in recent years. I think it's a fascinating topic. Uh I'd love to hear your thoughts about what the evolutionary of sorry, what the evolutionary psychology of psychology is and why it is important to study.

Yeah, yeah. Um yeah, thanks. Um and I think I think there's sort of a there's sort of two ways to answer that. One is to say, well, what's the psychology people are using to um uh to study the mind? And a lot of the work that you're alluding to is work that addresses that issue, and we can sort of talk about that. I think there's a second related issue, which has to do with the history of psychology, which is sort of more related to what we were just talking about, right? Which was um why um this idea of self aggrandizement and what what sort of ends uh the science um is is sort of trying to achieve. Um and um and I think you can do the evolutionary psychology of both that history um with that additional issue of sort of self aggrandizement and then

and then do this sort of more delineated thing. As an academic, what I'm doing right now is sort of that more delineated thing. Um and I just want to say um before I get to the to the psychology part, um the self aggrandizement thing, I want to be clear too, that like I think institutions and their selection pressures, if you want to put it that way, are different from the motivations of individual people. I think that most people don't uh really want to help people and are motivated to genuinely, and many people go into science and I do believe science generally helps people, but I think you can also be a very well intended therapist who believes in repressed memory ideas and their sort of cultural force reasons why or cultural

epidemiological ideas for why something like repressed memory therapy became popular and became what therapists believed. And so individual people being very well intended can do really terrible things, for example, you know, because of the prevailing ideas that sort of just succeed for sort of dumb differential reproductive success reasons, right? And so I want to be clear in talking about sort of um the cynical approach to sort of the history of psychology. I think it's it's often sort of on the backs of well-intended people. Um the institutions may not the structure is sort of orthogonal to that so I just want to I want to be clear um um uh for that um in terms of the psychology um of psychology um there's really um

uh boy there's a lot to say on that I mean the basic idea is that um almost all sciences go through a period of just kind of collecting data. You know, like the um uh you know, astronomy is a really good example of that, where you just sort of collect a bunch of data and you look out in the sky and you just sort of see like you know, dots of light and stars and planets and things moving. And of course, um, you know, there was no Netflix back then. So people got pretty good at knowing what was going on with all the stars and the planets and things. Um and uh there's a certain point where the data gets organized and you know, there are these things like planetary regressions, right? These little, so the the stars would sort of all move uniformly with respect to each other,

but there'd be smaller objects that were moving at a rate each night across the sky, but then they would sort of do these regressions. And so there were these ellipses, right? Um and I went to Poland when I was in Berlin, and there was like a statue of Copernicus in Warsaw. Um and uh so it was sort of reflecting on what Copernicus did. And there's a really nice book called The Copernican Revolution by the historian of science Thomas Kuhn, who's famous for the um, what is the book called? I can't even think of the Kuhn book of scientific revolution. Structure of scientific revolutions, of course. Yeah, yeah. Excellent book if anybody hasn't read it. It's very well written. But the the thing Copernicus did, you know, everybody sort of knows that Copernicus shifted

the um the geocentric model of the universe to the heliocentric, right? That the sun is the center and not the earth. Um and you know, part of that was um was because of these little uh planetary ellipses, like realizing that it wasn't that we were the center and the planets were actually doing these little ellipses. It was that if you're on a rotating body in orbit with another rote body rotating in orbit, and the orbit of one body is in different uh size than yours, then as you're traveling, there's basically apparent motion, right? It's a little hard to draw it, you know, over this, but basically as one, as one thing is moving past another, there'll be a point where the um it'll look like it kind of moves

backwards as they're going through their different orbits. Like I, you know, there's nice animations you can look up. Um the so the conclusion was the center of of the universe per se, right? Was was sort of the sun versus the earth. That's sort of the textbook thing. But the bigger approach was um what Copernicus did is he contextualized the observations of the data. So he said, Look, um what you're looking at is not the way the universe is structured. What you're looking at is a particular perspective within the universe. So why it looks the way it does is not a direct readout of the way it is. It's that it's a per particular perspective within that. And that is the real insight. And the same thing happened with in physics.

So the same thing with essentially the Einstein and the quantum and relative revolution, the post-Newtonian revolution, after the Newtonian revolution in physics, was that our experience of distance and time and space is not a description of actually the way things work. It's a description of a particular perspective of a particular range of spaces and times and macroscopic things. And so it contextualizes that perspective as well, that like what we experience as universal laws are actually only within a particular perspective. And it recontextualizes that. And this is all a long-winded way of saying that psychology. Um, and there's a very rich, and I've been very interested, I've been reading a lot of the

history of psychology, and there's a lot of really good lost ideas in that history. But basically, to oversimplify it, um, psychology still is sort of hasn't had its what is the perspective dependence of our data collection moment. Um and I actually think that um the the perspective dependence, the geocentrism, if you will, of our psychology is that as a default, in the same way that as an astronomer, your default is a terrestrial perspective, our default, our way of thinking about the mind, is our intuitive everyday psychology delivered by natural selection, a series of systems for that allow us to reason about mental states in the mind. These are intuitive, as in jargon, ontologies, right? These are ontologies, is just a philosophical term for it's a description of sort of what

exists and the rules that apply to what exists. And we have this intuitive ontology in physics, right? We have an intuitive physics that's different than our scientific physics. And we started with our intuitive physics and we still use it all the time. It helps, it's useful, but it fails and it's not exactly right, especially when you push it. And the idea is that psychology Really has been using, and psychologists in general, we are all, and even you and I to this day, we're using evolved minds that weren't designed to do science, whether it's physics or astronomy or psychology, we're using our evolved software to do psychology. And I think the perspective dependence of psychology is understanding how our

evolved software for reasoning about different things that we did evolve to reason about, which includes, for example, con specifics. So our theory of mind system, our ability to represent and think about mental states. Everyone who doesn't have some impairment can do this to varying degrees. That system operates effortlessly and visibly. We didn't even know it existed until a couple, you know, decades ago to a first approximation, it's been in people for at least 60,000 years, if not, you know, much, much longer. Um that system colors the ideas we have about, well, what exists in the mind? What is a mind? How do we study the mind? What are the questions we ask? Then it's it's the water we swim in as fish.

So that's our theory mind system. Um and if you look at the history of psychology, um, I think what you can see is sort of people reasonably enough starting with their theory of mind system, sort of adding in their folk physics system, because right, we know that there's like matter. And then people are sort of saying, well, like, you know, how do we have a science of the mind? Um, how do we think about things? And um what do we study? What are the questions we ask? What are what do we think are the elements or contained within the mind? Um, And I think to this day, as good as our data and method collection um techniques are, I still think that our our ideas of what exists in the mind are very

much colored by our intuitive psychology, much more than we would want to in an objective way in the f in the in the sense of um uh we can have really good data but if we think um for example that um just take something like a belief right or or like just say memory right like let's say that memory is um um uh memory is overly broad, um, but you want if you just sort of have this intuitive idea about memory, and we can talk about why that may be an intuitive idea. Um uh if you think that there's some sort of circle in the mind that corresponds to memory, um then uh you collect lots of really complicated and sophisticated data. But if it turns out that memory isn't a unitary thing, then it doesn't matter how sophisticated your data are, you're not going to really get a

coherent answer. I mean, a good analogy would be something like if you think that locomotion is a unitary system. Like you can maybe you can just be wrong about the kind of things something is, like Gilbert, philosopher Gilbert Ra called something being a category mistake. His example of a category mistake is that somebody's on a tour of university, they're shown the library, the the common area, the dining hall, um, you know, the psychology building, philosophy building, and the and the the tourist goes, you know, the person on the tour is like, that's great, but where's the university? Right. And the point is that, you know, well, that person's wrong about what kind of thing the university is.

The university is not a specific building, it's the overarching thing, you know. But if you keep looking for the university, no matter how good your data collection is, you're just going to be wrong. Right. Like it's just if you start a science in an ill pose way, you're you're just in trouble. And the idea is the same with if you think memory is a unitary thing, it would be just the same as if you think locomotion is a unitary thing. It's a category mistake. So health. Yeah. So you study trains and you see how locomotion works in trains. You study birds, you see how locomotion works in birds. You study, you know, a number of things, and then you're sort of like, well, look, we're really getting inconsistent information.

Like, look, I, you know, sometimes locomotion seems to be circular, sometimes it's sort of like up and down y. Sometimes it's soft, sometimes it's hard, right? Like if you don't understand that it's a broad overarching category, then you're sort of sticking feathers onto like the the um the like the st the the pneumatic like driving rods of the of the steam locomotive, right? It's just you're mashing things together that don't belong. And so I think our theory of mind system is not designed for the level of resolution that our science requires. And so when we're doing something like I'm looking for the neurocognitive signature of like a particular kind of memory, unless you have uh a really good converging mechanistic kind of software level description.

And we can talk about that in a second. But basically, if you're just using intuitive constructs like memory, attention, reasoning, emotion, then it's very likely you're making the locomotion mistake and you're going to get a lot of inconsistent data. And more fundamentally the answer is not collect more and more data. It's because that answer is basically the equivalent of saying, well, that tourist uh on Gilbert Riles tour just needs to find more buildings. And then eventually um, you know, you'll find the right building. It's like, well, no, it doesn't matter how much data we collect, we'll never find the university, right? And so um so I think that um the theory mind system is has been producing category mistakes for a really long time.

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 is there's the theory mind system, there's the intuitive physical system, which is sort of an intuitive thing related to like the body, or if you like look at a brain, which certainly people had access to for a long time, that's the other kind of element of our psychology. We evolved to deal with physical objects. We can apply that to think about the mind, just like the body. But that was for a long time the two options. It was sort of our theory mind system and our physical system. And I think basically with the advent of what has come to be known as the cognitive revolution, um, with the ideas of people like Alan Turing and other people

like um Marvin Minsky and uh other other historical people we can go into, but like Norbert Wiener and um the ethologists, basically we can add uh a functional or teleological approach where you think um, and this is the way we naturally think about the body now, because we did the science of this, but basically um the idea of function where and that's essentially that's what allows you to sort of do a software level description of what's happening in the mind. And that is a product of our evolved artifact psychology. And so the the answer or the idea is that what what's new in psychology in the 20th century and what computer ideas of computation, what it provided, and what the cognitive revolution was, was actually going

beyond what people had long been doing, which was saying, Well, look, we have this intuitive theory mind system for reasoning about people. It's what gives us the idea that I'm a me, that you're a you, we have beliefs, desires. David sees rain, wants rain, believes it's raining, etc. This propositional structure, long big influence in philosophy and early ideas of how the mind works and still has influence today. That combined with this physical system. So we're trying to map physical systems and intentional or theory mind systems, the theory mind ideas, like where is attention in the brain, where is memory in the brain? That idea. the revolution was adding that middle level, the functional or software level description,

and that was our artifact psychology. And so the idea is that uh psychology involves maybe uniquely in science, three evolved systems: our intuitive psychology, our theory of mind, our intuitive physics to the extent that we're looking at physical structures. And then it's also our intuitive artifact psychology, this idea that we can think about functional relationships, abstract, causal relationships that are not reducible just to the physical interaction. So yeah, I'll shut up. Yeah, I mean there's a lot you you put out there. I mean basically what I'm hearing is that it is not enough in science to answer questions and collect data. You must ask the right questions. You must know what questions are worth asking and worth investigating and are

are promising. You must carve nature by the joints, as they say. You must divide things into the right categories. If you get the categories wrong, you're going to go down a lot of blind alleys. And what I'm hearing you say is that the history of psychology was very much relying on two mental systems. One was the theory of mind system. It's a system that evolved for reasoning about people, for you know, thinking about their thoughts and feelings and desires and intentions. They help us communicate with one another and coordinate with one another, cooperate, compete. They evolve by natural selection. And the other system was the what you call uh the physical stance or um intuitive physics, you know, billiard balls combining, or sorry, billiard balls bumping

into each other, things dropping off of tables, those kinds of intuitions. Um two objects cannot be at the same place at the same time. Um if you apply force to one object, it will move the other object. Um if you shoot something through the air, it has a kind of impetus or oomph that depletes as it falls to the earth, those kinds of intuitions. And so basically a lot of our psychology has been like, well, you know, uh we know that beliefs are one thing, so let's study beliefs. You know, we know memory is one thing and it works like a video camera. So let's let's figure out what this memory thing is all about. Um we know that you know emotions are basically one thing, and you know, there's often

conflict between you know our emotions and our rationality. So let's, you know, think, let's divide the mind into emotions and rationality and figure out, you know, when they conflict and when one wins and when the other one loses. This kind of folksy way of thinking about the mind has has predominated. Uh, and I use the word folksy deliberately because another term for intuitive psychology is folk psychology. Um, it's sometimes referred to as folk psychology, folk physics, uh, uh, folk biology. We have intuitions about the way animals work. So this kind of folksy view of of psychology has been the prevailing framework. And occasionally you might get some some physical metaphors as well. Um so we talk about power as if it were a force, um, that we're that you're pushing someone

when you uh command them to do something or when you make a rule that that forces them to do something. You it's it's hard to avoid these physical metaphors when we're talking about you know leadership and power. Um And so it's a combination of this, you know, folk psychology and folk physics. And then we have the cognitive revolution where computers uh are invented, and uh, we start to think about the mind in a different way, using a different system. And that system would be something like folk engineering. You you refer to it as our artifact psychology. Um, it's probably the system that evolved for using uh and manipulating tools. So Homo sapiens famously uses tools. Uh, we need some way of thinking about tools and their functions.

We uh intuitively recognize that the function of a chair is you're supposed to sit on it, the function of a hammer is for uh hammering nails. Uh uh, you know, uh physical objects uh that that have a particular structure were designed for a particular reason. Um and we sort of effortlessly and spontaneously uh get fixated on on those those reasons. This is called functional fixedness. There's a uh psychology literature on this, uh, where if we know that the function of a particular artifact or tool, it's very hard for us to ignore that and think of a different possible function for it, because we get fixated on on the function that we think it has. Um so we have this this artifact psychology, this folk engineering, and in the cognitive

revolution, we start to make use of that. Um and uh so why why wasn't that enough? So we we we have the cognitive revolution. Um we start to think about the mind as a computational system, as a kind of tool uh that processes information and guides behavior. So we're done, right? That's that's it. We we we know how to understand the mind. Well, I mean I think that might be right. Uh, but I think that the artifact uh revolution is sort of still not underway because there's sort of I don't know if you ever saw the old like um old Batman, like the original one. Um the um uh um the one uh um uh who was it? Adam West? Was that who it was? That's that sounds about right now. Um but it was sort of the campy nineteen sixties uh Batman um

yeah exactly and one of the things that was really I liked about that was like there'd be something where um it was very Chekhov's gun where there would be like you know if if uh if an air vent was important for the plot like because you know Batman wasn't gonna remove the grading from the air vent the air vent would be labeled you know I think it was an homage to cartoon you know to like graphic novels or um uh things like that um But but I like that view of sort of like things being cartoonishly labeled. And I bring that up because folk psychology, which I think most psychologists, you know, they're like, yeah, I know about folk psychology. I think there's an idea that's sort of when you're using your folk psychology, and I think

we all have this, we sort of have this idea well, I know when I'm using my folk psychology. It's sort of like the Batman air vent where it's sort of like cartoonishly labeled. And the idea is that that's not true. So, for example, there's really sophisticated models in cognitive psychology of decision making, for example. Very complicated models, really data-rich. But the argument is that one of the things that's happening in the decision-making literature, and this is not just my criticism, this is happening with internal to that, is that there is an assumption of homogeneity of process, that decision making is a single process. And if you actually look and you take a step back and you say, well, where does the idea

that decision making is a co is a unitary process come from? The idea is that that is from the ontology of our folk psychology. So, so so sort of famously, uh philosopher Bertrand Russell was talking about, and these ideas were already uh half a century old when Bertrand Russell was talking about this in the 1920s. This idea that from Franz Brontano, um, who wrote a really good book, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, um, in the mid-18 18 uh hundreds, right around the same time that Wilhelm Wont was was writing um his stuff. Um and and this idea is that um you know when when somebody is thinking about something so like if Smith is thinking about St. Peter's um versus I'm thinking about you know uh Mr.

Brown, the content of what I'm thinking about, a church or a person is different, but the act, the thinking is the same. Right. That idea that the process is unitary has been more in more recent years been called sort of domain generality. I think it's a good idea. So if I'm thinking about a person or or a food or a building or uh a weather event or an animal correct or an emotion, the act thinking is the same no matter what I'm thinking about. That's right. There's actually the same Yeah, that's right. That's right. There's so there's an agent who's doing the thinking. So there's the Dav David, there's an agent slot, there's an act slot, and then there's sort of the content slot. And the idea is that that is an ontological commitment.

That's just sort of a blind commitment. It's sort of we even weird to say it out loud, but it's an assumption the way things work. And the idea is that even it's never been tested. It's not we never like tested this model. It's an assumption. Yeah, yeah. Or to the extent we have, it doesn't work. I mean, so this is this is this is an idea that um, you know, and this is where compute the history of computer science is really interesting because people thought, well, how hard could it be to um to think or how hard could it be to remember something? You just need a memory system or a thinking system. And then it turned out that the firewall between process and content doesn't work because thinking, and by thinking,

right, we're talking about, well, we can just leave it at thinking or for reasoning, right? Thinking about a person versus thinking about a church or thinking about food or thinking about what to do, the structure of sort of goals versus agents versus objects, those are just there's just intrinsically different um dynamics related to them. And um, if you try to build a robot or a computer um just with sort of uh a general thinking ability, it doesn't work. Like whenever there's this part is the David part, that's the self. And then you got, you know, there that is connected to the thinking stick, and then the thinking stick is connected to the to the whatever, to food, you know, people, plants,

whatever. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And my robot's not gonna work if I if I build the robot. Yeah. And so one of the earliest attempts to do that was something with reinforcement learning, which is you know very popular in AI right now, but it was uh it was a checkers playing program. And it was like, well, reinforcement learning. If a general reinforcement learning system, why not just put it in a robot or a computer? And that is the way you solve a lot of problems, and uh great, it'll work. And the very first basically dissertation using reinforcement learning was um Samuel's checkers playing program. And he realized that in order to uh have a computer be able to use reinforcements, like a good thing happened, do more of this.

A bad thing happened, do less of that. In order to actually even just have that trivial thing worked, required very domain-specific representations about checkers. And the reason is because of strategy selection and credit assignment stroke strategy or uh strategy selection is um of all the things to try to do, there's nothing in reinforcement learning that tells you what to do. So the robot or the computer needs some set of representations of things that it has either done or should try to do. So in and though that doesn't just come from nowhere. And then in addition to that, and that's specific to to checkers, right? You don't just get that for free with information from some other domain. And then in addition to that, there's the problem of credit assignment, which is that

suppose you um uh something good just happened. Well, to what do you assign credit to that good outcome? Is it the fact that you just let go of the chess piece or the checker? Um, is it because you just sighed? Is it because of the move you just made? Is it the last four moves you made? Is it the last 10 moves you made? At what to what do you assign credit? And so this is all a long-winded way of saying that the structure of our theory mind system agent process content, which has historically been a long uh assumption, um, people were importing that folk psychology, ontology into systems, into mechanics, into the what they believed were like very sophisticated models. And realizing, well, look, you know, a general process like reinforcement learning

divorced completely from content doesn't work. And that's something we've known for a really long time. But still to this day, people will talk about decision making and the rules that apply to decision making in a way that one is arguing, well, decision making is a unitary kind of process. What the decision making is about doesn't matter. We can make inferences about decision making. We can make inferences about a memory. We can make inferences about attention. And so my point is: even if people aren't using their folk psychology in a way that they think that it's not labeled in their mind's eye when they're doing their science, the assumptions of the theory-minded system or or the way that it colors what we study still show up to this day.

For example, in this idea that processes independent of their content are sort of coherent or sufficient. And I think even up and through right now, when you'll read a paper, a lot of it is sort of about, well, we designed this algorithm or this sort of strategy. Um and the information about what was all required to up to make that algorithm or strategy work for this particular problem is sort of not highlighted. And I think that's still a byproduct of our folk psychology, where it's sort of one off of. It's a it's a superficial painting over of like Dave sees it's raining, you know, and that and it's just that, well, now we've got reinforcement learning going into the C's slot, right? Like that's the process slot.

So so the idea is there's still a lot of um contamination by our folk psychology system going on in our science, even when we make a mechanistic or software level or functional level advance. And so this is the answer to why haven't we succeeded yet? I actually don't think that if you took seriously the idea that like the point of psychology is to articulate all the problems that the mind solves and figure out the mechanical systems that make that possible, mechanical in the sort of this abstract software level way. I don't think that is still being done very much to this day. And there's I bec I have I have thoughts about why that is, but um but uh so I think I think that's the answer. I think we're still in the very beginnings of this revolution of switching from a pure

theory mind system over to both the artifact system and the theory mind system. And I think we're we're watching the growing pains of not always being clear when we're using the theory mind system still, um, and where to draw the lines between the constructs that are results of one system versus the other. Right. So this folk psychology, this theory of mind system, is silently and perniciously guiding our thinking. And we have no idea that it's guiding our thinking. Psychologists who are the most nerdy and the most technical, who who do rigorous experiments and use computational models, still at the end of the day, they're being insidiously guided by their folk intuitions about what is going on inside

people's head. That there is an agent or a self, which is a unitary thing, and that agent or self is uh ha has a verb attached to it. you know, the agent or self wants or thinks or sees or remembers. And uh all of those verbs are are unitary things. So remembering is one thing, thinking is one thing, seeing is one thing, right? And then there is the content, the thing that the verb is attached to. You know, a piece of food, a person, a group, whatever. That way of thinking uh has basically been at the core of cognitive science correct for as long as it has been around. And if you and it as evidence of this, you can just look at what the topics are within cognitive science. So you talked about this this wonderful idea of a category mistake.

Uh you know, uh carving up nature in the wrong ways. Um well, what are the categories in cognitive science? Memory. I'm sure you could find a textbook on memory. Decision making. Decision making is literally a field of study in cognitive science. There are people who study decision making as if they were studying one thing. Um, if you if you just look, I mean, belief is a topic, attention is a topic. Um Our science is silently guided by our folk psychology when we don't even realize it. Uh I mean, we didn't, I mean, nobody tested the idea that memory is one thing and we need to have like a science of memory as if it were one thing. Nobody tested the idea that decision making is one thing and we need to study

decision-making as a coherent topic. This just happened silently without us discussing it. It happened intuitively. We just, oh, this is the way things are. This is how we need to approach studying the mind by carving it into these different bins. Um, but what you're saying is this whole way of thinking is is almost certainly wrong. That decision making is not one thing, memory is not one thing, attention is not one thing, belief is not one thing. And these things are interconnected and dynamic and they influence each other in myriad ways. So if we are carving up the mind in the wrong way, if we're making all of these category mistakes, what is the right way to carve up the mind? So if we have if if we're looking at at having a correct cognitive science where we've

carved up nature at the joints, you know, we're recognizing the categories that that really have some ontological significance. What does a correct theory of of the human mind look like? What are the different categories? Yeah. And I think the point about attention and memory and cognitive psychology is really important to part of this answer, which is, you know, and I there's very dear friends of mine who study attention and decision making. And I think, and this is where this idea of different levels of analysis comes in. So there's no question decision making exists, right? Attention exists. And I think there's even an argument where sort of um and this is an argument by like people like more recently, it's nice to um it was nice to come across this work by people

like Wayne Wu. And there's a BBS paper out pretty recently, Behavior on Brain Sciences, about this. But basically like let's say take something like attention. The idea is that attention, if you think about it as sort of if if the definition of attention is it's the selection of something over something else for further processing, right? Which is sort of the standard textbook definition. This is what Wayne Wu says. That if you if you think about that definition, then uh the retina has photoreceptors that are selective to particular, you know, wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. Or uh, well, by the by the textbook account of attention, then the retina, retina, retinal cells have it have attention, right?

They attend to certain things over others. And his argument is that then everything in the mind is attention. It's basically the input conditions of every system at every level of abstraction. And his point is that's sort of an absurdity. So his argument is that the way we talk about attention as the phenomenon to be explained only applies at this agent-based level. As in my language, it would be like this folk psychology or intentional level description. And so Dave is paying attention. Yeah, exactly. To me. So that's right. Dave didn't see the lion. The lion doesn't see me. I'm a gazelle. Like that. That is so the study of attention and the fact that I can't I didn't notice something or why I noticed something and the mechanical stuff underlying that is perfectly coherent.

So it's not that folk psychological constructs don't exist. There's a there's an idea of sort of a limitative materialism. Um and I I am not a limited eliminative materialist say that three times fast. Um but the idea is that we shouldn't confuse folk constructs for mechanisms. So Way Mu's argument is that attention only makes sense coherently at the person level, at the at the function or the intentional level, this folk psychology level. We can talk about the mechanisms that make attention possible, the software, using our artifact psychology. And then we can even study the physical things that implement or make possible those abstract functions. Right? But the idea is that attention lives at this one level of reduction.

And his claim, and I've made this claim in other contexts with colleagues, is that one of the great errors of psychology and not paying attention to this perspective dependence and the influence of our folks' psychology is not that it's wrong, but it's being unproblematically imported into what we believe is the mechanical level, what we believe is the software level thing. And so this is the answer to the question: is well, how if if theory of mind is wrong, what's the right way to do it? And the idea is that theory of mind isn't wrong, theory of mind is the highest level description, but it's not a description. The entities that exist or the rules that exist, the Dave noticed something, Dave has attention, Dave believes this, Dave feels this.

Those things all live at that top level. You don't get rid of that level. It's like an ice cream cone is a good example. Like an ice cream cone can taste like vanilla. You can talk about the chemistry, a vanilla molecule that makes the taste possible. You don't get rid of the taste when you study the chemistry. In fact, you lose something if you only talk about the chemistry. You say, look, this chemical vanilla corresponds to the taste of vanilla. All of those pieces of information are relevant and useful. And then you can even do the physics of the chemical structure. Just sticking to one level is not the right level. There's no such thing as the right level. It depends on what your goals are.

And a complete science uses all three and knows all three and understands that, you know, the taste of vanilla is part of why we care about this stupid vanilla molecule. And these are just two different ways of describing the same thing. And the and the argument is, and this is not my idea. I mean, I've written papers about this, but you can find this idea throughout history, throughout philosophy, throughout science, and I think it's it's still not adequately embodied, but it hopefully will be. Is just that the answer is that no one level is the right answer. It's just organizing them. And I think the sh the the short answer is we have historically inherited a very full folk psychological perspective.

Most of our ideas are from that perspective because we've only recently discovered and thought about this system. And most attention should be on deconfounding or teasing apart what our ideas at a folk psychological level, not to be pejorative, but to just say, where is it coherent? It's like the taste of vanilla. We're not saying it's the taste of vanilla is pejorative, it's saying it's not the molecule. If you try to plug the taste of vanilla into the molecule, it's a category mistake. It's the same as the university as a building. This is Wayne Wu's argument about attention. It doesn't make sense to say attention is a subpersonal mechanism. Attention is the phenomenon at the whole personal level or level of the whole person

that's made possible by systems. So you can have a cognitive science of attention, but you can have two different versions: one that works and one doesn't. The one that works says attention is the phenomenon to be explained. That Dave attends to things or doesn't is the thing to be explained by mechanisms that works. The one that doesn't work is the one that says attention is the mechanism, right? It's part of the software. And those sound very similar. They're very different and they have very different um viabilities. And the and essentially the argument is because they sound so similar, they're being confused right now. So maybe a completed science of the mind, if such a thing were possible, would correspond

to our folk. Yeah, for sure. I think any it would be crazy. It it would in the sense that we wouldn't lose any of our folk constructs, but we would understand those folk constructs with additional corresponding information. This we already think about the body from the neck down this way. On a on a physiological perspective, which we understand pretty well, you don't get rid of pain, you know, you don't get rid of um uh of the the folk construct of pain, but you understand physically how pain is made possible. You understand the functional relationships, why it exists, you understand the physical things that make it possible, you understand why somebody can have a limb removed and still feel pain.

Um, we understand pain well enough to like fix pain, right? To like change the inputs of the pain system to varying degrees. I mean, not not not perfect. But um so that's right, you don't you're not gonna lose this thing in the same way we don't lose the planetary regressions, right? We don't lose those at all, but we don't think this is actually uh the only description. It's contextualizes the folk psychological ideas in a broader account. Um, that's much more complete. So we're never gonna lose the folk psychology. The idea is that a complete science contextualizes folk psychology and has a lot more information attached to it. And what we know is probably that the software level, the description of what actually

exists, how complicated we are, is so complicated. I mean, I don't know how many functions exist in a word processing program or a modern computer, but it's, you know, I know my cell phone, when it takes a pick picture, does at least a million, if not a trillion things at once. Right. Now, the idea that you can do a trillion things at once seems absurd. And I was asked questions about this when I've given talks about, you know, my model where five things are happening in the mind at once, right? So that's very much a idea from our folk psychology. And so the idea is that our prejudice against thinking the mind can do lots and lots of things and needs lots and lots of stuff to do it is still strong.

And that's a prejudice we sort of have to work against. And there are many, many people in many, many areas outside of evolutionary psychology who make the same point. Evolutionary psychology is one way to get to this, that you need a lot of stuff in a system. Um, and and uh there's a from the old Simpson the Simpsons uh TV show, there's this um part where um they are visiting, I think what's the analog of like Disneyland and one of the robots, the animatronic robots, like kind of fails and is like breaks open what's inside. And uh Marge, Homer's wife, looks at him and says, see that, Homer, that's why your robot never worked. Right. And the idea is that, like, you know, Homer, kind of Oafish person was trying to make a

robot and didn't realize that it was actually hard to make a robot. Um, you actually need a lot of stuff. So, as simple as seeing seems, it's actually trillions of things happening at once and lots of different systems. Um and uh and I think that's sort of you if you wanted to say like there's one deep historical prejudice of the mind is that, and this is what uh Lita Cosmys and John Tubi called instinct blindness is this this idea that what feels easy is easy. What's easier than seeing, right? And actually turns out there's a lot of complicated stuff. And it's going to be uh true for for everything we do. It's going to be a lot of answers. It's very going to be very complicated. Um, and if there's a deep prejudice of forcing simple unitary or

dichotomous, is it a what system one or system two? Is it automatic or controlled? Is it learned or uh innate? Um, these are not gonna serve us well. Mm-hmm. Interesting. So I might actually uh be inclined to disagree with you a little bit. Good. I I think uh I I'm a little bit more sympathetic to eliminative materialism than than you are. Um I think uh whether or not our folk psychology is correct or is a correct description on on some level, um that is an open question. It could very well be the case that it's wrong and that it's wrong in in serious and significant ways. Uh and there you know I could I could go on all day listing all of the ways in which it is likely to be wrong. We have all sorts of biases that are self serving or in the interests of our groups, we

have all sorts of bullshit and propaganda that are contaminating our our folk models of of our mental life. Um and uh I I don't think we should assume at the outset that our folk categories are are correct. I think we should do the science and find out. Um if we do that we do good evolutionary psychology, we get the, you know, the good uh adaptationist theories of what the functions are, what they're you know, what uh what they're doing, uh how they're doing it. Um and it turns out that that the best uh science we can do uh corresponds to our folk descriptions, then great. Uh but if it doesn't, then I think we have to be prepared to reject the folk descriptions. Um, so a good example of this, uh, I've written about this on my blog, is this the this is

this idea that we are pursuing happiness. That the reason we do things is it bec is because it feels good, it makes us happy. Um, I I eat the ice cream because it gives me pleasure. I uh want to start a podcast with Dave Petrozowski because it is rewarding, it is fulfilling, and that is a coherent explanation for my behavior. Um, a lot of evolutionary psychologists, to my chagrin, talk about this as the proximate level of analysis, which is different from the evolutionary level. That you know, it's it's perfectly valid to say that you know, I do uh I play the guitar because I like it, because it feels good. All right. Um, or uh, you know, we we have sex because it feels good. Um but I think that once we actually do the science of what

happiness is and what function it's serving and how it works mechanistically, it actually makes no sense to say that we're pursuing happiness. I don't think that anybody actually wants to be happy. I don't think we want to feel the emotion of happiness as an end in itself. Um why? Well, we have to think about what happiness is. We intuitively think about it as a mental substance of intrinsic uh goodness, right? And its purpose, what we think its purpose is, is to motivate us to do things. In the same way that offering you ice cream uh will motivate you to come hang out with me. Um offering us dopamine or the mental substance of goodness motivates us to do things. And so uh happiness is evolution's way of dangling a carrot in front of us to motivate us

to do things. What's wrong with this picture? Well, it makes no sense. Motivation does not need a goodie, right? Our motivations are wired up to our hearts and our muscles. Our motivations can get us to do things directly. No goodie is required, right? If you if you think that we need a goodie to motivate us, some you know substance of dopamine, whatever. If you think we need that, well then how does evolution get us to want the dopamine? Does it have to give us another goodie to to motivate us to want the dopamine? Do we have to have so we we've entered an infinite regress? We need a goodie to motivate us to get the goodie, and then we need another goodie to motivate us to get that goodie. At some point, the buck has to stop and we have to say, motivation can just affect us

directly, right? We can be motivated to get things in the world independent of the pleasure it gives us. So motivation does not need happiness to do its job. And the idea that it needs happiness to do its job, I think is wrong. It's the wrong way of thinking about motivation. The right way of thinking about motivation is that we're motivated to get ancestral fitness proxies, the things that were reliably correlated with fitness in ancestral environments. Real things in the world, not fake things. Those of our ancestors who were mistaken or deceived or deluded about real things in the world and were motivated to get fake things or or uh believe lies, those uh those did people did not become our ancestors, right?

So we evolved to want real things in the world, not stuff in our heads. So what I think happiness is doing mechanistically, um, and this is consistent with a lot of neuroscience research, uh, it's consistent with the prediction error theory of dopamine, the idea is that uh we're constantly making predictions about how good or bad things are going to be. And when we make an error and things turn out to be better than we expected, um happiness kicks in. And the job of happiness is to recalibrate us, to shift our priorities, to shift our expectations, so that our predictions are more accurate the next time we encounter this good thing. So we're predicting the sensations of eating the ice cream. If the ice cream is better than we expected, we're going to feel pleasure.

And that's going to recalibrate our expectations. So we're going to expect the ice cream to be even better the next time we eat it. Our model is going to be a little bit more accurate about what ice cream tastes like, and we're going to shift our priorities. We're going to upgrade the ice cream so that that's going to be higher in our list of desired foods for next time. That's the job of happiness. It's recalibrating us, reorienting us when we stumble upon something that is higher value than we expected. If that's true, then we're not pursuing happiness so much as chasing it away. Because the more we encounter something, the better we get at predicting it, the more our prediction errors decline, and the less happy we feel when we uh get to have

it. Um if you look at at uh at the scientific literature, one of the most uh powerful findings we see is that happiness, the frequency of happy and joyful states declines with age. It's a massive effect size. There was a recent meta-analysis that was published. The effect size was 1.7 of the decline of the frequency and intensity of happy and joyful states throughout life. So it in terms of actually describing human mental life, the idea that we're pursuing happiness is a spectacular failure. Why would we get worse at pursuing the thing that we were pursuing as we aged? That makes no sense. So we're not pursuing happiness, we're chasing it away. Um, the things, if we repeatedly encounter something that makes us happy, we're going to

feel less and less happy the more we encounter it. Um, it doesn't mean we're going to stop wanting it. Um, we can still want to be in a marriage long after we've gotten used to our spouse and are no longer as excited by our spouse. Uh, But the pleasure, the happiness is going to decline because there's less recalibration to do. You don't need to pay as much attention to the thing to figure out where you went wrong in your predictions. You don't need as much reinforcement because your motivations are already on track. So your happiness should decline. So this folk concept that we're there that we're creatures that are motivated by the carrot of happiness and the stick of suffering, this model I think is just wrong.

Uh, and it has been a catastrophe for psychological science because we have used this model of the mind as a replacement for good evolutionary theorizing. We use, oh, this thing makes us happy, therefore that's the function. The function is to make us happy. And so psychologists often study things and say that the function of this or that, the function of this political belief, is to make us happy, as if that were a coherent claim. Um uh oftentimes you you it seems as if the entire purpose of the mind is to achieve happiness. Right? That that is how it's described in the psychology literature. Uh, that the mind is a machine for uh for getting stuff inside the mind, for getting the the dopamine or the serotonin or whatever, which is a preposterous way of

thinking about the evolution of the mind. Why would we evolve to get stuff inside of our heads? It makes no sense at all. It only makes sense that we evolved to get stuff in the world that would have enhanced our ancestors' fitness. Um so I think this this that's a long winded way of saying there's at least one very strong candidate for folk psychology being bullshit, and that is this pursuit of happiness idea. And if that's bullshit then there's likely to be much more bullshit where that came where that came from. And so maybe we should be a little bit more skeptical of folk psychology uh than we have been in the past. What do you think about that? That's great. Um I really appreciate that. And I I um that was a really nice um um uh

description in a very condensed way of uh big literature, and that was great. Um well let me ask you, um, do you think that so happiness, the idea um the idea that happiness or people are motivated to pursue happiness um there's two ways to think about the way in which happiness is wrong um and this may clarify sort of my claim too um one is to sort of say that you know happiness the folk psychology of happiness is wrong the other way to think about it is the folk psychology of happiness is a slightly different issue than using a folk construct like happiness and a folk construct like motivation, and then plying that to a scientific idea. Um, and saying, like, look, the way that the software works.

So I think what you were describing was sort of uh of using the the the faulty thing of using happiness and a motivation towards happiness, which I agree are all outputs of our folk psychology in different ways. Um, you know, that there's an agent who is sort of rationally pursuing a goal, that's one element. The other element is just the meant the mental thing of happiness and its intrinsic value. Um those are sort of two constituent elements of what you said. Those are being applied now to these scientific ideas that you don't think are right. Um the question for you is do you think that that's a problem for the folk psychology, or is it that the folk psychology is applying to a place where it doesn't belong?

So I think there is an emotion called happiness. And I think it it it probably serves the function of recalibration in light of prediction errors about how good things are going to be. And so it updates our model of the world and it shifts our priorities accordingly. So happiness is real. The idea that we are pursuing it, and that is an explanation for human behavior, is what is wrong. Um, so yeah, I guess you could say that it's a misapplication of the folk psychology, but um at the end of the day, you know, there are likely to be many such misapplications. Yeah, and then and then in that case, we don't disagree at all. I mean, I think what I was trying to say was that I wouldn't want to throw happiness out,

or the idea, like, or or what's the coherence of the belief that happiness is a thing, um, Or uh or that agents rationally pursue goals, right? Um, it's not that these things are, and even the idea that why are mental states, I mean, one of the things I do in this paper, this difference detecting paper that um will be out soon, um, is is explaining why an evolved organism would think that thinking is a unitary thing, right? This this agent process uh or process um content slot, so agent process content idea that we were talking about earlier, that is wrong when it comes to a scientific description of how the mind works. What what would a coherent argument for that be? Why would an organism think that's true?

Um, and the short answer that thinking is a reliable set of co-occurring processes for an organism. That's different than remembering, that's different than seeing. So there's a big difference between you see a bear right now and you're remembering a bear, especially if we're outside, especially if we're unarmed, especially if we're somewhere where bears are really dangerous, right? Um and so the uh the evolutionary affordances of these categories um Are what caused them to distill down into unitary things. So there's a good reason why we think attention is a thing, right? It's a placeholder for did I see something or not? Did I make a mistake? So it's exactly this, it's exactly like there is a coherent

argument for why happiness exists, right? There's an idea that like the belief that attention exists, there's a coherent argument for why that would be too. But that's a different issue than is are all the assumptions about attention or happiness right? And no, I wouldn't. So I'm so number one, I I I completely agree that there might be things in the ontology of folk psychology that are just flat out wrong. But I I don't, in some sense, I think this is also sort of just this linguistic difficulty of well, what does it mean to be wrong, right? If I think that you know, I so the simplest thing you can think of, I'm unitary, right? Is that wrong? Well, from the perspective of an evolved organism in its evolved environment, yes, that's

right. You can see the van the why does a why does why is the uh uh system in the mind for representing the self think the self is a unitary enduring entity. Well, it's because I'm different than you, I'm different than my child, I'm different than the tree and the rock and the lion and everything. And the things that I do today and tomorrow, and consequently, like where this sort of in enclosed body is sort of a unique auto-correlated entity, and it would make sense for it to represent itself as a unitary thing, right? So, in that sense, if that's what you understand why the unitary representation is there, it's correct. Yeah. But if you think that the unitary representation is for anything, or science, for example,

then it is wrong. And so this is, I think, where there's a trip up where if you say, is the theory of mind system right or wrong, there's a sense in which you can answer the question in two different ways. I'm sort of answering it from the perspective of is there a uh a coherent account for why the theory of mind is structured the way it is, that it thinks thoughts are unitary, that it thinks the agent is a unitary thing? And the answer is yes. But then your point, which I completely agree with, I think this is your point, and you can tell me if not, is that there's a really very deeply a sense in which those things are wrong. Um, too. And I think this is and this is where I think the language of sort of right or wrong is

hard because you can imagine nothing is right intrinsically. It's sort of right in a place and wrong in a place, right? And I think that's so I I I I would want to just clarify, I I don't disagree. I mean, and if you if in practice, I mean, most of my time is spent really uh in a sense railing against theory of mind. But there is this sense in which I respect it and why it is coherent and right for what it's for. And I think um another way to put it is we've been wrong about what what ideas are for, in some sense, like it's a it's an empirical question of like, you know, what what uh why why do we think thinking is unitary? If we if we understand that that's for an evolutionary environment, then we can understand

why that's right. But if we if we just take it as a blanket statement and we're not asking what it's for and we're just saying is thinking unitary, well then sometimes in some sense yes in some sense no, right? And that's the that's the sort of confusing thing, I think. Um but but anyway, the point is I don't think we disagree. Cool. Yeah, no, it's it seems like, yeah, it it's it's tricky to define what makes an idea true or false. I mean, we get into epistemology and philosophy of science. You know, certainly Newtonian physics is true in a sense when applied to you know medium-sized objects. You know, when you look at galaxies or fundamental particles, Newtonian physics doesn't work. So is Newtonian physics correct?

I don't know. Uh I uh we just have to, you know, use language in a way that is is good at for communication, and you know, we can define true as predictively powerful, or we can define true as predictively powerful in a in a wide range of cases. Um I don't know that there's a correct answer to what is a correct answer. That's right. Is the man on the moon real? Yeah. There's a sense in which yes and no. It depends on what you mean by the question. Same with free will, right? Is free will re real or not? I mean, it's the same. The idea is that, you know, the man on the moon is a real. If you think that what you mean by that is there does it look like there's a face on the moon? Yeah, that's real.

The the things that lead that, but is it actually a person on the moon? No. You know, and if you don't clarify that's what you mean by the question, you could have people arguing incessantly forever about is the man on the moon real? Because that question itself is actually hiding two distinct questions with two distinct answers. Right. But I do think once you start to think about um social strategizing, status seeking, intergroup competition, it begins to become apparent that the stories we tell about the mind are not merely going to be wrong in a way that, you know, it's it's oversimplifying things or it's carving up nature in the wrong ways. But it could be wrong in a more powerful way, which is that it is serving a strategic instr

interest. Absolutely. Um with the happiness idea, I think it is often used as an excuse uh for covering up uh unsavory, self interested or or status seeking motives. You know, I I'm pursuing this this career for me, for the sheer satisfaction of it, because it's fulfilling or rewarding, uh, not because it gets me status or money. Yeah. No. I'm I'm helping others uh not to virtue signal but but because it it is it makes me feel good. Um oftentimes this happiness myth is used as a kind of confabulation or rationalization uh that that serves a reputational function. And I think there are likely to be many intuitive ideas about the mind that are serving those kind of strategic reputational functions.

Uh, and I think it is fair to call a lot of those ideas bullshit. Uh and and as we do good science, we'll begin to discover more and more of them uh and and why they're bullshit and and what fun what strategic functions they're serving. Um this is a good segue into groups, which uh has been uh dominating the bulk of of your academic career. Uh we started out talking about, you know, your youth growing up uh on the periphery of of cults and uh religious extremism. Um certainly uh we can think about cults and religions as an extreme type of groupishness or commitment to a group of people. Um you've done research about the folk psychology of groups. What is a group? How does the mind categorize a collection of units as uh one thing, as a

group, as as something that could either be acting uh uh against me or with me? Um So I wanna uh join all these ideas into one grand question. Uh and we won't have time to answer it. Uh we'll probably probably won't get the right answer, but why are we so uh divided into groups? Why can't we all get along? This question was posed by Rodney King after the LA riots. Um tribalism seems to be a core feature of our species. We cannot help but form tribes and compete with other tribes for power, status, and resources. Often the competition is violent. Um do you see this tendency as unavoidable as a part of human nature that we need to live with? Are you more utopian? Do you think world peace is possible?

Um why can't we all get along? Uh 10 second answer, yeah. No. Um Yeah, no, I think that th that's that's great. And and there's obviously a lot to say about that. And maybe um this might also I'm gonna I'm gonna um sort of declare uh somewhat like a rain check on some of this I think into our next session we might need to do. Um I'll I'll I'll start answering that. I think just um b what we have what just to wrap up what we were um saying, because yeah, no, it's it's a really good question and and I think we have to unpack a few things to answer it. Um the uh one of the it's funny you mentioned the the thing about uh strategic reasons and group reasons for why um folk psychology is bullshit, as you put it.

And I think this actually swings back to um the beginning of our conversation, which is I also think that was part of my attraction to psychology and evolutionary psychology was that I saw the same thing in these basement cults, right? In these evangelical, where the superficial idea was not at all what was going on. You know, clearly these were people who wanted feeling of belongingness, needed social support. um, the content about what was talked about, you know, like the devil and Jesus and eternal life was this superficial thing, and there was clearly like other stuff going on. And I think um the the I think the beauty and the respectfulness of an evolutionary approach or this mechanical approach to the mind,

and we talked about the human universals, Don Brown's human universals. I'll get to groups in a second. Um I think um if you take a really simple view of how people work, David knows it's raining. Whatever David thinks or believes is sort of malleable and we can do whatever we want with it. Um it it doesn't it doesn't really give the um it's not a dignified way to treat people in the following respect. If people actually need things to be okay, you know, you you need to feel safe, you need resources, you need friends. You know, as a kid, you need to play, you need to feel empowerment, you need to have some autonomy, you need to be able to take risks and not kill yourself, but maybe skin your knee.

Um, if you want to learn something, you need to be able to like be okay and not afraid to ask questions or lose your status because you look dumb. Um, you know, people are complicated, but we're really fragile. Um, and we need a lot. We're very altrucial, you know, and we both appreciate that as parents right now. And I think a view of people as sort of not very complicated and not very not a lot of nature. Um it's very easy to sort of not think it really matters. Like I can put somebody in a room for 20 hours and not give them windows or proper nutrition and just sort of do whatever, it doesn't matter. They're alive, they're fine, you know? Um if you think that there's a sort of intrinsic complicated nature to people, um

then if you want people to be okay, if you want to be okay, um, if you want to treat people well, if you want people to not suffer, um, you have to be a student of what is that nature. Um and um and you have to provide you know things for yourself or your children or or your employees um uh or as institutions um if you want to respect people um and treat them well There's a complicated set of things you have to do. And so I think just just to to and then I'll go get to groups, I think um even though the idea of a human nature and it being complicated um and um innate um you know historically there have been things done with that idea very pernicious but it's exactly right that um the the flip

side can be quite pernicious too. And I I I think um there's a there's a way to really think about people being um human nature being very valuable and good and precious um because it's so complicated and because we have intrinsic things that we need or desire or want. Um and so I I think um uh I think it's a very humanitarian view to understand that there are universals and that um and that there is structure to human nature. Yeah. Um now to groups. Um I mean I think I think the short answer is related to what I just said, which is that um you know uh groups are an answer to the question of well, what do we do now? And what do we do now sometimes involves making things for the better and sometimes making things for the worst, and there's finite resources,

um, or not. So uh, you know, I can take your berries, or you and I can work together to make more berries uh exist, right? And so um I think when we talk about our groups inevitable or what is a group, you know, it's a folk construct. We understand that there's lots of different meanings of the word, and we can talk about that now or in a little bit or next time or whenever. But I think the bottom line thing is that we are really um privileged to be an organism that is not just stuck swimming together with other fish or crossing rivers with other gazelles and then just kind of eating side by side. We can decide, well, what's the basis of our organization and how are we all going to get together and do things?

And that ability gives us the ability to make more berries or to help people, help ourselves. And as a consequence or externality help other people, but it also allows us to gang up on people. And that can be a good thing if those people did something bad, but it can also be a bad thing. So I think the the the short answer is that a group is a rough cut folk psychological level description of this ability of organisms, particular people to um to to work cooperate c cooperate yeah that's a word collaborate cooper cooperate you know compete with one another it's this idea that they're sort of like software for allowing alliances and cooperation and the content of that is not infinite but it's well it is infinite it's

um it's not um it's not unconstrained but those constraints um uh in terms of sort of what what would be a basis of cooperation um is cre is creative and uh and that's part of our nature. So um uh so I don't think group conflict is when you say if something is inevitable or not, that's an outcome in the world. And I think that's um you know, I don't think a psychologist, even if we knew everything about the software, could predict everything about what outcomes would occur because things are complicated. We know how the weather works, we can't predict the weather. There's an idea called methodological individualism, right, where you just sort of study the individual, but there's all other, other higher level questions like for sociology,

that are even harder, even when psychology is done and we can go home and we're done with our work. So I don't know if it's inevitable. I mean, there are principled answers to it, but was that does that start to answer your question about groups? It begins to. The way I like to think about this question, and I think you know it's an underrated question. It sounds kind of sentimental, and why can't we all get along? But I actually think it's a really important question that social scientists really need to think about, especially uh in the 21st century when we have nuclear weapons. Um my tentative answer to the question is I think we're asking the wrong question. So a repeating theme of this conversation is that it is very bad to ask the wrong

questions, and it is very important to ask the right questions. And one thing that an evolutionary perspective allows you to do is ask the right questions. So I think why can't we all just get along is asking the wrong question. I actually think a better question would be, why can we all get along? Because if you think about it, conflict and competition are endemic to the biological world. There's conflict and competition at all levels of biological organization. We see it all throughout the animal kingdom. Resources are limited. We can't both have the mate. We can't both be on this territory. We need some way of figuring out who gets the goodie. And uh one of the most common ways of figuring that out is fighting uh physical

violence. Um physical violence is very costly and we've evolved to avoid it when we can. But when we can't avoid it, you know, things get bloody. Certainly uh conflict is a part of the Darwinian process. You can't have Darwinian natural selection without conflict and competition, at least in some sense, to for for a trait to be selected for, to evolve, it has to win out in the competition for some fitness enhancing resource. And it has to displace some other trait. Right? So some trait has to win and some trait has to lose. If you think about it in terms of individuals, one lineage has to win and another lineage has to lose in order for an adaptation to be produced. A desire to uh benefit the entire species cannot evolve.

We've known this since the 1970s, when uh Wynne Edwards-style group selection uh became uh out of fashion and uh Dawkinsian selfish gene theory rose to preeminence. We know that a desire to benefit the entire species cannot evolve. Organisms don't act for the good of the species, they act for the good of their genes. Organisms that act in ways that benefit themselves and their kin, well, uh genes for doing that will tend to proliferate uh at the expense of genes that don't do that. Um given all that, I don't think it's a mystery why we have conflict and competition. Um, really, what is the mystery is why we have cooperation. That's the puzzle that we need to solve. Why do we sometimes work together?

Why do we sometimes resolve our conflicts and avoid killing each other? Um why do we form trading networks? Why do we often help each other and trade favors? This in evolutionary biology is known as the problem of altruism. This is a great example of evolutionary biologists asking the right questions. And the right question they asked is: what is the deal with altruism? Why are organisms kind to one another, given the uh Darwinian struggle for existence that we believe to be true? It turns out there are a variety of beautiful explanations for altruism, a variety of beautiful solutions to this problem. They involve reciprocity, they involve kinship, and the theory of inclusive fitness, that is, a gene for helping kin uh is uh likely to be helping a copy of itself, and

such genes will therefore proliferate. We have uh more recently theories of uh interdependence. If I depend on you uh for survival, if I depend on your skills and knowledge, then your survival is good for my fitness. And so you you become intrinsically valuable to me. Um I have a reason to keep you alive independent of uh any favors you might give to me, because just the way you act in the world, um, the way you might oppose my enemies or support my friends, that's that's good for me. So interdependence is another pathway. Reputation is a huge one in our species. We can um help each other because it uh benefits us reputationally. We look virtuous, we look like an attractive partner, an attractive leader, an attractive

mate, an attractive friend. Um so there are all sorts of beautiful explanations for uh why altruism exists. Um conflict and competition, however, uh that's the part that doesn't really need a special explanation. It's it's it's Darwinism incarnate, survival of the fittest. Um insofar as um fitness is a uh is relative, it's zero sum, the higher my fitness, the lower your fitness, if we have different genes, then you will get conflict and competition. Um so that's my answer to the question. I'm curious what you think of it. Um I think um I might disagree a little bit. Um so I think um I think when people are asking, well, why can't we get along? They're they're doing exactly what their evolved psychology should be doing, which is

saying, Well, why can't there be uh why can't we do something different than what we're doing? right? And I think that is part of the way that the software is designed. Um, so um whenever given an intrinsic thing, is that um currently um you know, at a macroscopic level, you know, a thing can't be in two places at once. If I have, if I drink water, you can't drink the same water. Um so there is there are rival goods, there are just and there are conflicts of interests. So, and then there are also interests that overlap. And as you mentioned, you know, there's all this literature. There's a really great paper about the serial rediscovery of inclusive fitness theory. This question about why is there cooperation, you know, things like dispersal

versus not. So an organism can be selected to like benefit the group per se, if it's a non-dispersing thing like bacteria, right? Because you know, like they're just non-dispersing. Um, but it's because it's actually helping the next generation of copies of itself. It's like probistically copies of itself. So even if they're not technically related, if it's non-dispersal, um, but it's just sort of it's affecting its the design's differential reproductive success, right? So um this in, you know, there's this nice paper by Stu West and other people talking about like what she talked about, like mutualisms. There's sort of a deep structure of differential reproductive success explaining why people

or organisms do things that look weird or altruistic, right? And this sort of language of altruism was was a bit um confusing for a long time. And I think it's been pretty cleared up. Um when people say, well, why can't we get along? I do think, I do think that's a a perfectly valid question to ask. And I think that, or why can't we all get along? I think that I think it's a perfectly valid question in the in the two senses. One is you can still ask what's the mental software that makes um conflict possible, right? So I don't I think it still requires an explanation in that sense of the proximate psychology. I don't think it's a Darwinian uh mystery why conflict would occur. Um But even still, how why conflicts of interest happen in certain places

and not others is not as always straightforward. And why not cooperate? Um is a straightforward thing. So there's there's that, and then just the the answer of um or the the the the the question on its own of well, why can't we all get along is the right question to ask from the sense of um each individual organism has a set of represented interests about the current state of the world, what benefits me, what costs me, representations of what could be exist that don't exist yet, counterfactuals, and then also like what's likely to happen in the future. And each individual in interacting with other individuals is coordinating, negotiating, well, what do we do going forward? And our interests are going to overlap to some degree.

They won't in other ways. And all of these ideas about sort of like, well, who what groups exist? How do we treat one another? What are the rules? What are the assumptions about how we're going to treat another? Give resource flows. Who are we going to hurt? That narrative is very powerful, and that agreement is very powerful. It determines who's and what who is supported by who, who hurts other people. And the question, well, why can't we get all get along is I think a very reasonable insertion of why it's a it's a challenge to given what's currently happening, why can't it be that we have a different basis of socially discriminating? And I don't mean discriminating in like a discrimination sense, but like in a like uh just

behaving differently, which could include like cooperating. So if there are we currently are imposing costs on a set of people, well, why are we doing that? Who's benefiting that? Do you and I really benefit from that? Or does somebody else who's telling us that we do, who's in our group? Like, are we actually all in a group together? Like let's say there's a third party and um like Bob, I don't know. Sorry, Bob. And Bob is actually getting a lot out of all three of us being belligerent towards a group of people, but maybe you and I aren't at all, right? You know, it makes sense for us to represent that and say, well, why can't we all get along? And maybe question Bob and maybe question the fact that we should all be in a group

together, maybe question the fact that the people we've been belligerent towards, you know, we've been belligerent towards them. Um, and of course, it's in Bob's interest, if if it's in his interest to have us be belligerent towards him, to obscure that. So I think there's a lot of negotiation that goes on. And I think one of the great tragedies of sort of group identities generally is if you look historically or you look at any case study that's been well studied at international or interpersonal levels, the sort of um the projection of group boundaries or treating a set of agents as a group as opposed to individuals who who uh produce behaviors, um, a lot of so like retaliation, you know. So like a small number of people do something and then but they're members of a group.

Um, well, w who do we retaliate against? Do we retaliate against the specific people or do we retaliate against the group that they represent? Well, what group do they represent? And then uh different agents with different interests might say, Well, actually that's an instance of this group or another group or another group. And those identities are then the basis of the retack, the attack or revenge. And in the case of like modern large scale violence, uh this can affect millions of people and kill millions of people. Um and it's not always clear that it's rationally um the the the best way to actually address the the initial problem in the first place. Um so um so so yeah, that's sort of my long winded way of of saying that.

I think it is a fair question to ask in in the in these at least these two respects of the um it makes sense why an individual would ask it. And then that we can also just ask about the software. But I agree that the Darwinian question is sort of straightforward. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it seems like there's a different there are different perspectives we could take on the question. You know, one is a Darwinian question. Is there a Darwinian mystery here? Right. And the other is, well, is there a socially intelligible reason why someone would pose the question? And is there a sensible response that we could give knowing everything we do about the individuals involved? And again, we're we're back to this distinction between the Darwinian

level of understanding and the folk psychology level of understanding and the uh endless ways in which they conflict with one another sometimes and complement each other sometimes. Uh and we're still trying to figure out uh the resolution between these two ways of thinking. Um, and I look forward to continuing to resolve these contradictions and explore the ways in which our folk understanding of the world is right or bullshit or incomplete, and the ways in which evolutionary theory can illuminate and shed insight on the human condition and on questions like why we can't all get along. That's right. I think that the thing I learned from this is that uh uh it's instead of asking if something's right or wrong, it's uh is in which way.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. Well, on that note, uh thank you, Dave. This was a really fun conversation. Yeah, thank you. And I look forward to yeah, I look forward to many more. Sounds good. We have finished up another episode. Good job. Thank you. Good job as well. And thank you, uh, listener for listening. Um, if you like what we're doing here, uh don't be afraid to tell other people that you like it. Um, it means a lot to us. We're a new podcast, we're starting out, we'd love to spread the word about what we're doing. Um please leave us a kind review or if you're inclined to throw us some money, uh, you can check out our Patreon page. Um and other than that, stay tuned for the next episode. We'll be doing one of these every week.

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