WEBVTT

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I'm David Pinsoff.

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And I'm David Petrozowski.

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Welcome to Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast.

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Actual evolutionary psychologist.

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Doing actual evolutionary psychology.

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All right, we'll try again.

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Try again.

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Okay.

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

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This is really hard.

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I know it's hard.

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It's hard.

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

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Really excited that I get to explain how

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

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episode.

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Yeah.

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

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childhood.

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Like so this has some deep roots.

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

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be sincere and genuine.

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

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

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

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

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excellent questioning.

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

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

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

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

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psychologists.

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

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

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in what ways they might be correct.

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

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Was that this episode?

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I think it was.

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I think, yeah.

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In in uh yeah, I think we did disagree.

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This is the first moment we disagreed.

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

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is to actually disagree on science.

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

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of of of of clashing perspectives there.

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

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Yeah.

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Exactly.

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

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And without further ado, here is episode two.

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David interviews me about how I got into evolutionary psychology.

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All right.

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I think we're gone, sir.

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Yeah.

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All right.

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

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

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

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

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evolutionary psychology.

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

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at Santa Barbara.

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At UCSP, that's right.

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At UCSP at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology.

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

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Um so how did you get interested in this uh

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weird set of ideas.

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

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evolutionary psychology.

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Um what what moved you in that direction?

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

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

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

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

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

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of stumble into.

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

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

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

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

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

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undergrad that I wanted to go into uh medical school.

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

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as bodies.

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Um, right?

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

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

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

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

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Um, and so I started taking psychology courses.

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

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lot of anthropology courses.

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

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It was a great education.

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

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

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

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student in my undergrad.

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Really good education, really happy with it.

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

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just sort of psychology.

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And so I was actually an anthropology minor.

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

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

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cultural relativity.

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

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

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really culturally determined.

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

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And that was really an impactful idea for me.

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And it's really interesting.

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

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

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

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families are different, right?

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

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

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

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

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But this this really strong idea that everything about

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

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Um, again, I found that really interesting.

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

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

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

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I had a pretty idyllic childhood.

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

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

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

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attending basement like cults, um, sort of.

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

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of very evangelical almost cults in Western New York.

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

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

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coming out of that situation, the the idea that sort

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

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

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

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places th than sort of mainstream life.

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

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on the periphery of religious cults.

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

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

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uh into this uh worldview yeah and and sacrifice pretty much

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

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ideology.

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

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

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our psychology.

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

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

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

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in these different groups.

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Yeah, no, it's a good question.

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

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

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

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versus culture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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you know, be perfect.

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

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

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

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

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and I.

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

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

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nature.

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It's just malleable based on context.

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

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

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

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um uh the the way human nature works is that the

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

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

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

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agree with what this person's saying.

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I think this person's a con artist.

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

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

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

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criteria.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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what you uh should be happy about.

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

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about.

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

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

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thinking about cultural relativism.

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

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

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And what Human Universals was a book about exactly what

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it sounds like, human universals.

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

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

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

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

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And Don Brown was coming from this very cultural determinism

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perspective.

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

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

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Don Simons thought there was.

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

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

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It it actually took up a book, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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saying the things I couldn't articulate.

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

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

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And I kept doing that.

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

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

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um and especially reading their work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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wanting to do.

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

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

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

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list of human universals.

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

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

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Donald Brown's list of universals.

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

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in all of the different cultures and ethnographic records that he looked at.

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

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seeing you know the the essence of of human nature.

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

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

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I've pulled up the list right here.

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Yeah.

00:17:26.230 --> 00:17:31.360
Um, so starting with A, uh his list of human universals that he's found evidence for in all

00:17:31.360 --> 00:17:33.360
the ethnographic records he's looked at.

00:17:34.160 --> 00:17:37.680
Abstraction in speech and thought.

00:17:38.320 --> 00:17:43.520
Actions under self-control distinguished from those not

00:17:44.160 --> 00:17:44.800
under control.

00:17:45.440 --> 00:17:48.640
And I know you've actually written a lot about that, and we'll we'll get to that later on

00:17:48.640 --> 00:17:53.040
in the episode: this difference between whether an action is under control or not and what

00:17:53.120 --> 00:17:54.880
what this free will debate is all about.

00:17:55.040 --> 00:17:59.130
But it's interesting that that is one of uh Don Brown's universals.

00:17:59.290 --> 00:18:00.970
Uh aesthetics.

00:18:01.290 --> 00:18:04.410
All cultures have some idea of beauty.

00:18:04.570 --> 00:18:08.330
Um affection, expressed and felt.

00:18:08.810 --> 00:18:14.490
Seems pretty obvious, but it's kind of cool that it's it's

00:18:14.570 --> 00:18:18.970
presumably a good candidate for being a part of human nature or various affections.

00:18:19.130 --> 00:18:24.890
Uh age grades, age statuses, um, age terms.

00:18:25.400 --> 00:18:29.560
Age is a is a hugely important part of human social life.

00:18:29.640 --> 00:18:35.080
It makes sense that age would be important in a variety of different cultures.

00:18:35.320 --> 00:18:39.160
Ambivalence the concept of ambivalence

00:18:41.000 --> 00:18:42.760
anthropomorphism.

00:18:43.560 --> 00:18:49.240
So imputing human traits to uh you know plants or animals or artifacts

00:18:49.800 --> 00:18:52.970
antonyms, things being the opposite of one another.

00:18:53.130 --> 00:18:54.490
So I've just made it through the A's.

00:18:54.570 --> 00:18:54.730
Yeah.

00:18:55.050 --> 00:18:56.810
And there are there are many more on this list.

00:18:56.970 --> 00:19:00.730
And and just uh just going through them all and just taking your time and letting each one

00:19:00.730 --> 00:19:03.930
sink in is a kind of meditative experience.

00:19:04.410 --> 00:19:10.410
Um and I I found it so I I certainly sympathize with with this book sort of uh

00:19:10.570 --> 00:19:13.850
being a kind of paradigm changer for you.

00:19:14.490 --> 00:19:16.810
Uh it was for me as well.

00:19:18.640 --> 00:19:24.560
And uh so it seems like what I'm hearing from you is that having

00:19:24.560 --> 00:19:30.160
grown up around these really powerful cultural forces, these you know, these religious

00:19:30.160 --> 00:19:36.080
mythologies, these cults, um, and their failure to imprint themselves on you

00:19:36.160 --> 00:19:42.160
and and sort of make you into their image, that these failures sort of gave you

00:19:42.160 --> 00:19:47.710
an inkling that that there's really something more than these uh cultural ideas, that

00:19:47.710 --> 00:19:49.070
there's such a thing as human nature.

00:19:49.230 --> 00:19:54.750
There's something inside you that that isn't just these mythologies and these ideas,

00:19:54.910 --> 00:19:58.350
there's something in you that resisted them and that pushed back against them.

00:19:58.510 --> 00:19:59.230
What is that?

00:19:59.390 --> 00:20:00.670
Where does it come from?

00:20:01.150 --> 00:20:06.640
Uh and it seems like that was the question that sort of ultimately drew you to this this

00:20:06.640 --> 00:20:07.280
field of study.

00:20:07.360 --> 00:20:08.560
Is that a fair question?

00:20:08.640 --> 00:20:08.880
Yeah.

00:20:08.960 --> 00:20:14.480
And I think, I mean, at the time I was very, I think appropriately for my

00:20:14.480 --> 00:20:16.400
circumstances, very focused on myself.

00:20:16.480 --> 00:20:20.160
But I think it also having that experience did two other things.

00:20:20.400 --> 00:20:26.240
One was I was also looking at people who, you know, the people who

00:20:26.240 --> 00:20:32.150
were I to characterize it too, I mean, it was it what it what it really looked like

00:20:32.150 --> 00:20:38.150
was there was sort of there was typically like one sort of charismatic

00:20:38.150 --> 00:20:42.870
leader or preacher, you know, and this even involved like you know literally a basement

00:20:42.950 --> 00:20:48.870
religious services, um uh where but there were like maybe four

00:20:48.870 --> 00:20:54.790
to five or you know bigger numbers of people in the congregation.

00:20:55.430 --> 00:21:01.420
And the um The people in the

00:21:01.420 --> 00:21:06.940
congregation, they were clearly on board and affected by this.

00:21:07.180 --> 00:21:12.620
And I was looking at sort of the um the speaker or the pastor, this

00:21:12.620 --> 00:21:18.140
charismatic person, and I think you know, sort of almost if if to to get it an image of it,

00:21:18.220 --> 00:21:24.190
it would be sort of like you know, um televangelist sort of spittle throbbing temples

00:21:24.270 --> 00:21:25.950
sort of kind of thing, you know.

00:21:26.990 --> 00:21:32.830
And uh and it really it had sort of a scam feel to it, even for me at

00:21:33.230 --> 00:21:33.550
a time.

00:21:33.710 --> 00:21:38.590
And so I think it um but clearly people were getting something out of it.

00:21:38.670 --> 00:21:43.920
And I don't I don't have strong um I don't have a strong sort of

00:21:43.920 --> 00:21:45.840
anti-religious feeling.

00:21:46.080 --> 00:21:50.480
I think I did afterwards, but I think I've kind of come full circle around that.

00:21:50.560 --> 00:21:54.000
Um, and I think I've sort of made peace with that, and that's something to talk about

00:21:54.000 --> 00:21:54.400
later.

00:21:54.560 --> 00:22:00.000
But um uh but I think there were two things.

00:22:00.160 --> 00:22:06.030
One is it made me realize that what how people work is important because I was

00:22:06.030 --> 00:22:11.230
looking at people whose lives, like these were people who did not have a lot of money.

00:22:11.470 --> 00:22:16.430
They had rusty cars in Buffalo, New York, and they were giving their money to somebody who

00:22:16.430 --> 00:22:19.070
had a Porsche in the garage.

00:22:19.630 --> 00:22:22.510
Um, and that made a big impact on me.

00:22:22.590 --> 00:22:28.590
Like these things have consequences, and sort of what so so there was even at a young

00:22:28.590 --> 00:22:34.480
age, was this idea sort of that you really have to take seriously people's beliefs

00:22:34.560 --> 00:22:40.480
and sort of getting it right is not a um it's not a feckless

00:22:41.040 --> 00:22:41.520
thing.

00:22:41.680 --> 00:22:47.280
And so I think I really took seriously criticizing and thinking about ideas.

00:22:47.440 --> 00:22:53.440
And I think the one good skill it gave me, this is the second thing, is that um I

00:22:53.440 --> 00:22:54.560
got really good.

00:22:54.800 --> 00:23:00.430
What I basically spent my time doing was just sort of deconstructing what the

00:23:00.430 --> 00:23:01.790
preacher was doing.

00:23:02.030 --> 00:23:03.870
Because that's, you know, I was bored.

00:23:03.950 --> 00:23:06.830
I was sitting in this thing for hours at a time.

00:23:07.070 --> 00:23:08.670
There was nothing else to do.

00:23:08.910 --> 00:23:12.110
So I think it really honed my critical thinking.

00:23:12.590 --> 00:23:18.510
Um, and it was my freedom and independence and autonomy in

00:23:18.510 --> 00:23:24.460
power was, you know, my my mother wanted me to be

00:23:24.460 --> 00:23:24.700
there.

00:23:24.860 --> 00:23:26.860
I couldn't leave because I was a kid.

00:23:27.020 --> 00:23:32.220
But what I could do and what nobody could take away from me was my ability to sort of say,

00:23:32.460 --> 00:23:34.140
what is does this make sense?

00:23:34.380 --> 00:23:36.380
What do I actually think about this?

00:23:36.620 --> 00:23:42.460
Um and I think that that really honed my um my sort of critical

00:23:42.460 --> 00:23:43.100
thinking.

00:23:43.340 --> 00:23:49.210
Um and so I think um, you know I don't

00:23:49.210 --> 00:23:54.730
think it's the kind of thing that was a good experience, um, but there's

00:23:54.730 --> 00:23:57.130
always pluses and minuses to things.

00:23:57.210 --> 00:24:02.890
And I think it's certainly like um it gave there there were there were there were

00:24:02.890 --> 00:24:08.810
benefits to um in retrospect, um, you

00:24:08.810 --> 00:24:14.330
can see where sort of the combination of like it's important to get ideas right

00:24:14.730 --> 00:24:17.840
and um and I'm not saying my ideas are right.

00:24:17.920 --> 00:24:18.800
I don't think that's true.

00:24:18.960 --> 00:24:21.840
I think they're um, I'm just trying to make it more right.

00:24:22.000 --> 00:24:27.520
Um, um, but uh um, but but in honing that

00:24:27.520 --> 00:24:33.520
criticism skill um in a way that is not just about, and to bring it back to your thing,

00:24:33.600 --> 00:24:34.640
sort of about status.

00:24:34.800 --> 00:24:40.640
Like I wasn't concerned about, I wasn't looking at somebody using ideas and

00:24:40.640 --> 00:24:45.350
beliefs and rhetoric to improve their status and thinking that's what I want to do.

00:24:45.590 --> 00:24:49.590
I was looking at somebody doing that and saying, my God, that's horrible.

00:24:50.870 --> 00:24:54.630
And that's the that's almost the enemy.

00:24:55.030 --> 00:25:00.710
And so I think um and I actually think that's one of the things that attracted me to

00:25:00.710 --> 00:25:06.360
evolutionary psychology was um And there's a lot of,

00:25:06.520 --> 00:25:11.960
especially in popular presentations, there's a lot of sort of cynical

00:25:11.960 --> 00:25:13.160
evolutionary psychology.

00:25:13.240 --> 00:25:19.000
There's a lot of very superficial things, and it is often used to for for various

00:25:19.000 --> 00:25:24.280
purposes that I don't think are consistent with its core, but which is again something to

00:25:24.280 --> 00:25:25.880
talk about at another time.

00:25:26.120 --> 00:25:30.520
But I think ultimately what I was really appealing to

00:25:32.370 --> 00:25:38.210
to me about evolutionary psychology was not that it was controversial, not that

00:25:38.210 --> 00:25:43.330
it was cynical, um, not that it was patriarchal, like and I don't think it is.

00:25:43.410 --> 00:25:47.170
Um, and I would disagree with, I mean, I think people try to use it that way.

00:25:47.250 --> 00:25:51.970
I think people or people, you can be an evolutionary psychologist about how people are

00:25:51.970 --> 00:25:54.530
going to use science, and that falls out nicely.

00:25:54.690 --> 00:26:00.240
But but leaving that aside, what I really found appealing, especially about um

00:26:00.480 --> 00:26:06.320
Lita and John's work, was it was sort of courageous in the same way as it really spoke to

00:26:06.320 --> 00:26:12.320
this kid in these basement revival meetings, um, where it was sort of like it matters

00:26:12.320 --> 00:26:18.130
if something's true, even if everybody um thinks it's true, it might not

00:26:18.130 --> 00:26:18.930
be true.

00:26:19.810 --> 00:26:25.810
And uh and what's the argument and what's the logic and that

00:26:25.970 --> 00:26:31.890
sort of spirit of um being courageous even when everyone

00:26:31.890 --> 00:26:37.880
else around you is sort of saying something and is going along with something, but

00:26:37.880 --> 00:26:40.120
it doesn't quite make sense.

00:26:40.440 --> 00:26:43.640
Um that that was really appealing, I think.

00:26:43.720 --> 00:26:49.560
And that was a big part of um uh um of

00:26:49.560 --> 00:26:52.280
that approach um I think for me.

00:26:55.000 --> 00:27:00.030
Well I mean you you mention the prevailing ideas at the time, and they're still somewhat

00:27:00.030 --> 00:27:03.390
popular, these ideas about cultural relativism.

00:27:03.550 --> 00:27:08.110
Um Tubi and Cosmedys refer to them as the standard social science model.

00:27:08.270 --> 00:27:14.190
It's it's essentially a blank slate model of the mind or something quite close to it.

00:27:14.350 --> 00:27:20.120
Um that they're uh we we are we basically come into the world empty of

00:27:20.360 --> 00:27:26.040
instincts or intuitions or predispositions or drives or

00:27:26.040 --> 00:27:27.160
anything like that.

00:27:27.480 --> 00:27:32.840
And we basically absorb the entirety of who we are from our surroundings, in particular our

00:27:32.840 --> 00:27:35.000
cultural surroundings.

00:27:35.720 --> 00:27:41.570
And that idea, for whatever reason, has really been a powerful idea within

00:27:41.570 --> 00:27:43.410
academia and social science.

00:27:43.810 --> 00:27:47.650
And it's interesting why that way of thinking has been so appealing.

00:27:47.730 --> 00:27:52.850
I mean, you could do some evolutionary psychology to try to explain what is appealing about

00:27:52.850 --> 00:27:56.290
this idea of cultural determinism and blank sladism.

00:27:57.490 --> 00:28:03.300
I mean, maybe it is analogous to the kinds of cult-like mentalities that you were

00:28:03.300 --> 00:28:07.860
exposed to in the sense that all cults have an interest in social control.

00:28:08.340 --> 00:28:14.260
And what blank slatist ideology gives you is a reason to think that social control

00:28:14.260 --> 00:28:15.700
is going to be effective.

00:28:16.740 --> 00:28:20.420
It's a justification for social control at the end of the day.

00:28:20.820 --> 00:28:26.660
I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of totalitarian ideologies, uh, from you know

00:28:26.740 --> 00:28:32.650
uh Maoism to uh Stalinism, that they have a kind of blank slatist view of the mind

00:28:32.650 --> 00:28:38.490
at their core, that we can remake uh human beings into uh vessels of the

00:28:38.490 --> 00:28:39.050
state.

00:28:39.290 --> 00:28:44.970
Uh we can we can make them into you know perfect um citizens uh through

00:28:44.970 --> 00:28:50.010
indoctrination um and and re-education um

00:28:50.800 --> 00:28:56.240
so yeah, I'm curious about your thoughts on that, on the parallels between this so-called

00:28:56.240 --> 00:29:02.000
standard social science model and number one, uh your upbringing,

00:29:02.240 --> 00:29:07.360
uh and number two, your desire to

00:29:08.000 --> 00:29:12.320
cut through the bullshit and and retain a sense of autonomy.

00:29:12.800 --> 00:29:17.810
Yeah, and I and just to follow up on what you're saying, I mean I also think that um it

00:29:17.810 --> 00:29:23.410
reminds me a little bit about your uh political propaganda um work

00:29:23.570 --> 00:29:29.250
too, that you know, and then this is an idea um I've heard other people mention this is not

00:29:29.250 --> 00:29:34.770
my idea, but you know, it's no coincidence that people who work for a living

00:29:35.010 --> 00:29:40.800
making ideas are uh incentivized to sort of uh work

00:29:40.960 --> 00:29:46.880
in a rubric that says ideology or esoteric ideas are really important,

00:29:47.360 --> 00:29:47.680
right?

00:29:47.920 --> 00:29:53.520
Like um uh and so and I think if you look historically, I mean um

00:29:54.320 --> 00:30:00.080
I was just um you know talking about um the history of

00:30:00.080 --> 00:30:02.800
public relations in in an intro class.

00:30:02.880 --> 00:30:08.650
Um so Edward Renet's uh really interesting um person who basically started the

00:30:08.650 --> 00:30:14.490
field of public relations, although at the time it was called propaganda prior to uh or

00:30:14.490 --> 00:30:16.170
during the First World War.

00:30:16.410 --> 00:30:22.170
Um his um uh the the idea that sort of

00:30:22.890 --> 00:30:28.890
um there's an opportunity, uh, sets of people who say there's an opportunity to to

00:30:28.890 --> 00:30:34.660
use uh what we know about the design of the mind to um to essentially

00:30:34.660 --> 00:30:35.860
manipulate people, right?

00:30:35.940 --> 00:30:39.540
To like get them to buy product or to get them to think in a certain way.

00:30:40.100 --> 00:30:43.780
Obviously that's not reserved for totalitarian regimes.

00:30:43.860 --> 00:30:49.700
And it's um, you know, whether the people who are interested in doing it

00:30:49.700 --> 00:30:51.060
are can be horrible people.

00:30:51.140 --> 00:30:54.020
Like I mean, I think Edward Bernese by all accounts was that.

00:30:54.180 --> 00:30:59.300
I mean he one of his first jobs was to convince, figure out a way to convince women who are

00:30:59.300 --> 00:31:02.630
not smoking as a population to smoke.

00:31:02.710 --> 00:31:07.910
Um, you know, you could probably do some actuarial statistics on the consequences of that,

00:31:07.990 --> 00:31:12.870
but I don't think you would need to see that to know that's probably a bad idea for women

00:31:12.870 --> 00:31:15.110
and babies and lots of people.

00:31:15.350 --> 00:31:20.950
Um uh but um uh but there's an

00:31:21.190 --> 00:31:26.790
there's these just institutional structural s incentives for uh the use

00:31:27.110 --> 00:31:31.080
of ideas and psychology towards certain ends, right?

00:31:31.240 --> 00:31:37.160
And I think if you if you think there's basic funding for research, but then there's

00:31:37.160 --> 00:31:42.840
a lot of interest in sort of for-profit uses as well, um, it's not

00:31:42.840 --> 00:31:48.200
surprising that just from a purely sort of institutional selection pressure

00:31:48.200 --> 00:31:53.560
perspective, the ideas that um uh

00:31:54.470 --> 00:31:59.830
what you tell people will change what they do um

00:32:00.470 --> 00:32:06.470
will be selected for in the sense of if you're a corporation and you wanna have advertising

00:32:06.470 --> 00:32:11.350
and you want to pay people um and if you have a psychologist who says actually what you

00:32:11.350 --> 00:32:16.870
tell people isn't gonna affect um how they purchase things, they're not gonna have a job,

00:32:17.030 --> 00:32:17.270
right?

00:32:17.510 --> 00:32:22.220
Because they've just told the company that, you know, I'm useless to you.

00:32:22.380 --> 00:32:28.300
Um but if somebody says, you know, look, I can um I either know

00:32:28.300 --> 00:32:33.100
now or I have a method for determining um how to get women to smoke.

00:32:33.260 --> 00:32:35.180
You know, I'll get back to you, right?

00:32:35.500 --> 00:32:41.180
Um uh that the implicit in that or explicit in that is this idea that um

00:32:41.340 --> 00:32:46.780
the ideas that we have um and what we show to people will

00:32:47.050 --> 00:32:49.610
change them or determine what they do.

00:32:49.850 --> 00:32:55.370
And so if you just imagine what kind of institutional structure uh

00:32:55.610 --> 00:33:01.370
selection, what ideas sort of would follow from that, you would expect that a professional

00:33:01.370 --> 00:33:07.290
community of people who study the mind, um, uh, some subset of that, you're

00:33:07.290 --> 00:33:13.130
gonna probably likely get ideas around the idea that um people are pretty

00:33:13.130 --> 00:33:14.250
manipulatable.

00:33:14.650 --> 00:33:19.020
Uh um ideas are really important.

00:33:19.820 --> 00:33:25.820
And the ideas of the information we provide to people are is really powerful.

00:33:25.980 --> 00:33:28.780
And we are the powerful stewards of that.

00:33:29.500 --> 00:33:32.060
And that gives people status.

00:33:32.860 --> 00:33:38.540
It's a motivation or a justification for paying them or for giving them positions.

00:33:38.700 --> 00:33:44.650
And so so that's my take on why um why the uh

00:33:44.970 --> 00:33:50.650
why the idea of um any any idea that sort of people are malleable

00:33:50.890 --> 00:33:56.490
or people um are people need our ideas in order to be

00:33:56.490 --> 00:33:57.130
okay.

00:33:57.290 --> 00:34:01.610
Um you you can you can see why that would be a selected for idea.

00:34:01.690 --> 00:34:07.290
Um there's different translations of that core idea, but I think the idea that like um boy,

00:34:07.360 --> 00:34:10.240
you really need us or or you're not gonna be okay.

00:34:10.320 --> 00:34:15.680
Um I buy that 100%.

00:34:16.560 --> 00:34:22.160
Um it's a very self-aggrandizing way of thinking that if everything is

00:34:22.160 --> 00:34:27.440
determined by culture and ideas, uh, and we are the people who understand culture and

00:34:27.440 --> 00:34:32.490
ideas, well then we're by definition the most powerful people in the world.

00:34:32.650 --> 00:34:35.290
Um, listen to us, give us power.

00:34:35.450 --> 00:34:39.930
Um, we know what to do, we know how to sell your product, we know how to get people to

00:34:39.930 --> 00:34:44.650
behave how you want them to behave, we know how to design policy, you know, put us in

00:34:44.650 --> 00:34:48.090
government, uh, put us in positions of of influence.

00:34:48.410 --> 00:34:54.090
Um yeah, uh it's it's very sensible that the social science, the social

00:34:54.090 --> 00:34:59.980
sciences, in absence of a strong theoretical framework to constrain them, will tend to go

00:34:59.980 --> 00:35:01.900
in these self-aggrandizing directions.

00:35:02.060 --> 00:35:06.620
You could almost predict it from an evolutionary psychological perspective.

00:35:10.060 --> 00:35:12.940
The idea of evolutionary psychology is actually not new.

00:35:13.420 --> 00:35:19.020
Darwin himself, uh, in 1859 said that uh evolution is

00:35:19.090 --> 00:35:21.490
basically going to be a game changer for for psychology.

00:35:21.650 --> 00:35:25.250
He wrote, you know, psychology will be placed on a new foundation.

00:35:25.570 --> 00:35:31.170
Uh and yet, for some reason, and we could talk about the reasons why, uh, it took nearly

00:35:31.170 --> 00:35:37.010
two centuries for Darwin's vision to come to fruition, for the social sciences to actually

00:35:37.010 --> 00:35:41.970
adopt evolution as an organizing uh theoretical framework.

00:35:42.370 --> 00:35:47.900
Um, and well, what happens when you don't have an organizing

00:35:47.980 --> 00:35:53.580
theoretical framework that is correct to constrain uh your

00:35:53.580 --> 00:35:54.380
research?

00:35:54.700 --> 00:35:59.820
Well, it's going to go in the directions that we would expect, you know, humans to go in

00:35:59.820 --> 00:36:03.980
the absence of any constraints, which is namely self-aggrandizement.

00:36:04.540 --> 00:36:10.070
Um so it's it's a cynical way of of looking at uh

00:36:10.390 --> 00:36:12.230
the social sciences.

00:36:12.550 --> 00:36:18.230
Um and I think it's an argument in favor of

00:36:18.470 --> 00:36:22.790
uh bringing evolution or at least rigorous conceptions of evolution into the social

00:36:22.790 --> 00:36:23.030
sciences.

00:36:23.830 --> 00:36:27.750
Certainly there are ways of using evolutionary psychology in manipulative and

00:36:27.750 --> 00:36:29.990
propagandistic ways as well, as you mentioned.

00:36:30.230 --> 00:36:34.710
So it's not that it's impossible to run in these sort of self aggrandizing or

00:36:34.710 --> 00:36:38.150
propagandistic directions once you adopt an evolutionary perspective.

00:36:38.390 --> 00:36:40.680
Um the hope is that it will be harder.

00:36:41.480 --> 00:36:46.760
Um, that there are, you know, a few more con a few more constraints on ongoing in those

00:36:46.760 --> 00:36:48.200
kinds of of directions.

00:36:48.360 --> 00:36:53.320
And in particular, the hope is that the more rigorously you apply evolutionary principles,

00:36:53.480 --> 00:36:59.090
evolutionary game theory, um, the harder it will be to

00:36:59.490 --> 00:37:04.370
to move in erroneous, uh self-serving or self-aggrandizing directions.

00:37:04.610 --> 00:37:07.010
Um there's a wonderful quote, I forget who said it.

00:37:07.170 --> 00:37:13.090
Um uh it's it's easy to lie with statistics, but it's even easier to

00:37:13.090 --> 00:37:14.210
lie without them.

00:37:14.770 --> 00:37:17.890
Um I think the same is true uh with with good theory.

00:37:17.970 --> 00:37:21.570
You know, it's easy to lie with with a good theory or manipulate, but it's even harder to

00:37:21.570 --> 00:37:27.480
sorry it's even easier to lie um without a good theory, where you're just free to come

00:37:27.480 --> 00:37:30.040
up with ever what whatever ideas you want.

00:37:32.520 --> 00:37:38.520
So that is a long-winded way of saying we need more rigorous

00:37:38.520 --> 00:37:44.520
applications of evolutionary theory in the social sciences as a as a check on our

00:37:44.520 --> 00:37:49.800
all-too human tendencies toward self-deception, self-aggrandizement, et cetera.

00:37:51.320 --> 00:37:56.610
What we're getting into right now is a is a really interesting topic that that you call the

00:37:56.610 --> 00:37:59.570
evolutionary psychology of psychology.

00:38:00.370 --> 00:38:05.410
I know that has been an attractive topic for you uh in recent years.

00:38:05.570 --> 00:38:08.210
I think it's a fascinating topic.

00:38:08.450 --> 00:38:13.250
Uh I'd love to hear your thoughts about what the evolutionary of sorry, what the

00:38:13.250 --> 00:38:17.520
evolutionary psychology of psychology is and why it is important to study.

00:38:17.920 --> 00:38:18.640
Yeah, yeah.

00:38:18.800 --> 00:38:20.320
Um yeah, thanks.

00:38:20.480 --> 00:38:25.840
Um and I think I think there's sort of a there's sort of two ways to answer that.

00:38:25.920 --> 00:38:31.920
One is to say, well, what's the psychology people are using to um uh to study

00:38:31.920 --> 00:38:32.480
the mind?

00:38:32.720 --> 00:38:38.270
And a lot of the work that you're alluding to is work that addresses that issue, and we can

00:38:38.270 --> 00:38:38.990
sort of talk about that.

00:38:39.150 --> 00:38:43.470
I think there's a second related issue, which has to do with the history of psychology,

00:38:43.550 --> 00:38:46.430
which is sort of more related to what we were just talking about, right?

00:38:46.590 --> 00:38:51.870
Which was um why um this idea of self

00:38:51.950 --> 00:38:57.790
aggrandizement and what what sort of ends uh the science

00:38:57.790 --> 00:39:00.670
um is is sort of trying to achieve.

00:39:00.910 --> 00:39:06.860
Um and um and I think you can do the evolutionary psychology of both that

00:39:06.860 --> 00:39:12.860
history um with that additional issue of sort of self aggrandizement and then

00:39:13.020 --> 00:39:16.780
and then do this sort of more delineated thing.

00:39:16.940 --> 00:39:21.260
As an academic, what I'm doing right now is sort of that more delineated thing.

00:39:21.420 --> 00:39:27.180
Um and I just want to say um before I get to the to the psychology part, um

00:39:27.420 --> 00:39:32.330
the self aggrandizement thing, I want to be clear too, that like I think

00:39:32.970 --> 00:39:38.170
institutions and their selection pressures, if you want to put it that way, are different

00:39:38.170 --> 00:39:40.090
from the motivations of individual people.

00:39:40.250 --> 00:39:45.690
I think that most people don't uh really want to help people

00:39:46.090 --> 00:39:52.010
and are motivated to genuinely, and many people go into science and I do believe science

00:39:52.010 --> 00:39:57.860
generally helps people, but I think you can also be a very well

00:39:58.020 --> 00:40:02.740
intended therapist who believes in repressed memory

00:40:04.100 --> 00:40:09.860
ideas and their sort of cultural force reasons why or cultural

00:40:09.860 --> 00:40:15.460
epidemiological ideas for why something like repressed

00:40:15.460 --> 00:40:19.590
memory therapy became popular and became what therapists believed.

00:40:19.670 --> 00:40:24.470
And so individual people being very well intended can do really terrible things, for

00:40:24.470 --> 00:40:30.390
example, you know, because of the prevailing ideas that sort of just succeed for sort

00:40:30.390 --> 00:40:35.270
of dumb differential reproductive success reasons, right?

00:40:35.350 --> 00:40:41.190
And so I want to be clear in talking about sort of um the cynical approach to sort of the

00:40:41.190 --> 00:40:42.710
history of psychology.

00:40:43.030 --> 00:40:46.790
I think it's it's often sort of on the backs of well-intended people.

00:40:46.950 --> 00:40:52.320
Um the institutions may not the structure is sort of orthogonal to that so I just want to I

00:40:52.320 --> 00:40:58.000
want to be clear um um uh for that um in terms of the

00:40:58.000 --> 00:41:03.920
psychology um of psychology um there's really um

00:41:04.560 --> 00:41:10.320
uh boy there's a lot to say on that I mean the basic idea is that um

00:41:11.530 --> 00:41:16.810
almost all sciences go through a period of just

00:41:17.610 --> 00:41:19.770
kind of collecting data.

00:41:21.130 --> 00:41:26.570
You know, like the um uh you know, astronomy is a really good example of that, where you

00:41:26.570 --> 00:41:30.090
just sort of collect a bunch of data and you look out in the sky and you just sort of see

00:41:30.170 --> 00:41:34.170
like you know, dots of light and stars and planets and things moving.

00:41:34.410 --> 00:41:38.420
And of course, um, you know, there was no Netflix back then.

00:41:38.500 --> 00:41:43.300
So people got pretty good at knowing what was going on with all the stars and the planets

00:41:43.300 --> 00:41:44.020
and things.

00:41:44.260 --> 00:41:50.260
Um and uh there's a certain point where the data gets

00:41:50.260 --> 00:41:54.980
organized and you know, there are these things like planetary regressions, right?

00:41:55.060 --> 00:42:00.420
These little, so the the stars would sort of all move uniformly with respect to each other,

00:42:00.500 --> 00:42:06.350
but there'd be smaller objects that were moving at a rate each night across the sky, but

00:42:06.350 --> 00:42:07.950
then they would sort of do these regressions.

00:42:08.030 --> 00:42:10.110
And so there were these ellipses, right?

00:42:10.750 --> 00:42:16.350
Um and I went to Poland when I was in Berlin, and there was like a statue of

00:42:16.350 --> 00:42:18.430
Copernicus in Warsaw.

00:42:18.590 --> 00:42:22.830
Um and uh so it was sort of reflecting on what Copernicus did.

00:42:22.910 --> 00:42:26.750
And there's a really nice book called The Copernican Revolution by the historian of science

00:42:26.830 --> 00:42:30.670
Thomas Kuhn, who's famous for the um, what is the book called?

00:42:30.750 --> 00:42:34.300
I can't even think of the Kuhn book of scientific revolution.

00:42:34.540 --> 00:42:35.900
Structure of scientific revolutions, of course.

00:42:35.980 --> 00:42:36.380
Yeah, yeah.

00:42:36.540 --> 00:42:38.380
Excellent book if anybody hasn't read it.

00:42:38.460 --> 00:42:39.980
It's very well written.

00:42:41.020 --> 00:42:47.020
But the the thing Copernicus did, you know, everybody sort of knows that Copernicus shifted

00:42:47.180 --> 00:42:52.540
the um the geocentric model of the universe to the heliocentric, right?

00:42:52.620 --> 00:42:54.940
That the sun is the center and not the earth.

00:42:55.100 --> 00:43:00.670
Um and you know, part of that was um was because of these little uh planetary

00:43:00.670 --> 00:43:06.350
ellipses, like realizing that it wasn't that we were the center and the planets were

00:43:06.350 --> 00:43:08.670
actually doing these little ellipses.

00:43:08.910 --> 00:43:14.830
It was that if you're on a rotating body in orbit with another

00:43:14.830 --> 00:43:20.110
rote body rotating in orbit, and the orbit of one body is in

00:43:20.110 --> 00:43:26.060
different uh size than yours, then as you're traveling, there's

00:43:26.060 --> 00:43:27.980
basically apparent motion, right?

00:43:28.140 --> 00:43:32.940
It's a little hard to draw it, you know, over this, but basically as one, as one thing is

00:43:32.940 --> 00:43:37.660
moving past another, there'll be a point where the um it'll look like it kind of moves

00:43:37.660 --> 00:43:39.660
backwards as they're going through their different orbits.

00:43:39.740 --> 00:43:42.540
Like I, you know, there's nice animations you can look up.

00:43:42.780 --> 00:43:48.630
Um the so the conclusion was the center of of the

00:43:48.630 --> 00:43:50.070
universe per se, right?

00:43:50.150 --> 00:43:52.230
Was was sort of the sun versus the earth.

00:43:52.310 --> 00:43:54.550
That's sort of the textbook thing.

00:43:55.030 --> 00:44:01.030
But the bigger approach was um what Copernicus did is he contextualized

00:44:01.030 --> 00:44:03.030
the observations of the data.

00:44:03.270 --> 00:44:09.240
So he said, Look, um what you're looking at is not the

00:44:09.240 --> 00:44:11.800
way the universe is structured.

00:44:12.040 --> 00:44:17.400
What you're looking at is a particular perspective within the universe.

00:44:18.360 --> 00:44:23.640
So why it looks the way it does is not a direct readout of the way it is.

00:44:23.800 --> 00:44:27.080
It's that it's a per particular perspective within that.

00:44:27.400 --> 00:44:29.000
And that is the real insight.

00:44:29.080 --> 00:44:31.000
And the same thing happened with in physics.

00:44:31.160 --> 00:44:36.990
So the same thing with essentially the Einstein and the quantum

00:44:36.990 --> 00:44:42.350
and relative revolution, the post-Newtonian

00:44:42.350 --> 00:44:47.710
revolution, after the Newtonian revolution in physics, was that our

00:44:47.710 --> 00:44:53.560
experience of distance and time and space is

00:44:53.560 --> 00:44:56.680
not a description of actually the way things work.

00:44:56.760 --> 00:45:02.040
It's a description of a particular perspective of a particular range of spaces and times

00:45:02.280 --> 00:45:04.840
and macroscopic things.

00:45:05.080 --> 00:45:10.440
And so it contextualizes that perspective as well, that like what we experience as

00:45:10.440 --> 00:45:15.320
universal laws are actually only within a particular perspective.

00:45:15.480 --> 00:45:17.880
And it recontextualizes that.

00:45:18.090 --> 00:45:22.090
And this is all a long-winded way of saying that psychology.

00:45:22.650 --> 00:45:28.570
Um, and there's a very rich, and I've been very interested, I've been reading a lot of the

00:45:28.570 --> 00:45:32.890
history of psychology, and there's a lot of really good lost ideas in that history.

00:45:32.970 --> 00:45:38.970
But basically, to oversimplify it, um, psychology still is sort

00:45:38.970 --> 00:45:44.760
of hasn't had its what is the perspective dependence of our data collection

00:45:45.080 --> 00:45:45.400
moment.

00:45:46.120 --> 00:45:52.120
Um and I actually think that um the the perspective dependence,

00:45:52.280 --> 00:45:57.320
the geocentrism, if you will, of our psychology is

00:45:58.200 --> 00:46:03.960
that as a default, in the same way that as an astronomer, your default is a terrestrial

00:46:03.960 --> 00:46:09.160
perspective, our default, our way of thinking about the mind,

00:46:09.910 --> 00:46:15.910
is our intuitive everyday psychology delivered by

00:46:15.910 --> 00:46:21.910
natural selection, a series of systems for that allow us to reason about mental states in

00:46:21.910 --> 00:46:22.550
the mind.

00:46:23.030 --> 00:46:26.550
These are intuitive, as in jargon, ontologies, right?

00:46:26.710 --> 00:46:31.910
These are ontologies, is just a philosophical term for it's a description of sort of what

00:46:31.910 --> 00:46:35.030
exists and the rules that apply to what exists.

00:46:35.190 --> 00:46:39.280
And we have this intuitive ontology in physics, right?

00:46:39.360 --> 00:46:43.120
We have an intuitive physics that's different than our scientific physics.

00:46:43.760 --> 00:46:47.520
And we started with our intuitive physics and we still use it all the time.

00:46:47.680 --> 00:46:53.040
It helps, it's useful, but it fails and it's not exactly right, especially when you push

00:46:53.040 --> 00:46:53.200
it.

00:46:54.160 --> 00:46:59.930
And the idea is that psychology Really has been using, and

00:46:59.930 --> 00:47:05.930
psychologists in general, we are all, and even you and I to this day, we're using

00:47:05.930 --> 00:47:11.530
evolved minds that weren't designed to do science, whether it's physics or astronomy or

00:47:11.530 --> 00:47:16.890
psychology, we're using our evolved software to do psychology.

00:47:17.530 --> 00:47:23.530
And I think the perspective dependence of psychology is understanding how our

00:47:23.530 --> 00:47:29.160
evolved software for reasoning about different things that we did evolve to

00:47:29.160 --> 00:47:33.480
reason about, which includes, for example, con specifics.

00:47:33.640 --> 00:47:39.000
So our theory of mind system, our ability to represent and think about mental states.

00:47:39.400 --> 00:47:44.440
Everyone who doesn't have some impairment can do this to varying degrees.

00:47:44.760 --> 00:47:48.040
That system operates effortlessly and visibly.

00:47:48.280 --> 00:47:52.970
We didn't even know it existed until a couple, you know, decades ago to a first

00:47:52.970 --> 00:47:58.090
approximation, it's been in people for at least 60,000 years, if not, you know, much, much

00:47:58.090 --> 00:47:58.730
longer.

00:47:58.970 --> 00:48:04.890
Um that system colors the ideas we have about, well, what

00:48:04.890 --> 00:48:05.610
exists in the mind?

00:48:05.770 --> 00:48:06.410
What is a mind?

00:48:06.490 --> 00:48:07.450
How do we study the mind?

00:48:07.610 --> 00:48:08.890
What are the questions we ask?

00:48:09.210 --> 00:48:12.170
Then it's it's the water we swim in as fish.

00:48:12.410 --> 00:48:14.330
So that's our theory mind system.

00:48:14.730 --> 00:48:20.570
Um and if you look at the history of psychology, um, I think

00:48:20.880 --> 00:48:26.880
what you can see is sort of people reasonably enough starting with their theory of mind

00:48:27.200 --> 00:48:32.560
system, sort of adding in their folk physics system, because right, we know that there's

00:48:32.560 --> 00:48:33.200
like matter.

00:48:33.280 --> 00:48:38.000
And then people are sort of saying, well, like, you know, how do we have a science of the

00:48:38.000 --> 00:48:38.320
mind?

00:48:38.560 --> 00:48:40.880
Um, how do we think about things?

00:48:41.120 --> 00:48:43.280
And um what do we study?

00:48:43.360 --> 00:48:44.560
What are the questions we ask?

00:48:44.720 --> 00:48:48.640
What are what do we think are the elements or contained within the mind?

00:48:49.040 --> 00:48:54.650
Um, And I think to this day, as good as our data and

00:48:54.650 --> 00:49:00.650
method collection um techniques are, I

00:49:00.650 --> 00:49:06.650
still think that our our ideas of what exists in the mind are very

00:49:06.650 --> 00:49:11.290
much colored by our intuitive psychology, much more than

00:49:12.580 --> 00:49:18.020
we would want to in an objective way in the f in the in the sense of um

00:49:19.300 --> 00:49:25.300
uh we can have really good data but if we think um for

00:49:25.300 --> 00:49:30.820
example that um just take something like a belief right or or like just say memory right

00:49:30.900 --> 00:49:36.340
like let's say that memory is um um uh

00:49:37.690 --> 00:49:43.370
memory is overly broad, um, but you want if you just sort of have this intuitive idea about

00:49:43.370 --> 00:49:46.250
memory, and we can talk about why that may be an intuitive idea.

00:49:46.410 --> 00:49:52.090
Um uh if you think that there's some sort of

00:49:52.090 --> 00:49:57.930
circle in the mind that corresponds to memory, um then uh you collect

00:49:57.930 --> 00:50:00.650
lots of really complicated and sophisticated data.

00:50:00.810 --> 00:50:06.220
But if it turns out that memory isn't a unitary thing, then

00:50:07.740 --> 00:50:11.420
it doesn't matter how sophisticated your data are, you're not going to really get a

00:50:11.420 --> 00:50:12.140
coherent answer.

00:50:12.300 --> 00:50:18.220
I mean, a good analogy would be something like if you think that locomotion is a

00:50:18.220 --> 00:50:19.420
unitary system.

00:50:19.580 --> 00:50:22.620
Like you can maybe you can just be wrong about the kind of things something is, like

00:50:22.700 --> 00:50:26.370
Gilbert, philosopher Gilbert Ra called something being a category mistake.

00:50:26.450 --> 00:50:30.610
His example of a category mistake is that somebody's on a tour of university, they're shown

00:50:30.610 --> 00:50:36.610
the library, the the common area, the dining hall, um, you know, the psychology building,

00:50:36.770 --> 00:50:40.530
philosophy building, and the and the the tourist goes, you know, the person on the tour is

00:50:40.610 --> 00:50:42.690
like, that's great, but where's the university?

00:50:43.010 --> 00:50:43.570
Right.

00:50:43.760 --> 00:50:47.920
And the point is that, you know, well, that person's wrong about what kind of thing the

00:50:47.920 --> 00:50:48.480
university is.

00:50:48.560 --> 00:50:52.000
The university is not a specific building, it's the overarching thing, you know.

00:50:52.080 --> 00:50:55.680
But if you keep looking for the university, no matter how good your data collection is,

00:50:55.840 --> 00:50:56.800
you're just going to be wrong.

00:50:56.880 --> 00:50:57.120
Right.

00:50:57.200 --> 00:51:01.440
Like it's just if you start a science in an ill pose way, you're you're just in trouble.

00:51:01.680 --> 00:51:05.840
And the idea is the same with if you think memory is a unitary thing, it would be just the

00:51:05.840 --> 00:51:08.160
same as if you think locomotion is a unitary thing.

00:51:08.240 --> 00:51:09.280
It's a category mistake.

00:51:09.360 --> 00:51:10.800
So health.

00:51:11.070 --> 00:51:11.310
Yeah.

00:51:11.550 --> 00:51:14.910
So you study trains and you see how locomotion works in trains.

00:51:14.990 --> 00:51:17.390
You study birds, you see how locomotion works in birds.

00:51:17.550 --> 00:51:21.470
You study, you know, a number of things, and then you're sort of like, well, look, we're

00:51:21.470 --> 00:51:23.070
really getting inconsistent information.

00:51:23.230 --> 00:51:27.390
Like, look, I, you know, sometimes locomotion seems to be circular, sometimes it's sort of

00:51:27.390 --> 00:51:28.190
like up and down y.

00:51:28.350 --> 00:51:30.190
Sometimes it's soft, sometimes it's hard, right?

00:51:30.350 --> 00:51:34.510
Like if you don't understand that it's a broad overarching category, then you're sort of

00:51:34.510 --> 00:51:40.380
sticking feathers onto like the the um the like the st the the pneumatic

00:51:40.620 --> 00:51:43.580
like driving rods of the of the steam locomotive, right?

00:51:43.660 --> 00:51:45.980
It's just you're mashing things together that don't belong.

00:51:46.140 --> 00:51:51.980
And so I think our theory of mind system is not designed for the level of

00:51:51.980 --> 00:51:53.980
resolution that our science requires.

00:51:54.140 --> 00:51:59.900
And so when we're doing something like I'm looking for the neurocognitive signature of like

00:51:59.900 --> 00:52:05.590
a particular kind of memory, unless you have uh a really

00:52:05.590 --> 00:52:09.510
good converging mechanistic kind of software level description.

00:52:09.590 --> 00:52:11.510
And we can talk about that in a second.

00:52:11.590 --> 00:52:16.710
But basically, if you're just using intuitive constructs like memory, attention, reasoning,

00:52:17.030 --> 00:52:22.950
emotion, then it's very likely you're making the locomotion mistake and you're going to

00:52:22.950 --> 00:52:25.030
get a lot of inconsistent data.

00:52:25.270 --> 00:52:30.060
And more fundamentally the answer is not collect more and more data.

00:52:30.140 --> 00:52:35.900
It's because that answer is basically the equivalent of saying, well, that tourist uh on

00:52:35.900 --> 00:52:39.660
Gilbert Riles tour just needs to find more buildings.

00:52:39.820 --> 00:52:43.580
And then eventually um, you know, you'll find the right building.

00:52:43.740 --> 00:52:48.540
It's like, well, no, it doesn't matter how much data we collect, we'll never find the

00:52:48.540 --> 00:52:49.420
university, right?

00:52:49.500 --> 00:52:54.830
And so um so I think that um the theory mind

00:52:55.390 --> 00:53:00.670
system is has been producing category mistakes for a really long time.

00:53:00.910 --> 00:53:06.110
And I don't I'll I I'll just shut up in a second, but I think the so what we've alluded to

00:53:06.110 --> 00:53:11.790
is there's the theory mind system, there's the intuitive physical system, which is sort of

00:53:11.920 --> 00:53:16.240
an intuitive thing related to like the body, or if you like look at a brain, which

00:53:16.240 --> 00:53:21.920
certainly people had access to for a long time, that's the other kind of element of our

00:53:21.920 --> 00:53:22.640
psychology.

00:53:22.800 --> 00:53:24.720
We evolved to deal with physical objects.

00:53:24.800 --> 00:53:28.560
We can apply that to think about the mind, just like the body.

00:53:29.840 --> 00:53:32.240
But that was for a long time the two options.

00:53:32.320 --> 00:53:34.720
It was sort of our theory mind system and our physical system.

00:53:34.800 --> 00:53:39.360
And I think basically with the advent of what has come to be known as the cognitive

00:53:39.360 --> 00:53:45.270
revolution, um, with the ideas of people like Alan Turing and other people

00:53:45.270 --> 00:53:51.110
like um Marvin Minsky and uh other

00:53:51.910 --> 00:53:57.270
other historical people we can go into, but like Norbert Wiener and um the

00:53:57.270 --> 00:54:03.190
ethologists, basically we can add uh a functional or teleological approach where you

00:54:03.190 --> 00:54:07.190
think um, and this is the way we naturally think about the body now, because we did the

00:54:07.190 --> 00:54:12.800
science of this, but basically um the idea of function where and that's

00:54:12.800 --> 00:54:17.840
essentially that's what allows you to sort of do a software level description of what's

00:54:17.840 --> 00:54:19.040
happening in the mind.

00:54:19.360 --> 00:54:23.120
And that is a product of our evolved artifact psychology.

00:54:23.280 --> 00:54:29.280
And so the the answer or the idea is that what what's new in

00:54:29.280 --> 00:54:34.890
psychology in the 20th century and what computer ideas of computation,

00:54:35.050 --> 00:54:40.570
what it provided, and what the cognitive revolution was, was actually going

00:54:40.570 --> 00:54:45.050
beyond what people had long been doing, which was saying, Well, look, we have this

00:54:45.370 --> 00:54:48.730
intuitive theory mind system for reasoning about people.

00:54:48.970 --> 00:54:53.290
It's what gives us the idea that I'm a me, that you're a you, we have beliefs, desires.

00:54:53.720 --> 00:54:57.240
David sees rain, wants rain, believes it's raining, etc.

00:54:57.480 --> 00:55:03.480
This propositional structure, long big influence in philosophy and early ideas of how the

00:55:03.480 --> 00:55:05.800
mind works and still has influence today.

00:55:06.040 --> 00:55:07.880
That combined with this physical system.

00:55:07.960 --> 00:55:12.760
So we're trying to map physical systems and intentional or theory mind systems, the theory

00:55:12.920 --> 00:55:16.600
mind ideas, like where is attention in the brain, where is memory in the brain?

00:55:16.760 --> 00:55:17.480
That idea.

00:55:18.110 --> 00:55:22.990
the revolution was adding that middle level, the functional or software level description,

00:55:23.070 --> 00:55:24.990
and that was our artifact psychology.

00:55:25.070 --> 00:55:29.950
And so the idea is that uh psychology

00:55:30.430 --> 00:55:35.710
involves maybe uniquely in science, three evolved systems: our

00:55:35.710 --> 00:55:41.460
intuitive psychology, our theory of mind, our intuitive physics to the

00:55:41.460 --> 00:55:43.780
extent that we're looking at physical structures.

00:55:43.940 --> 00:55:49.220
And then it's also our intuitive artifact psychology, this idea that we can think about

00:55:49.220 --> 00:55:54.660
functional relationships, abstract, causal relationships that are not

00:55:54.660 --> 00:55:57.540
reducible just to the physical interaction.

00:55:57.780 --> 00:55:59.700
So yeah, I'll shut up.

00:56:00.150 --> 00:56:03.510
Yeah, I mean there's a lot you you put out there.

00:56:03.750 --> 00:56:09.590
I mean basically what I'm hearing is that it is not

00:56:09.590 --> 00:56:13.670
enough in science to answer questions and collect data.

00:56:13.990 --> 00:56:16.150
You must ask the right questions.

00:56:16.790 --> 00:56:22.630
You must know what questions are worth asking and worth investigating and are

00:56:22.870 --> 00:56:24.150
are promising.

00:56:25.520 --> 00:56:29.120
You must carve nature by the joints, as they say.

00:56:29.200 --> 00:56:31.840
You must divide things into the right categories.

00:56:32.080 --> 00:56:35.840
If you get the categories wrong, you're going to go down a lot of blind alleys.

00:56:37.280 --> 00:56:42.640
And what I'm hearing you say is that the history of psychology was very much

00:56:42.640 --> 00:56:45.360
relying on two mental systems.

00:56:45.610 --> 00:56:47.450
One was the theory of mind system.

00:56:47.530 --> 00:56:51.610
It's a system that evolved for reasoning about people, for you know, thinking about their

00:56:51.610 --> 00:56:54.010
thoughts and feelings and desires and intentions.

00:56:54.090 --> 00:56:58.090
They help us communicate with one another and coordinate with one another, cooperate,

00:56:58.410 --> 00:56:59.050
compete.

00:56:59.690 --> 00:57:02.010
They evolve by natural selection.

00:57:03.050 --> 00:57:08.890
And the other system was the what you call uh the physical stance or

00:57:08.890 --> 00:57:14.460
um intuitive physics, you know, billiard balls combining, or sorry, billiard balls bumping

00:57:14.460 --> 00:57:18.380
into each other, things dropping off of tables, those kinds of intuitions.

00:57:18.540 --> 00:57:22.620
Um two objects cannot be at the same place at the same time.

00:57:22.860 --> 00:57:26.540
Um if you apply force to one object, it will move the other object.

00:57:26.780 --> 00:57:31.660
Um if you shoot something through the air, it has a kind of impetus or oomph that depletes

00:57:31.660 --> 00:57:34.700
as it falls to the earth, those kinds of intuitions.

00:57:35.850 --> 00:57:40.730
And so basically a lot of our psychology has been like, well, you know, uh we know that

00:57:40.730 --> 00:57:43.290
beliefs are one thing, so let's study beliefs.

00:57:43.370 --> 00:57:46.250
You know, we know memory is one thing and it works like a video camera.

00:57:46.330 --> 00:57:49.290
So let's let's figure out what this memory thing is all about.

00:57:49.610 --> 00:57:54.410
Um we know that you know emotions are basically one thing, and you know, there's often

00:57:54.410 --> 00:57:57.370
conflict between you know our emotions and our rationality.

00:57:57.530 --> 00:58:01.820
So let's, you know, think, let's divide the mind into emotions and rationality and figure

00:58:01.820 --> 00:58:05.420
out, you know, when they conflict and when one wins and when the other one loses.

00:58:05.660 --> 00:58:11.260
This kind of folksy way of thinking about the mind has has predominated.

00:58:11.340 --> 00:58:16.060
Uh, and I use the word folksy deliberately because another term for intuitive psychology is

00:58:16.060 --> 00:58:17.420
folk psychology.

00:58:17.500 --> 00:58:22.380
Um, it's sometimes referred to as folk psychology, folk physics, uh, uh, folk biology.

00:58:22.460 --> 00:58:24.540
We have intuitions about the way animals work.

00:58:24.780 --> 00:58:28.710
So this kind of folksy view of of psychology has been the prevailing framework.

00:58:28.790 --> 00:58:32.390
And occasionally you might get some some physical metaphors as well.

00:58:32.630 --> 00:58:38.470
Um so we talk about power as if it were a force, um, that we're that you're pushing someone

00:58:38.470 --> 00:58:42.950
when you uh command them to do something or when you make a rule that that forces them to

00:58:42.950 --> 00:58:43.350
do something.

00:58:43.590 --> 00:58:47.670
You it's it's hard to avoid these physical metaphors when we're talking about you know

00:58:47.750 --> 00:58:49.190
leadership and power.

00:58:49.430 --> 00:58:54.800
Um And so it's a combination of this, you know, folk psychology and folk physics.

00:58:55.040 --> 00:59:00.960
And then we have the cognitive revolution where computers uh are invented, and uh, we

00:59:00.960 --> 00:59:04.000
start to think about the mind in a different way, using a different system.

00:59:04.160 --> 00:59:07.840
And that system would be something like folk engineering.

00:59:08.000 --> 00:59:10.400
You you refer to it as our artifact psychology.

00:59:10.480 --> 00:59:14.880
Um, it's probably the system that evolved for using uh and manipulating tools.

00:59:15.040 --> 00:59:17.600
So Homo sapiens famously uses tools.

00:59:17.680 --> 00:59:21.810
Uh, we need some way of thinking about tools and their functions.

00:59:22.450 --> 00:59:27.250
We uh intuitively recognize that the function of a chair is you're supposed to sit on it,

00:59:27.410 --> 00:59:30.690
the function of a hammer is for uh hammering nails.

00:59:30.930 --> 00:59:36.610
Uh uh, you know, uh physical objects uh that that have a particular structure were

00:59:36.610 --> 00:59:38.530
designed for a particular reason.

00:59:38.770 --> 00:59:44.720
Um and we sort of effortlessly and spontaneously uh get fixated on on those

00:59:44.880 --> 00:59:45.520
those reasons.

00:59:45.680 --> 00:59:47.280
This is called functional fixedness.

00:59:47.360 --> 00:59:52.160
There's a uh psychology literature on this, uh, where if we know that the function of a

00:59:52.160 --> 00:59:56.960
particular artifact or tool, it's very hard for us to ignore that and think of a different

00:59:56.960 --> 01:00:00.880
possible function for it, because we get fixated on on the function that we think it has.

01:00:01.200 --> 01:00:06.080
Um so we have this this artifact psychology, this folk engineering, and in the cognitive

01:00:06.080 --> 01:00:08.240
revolution, we start to make use of that.

01:00:08.730 --> 01:00:14.090
Um and uh so why why wasn't that enough?

01:00:14.250 --> 01:00:16.090
So we we we have the cognitive revolution.

01:00:16.250 --> 01:00:21.050
Um we start to think about the mind as a computational system, as a kind of tool uh that

01:00:21.050 --> 01:00:23.210
processes information and guides behavior.

01:00:23.450 --> 01:00:24.330
So we're done, right?

01:00:24.490 --> 01:00:25.050
That's that's it.

01:00:25.130 --> 01:00:27.130
We we we know how to understand the mind.

01:00:27.770 --> 01:00:30.720
Well, I mean I think that might be right.

01:00:30.800 --> 01:00:36.640
Uh, but I think that the artifact uh revolution is sort of still not underway because

01:00:36.640 --> 01:00:42.560
there's sort of I don't know if you ever saw the old like um old Batman, like the

01:00:42.560 --> 01:00:43.360
original one.

01:00:43.600 --> 01:00:48.960
Um the um uh um the one uh um uh who was it?

01:00:49.120 --> 01:00:49.920
Adam West?

01:00:50.240 --> 01:00:51.200
Was that who it was?

01:00:51.440 --> 01:00:52.640
That's that sounds about right now.

01:00:54.240 --> 01:00:58.730
Um but it was sort of the campy nineteen sixties uh Batman um

01:01:00.570 --> 01:01:04.490
yeah exactly and one of the things that was really I liked about that was like there'd be

01:01:04.490 --> 01:01:08.570
something where um it was very Chekhov's gun where there would be like you know if if uh if

01:01:08.570 --> 01:01:14.250
an air vent was important for the plot like because you know Batman wasn't gonna remove the

01:01:14.250 --> 01:01:18.730
grading from the air vent the air vent would be labeled you know I think it was an homage

01:01:18.890 --> 01:01:24.780
to cartoon you know to like graphic novels or um uh things like that um But

01:01:24.940 --> 01:01:29.100
but I like that view of sort of like things being cartoonishly labeled.

01:01:29.500 --> 01:01:35.340
And I bring that up because folk psychology, which I think most psychologists, you know,

01:01:35.420 --> 01:01:37.820
they're like, yeah, I know about folk psychology.

01:01:38.460 --> 01:01:43.340
I think there's an idea that's sort of when you're using your folk psychology, and I think

01:01:43.340 --> 01:01:47.660
we all have this, we sort of have this idea well, I know when I'm using my folk psychology.

01:01:47.740 --> 01:01:51.420
It's sort of like the Batman air vent where it's sort of like cartoonishly labeled.

01:01:51.500 --> 01:01:53.570
And the idea is that that's not true.

01:01:53.890 --> 01:01:59.410
So, for example, there's really sophisticated models in

01:01:59.410 --> 01:02:04.770
cognitive psychology of decision making, for example.

01:02:05.090 --> 01:02:08.370
Very complicated models, really data-rich.

01:02:09.650 --> 01:02:15.490
But the argument is that one of the things that's happening in the decision-making

01:02:15.490 --> 01:02:20.530
literature, and this is not just my criticism, this is happening with internal to that, is

01:02:20.530 --> 01:02:26.480
that there is an assumption of homogeneity of process, that decision making is a single

01:02:26.480 --> 01:02:27.120
process.

01:02:27.680 --> 01:02:32.720
And if you actually look and you take a step back and you say, well, where does the idea

01:02:32.720 --> 01:02:36.240
that decision making is a co is a unitary process come from?

01:02:36.480 --> 01:02:42.080
The idea is that that is from the ontology of our folk psychology.

01:02:42.570 --> 01:02:48.250
So, so so sort of famously, uh philosopher Bertrand Russell was

01:02:48.250 --> 01:02:54.010
talking about, and these ideas were already uh half a century old when Bertrand

01:02:54.010 --> 01:02:56.330
Russell was talking about this in the 1920s.

01:02:56.490 --> 01:03:01.610
This idea that from Franz Brontano, um, who wrote a really good book, Psychology from an

01:03:01.610 --> 01:03:07.400
Empirical Standpoint, um, in the mid-18 18 uh hundreds,

01:03:07.800 --> 01:03:12.440
right around the same time that Wilhelm Wont was was writing um his stuff.

01:03:12.600 --> 01:03:18.600
Um and and this idea is that um you know when when somebody is thinking about

01:03:18.600 --> 01:03:21.640
something so like if Smith is thinking about St.

01:03:21.960 --> 01:03:26.630
Peter's um versus I'm thinking about you know uh Mr.

01:03:26.870 --> 01:03:32.390
Brown, the content of what I'm thinking about, a church or a person is different,

01:03:32.630 --> 01:03:36.870
but the act, the thinking is the same.

01:03:37.270 --> 01:03:37.830
Right.

01:03:38.150 --> 01:03:44.150
That idea that the process is unitary has been more

01:03:44.230 --> 01:03:47.190
in more recent years been called sort of domain generality.

01:03:47.420 --> 01:03:48.060
I think it's a good idea.

01:03:48.700 --> 01:03:54.700
So if I'm thinking about a person or or a food or a building or uh a weather

01:03:54.700 --> 01:04:00.700
event or an animal correct or an emotion, the act thinking is the same no matter what

01:04:00.700 --> 01:04:01.260
I'm thinking about.

01:04:01.580 --> 01:04:01.820
That's right.

01:04:01.900 --> 01:04:03.900
There's actually the same Yeah, that's right.

01:04:04.140 --> 01:04:04.460
That's right.

01:04:04.540 --> 01:04:06.940
There's so there's an agent who's doing the thinking.

01:04:07.100 --> 01:04:11.980
So there's the Dav David, there's an agent slot, there's an act slot, and then there's sort

01:04:11.980 --> 01:04:13.420
of the content slot.

01:04:13.660 --> 01:04:18.410
And the idea is that that is an ontological commitment.

01:04:18.490 --> 01:04:19.770
That's just sort of a blind commitment.

01:04:20.010 --> 01:04:23.610
It's sort of we even weird to say it out loud, but it's an assumption the way things work.

01:04:23.770 --> 01:04:26.890
And the idea is that even it's never been tested.

01:04:26.970 --> 01:04:28.730
It's not we never like tested this model.

01:04:29.850 --> 01:04:30.410
It's an assumption.

01:04:30.490 --> 01:04:30.810
Yeah, yeah.

01:04:30.970 --> 01:04:32.650
Or to the extent we have, it doesn't work.

01:04:32.810 --> 01:04:36.970
I mean, so this is this is this is an idea that um, you know, and this is where compute the

01:04:36.970 --> 01:04:41.450
history of computer science is really interesting because people thought, well, how hard

01:04:41.450 --> 01:04:46.100
could it be to um to think or how hard could it be to remember something?

01:04:46.180 --> 01:04:48.020
You just need a memory system or a thinking system.

01:04:48.180 --> 01:04:54.100
And then it turned out that the firewall between

01:04:54.100 --> 01:05:00.100
process and content doesn't work because thinking, and by thinking,

01:05:00.180 --> 01:05:05.310
right, we're talking about, well, we can just leave it at thinking or for reasoning, right?

01:05:05.470 --> 01:05:11.150
Thinking about a person versus thinking about a church or thinking about food or

01:05:11.150 --> 01:05:16.830
thinking about what to do, the structure of sort of goals versus

01:05:16.830 --> 01:05:22.750
agents versus objects, those are just there's just intrinsically different um

01:05:22.910 --> 01:05:24.990
dynamics related to them.

01:05:25.310 --> 01:05:31.310
And um, if you try to build a robot or a computer um just with sort

01:05:31.310 --> 01:05:35.820
of uh a general thinking ability, it doesn't work.

01:05:35.980 --> 01:05:39.660
Like whenever there's this part is the David part, that's the self.

01:05:39.900 --> 01:05:43.260
And then you got, you know, there that is connected to the thinking stick, and then the

01:05:43.260 --> 01:05:48.220
thinking stick is connected to the to the whatever, to food, you know, people, plants,

01:05:48.300 --> 01:05:48.460
whatever.

01:05:48.700 --> 01:05:48.940
Exactly.

01:05:49.260 --> 01:05:49.500
Yeah, yeah.

01:05:49.660 --> 01:05:49.820
Yeah.

01:05:49.980 --> 01:05:52.380
And my robot's not gonna work if I if I build the robot.

01:05:52.700 --> 01:05:52.860
Yeah.

01:05:52.940 --> 01:05:56.380
And so one of the earliest attempts to do that was something with reinforcement learning,

01:05:56.460 --> 01:05:59.990
which is you know very popular in AI right now, but it was uh it was a checkers playing

01:05:59.990 --> 01:06:00.230
program.

01:06:00.310 --> 01:06:02.390
And it was like, well, reinforcement learning.

01:06:02.550 --> 01:06:07.910
If a general reinforcement learning system, why not just put it in a robot or a computer?

01:06:08.150 --> 01:06:13.190
And that is the way you solve a lot of problems, and uh great, it'll work.

01:06:13.430 --> 01:06:18.790
And the very first basically dissertation using reinforcement learning was um

01:06:19.030 --> 01:06:20.950
Samuel's checkers playing program.

01:06:21.190 --> 01:06:27.140
And he realized that in order to uh have a computer be able

01:06:27.140 --> 01:06:31.220
to use reinforcements, like a good thing happened, do more of this.

01:06:31.380 --> 01:06:33.620
A bad thing happened, do less of that.

01:06:33.940 --> 01:06:39.380
In order to actually even just have that trivial thing worked, required

01:06:39.700 --> 01:06:45.620
very domain-specific representations about checkers.

01:06:45.780 --> 01:06:51.780
And the reason is because of strategy selection and credit assignment stroke strategy or uh

01:06:51.940 --> 01:06:57.450
strategy selection is um of all the things to try to do,

01:06:58.090 --> 01:07:02.010
there's nothing in reinforcement learning that tells you what to do.

01:07:02.170 --> 01:07:07.930
So the robot or the computer needs some set of representations of

01:07:07.930 --> 01:07:11.530
things that it has either done or should try to do.

01:07:11.770 --> 01:07:15.930
So in and though that doesn't just come from nowhere.

01:07:16.570 --> 01:07:20.660
And then in addition to that, and that's specific to to checkers, right?

01:07:20.820 --> 01:07:25.140
You don't just get that for free with information from some other domain.

01:07:25.380 --> 01:07:29.380
And then in addition to that, there's the problem of credit assignment, which is that

01:07:29.620 --> 01:07:33.060
suppose you um uh something good just happened.

01:07:33.220 --> 01:07:36.500
Well, to what do you assign credit to that good outcome?

01:07:36.740 --> 01:07:40.900
Is it the fact that you just let go of the chess piece or the checker?

01:07:41.220 --> 01:07:43.510
Um, is it because you just sighed?

01:07:43.750 --> 01:07:45.430
Is it because of the move you just made?

01:07:45.590 --> 01:07:47.030
Is it the last four moves you made?

01:07:47.190 --> 01:07:48.550
Is it the last 10 moves you made?

01:07:48.630 --> 01:07:50.710
At what to what do you assign credit?

01:07:50.870 --> 01:07:56.870
And so this is all a long-winded way of saying that the structure of our theory

01:07:57.190 --> 01:08:02.950
mind system agent process content, which has historically been a long uh

01:08:03.190 --> 01:08:08.860
assumption, um, people were importing that folk psychology,

01:08:09.180 --> 01:08:14.860
ontology into systems, into mechanics, into the what they believed were like very

01:08:15.100 --> 01:08:16.940
sophisticated models.

01:08:17.660 --> 01:08:23.180
And realizing, well, look, you know, a general process like reinforcement learning

01:08:23.500 --> 01:08:27.580
divorced completely from content doesn't work.

01:08:27.740 --> 01:08:29.900
And that's something we've known for a really long time.

01:08:30.060 --> 01:08:35.710
But still to this day, people will talk about decision making and the rules that apply to

01:08:35.710 --> 01:08:41.470
decision making in a way that one is arguing, well, decision making is a unitary kind

01:08:41.470 --> 01:08:42.430
of process.

01:08:42.830 --> 01:08:45.070
What the decision making is about doesn't matter.

01:08:45.230 --> 01:08:47.870
We can make inferences about decision making.

01:08:48.110 --> 01:08:49.790
We can make inferences about a memory.

01:08:49.870 --> 01:08:51.710
We can make inferences about attention.

01:08:52.030 --> 01:08:57.340
And so my point is: even if people aren't using their folk

01:08:57.420 --> 01:09:01.580
psychology in a way that they think that it's not labeled in their mind's eye when they're

01:09:01.580 --> 01:09:07.420
doing their science, the assumptions of the theory-minded system or or

01:09:07.420 --> 01:09:12.940
the way that it colors what we study still show up to this day.

01:09:13.180 --> 01:09:18.990
For example, in this idea that processes independent of their content are sort of

01:09:18.990 --> 01:09:21.230
coherent or sufficient.

01:09:21.710 --> 01:09:27.310
And I think even up and through right now, when you'll read a paper, a lot of it is sort of

01:09:27.310 --> 01:09:32.350
about, well, we designed this algorithm or this sort of strategy.

01:09:32.990 --> 01:09:38.990
Um and the information about what was all required to up to make that algorithm

01:09:38.990 --> 01:09:44.180
or strategy work for this particular problem is sort of not highlighted.

01:09:44.260 --> 01:09:50.260
And I think that's still a byproduct of our folk psychology, where it's sort of one off

01:09:50.260 --> 01:09:50.420
of.

01:09:50.500 --> 01:09:55.620
It's a it's a superficial painting over of like Dave sees it's raining, you know, and that

01:09:55.700 --> 01:10:00.260
and it's just that, well, now we've got reinforcement learning going into the C's slot,

01:10:00.420 --> 01:10:00.580
right?

01:10:00.740 --> 01:10:02.260
Like that's the process slot.

01:10:02.420 --> 01:10:08.390
So so the idea is there's still a lot of um contamination by

01:10:08.710 --> 01:10:14.150
our folk psychology system going on in our science, even when

01:10:14.790 --> 01:10:19.670
we make a mechanistic or software level or functional level advance.

01:10:19.830 --> 01:10:23.430
And so this is the answer to why haven't we succeeded yet?

01:10:23.590 --> 01:10:28.870
I actually don't think that if you took seriously the idea that like the point of

01:10:28.870 --> 01:10:33.430
psychology is to articulate all the problems that the mind solves and figure out the

01:10:33.430 --> 01:10:38.120
mechanical systems that make that possible, mechanical in the sort of this abstract

01:10:38.120 --> 01:10:39.080
software level way.

01:10:39.240 --> 01:10:43.080
I don't think that is still being done very much to this day.

01:10:43.160 --> 01:10:48.760
And there's I bec I have I have thoughts about why that is, but um but uh so I think

01:10:49.160 --> 01:10:50.360
I think that's the answer.

01:10:50.440 --> 01:10:55.960
I think we're still in the very beginnings of this revolution of switching from a pure

01:10:55.960 --> 01:11:00.840
theory mind system over to both the artifact system and the theory mind system.

01:11:00.920 --> 01:11:06.770
And I think we're we're watching the growing pains of not always being clear when

01:11:06.770 --> 01:11:12.770
we're using the theory mind system still, um, and where to draw the lines between the

01:11:12.770 --> 01:11:15.970
constructs that are results of one system versus the other.

01:11:16.530 --> 01:11:16.850
Right.

01:11:17.090 --> 01:11:22.690
So this folk psychology, this theory of mind system, is silently and

01:11:22.690 --> 01:11:25.090
perniciously guiding our thinking.

01:11:25.170 --> 01:11:28.020
And we have no idea that it's guiding our thinking.

01:11:28.340 --> 01:11:33.060
Psychologists who are the most nerdy and the most technical, who who do rigorous

01:11:33.060 --> 01:11:36.900
experiments and use computational models, still at the end of the day, they're being

01:11:36.900 --> 01:11:42.580
insidiously guided by their folk intuitions about what is going on inside

01:11:42.580 --> 01:11:43.380
people's head.

01:11:43.540 --> 01:11:49.300
That there is an agent or a self, which is a unitary thing, and that agent or self

01:11:49.300 --> 01:11:52.420
is uh ha has a verb attached to it.

01:11:52.670 --> 01:11:57.150
you know, the agent or self wants or thinks or sees or remembers.

01:11:57.390 --> 01:11:59.950
And uh all of those verbs are are unitary things.

01:12:00.030 --> 01:12:04.110
So remembering is one thing, thinking is one thing, seeing is one thing, right?

01:12:04.270 --> 01:12:08.430
And then there is the content, the thing that the verb is attached to.

01:12:09.630 --> 01:12:13.230
You know, a piece of food, a person, a group, whatever.

01:12:14.110 --> 01:12:19.400
That way of thinking uh has basically been at the core of

01:12:19.640 --> 01:12:23.400
cognitive science correct for as long as it has been around.

01:12:23.640 --> 01:12:28.520
And if you and it as evidence of this, you can just look at what the topics are within

01:12:28.520 --> 01:12:29.160
cognitive science.

01:12:29.320 --> 01:12:32.200
So you talked about this this wonderful idea of a category mistake.

01:12:32.360 --> 01:12:36.120
Uh you know, uh carving up nature in the wrong ways.

01:12:36.520 --> 01:12:40.600
Um well, what are the categories in cognitive science?

01:12:40.920 --> 01:12:41.800
Memory.

01:12:42.150 --> 01:12:44.150
I'm sure you could find a textbook on memory.

01:12:44.310 --> 01:12:45.190
Decision making.

01:12:45.430 --> 01:12:49.750
Decision making is literally a field of study in cognitive science.

01:12:49.830 --> 01:12:55.510
There are people who study decision making as if they were studying one thing.

01:12:55.910 --> 01:13:00.870
Um, if you if you just look, I mean, belief is a topic, attention is a topic.

01:13:01.110 --> 01:13:07.000
Um Our science is silently guided by our folk psychology when we don't

01:13:07.000 --> 01:13:07.960
even realize it.

01:13:08.200 --> 01:13:12.520
Uh I mean, we didn't, I mean, nobody tested the idea that memory is one thing and we need

01:13:12.520 --> 01:13:15.080
to have like a science of memory as if it were one thing.

01:13:15.240 --> 01:13:18.680
Nobody tested the idea that decision making is one thing and we need to study

01:13:18.680 --> 01:13:20.120
decision-making as a coherent topic.

01:13:20.280 --> 01:13:23.080
This just happened silently without us discussing it.

01:13:23.240 --> 01:13:24.360
It happened intuitively.

01:13:24.520 --> 01:13:25.960
We just, oh, this is the way things are.

01:13:26.040 --> 01:13:30.360
This is how we need to approach studying the mind by carving it into these different bins.

01:13:30.600 --> 01:13:35.170
Um, but what you're saying is this whole way of thinking is is almost certainly wrong.

01:13:35.330 --> 01:13:39.410
That decision making is not one thing, memory is not one thing, attention is not one thing,

01:13:39.570 --> 01:13:41.010
belief is not one thing.

01:13:41.730 --> 01:13:47.010
And these things are interconnected and dynamic and they influence each other in

01:13:47.250 --> 01:13:48.450
myriad ways.

01:13:49.970 --> 01:13:55.260
So if we are carving up the mind in the wrong way, if we're making all of these category

01:13:55.260 --> 01:13:59.100
mistakes, what is the right way to carve up the mind?

01:13:59.340 --> 01:14:04.460
So if we have if if we're looking at at having a correct cognitive science where we've

01:14:04.460 --> 01:14:09.740
carved up nature at the joints, you know, we're recognizing the categories that that really

01:14:09.740 --> 01:14:11.660
have some ontological significance.

01:14:11.820 --> 01:14:15.090
What does a correct theory of of the human mind look like?

01:14:15.170 --> 01:14:16.210
What are the different categories?

01:14:16.530 --> 01:14:16.770
Yeah.

01:14:16.850 --> 01:14:21.970
And I think the point about attention and memory and cognitive psychology is really

01:14:21.970 --> 01:14:26.770
important to part of this answer, which is, you know, and I there's very dear friends of

01:14:26.770 --> 01:14:29.730
mine who study attention and decision making.

01:14:30.050 --> 01:14:36.050
And I think, and this is where this idea of different levels of analysis comes in.

01:14:36.210 --> 01:14:39.200
So there's no question decision making exists, right?

01:14:39.440 --> 01:14:40.720
Attention exists.

01:14:41.440 --> 01:14:47.040
And I think there's even an argument where sort of um and this is an argument by like

01:14:47.120 --> 01:14:51.920
people like more recently, it's nice to um it was nice to come across this work by people

01:14:51.920 --> 01:14:52.960
like Wayne Wu.

01:14:53.520 --> 01:14:58.480
And there's a BBS paper out pretty recently, Behavior on Brain Sciences, about this.

01:14:58.560 --> 01:15:01.440
But basically like let's say take something like attention.

01:15:02.480 --> 01:15:07.450
The idea is that attention, if you think about it as sort of if if the definition of

01:15:07.450 --> 01:15:13.450
attention is it's the selection of something over something else for further processing,

01:15:13.530 --> 01:15:13.690
right?

01:15:13.770 --> 01:15:15.690
Which is sort of the standard textbook definition.

01:15:15.770 --> 01:15:17.450
This is what Wayne Wu says.

01:15:18.090 --> 01:15:23.770
That if you if you think about that definition, then uh the retina has

01:15:23.770 --> 01:15:29.260
photoreceptors that are selective to particular, you know, wavelengths of electromagnetic

01:15:29.260 --> 01:15:29.900
radiation.

01:15:30.380 --> 01:15:36.380
Or uh, well, by the by the textbook account of attention, then the retina, retina,

01:15:36.540 --> 01:15:39.020
retinal cells have it have attention, right?

01:15:39.100 --> 01:15:41.180
They attend to certain things over others.

01:15:41.420 --> 01:15:44.540
And his argument is that then everything in the mind is attention.

01:15:44.620 --> 01:15:48.780
It's basically the input conditions of every system at every level of abstraction.

01:15:48.860 --> 01:15:51.260
And his point is that's sort of an absurdity.

01:15:51.420 --> 01:15:57.290
So his argument is that the way we talk about attention as the phenomenon to be explained

01:15:57.610 --> 01:15:59.850
only applies at this agent-based level.

01:16:00.010 --> 01:16:04.970
As in my language, it would be like this folk psychology or intentional level description.

01:16:05.210 --> 01:16:06.810
And so Dave is paying attention.

01:16:06.970 --> 01:16:07.370
Yeah, exactly.

01:16:07.530 --> 01:16:07.770
To me.

01:16:07.930 --> 01:16:08.330
So that's right.

01:16:08.490 --> 01:16:09.610
Dave didn't see the lion.

01:16:09.770 --> 01:16:10.570
The lion doesn't see me.

01:16:10.650 --> 01:16:11.450
I'm a gazelle.

01:16:11.530 --> 01:16:11.930
Like that.

01:16:12.090 --> 01:16:16.900
That is so the study of attention and the fact that I can't I didn't notice something or

01:16:16.900 --> 01:16:22.020
why I noticed something and the mechanical stuff underlying that is perfectly coherent.

01:16:22.100 --> 01:16:26.180
So it's not that folk psychological constructs don't exist.

01:16:26.340 --> 01:16:29.620
There's a there's an idea of sort of a limitative materialism.

01:16:29.700 --> 01:16:34.500
Um and I I am not a limited eliminative materialist say that three times fast.

01:16:34.660 --> 01:16:39.210
Um but the idea is that we shouldn't confuse folk

01:16:39.530 --> 01:16:42.410
constructs for mechanisms.

01:16:42.650 --> 01:16:48.090
So Way Mu's argument is that attention only makes sense coherently at the person level, at

01:16:48.090 --> 01:16:53.770
the at the function or the intentional level, this folk psychology level.

01:16:54.250 --> 01:16:59.820
We can talk about the mechanisms that make attention possible, the

01:16:59.820 --> 01:17:03.980
software, using our artifact psychology.

01:17:04.300 --> 01:17:09.820
And then we can even study the physical things that implement or make

01:17:09.820 --> 01:17:12.700
possible those abstract functions.

01:17:13.020 --> 01:17:13.500
Right?

01:17:13.740 --> 01:17:18.380
But the idea is that attention lives at this one level of reduction.

01:17:19.020 --> 01:17:24.300
And his claim, and I've made this claim in other contexts with

01:17:24.300 --> 01:17:29.970
colleagues, is that one of the great errors of psychology and not paying

01:17:29.970 --> 01:17:34.610
attention to this perspective dependence and the influence of our folks' psychology is not

01:17:34.610 --> 01:17:40.450
that it's wrong, but it's being unproblematically imported into what we believe is the

01:17:40.450 --> 01:17:43.810
mechanical level, what we believe is the software level thing.

01:17:44.050 --> 01:17:47.970
And so this is the answer to the question: is well, how if if theory of mind is wrong,

01:17:48.050 --> 01:17:49.330
what's the right way to do it?

01:17:49.570 --> 01:17:55.010
And the idea is that theory of mind isn't wrong, theory of mind is the

01:17:55.320 --> 01:17:59.000
highest level description, but it's not a description.

01:17:59.160 --> 01:18:05.000
The entities that exist or the rules that exist, the Dave noticed something,

01:18:05.160 --> 01:18:09.560
Dave has attention, Dave believes this, Dave feels this.

01:18:10.360 --> 01:18:13.240
Those things all live at that top level.

01:18:13.480 --> 01:18:15.080
You don't get rid of that level.

01:18:15.160 --> 01:18:17.400
It's like an ice cream cone is a good example.

01:18:17.480 --> 01:18:19.720
Like an ice cream cone can taste like vanilla.

01:18:20.600 --> 01:18:25.430
You can talk about the chemistry, a vanilla molecule that makes the taste possible.

01:18:25.910 --> 01:18:29.510
You don't get rid of the taste when you study the chemistry.

01:18:29.750 --> 01:18:32.790
In fact, you lose something if you only talk about the chemistry.

01:18:32.870 --> 01:18:36.950
You say, look, this chemical vanilla corresponds to the taste of vanilla.

01:18:37.990 --> 01:18:41.270
All of those pieces of information are relevant and useful.

01:18:41.350 --> 01:18:44.790
And then you can even do the physics of the chemical structure.

01:18:45.580 --> 01:18:49.340
Just sticking to one level is not the right level.

01:18:49.420 --> 01:18:50.780
There's no such thing as the right level.

01:18:50.860 --> 01:18:52.700
It depends on what your goals are.

01:18:53.580 --> 01:18:59.100
And a complete science uses all three and knows all three and understands that, you know,

01:18:59.180 --> 01:19:03.180
the taste of vanilla is part of why we care about this stupid vanilla molecule.

01:19:03.340 --> 01:19:06.300
And these are just two different ways of describing the same thing.

01:19:06.460 --> 01:19:08.700
And the and the argument is, and this is not my idea.

01:19:08.780 --> 01:19:12.550
I mean, I've written papers about this, but you can find this idea throughout history,

01:19:12.710 --> 01:19:17.590
throughout philosophy, throughout science, and I think it's it's still not adequately

01:19:17.590 --> 01:19:19.910
embodied, but it hopefully will be.

01:19:20.230 --> 01:19:24.390
Is just that the answer is that no one level is the right answer.

01:19:24.630 --> 01:19:26.230
It's just organizing them.

01:19:26.390 --> 01:19:32.070
And I think the sh the the short answer is we have historically inherited

01:19:32.310 --> 01:19:36.620
a very full folk psychological perspective.

01:19:36.780 --> 01:19:40.700
Most of our ideas are from that perspective because we've only recently discovered and

01:19:40.700 --> 01:19:41.980
thought about this system.

01:19:42.780 --> 01:19:47.100
And most attention should be on

01:19:47.420 --> 01:19:53.420
deconfounding or teasing apart what our ideas at a folk psychological

01:19:53.420 --> 01:19:58.470
level, not to be pejorative, but to just say, where is it coherent?

01:19:58.550 --> 01:19:59.670
It's like the taste of vanilla.

01:19:59.750 --> 01:20:03.670
We're not saying it's the taste of vanilla is pejorative, it's saying it's not the

01:20:03.670 --> 01:20:04.390
molecule.

01:20:04.630 --> 01:20:09.750
If you try to plug the taste of vanilla into the molecule, it's a category mistake.

01:20:10.550 --> 01:20:13.270
It's the same as the university as a building.

01:20:13.510 --> 01:20:15.670
This is Wayne Wu's argument about attention.

01:20:15.750 --> 01:20:19.270
It doesn't make sense to say attention is a subpersonal mechanism.

01:20:19.510 --> 01:20:25.260
Attention is the phenomenon at the whole personal level or level of the whole person

01:20:25.420 --> 01:20:27.180
that's made possible by systems.

01:20:27.340 --> 01:20:31.660
So you can have a cognitive science of attention, but you can have two different versions:

01:20:31.820 --> 01:20:33.020
one that works and one doesn't.

01:20:33.180 --> 01:20:36.460
The one that works says attention is the phenomenon to be explained.

01:20:36.620 --> 01:20:42.460
That Dave attends to things or doesn't is the thing to be explained by mechanisms that

01:20:42.460 --> 01:20:42.860
works.

01:20:43.020 --> 01:20:48.430
The one that doesn't work is the one that says attention is the mechanism, right?

01:20:48.590 --> 01:20:50.110
It's part of the software.

01:20:50.270 --> 01:20:52.350
And those sound very similar.

01:20:52.590 --> 01:20:57.230
They're very different and they have very different um viabilities.

01:20:57.310 --> 01:21:01.790
And the and essentially the argument is because they sound so similar, they're being

01:21:01.790 --> 01:21:02.990
confused right now.

01:21:04.990 --> 01:21:10.670
So maybe a completed science of the mind, if such a thing were possible, would correspond

01:21:10.670 --> 01:21:11.150
to our folk.

01:21:11.870 --> 01:21:12.510
Yeah, for sure.

01:21:12.910 --> 01:21:14.910
I think any it would be crazy.

01:21:15.070 --> 01:21:20.480
It it would in the sense that we wouldn't lose any of our folk constructs, but we would

01:21:20.480 --> 01:21:24.720
understand those folk constructs with additional corresponding information.

01:21:24.800 --> 01:21:27.920
This we already think about the body from the neck down this way.

01:21:28.400 --> 01:21:33.920
On a on a physiological perspective, which we understand pretty well, you don't get rid of

01:21:33.920 --> 01:21:39.670
pain, you know, you don't get rid of um uh of the the folk

01:21:39.910 --> 01:21:45.350
construct of pain, but you understand physically how pain is made possible.

01:21:45.510 --> 01:21:49.990
You understand the functional relationships, why it exists, you understand the physical

01:21:49.990 --> 01:21:54.070
things that make it possible, you understand why somebody can have a limb removed and still

01:21:54.070 --> 01:21:54.950
feel pain.

01:21:55.030 --> 01:21:59.430
Um, we understand pain well enough to like fix pain, right?

01:21:59.510 --> 01:22:03.270
To like change the inputs of the pain system to varying degrees.

01:22:03.350 --> 01:22:04.950
I mean, not not not perfect.

01:22:05.190 --> 01:22:11.040
But um so that's right, you don't you're not gonna lose this thing in the same way we don't

01:22:11.040 --> 01:22:13.360
lose the planetary regressions, right?

01:22:13.920 --> 01:22:19.840
We don't lose those at all, but we don't think this is actually

01:22:20.320 --> 01:22:22.800
uh the only description.

01:22:22.960 --> 01:22:28.800
It's contextualizes the folk psychological ideas in a broader account.

01:22:28.880 --> 01:22:30.560
Um, that's much more complete.

01:22:30.640 --> 01:22:34.640
So we're never gonna lose the folk psychology.

01:22:35.190 --> 01:22:41.110
The idea is that a complete science contextualizes folk psychology and has

01:22:41.110 --> 01:22:42.870
a lot more information attached to it.

01:22:43.030 --> 01:22:48.710
And what we know is probably that the software level, the description of what actually

01:22:48.710 --> 01:22:52.310
exists, how complicated we are, is so complicated.

01:22:52.710 --> 01:22:57.430
I mean, I don't know how many functions exist in a word processing program or a modern

01:22:57.430 --> 01:23:02.800
computer, but it's, you know, I know my cell phone, when it takes a pick picture, does at

01:23:02.800 --> 01:23:05.200
least a million, if not a trillion things at once.

01:23:05.440 --> 01:23:05.920
Right.

01:23:06.240 --> 01:23:11.600
Now, the idea that you can do a trillion things at once seems absurd.

01:23:11.760 --> 01:23:16.800
And I was asked questions about this when I've given talks about, you know, my model where

01:23:16.800 --> 01:23:19.280
five things are happening in the mind at once, right?

01:23:19.600 --> 01:23:24.240
So that's very much a idea from our folk psychology.

01:23:24.320 --> 01:23:30.030
And so the idea is that our prejudice against thinking the mind

01:23:30.270 --> 01:23:35.470
can do lots and lots of things and needs lots and lots of stuff to do it

01:23:36.590 --> 01:23:38.430
is still strong.

01:23:38.590 --> 01:23:41.550
And that's a prejudice we sort of have to work against.

01:23:41.710 --> 01:23:46.990
And there are many, many people in many, many areas outside of evolutionary psychology who

01:23:47.310 --> 01:23:48.270
make the same point.

01:23:48.660 --> 01:23:52.420
Evolutionary psychology is one way to get to this, that you need a lot of stuff in a

01:23:52.420 --> 01:23:52.740
system.

01:23:53.060 --> 01:23:59.060
Um, and and uh there's a from the old Simpson the Simpsons uh TV show, there's this

01:23:59.060 --> 01:24:04.660
um part where um they are visiting, I think what's the analog of like

01:24:04.660 --> 01:24:09.460
Disneyland and one of the robots, the animatronic robots, like kind of fails and is like

01:24:10.150 --> 01:24:11.990
breaks open what's inside.

01:24:12.230 --> 01:24:16.790
And uh Marge, Homer's wife, looks at him and says, see that, Homer, that's why your robot

01:24:16.790 --> 01:24:17.430
never worked.

01:24:17.590 --> 01:24:17.830
Right.

01:24:17.910 --> 01:24:23.270
And the idea is that, like, you know, Homer, kind of Oafish person was trying to make a

01:24:23.270 --> 01:24:26.310
robot and didn't realize that it was actually hard to make a robot.

01:24:26.470 --> 01:24:28.790
Um, you actually need a lot of stuff.

01:24:29.030 --> 01:24:34.230
So, as simple as seeing seems, it's actually trillions of things happening at once and lots

01:24:34.230 --> 01:24:35.430
of different systems.

01:24:35.670 --> 01:24:41.120
Um and uh and I think that's sort of you if you wanted to say like there's one

01:24:41.120 --> 01:24:47.040
deep historical prejudice of the mind is that, and this

01:24:47.040 --> 01:24:53.040
is what uh Lita Cosmys and John Tubi called instinct blindness is this this idea that what

01:24:53.040 --> 01:24:55.120
feels easy is easy.

01:24:55.360 --> 01:24:57.390
What's easier than seeing, right?

01:24:57.630 --> 01:24:59.950
And actually turns out there's a lot of complicated stuff.

01:25:00.030 --> 01:25:03.310
And it's going to be uh true for for everything we do.

01:25:03.390 --> 01:25:05.070
It's going to be a lot of answers.

01:25:05.310 --> 01:25:07.230
It's very going to be very complicated.

01:25:07.470 --> 01:25:12.910
Um, and if there's a deep prejudice of forcing simple unitary or

01:25:12.910 --> 01:25:15.870
dichotomous, is it a what system one or system two?

01:25:16.270 --> 01:25:17.950
Is it automatic or controlled?

01:25:18.110 --> 01:25:20.270
Is it learned or uh innate?

01:25:20.590 --> 01:25:23.070
Um, these are not gonna serve us well.

01:25:23.630 --> 01:25:24.110
Mm-hmm.

01:25:25.560 --> 01:25:26.440
Interesting.

01:25:26.760 --> 01:25:32.200
So I might actually uh be inclined to disagree with you a little bit.

01:25:32.520 --> 01:25:32.840
Good.

01:25:33.080 --> 01:25:38.920
I I think uh I I'm a little bit more sympathetic to eliminative materialism than than

01:25:38.920 --> 01:25:39.560
you are.

01:25:39.960 --> 01:25:45.960
Um I think uh whether or not our folk psychology is correct or is a correct

01:25:45.960 --> 01:25:50.360
description on on some level, um that is an open question.

01:25:50.670 --> 01:25:54.830
It could very well be the case that it's wrong and that it's wrong in in serious and

01:25:54.830 --> 01:25:56.030
significant ways.

01:25:56.190 --> 01:26:00.430
Uh and there you know I could I could go on all day listing all of the ways in which it is

01:26:00.430 --> 01:26:01.150
likely to be wrong.

01:26:01.310 --> 01:26:05.470
We have all sorts of biases that are self serving or in the interests of our groups, we

01:26:05.470 --> 01:26:10.190
have all sorts of bullshit and propaganda that are contaminating our our folk models of of

01:26:10.190 --> 01:26:11.310
our mental life.

01:26:11.550 --> 01:26:16.750
Um and uh I I don't think we should assume at the outset that our folk

01:26:16.960 --> 01:26:18.480
categories are are correct.

01:26:18.640 --> 01:26:20.720
I think we should do the science and find out.

01:26:20.960 --> 01:26:25.760
Um if we do that we do good evolutionary psychology, we get the, you know, the good uh

01:26:25.760 --> 01:26:29.280
adaptationist theories of what the functions are, what they're you know, what uh what

01:26:29.280 --> 01:26:30.720
they're doing, uh how they're doing it.

01:26:30.880 --> 01:26:36.640
Um and it turns out that that the best uh science we can do uh corresponds to our

01:26:36.640 --> 01:26:38.240
folk descriptions, then great.

01:26:38.400 --> 01:26:43.510
Uh but if it doesn't, then I think we have to be prepared to reject the folk descriptions.

01:26:43.830 --> 01:26:49.510
Um, so a good example of this, uh, I've written about this on my blog, is this the this is

01:26:49.590 --> 01:26:52.870
this idea that we are pursuing happiness.

01:26:53.590 --> 01:26:58.950
That the reason we do things is it bec is because it feels good, it makes us happy.

01:26:59.190 --> 01:27:03.350
Um, I I eat the ice cream because it gives me pleasure.

01:27:04.220 --> 01:27:10.060
I uh want to start a podcast with Dave Petrozowski because it is rewarding, it is

01:27:10.060 --> 01:27:14.140
fulfilling, and that is a coherent explanation for my behavior.

01:27:14.300 --> 01:27:18.620
Um, a lot of evolutionary psychologists, to my chagrin, talk about this as the proximate

01:27:18.620 --> 01:27:21.420
level of analysis, which is different from the evolutionary level.

01:27:21.500 --> 01:27:26.460
That you know, it's it's perfectly valid to say that you know, I do uh I play the guitar

01:27:26.460 --> 01:27:27.820
because I like it, because it feels good.

01:27:27.980 --> 01:27:28.380
All right.

01:27:28.540 --> 01:27:31.900
Um, or uh, you know, we we have sex because it feels good.

01:27:32.140 --> 01:27:37.630
Um but I think that once we actually do the science of what

01:27:37.630 --> 01:27:42.030
happiness is and what function it's serving and how it works mechanistically, it actually

01:27:42.030 --> 01:27:44.110
makes no sense to say that we're pursuing happiness.

01:27:44.270 --> 01:27:47.310
I don't think that anybody actually wants to be happy.

01:27:47.470 --> 01:27:52.350
I don't think we want to feel the emotion of happiness as an end in itself.

01:27:52.830 --> 01:27:54.990
Um why?

01:27:55.230 --> 01:27:58.110
Well, we have to think about what happiness is.

01:27:58.900 --> 01:28:04.900
We intuitively think about it as a mental substance of intrinsic uh goodness,

01:28:05.380 --> 01:28:05.700
right?

01:28:05.940 --> 01:28:09.540
And its purpose, what we think its purpose is, is to motivate us to do things.

01:28:09.620 --> 01:28:14.340
In the same way that offering you ice cream uh will motivate you to come hang out with me.

01:28:14.500 --> 01:28:19.700
Um offering us dopamine or the mental substance of goodness motivates us to do things.

01:28:19.860 --> 01:28:24.740
And so uh happiness is evolution's way of dangling a carrot in front of us to motivate us

01:28:24.740 --> 01:28:25.380
to do things.

01:28:25.620 --> 01:28:26.980
What's wrong with this picture?

01:28:27.140 --> 01:28:28.910
Well, it makes no sense.

01:28:29.150 --> 01:28:32.750
Motivation does not need a goodie, right?

01:28:32.990 --> 01:28:35.790
Our motivations are wired up to our hearts and our muscles.

01:28:35.950 --> 01:28:38.430
Our motivations can get us to do things directly.

01:28:38.590 --> 01:28:41.070
No goodie is required, right?

01:28:41.230 --> 01:28:46.110
If you if you think that we need a goodie to motivate us, some you know substance of

01:28:46.110 --> 01:28:47.230
dopamine, whatever.

01:28:47.390 --> 01:28:50.990
If you think we need that, well then how does evolution get us to want the dopamine?

01:28:51.390 --> 01:28:56.440
Does it have to give us another goodie to to motivate us to want the dopamine?

01:28:56.680 --> 01:29:00.680
Do we have to have so we we've entered an infinite regress?

01:29:00.840 --> 01:29:04.040
We need a goodie to motivate us to get the goodie, and then we need another goodie to

01:29:04.040 --> 01:29:05.160
motivate us to get that goodie.

01:29:05.240 --> 01:29:09.960
At some point, the buck has to stop and we have to say, motivation can just affect us

01:29:09.960 --> 01:29:10.840
directly, right?

01:29:10.920 --> 01:29:15.930
We can be motivated to get things in the world independent of the pleasure it gives us.

01:29:16.170 --> 01:29:20.330
So motivation does not need happiness to do its job.

01:29:20.970 --> 01:29:25.210
And the idea that it needs happiness to do its job, I think is wrong.

01:29:25.530 --> 01:29:27.530
It's the wrong way of thinking about motivation.

01:29:27.850 --> 01:29:32.890
The right way of thinking about motivation is that we're motivated to get ancestral fitness

01:29:32.890 --> 01:29:36.970
proxies, the things that were reliably correlated with fitness in ancestral environments.

01:29:37.210 --> 01:29:39.530
Real things in the world, not fake things.

01:29:39.840 --> 01:29:44.880
Those of our ancestors who were mistaken or deceived or deluded about real things in the

01:29:44.880 --> 01:29:50.560
world and were motivated to get fake things or or uh believe lies, those

01:29:50.720 --> 01:29:54.800
uh those did people did not become our ancestors, right?

01:29:55.120 --> 01:30:00.320
So we evolved to want real things in the world, not stuff in our heads.

01:30:00.640 --> 01:30:06.070
So what I think happiness is doing mechanistically, um, and this is consistent with a lot

01:30:06.070 --> 01:30:10.310
of neuroscience research, uh, it's consistent with the prediction error theory of dopamine,

01:30:10.710 --> 01:30:15.190
the idea is that uh we're constantly making predictions about how good or bad things are

01:30:15.190 --> 01:30:15.910
going to be.

01:30:16.150 --> 01:30:21.750
And when we make an error and things turn out to be better than we expected, um

01:30:22.440 --> 01:30:24.200
happiness kicks in.

01:30:24.600 --> 01:30:30.200
And the job of happiness is to recalibrate us, to shift our priorities,

01:30:30.440 --> 01:30:35.080
to shift our expectations, so that our predictions are more accurate the next time we

01:30:35.080 --> 01:30:36.440
encounter this good thing.

01:30:36.680 --> 01:30:39.480
So we're predicting the sensations of eating the ice cream.

01:30:39.800 --> 01:30:42.440
If the ice cream is better than we expected, we're going to feel pleasure.

01:30:42.520 --> 01:30:44.520
And that's going to recalibrate our expectations.

01:30:44.680 --> 01:30:48.750
So we're going to expect the ice cream to be even better the next time we eat it.

01:30:49.550 --> 01:30:53.070
Our model is going to be a little bit more accurate about what ice cream tastes like, and

01:30:53.070 --> 01:30:54.270
we're going to shift our priorities.

01:30:54.350 --> 01:30:59.230
We're going to upgrade the ice cream so that that's going to be higher in our list of

01:30:59.230 --> 01:31:01.390
desired foods for next time.

01:31:01.550 --> 01:31:02.990
That's the job of happiness.

01:31:03.150 --> 01:31:08.830
It's recalibrating us, reorienting us when we stumble upon something that is higher value

01:31:08.830 --> 01:31:10.030
than we expected.

01:31:10.750 --> 01:31:15.020
If that's true, then we're not pursuing happiness so much as chasing it away.

01:31:15.260 --> 01:31:18.540
Because the more we encounter something, the better we get at predicting it, the more our

01:31:18.540 --> 01:31:24.380
prediction errors decline, and the less happy we feel when we uh get to have

01:31:24.380 --> 01:31:24.620
it.

01:31:24.860 --> 01:31:30.620
Um if you look at at uh at the scientific literature, one of the most uh powerful

01:31:30.620 --> 01:31:35.170
findings we see is that happiness, the frequency of happy and joyful states declines with

01:31:35.170 --> 01:31:35.490
age.

01:31:35.650 --> 01:31:36.850
It's a massive effect size.

01:31:36.930 --> 01:31:38.530
There was a recent meta-analysis that was published.

01:31:38.610 --> 01:31:44.450
The effect size was 1.7 of the decline of the frequency and intensity of happy and joyful

01:31:44.450 --> 01:31:45.730
states throughout life.

01:31:45.970 --> 01:31:51.730
So it in terms of actually describing human

01:31:51.730 --> 01:31:55.890
mental life, the idea that we're pursuing happiness is a spectacular failure.

01:31:56.130 --> 01:31:59.810
Why would we get worse at pursuing the thing that we were pursuing as we aged?

01:31:59.970 --> 01:32:01.410
That makes no sense.

01:32:02.220 --> 01:32:05.340
So we're not pursuing happiness, we're chasing it away.

01:32:05.580 --> 01:32:09.580
Um, the things, if we repeatedly encounter something that makes us happy, we're going to

01:32:09.580 --> 01:32:11.660
feel less and less happy the more we encounter it.

01:32:11.820 --> 01:32:14.140
Um, it doesn't mean we're going to stop wanting it.

01:32:14.460 --> 01:32:20.140
Um, we can still want to be in a marriage long after we've gotten used to our

01:32:20.140 --> 01:32:23.020
spouse and are no longer as excited by our spouse.

01:32:23.180 --> 01:32:28.230
Uh, But the pleasure, the happiness is going to decline because there's less recalibration

01:32:28.550 --> 01:32:29.110
to do.

01:32:29.430 --> 01:32:35.350
You don't need to pay as much attention to the thing to figure out where you went wrong in

01:32:35.350 --> 01:32:36.230
your predictions.

01:32:36.470 --> 01:32:39.510
You don't need as much reinforcement because your motivations are already on track.

01:32:39.590 --> 01:32:41.110
So your happiness should decline.

01:32:41.350 --> 01:32:46.550
So this folk concept that we're there that we're creatures that are motivated by the carrot

01:32:46.550 --> 01:32:50.710
of happiness and the stick of suffering, this model I think is just wrong.

01:32:50.920 --> 01:32:56.200
Uh, and it has been a catastrophe for psychological science because we have used this model

01:32:56.200 --> 01:32:59.080
of the mind as a replacement for good evolutionary theorizing.

01:32:59.240 --> 01:33:02.280
We use, oh, this thing makes us happy, therefore that's the function.

01:33:02.360 --> 01:33:03.880
The function is to make us happy.

01:33:04.040 --> 01:33:08.280
And so psychologists often study things and say that the function of this or that, the

01:33:08.280 --> 01:33:12.680
function of this political belief, is to make us happy, as if that were a coherent claim.

01:33:13.240 --> 01:33:18.830
Um uh oftentimes you you

01:33:19.230 --> 01:33:23.870
it seems as if the entire purpose of the mind is to achieve happiness.

01:33:24.190 --> 01:33:24.590
Right?

01:33:24.830 --> 01:33:27.470
That that is how it's described in the psychology literature.

01:33:28.190 --> 01:33:33.950
Uh, that the mind is a machine for uh for getting stuff inside the mind,

01:33:34.110 --> 01:33:38.110
for getting the the dopamine or the serotonin or whatever, which is a preposterous way of

01:33:38.110 --> 01:33:39.470
thinking about the evolution of the mind.

01:33:39.630 --> 01:33:42.430
Why would we evolve to get stuff inside of our heads?

01:33:42.590 --> 01:33:43.950
It makes no sense at all.

01:33:44.190 --> 01:33:48.500
It only makes sense that we evolved to get stuff in the world that would have enhanced our

01:33:48.500 --> 01:33:50.260
ancestors' fitness.

01:33:50.660 --> 01:33:55.940
Um so I think this this that's a long winded way of saying there's at least one very strong

01:33:55.940 --> 01:34:00.740
candidate for folk psychology being bullshit, and that is this pursuit of happiness idea.

01:34:00.900 --> 01:34:05.350
And if that's bullshit then there's likely to be much more bullshit where that came where

01:34:05.350 --> 01:34:05.990
that came from.

01:34:06.150 --> 01:34:11.510
And so maybe we should be a little bit more skeptical of folk psychology uh than we have

01:34:11.510 --> 01:34:12.070
been in the past.

01:34:12.310 --> 01:34:13.030
What do you think about that?

01:34:13.350 --> 01:34:13.830
That's great.

01:34:13.910 --> 01:34:15.190
Um I really appreciate that.

01:34:15.350 --> 01:34:21.110
And I I um that was a really nice um um uh

01:34:21.350 --> 01:34:26.150
description in a very condensed way of uh big literature, and that was great.

01:34:26.390 --> 01:34:32.310
Um well let me ask you, um, do you think that so happiness, the

01:34:32.310 --> 01:34:38.080
idea um the idea that happiness or people are

01:34:38.080 --> 01:34:43.600
motivated to pursue happiness um there's two ways to think about the way in which

01:34:43.600 --> 01:34:49.200
happiness is wrong um and this may clarify sort of my claim too um

01:34:49.680 --> 01:34:54.960
one is to sort of say that you know happiness the folk

01:34:55.200 --> 01:34:59.360
psychology of happiness is wrong the other way to think about it is

01:35:01.770 --> 01:35:06.970
the folk psychology of happiness is a slightly different issue than using a folk

01:35:07.290 --> 01:35:13.050
construct like happiness and a folk construct like motivation, and then plying

01:35:13.050 --> 01:35:16.410
that to a scientific idea.

01:35:16.810 --> 01:35:20.170
Um, and saying, like, look, the way that the software works.

01:35:20.330 --> 01:35:26.090
So I think what you were describing was sort of uh of using

01:35:26.570 --> 01:35:32.560
the the the faulty thing of using happiness and a motivation towards happiness, which

01:35:32.560 --> 01:35:37.200
I agree are all outputs of our folk psychology in different ways.

01:35:37.360 --> 01:35:43.120
Um, you know, that there's an agent who is sort of rationally pursuing a goal, that's one

01:35:43.120 --> 01:35:43.440
element.

01:35:43.600 --> 01:35:48.960
The other element is just the meant the mental thing of happiness and its intrinsic value.

01:35:49.200 --> 01:35:53.250
Um those are sort of two constituent elements of what you said.

01:35:53.490 --> 01:35:58.290
Those are being applied now to these scientific ideas that you don't think are right.

01:35:58.690 --> 01:36:03.970
Um the question for you is do you think that that's a problem for the folk psychology, or

01:36:03.970 --> 01:36:07.730
is it that the folk psychology is applying to a place where it doesn't belong?

01:36:09.250 --> 01:36:11.810
So I think there is an emotion called happiness.

01:36:12.920 --> 01:36:18.440
And I think it it it probably serves the function of recalibration in light of

01:36:18.440 --> 01:36:22.440
prediction errors about how good things are going to be.

01:36:22.920 --> 01:36:27.800
And so it updates our model of the world and it shifts our priorities accordingly.

01:36:28.360 --> 01:36:29.880
So happiness is real.

01:36:30.520 --> 01:36:36.520
The idea that we are pursuing it, and that is an explanation for human behavior, is what is

01:36:36.520 --> 01:36:36.920
wrong.

01:36:38.070 --> 01:36:43.190
Um, so yeah, I guess you could say that it's a misapplication of the folk psychology, but

01:36:43.190 --> 01:36:47.670
um at the end of the day, you know, there are likely to be many such misapplications.

01:36:48.070 --> 01:36:51.030
Yeah, and then and then in that case, we don't disagree at all.

01:36:51.190 --> 01:36:55.910
I mean, I think what I was trying to say was that I wouldn't want to throw happiness out,

01:36:56.070 --> 01:37:01.910
or the idea, like, or or what's the coherence of the belief that happiness is a thing,

01:37:02.070 --> 01:37:06.600
um, Or uh or that agents rationally pursue goals, right?

01:37:06.840 --> 01:37:12.360
Um, it's not that these things are, and even the idea that why are mental states, I mean,

01:37:12.440 --> 01:37:17.400
one of the things I do in this paper, this difference detecting paper that um will be out

01:37:17.400 --> 01:37:23.000
soon, um, is is explaining why an evolved organism would think

01:37:23.640 --> 01:37:27.150
that thinking is a unitary thing, right?

01:37:27.310 --> 01:37:33.310
This this agent process uh or process um content slot, so agent

01:37:33.390 --> 01:37:38.990
process content idea that we were talking about earlier, that is wrong when it

01:37:38.990 --> 01:37:42.750
comes to a scientific description of how the mind works.

01:37:43.150 --> 01:37:46.110
What what would a coherent argument for that be?

01:37:46.270 --> 01:37:48.590
Why would an organism think that's true?

01:37:48.750 --> 01:37:54.000
Um, and the short answer that thinking is a reliable set of

01:37:54.000 --> 01:37:57.120
co-occurring processes for an organism.

01:37:57.280 --> 01:38:00.800
That's different than remembering, that's different than seeing.

01:38:01.040 --> 01:38:05.200
So there's a big difference between you see a bear right now and you're remembering a bear,

01:38:05.360 --> 01:38:09.120
especially if we're outside, especially if we're unarmed, especially if we're somewhere

01:38:09.120 --> 01:38:10.960
where bears are really dangerous, right?

01:38:11.200 --> 01:38:16.400
Um and so the uh the evolutionary affordances of these

01:38:16.400 --> 01:38:22.330
categories um Are what caused them to distill down into unitary

01:38:22.330 --> 01:38:22.810
things.

01:38:23.050 --> 01:38:26.410
So there's a good reason why we think attention is a thing, right?

01:38:26.490 --> 01:38:30.650
It's a placeholder for did I see something or not?

01:38:30.890 --> 01:38:32.010
Did I make a mistake?

01:38:32.330 --> 01:38:38.250
So it's exactly this, it's exactly like there is a coherent

01:38:38.250 --> 01:38:41.450
argument for why happiness exists, right?

01:38:41.530 --> 01:38:46.380
There's an idea that like the belief that attention exists, there's a coherent argument for

01:38:46.380 --> 01:38:47.980
why that would be too.

01:38:48.460 --> 01:38:53.980
But that's a different issue than is are all the assumptions about

01:38:53.980 --> 01:38:56.140
attention or happiness right?

01:38:56.380 --> 01:38:57.660
And no, I wouldn't.

01:38:57.740 --> 01:39:01.820
So I'm so number one, I I I completely agree that there might be

01:39:03.420 --> 01:39:09.100
things in the ontology of folk psychology that are just flat out

01:39:09.100 --> 01:39:09.660
wrong.

01:39:09.900 --> 01:39:14.470
But I I don't, in some sense, I think this is also sort of just this linguistic difficulty

01:39:14.550 --> 01:39:16.390
of well, what does it mean to be wrong, right?

01:39:16.470 --> 01:39:21.750
If I think that you know, I so the simplest thing you can think of, I'm unitary, right?

01:39:22.150 --> 01:39:23.030
Is that wrong?

01:39:23.190 --> 01:39:28.470
Well, from the perspective of an evolved organism in its evolved environment, yes, that's

01:39:28.470 --> 01:39:28.630
right.

01:39:28.790 --> 01:39:34.150
You can see the van the why does a why does why is the uh uh system in the mind for

01:39:34.150 --> 01:39:38.020
representing the self think the self is a unitary enduring entity.

01:39:38.180 --> 01:39:41.780
Well, it's because I'm different than you, I'm different than my child, I'm different than

01:39:41.780 --> 01:39:44.260
the tree and the rock and the lion and everything.

01:39:44.500 --> 01:39:50.500
And the things that I do today and tomorrow, and consequently, like where this

01:39:50.900 --> 01:39:56.820
sort of in enclosed body is sort of a unique auto-correlated entity, and it

01:39:56.820 --> 01:40:00.930
would make sense for it to represent itself as a unitary thing, right?

01:40:01.170 --> 01:40:06.850
So, in that sense, if that's what you understand why the unitary representation is there,

01:40:07.090 --> 01:40:08.450
it's correct.

01:40:08.770 --> 01:40:08.930
Yeah.

01:40:09.170 --> 01:40:15.090
But if you think that the unitary representation is for anything, or science, for example,

01:40:15.330 --> 01:40:16.210
then it is wrong.

01:40:16.370 --> 01:40:21.170
And so this is, I think, where there's a trip up where if you say, is the theory of mind

01:40:21.570 --> 01:40:26.280
system right or wrong, there's a sense in which you can answer the question in two

01:40:26.280 --> 01:40:26.760
different ways.

01:40:26.840 --> 01:40:31.960
I'm sort of answering it from the perspective of is there a uh a coherent

01:40:32.520 --> 01:40:37.960
account for why the theory of mind is structured the way it is, that it thinks thoughts are

01:40:37.960 --> 01:40:41.160
unitary, that it thinks the agent is a unitary thing?

01:40:41.400 --> 01:40:43.160
And the answer is yes.

01:40:43.720 --> 01:40:47.960
But then your point, which I completely agree with, I think this is your point, and you can

01:40:47.960 --> 01:40:53.670
tell me if not, is that there's a really very deeply a sense in

01:40:53.670 --> 01:40:56.070
which those things are wrong.

01:40:56.230 --> 01:40:57.430
Um, too.

01:40:57.670 --> 01:41:02.870
And I think this is and this is where I think the language of sort of right or wrong is

01:41:02.870 --> 01:41:08.550
hard because you can imagine nothing is right intrinsically.

01:41:08.630 --> 01:41:11.750
It's sort of right in a place and wrong in a place, right?

01:41:11.830 --> 01:41:17.100
And I think that's so I I I I would want to just clarify, I I don't disagree.

01:41:17.340 --> 01:41:23.180
I mean, and if you if in practice, I mean, most of my time is spent really uh in a sense

01:41:23.340 --> 01:41:25.100
railing against theory of mind.

01:41:25.660 --> 01:41:31.580
But there is this sense in which I respect it and why it is coherent and right for

01:41:31.580 --> 01:41:32.860
what it's for.

01:41:33.260 --> 01:41:38.860
And I think um another way to put it is we've been wrong about what

01:41:39.530 --> 01:41:45.050
what ideas are for, in some sense, like it's a it's an empirical question of like, you

01:41:45.050 --> 01:41:50.330
know, what what uh why why do we think thinking is

01:41:50.330 --> 01:41:51.210
unitary?

01:41:51.530 --> 01:41:57.290
If we if we understand that that's for an evolutionary environment, then we can understand

01:41:57.290 --> 01:41:58.410
why that's right.

01:41:58.730 --> 01:42:03.690
But if we if we just take it as a blanket statement and we're not asking what it's for and

01:42:03.690 --> 01:42:09.640
we're just saying is thinking unitary, well then sometimes in some sense yes in some

01:42:09.640 --> 01:42:10.440
sense no, right?

01:42:10.600 --> 01:42:14.120
And that's the that's the sort of confusing thing, I think.

01:42:14.360 --> 01:42:18.040
Um but but anyway, the point is I don't think we disagree.

01:42:19.080 --> 01:42:19.320
Cool.

01:42:19.480 --> 01:42:25.480
Yeah, no, it's it seems like, yeah, it it's it's tricky to define what makes an idea true

01:42:25.480 --> 01:42:26.040
or false.

01:42:26.280 --> 01:42:29.160
I mean, we get into epistemology and philosophy of science.

01:42:29.400 --> 01:42:33.960
You know, certainly Newtonian physics is true in a sense when applied to you know

01:42:34.040 --> 01:42:35.730
medium-sized objects.

01:42:35.890 --> 01:42:40.610
You know, when you look at galaxies or fundamental particles, Newtonian physics doesn't

01:42:40.610 --> 01:42:40.850
work.

01:42:41.010 --> 01:42:43.250
So is Newtonian physics correct?

01:42:43.490 --> 01:42:44.290
I don't know.

01:42:44.530 --> 01:42:49.730
Uh I uh we just have to, you know, use language in a way that is is good at for

01:42:49.890 --> 01:42:54.850
communication, and you know, we can define true as predictively powerful, or we can define

01:42:54.850 --> 01:42:57.970
true as predictively powerful in a in a wide range of cases.

01:42:58.130 --> 01:43:01.570
Um I don't know that there's a correct answer to what is a correct answer.

01:43:01.970 --> 01:43:02.290
That's right.

01:43:02.370 --> 01:43:03.890
Is the man on the moon real?

01:43:04.130 --> 01:43:04.450
Yeah.

01:43:04.800 --> 01:43:06.400
There's a sense in which yes and no.

01:43:06.560 --> 01:43:08.000
It depends on what you mean by the question.

01:43:08.160 --> 01:43:09.280
Same with free will, right?

01:43:09.360 --> 01:43:10.640
Is free will re real or not?

01:43:10.800 --> 01:43:11.680
I mean, it's the same.

01:43:12.640 --> 01:43:16.640
The idea is that, you know, the man on the moon is a real.

01:43:16.720 --> 01:43:20.640
If you think that what you mean by that is there does it look like there's a face on the

01:43:20.640 --> 01:43:20.880
moon?

01:43:20.960 --> 01:43:21.840
Yeah, that's real.

01:43:21.920 --> 01:43:25.440
The the things that lead that, but is it actually a person on the moon?

01:43:25.520 --> 01:43:25.680
No.

01:43:25.760 --> 01:43:29.520
You know, and if you don't clarify that's what you mean by the question, you could have

01:43:29.520 --> 01:43:34.190
people arguing incessantly forever about is the man on the moon real?

01:43:34.350 --> 01:43:38.670
Because that question itself is actually hiding two distinct questions with two distinct

01:43:38.670 --> 01:43:39.310
answers.

01:43:39.710 --> 01:43:40.110
Right.

01:43:40.430 --> 01:43:45.790
But I do think once you start to think about um social strategizing,

01:43:46.030 --> 01:43:51.390
status seeking, intergroup competition, it begins to become apparent that the stories we

01:43:51.390 --> 01:43:56.960
tell about the mind are not merely going to be wrong in a way that, you know, it's it's

01:43:56.960 --> 01:44:00.400
oversimplifying things or it's carving up nature in the wrong ways.

01:44:00.640 --> 01:44:05.120
But it could be wrong in a more powerful way, which is that it is serving a strategic instr

01:44:05.360 --> 01:44:05.680
interest.

01:44:06.000 --> 01:44:06.320
Absolutely.

01:44:06.640 --> 01:44:12.240
Um with the happiness idea, I think it is often used as an excuse uh for

01:44:12.240 --> 01:44:17.150
covering up uh unsavory, self interested or or status seeking motives.

01:44:17.230 --> 01:44:22.190
You know, I I'm pursuing this this career for me, for the sheer satisfaction of it, because

01:44:22.190 --> 01:44:25.550
it's fulfilling or rewarding, uh, not because it gets me status or money.

01:44:25.870 --> 01:44:26.030
Yeah.

01:44:26.190 --> 01:44:26.270
No.

01:44:26.670 --> 01:44:31.870
I'm I'm helping others uh not to virtue signal but but because it it is it makes me feel

01:44:31.870 --> 01:44:32.110
good.

01:44:32.350 --> 01:44:37.390
Um oftentimes this happiness myth is used as a kind of confabulation or rationalization uh

01:44:37.470 --> 01:44:40.780
that that serves a reputational function.

01:44:41.500 --> 01:44:45.980
And I think there are likely to be many intuitive ideas about the mind that are serving

01:44:45.980 --> 01:44:49.020
those kind of strategic reputational functions.

01:44:49.100 --> 01:44:52.940
Uh, and I think it is fair to call a lot of those ideas bullshit.

01:44:53.260 --> 01:44:57.820
Uh and and as we do good science, we'll begin to discover more and more of them uh and and

01:44:57.820 --> 01:45:01.580
why they're bullshit and and what fun what strategic functions they're serving.

01:45:01.740 --> 01:45:07.610
Um this is a good segue into groups, which uh has been uh dominating the bulk

01:45:07.610 --> 01:45:09.370
of of your academic career.

01:45:09.450 --> 01:45:14.730
Uh we started out talking about, you know, your youth growing up uh on the periphery of of

01:45:14.730 --> 01:45:17.290
cults and uh religious extremism.

01:45:17.530 --> 01:45:23.450
Um certainly uh we can think about cults and religions as an extreme type

01:45:23.450 --> 01:45:26.170
of groupishness or commitment to a group of people.

01:45:26.410 --> 01:45:30.440
Um you've done research about the folk psychology of groups.

01:45:30.600 --> 01:45:31.320
What is a group?

01:45:31.480 --> 01:45:37.400
How does the mind categorize a collection of units as uh one thing, as a

01:45:37.400 --> 01:45:42.120
group, as as something that could either be acting uh uh against me or with me?

01:45:42.760 --> 01:45:48.520
Um So I wanna uh

01:45:48.760 --> 01:45:52.040
join all these ideas into one grand question.

01:45:52.280 --> 01:45:54.280
Uh and we won't have time to answer it.

01:45:54.520 --> 01:46:00.190
Uh we'll probably probably won't get the right answer, but why are we so uh

01:46:00.830 --> 01:46:03.630
divided into groups?

01:46:03.870 --> 01:46:05.870
Why can't we all get along?

01:46:06.030 --> 01:46:09.950
This question was posed by Rodney King after the LA riots.

01:46:10.430 --> 01:46:15.150
Um tribalism seems to be a core feature of our species.

01:46:15.390 --> 01:46:20.670
We cannot help but form tribes and compete with other tribes for power, status, and

01:46:20.670 --> 01:46:21.230
resources.

01:46:21.390 --> 01:46:23.470
Often the competition is violent.

01:46:23.710 --> 01:46:29.420
Um do you see this tendency as unavoidable as a part of

01:46:29.420 --> 01:46:31.340
human nature that we need to live with?

01:46:31.580 --> 01:46:32.860
Are you more utopian?

01:46:32.940 --> 01:46:34.780
Do you think world peace is possible?

01:46:35.020 --> 01:46:39.020
Um why can't we all get along?

01:46:40.220 --> 01:46:42.460
Uh 10 second answer, yeah.

01:46:42.540 --> 01:46:42.780
No.

01:46:43.020 --> 01:46:45.740
Um Yeah, no, I think that th that's that's great.

01:46:45.820 --> 01:46:47.740
And and there's obviously a lot to say about that.

01:46:47.900 --> 01:46:53.730
And maybe um this might also I'm gonna I'm gonna um sort of declare

01:46:53.730 --> 01:46:58.610
uh somewhat like a rain check on some of this I think into our next session we might need

01:46:58.610 --> 01:46:59.170
to do.

01:46:59.490 --> 01:47:03.090
Um I'll I'll I'll start answering that.

01:47:03.250 --> 01:47:08.930
I think just um b what we have what just to wrap up what we were

01:47:09.010 --> 01:47:13.330
um saying, because yeah, no, it's it's a really good question and and I think we have to

01:47:13.330 --> 01:47:15.250
unpack a few things to answer it.

01:47:15.490 --> 01:47:21.280
Um the uh one of the it's funny you mentioned the the thing

01:47:21.280 --> 01:47:27.280
about uh strategic reasons and group reasons for why um folk psychology is

01:47:27.280 --> 01:47:28.800
bullshit, as you put it.

01:47:29.360 --> 01:47:35.280
And I think this actually swings back to um the beginning of our conversation,

01:47:35.520 --> 01:47:41.470
which is I also think that was part of my attraction to

01:47:41.630 --> 01:47:47.310
psychology and evolutionary psychology was that I saw the same thing in these basement

01:47:47.310 --> 01:47:48.110
cults, right?

01:47:48.190 --> 01:47:54.190
In these evangelical, where the superficial idea was not at all what was

01:47:54.190 --> 01:47:54.590
going on.

01:47:54.750 --> 01:48:00.750
You know, clearly these were people who wanted feeling of belongingness, needed

01:48:00.750 --> 01:48:01.710
social support.

01:48:02.000 --> 01:48:07.440
um, the content about what was talked about, you know, like the devil and Jesus and eternal

01:48:07.440 --> 01:48:11.520
life was this superficial thing, and there was clearly like other stuff going on.

01:48:11.680 --> 01:48:17.680
And I think um the the I think the beauty

01:48:17.680 --> 01:48:23.200
and the respectfulness of an evolutionary approach or this mechanical approach to the mind,

01:48:23.280 --> 01:48:26.480
and we talked about the human universals, Don Brown's human universals.

01:48:26.560 --> 01:48:28.000
I'll get to groups in a second.

01:48:28.240 --> 01:48:34.150
Um I think um if you take a really simple view of how

01:48:34.150 --> 01:48:37.350
people work, David knows it's raining.

01:48:37.510 --> 01:48:42.310
Whatever David thinks or believes is sort of malleable and we can do whatever we want with

01:48:42.310 --> 01:48:42.630
it.

01:48:43.030 --> 01:48:49.030
Um it it doesn't it doesn't really give the um it's not

01:48:49.030 --> 01:48:51.910
a dignified way to treat people in the following respect.

01:48:52.070 --> 01:48:57.960
If people actually need things to be okay, you know, you you need to feel safe,

01:48:58.120 --> 01:48:59.960
you need resources, you need friends.

01:49:00.120 --> 01:49:03.880
You know, as a kid, you need to play, you need to feel empowerment, you need to have some

01:49:03.880 --> 01:49:08.440
autonomy, you need to be able to take risks and not kill yourself, but maybe skin your

01:49:08.440 --> 01:49:09.000
knee.

01:49:09.160 --> 01:49:14.360
Um, if you want to learn something, you need to be able to like be okay and not afraid to

01:49:14.360 --> 01:49:17.320
ask questions or lose your status because you look dumb.

01:49:17.480 --> 01:49:23.430
Um, you know, people are complicated, but we're really

01:49:23.430 --> 01:49:24.230
fragile.

01:49:24.310 --> 01:49:26.470
Um, and we need a lot.

01:49:26.550 --> 01:49:30.630
We're very altrucial, you know, and we both appreciate that as parents right now.

01:49:31.030 --> 01:49:36.950
And I think a view of people as sort of not very complicated and not very not a

01:49:36.950 --> 01:49:38.150
lot of nature.

01:49:38.630 --> 01:49:43.180
Um it's very easy to sort of not think it really matters.

01:49:43.260 --> 01:49:47.580
Like I can put somebody in a room for 20 hours and not give them windows or proper

01:49:47.580 --> 01:49:50.380
nutrition and just sort of do whatever, it doesn't matter.

01:49:50.460 --> 01:49:52.380
They're alive, they're fine, you know?

01:49:52.780 --> 01:49:58.540
Um if you think that there's a sort of intrinsic complicated nature to people, um

01:49:59.260 --> 01:50:05.050
then if you want people to be okay, if you want to be okay, um, if you want to treat

01:50:05.050 --> 01:50:10.890
people well, if you want people to not suffer, um, you have to be a

01:50:10.890 --> 01:50:12.970
student of what is that nature.

01:50:13.130 --> 01:50:18.970
Um and um and you have to provide you know things for yourself or your children or

01:50:19.050 --> 01:50:24.970
or your employees um uh or as institutions um if

01:50:24.970 --> 01:50:28.410
you want to respect people um and treat them well

01:50:30.700 --> 01:50:33.260
There's a complicated set of things you have to do.

01:50:33.420 --> 01:50:39.020
And so I think just just to to and then I'll go get to groups, I think um even

01:50:39.180 --> 01:50:44.860
though the idea of a human nature and it being complicated um and

01:50:45.180 --> 01:50:51.180
um innate um you know historically there have been things done

01:50:51.180 --> 01:50:57.130
with that idea very pernicious but it's exactly right that um the the flip

01:50:57.130 --> 01:50:58.810
side can be quite pernicious too.

01:50:58.890 --> 01:51:04.650
And I I I think um there's a there's a way to really think about people being

01:51:04.970 --> 01:51:10.570
um human nature being very valuable and good and precious um because it's so

01:51:10.570 --> 01:51:15.770
complicated and because we have intrinsic things that we need or desire or want.

01:51:16.170 --> 01:51:20.890
Um and so I I think um uh

01:51:22.280 --> 01:51:28.280
I think it's a very humanitarian view to understand that there are universals and

01:51:28.280 --> 01:51:32.040
that um and that there is structure to human nature.

01:51:32.440 --> 01:51:33.080
Yeah.

01:51:33.560 --> 01:51:35.720
Um now to groups.

01:51:36.360 --> 01:51:42.360
Um I mean I think I think the short answer is related to what I just said, which is

01:51:42.360 --> 01:51:47.560
that um you know uh groups are

01:51:48.590 --> 01:51:52.270
an answer to the question of well, what do we do now?

01:51:52.750 --> 01:51:58.670
And what do we do now sometimes involves making things

01:51:58.670 --> 01:52:03.790
for the better and sometimes making things for the worst, and there's finite resources,

01:52:04.510 --> 01:52:05.950
um, or not.

01:52:06.350 --> 01:52:12.270
So uh, you know, I can take your berries, or you and I can work together

01:52:12.270 --> 01:52:15.790
to make more berries uh exist, right?

01:52:16.030 --> 01:52:22.000
And so um I think when we talk about our groups inevitable

01:52:22.080 --> 01:52:25.600
or what is a group, you know, it's a folk construct.

01:52:25.840 --> 01:52:29.440
We understand that there's lots of different meanings of the word, and we can talk about

01:52:29.440 --> 01:52:32.720
that now or in a little bit or next time or whenever.

01:52:33.280 --> 01:52:38.240
But I think the bottom line thing is that we are

01:52:39.520 --> 01:52:45.490
really um privileged to be an organism that

01:52:45.810 --> 01:52:51.650
is not just stuck swimming together with other fish or crossing rivers with

01:52:51.650 --> 01:52:54.290
other gazelles and then just kind of eating side by side.

01:52:54.370 --> 01:52:58.530
We can decide, well, what's the basis of our organization and how are we all going to get

01:52:58.530 --> 01:52:59.650
together and do things?

01:52:59.890 --> 01:53:05.570
And that ability gives us the ability to make more berries or to help people, help

01:53:05.570 --> 01:53:06.450
ourselves.

01:53:07.010 --> 01:53:11.780
And as a consequence or externality help other people, but it also allows us to gang up on

01:53:11.780 --> 01:53:12.100
people.

01:53:13.060 --> 01:53:17.780
And that can be a good thing if those people did something bad, but it can also be a bad

01:53:17.780 --> 01:53:18.100
thing.

01:53:19.940 --> 01:53:25.940
So I think the the the short answer is that a group is a rough cut

01:53:26.660 --> 01:53:32.500
folk psychological level description of this ability of organisms, particular

01:53:32.500 --> 01:53:38.070
people to um to to work cooperate c cooperate yeah that's a word

01:53:38.310 --> 01:53:43.190
collaborate cooper cooperate you know compete with one another it's this idea that they're

01:53:43.190 --> 01:53:48.790
sort of like software for allowing alliances and cooperation and

01:53:49.030 --> 01:53:54.870
the content of that is not infinite but it's well it is infinite it's

01:53:54.950 --> 01:54:00.660
um it's not um it's not unconstrained but those constraints um uh

01:54:00.740 --> 01:54:06.500
in terms of sort of what what would be a basis of cooperation um is cre is

01:54:06.500 --> 01:54:09.620
creative and uh and that's part of our nature.

01:54:09.940 --> 01:54:15.220
So um uh so I don't think group conflict is

01:54:15.860 --> 01:54:20.020
when you say if something is inevitable or not, that's an outcome in the world.

01:54:20.100 --> 01:54:25.490
And I think that's um you know, I don't think a psychologist, even if we knew everything

01:54:25.490 --> 01:54:29.810
about the software, could predict everything about what outcomes would occur because things

01:54:29.810 --> 01:54:30.370
are complicated.

01:54:30.530 --> 01:54:32.530
We know how the weather works, we can't predict the weather.

01:54:32.690 --> 01:54:36.450
There's an idea called methodological individualism, right, where you just sort of study

01:54:36.450 --> 01:54:41.410
the individual, but there's all other, other higher level questions like for sociology,

01:54:41.730 --> 01:54:47.010
that are even harder, even when psychology is done and we can go home and we're done with

01:54:47.010 --> 01:54:47.330
our work.

01:54:47.490 --> 01:54:48.930
So I don't know if it's inevitable.

01:54:49.010 --> 01:54:53.680
I mean, there are principled answers to it, but was that does that start to answer your

01:54:53.680 --> 01:54:55.040
question about groups?

01:54:55.600 --> 01:54:56.720
It begins to.

01:54:58.240 --> 01:55:03.840
The way I like to think about this question, and I think you know it's an underrated

01:55:03.840 --> 01:55:04.160
question.

01:55:04.240 --> 01:55:08.160
It sounds kind of sentimental, and why can't we all get along?

01:55:08.240 --> 01:55:12.160
But I actually think it's a really important question that social scientists really need to

01:55:12.160 --> 01:55:16.640
think about, especially uh in the 21st century when we have nuclear weapons.

01:55:16.880 --> 01:55:22.110
Um my tentative answer to the question is I think we're asking the wrong question.

01:55:22.190 --> 01:55:26.510
So a repeating theme of this conversation is that it is very bad to ask the wrong

01:55:26.510 --> 01:55:29.630
questions, and it is very important to ask the right questions.

01:55:29.790 --> 01:55:34.110
And one thing that an evolutionary perspective allows you to do is ask the right questions.

01:55:34.590 --> 01:55:38.030
So I think why can't we all just get along is asking the wrong question.

01:55:38.110 --> 01:55:43.340
I actually think a better question would be, why can we all get along?

01:55:43.580 --> 01:55:49.260
Because if you think about it, conflict and competition are endemic to the biological

01:55:49.260 --> 01:55:49.740
world.

01:55:50.220 --> 01:55:53.900
There's conflict and competition at all levels of biological organization.

01:55:53.980 --> 01:55:55.500
We see it all throughout the animal kingdom.

01:55:55.740 --> 01:55:57.100
Resources are limited.

01:56:00.220 --> 01:56:01.660
We can't both have the mate.

01:56:01.820 --> 01:56:03.820
We can't both be on this territory.

01:56:04.220 --> 01:56:07.420
We need some way of figuring out who gets the goodie.

01:56:07.710 --> 01:56:13.470
And uh one of the most common ways of figuring that out is fighting uh physical

01:56:13.470 --> 01:56:14.190
violence.

01:56:14.350 --> 01:56:18.750
Um physical violence is very costly and we've evolved to avoid it when we can.

01:56:18.990 --> 01:56:22.910
But when we can't avoid it, you know, things get bloody.

01:56:24.910 --> 01:56:30.030
Certainly uh conflict is a part of the Darwinian process.

01:56:30.190 --> 01:56:35.920
You can't have Darwinian natural selection without conflict and competition, at least

01:56:35.920 --> 01:56:41.680
in some sense, to for for a trait to be selected for, to evolve, it has to

01:56:41.680 --> 01:56:46.320
win out in the competition for some fitness enhancing resource.

01:56:46.480 --> 01:56:49.360
And it has to displace some other trait.

01:56:49.520 --> 01:56:49.840
Right?

01:56:50.000 --> 01:56:52.400
So some trait has to win and some trait has to lose.

01:56:52.480 --> 01:56:57.130
If you think about it in terms of individuals, one lineage has to win and another lineage

01:56:57.130 --> 01:57:00.730
has to lose in order for an adaptation to be produced.

01:57:01.690 --> 01:57:06.250
A desire to uh benefit the entire species cannot evolve.

01:57:06.330 --> 01:57:12.010
We've known this since the 1970s, when uh Wynne Edwards-style group

01:57:12.010 --> 01:57:17.930
selection uh became uh out of fashion and uh Dawkinsian selfish gene theory rose

01:57:17.930 --> 01:57:18.810
to preeminence.

01:57:18.970 --> 01:57:23.140
We know that a desire to benefit the entire species cannot evolve.

01:57:23.300 --> 01:57:28.340
Organisms don't act for the good of the species, they act for the good of their genes.

01:57:30.260 --> 01:57:35.780
Organisms that act in ways that benefit themselves and their kin,

01:57:36.020 --> 01:57:41.780
well, uh genes for doing that will tend to proliferate uh at the expense of genes that

01:57:41.780 --> 01:57:42.900
don't do that.

01:57:43.620 --> 01:57:49.510
Um given all that, I don't think it's a mystery why we have conflict and competition.

01:57:49.990 --> 01:57:53.830
Um, really, what is the mystery is why we have cooperation.

01:57:53.990 --> 01:57:56.070
That's the puzzle that we need to solve.

01:57:56.310 --> 01:57:57.990
Why do we sometimes work together?

01:57:58.150 --> 01:58:02.150
Why do we sometimes resolve our conflicts and avoid killing each other?

01:58:02.470 --> 01:58:05.830
Um why do we form trading networks?

01:58:06.630 --> 01:58:10.630
Why do we often help each other and trade favors?

01:58:11.520 --> 01:58:15.360
This in evolutionary biology is known as the problem of altruism.

01:58:16.080 --> 01:58:20.640
This is a great example of evolutionary biologists asking the right questions.

01:58:20.880 --> 01:58:24.160
And the right question they asked is: what is the deal with altruism?

01:58:24.400 --> 01:58:30.240
Why are organisms kind to one another, given the uh Darwinian struggle for

01:58:30.240 --> 01:58:33.360
existence that we believe to be true?

01:58:34.010 --> 01:58:38.810
It turns out there are a variety of beautiful explanations for altruism, a variety of

01:58:38.810 --> 01:58:40.730
beautiful solutions to this problem.

01:58:40.970 --> 01:58:45.770
They involve reciprocity, they involve kinship, and the theory of inclusive fitness, that

01:58:45.770 --> 01:58:51.610
is, a gene for helping kin uh is uh likely to be helping a copy of itself, and

01:58:51.610 --> 01:58:54.010
such genes will therefore proliferate.

01:58:54.660 --> 01:58:58.420
We have uh more recently theories of uh interdependence.

01:58:58.660 --> 01:59:03.300
If I depend on you uh for survival, if I depend on your skills and knowledge, then your

01:59:03.300 --> 01:59:05.700
survival is good for my fitness.

01:59:05.860 --> 01:59:09.140
And so you you become intrinsically valuable to me.

01:59:09.220 --> 01:59:14.260
Um I have a reason to keep you alive independent of uh any favors you might give to me,

01:59:14.420 --> 01:59:19.430
because just the way you act in the world, um, the way you might oppose my enemies or

01:59:19.430 --> 01:59:21.190
support my friends, that's that's good for me.

01:59:21.350 --> 01:59:23.190
So interdependence is another pathway.

01:59:23.350 --> 01:59:25.990
Reputation is a huge one in our species.

01:59:26.230 --> 01:59:31.190
We can um help each other because it uh benefits us reputationally.

01:59:31.270 --> 01:59:35.430
We look virtuous, we look like an attractive partner, an attractive leader, an attractive

01:59:35.430 --> 01:59:37.110
mate, an attractive friend.

01:59:37.350 --> 01:59:42.470
Um so there are all sorts of beautiful explanations for uh why altruism exists.

01:59:43.190 --> 01:59:48.860
Um conflict and competition, however, uh that's the part that

01:59:48.860 --> 01:59:51.660
doesn't really need a special explanation.

01:59:51.900 --> 01:59:55.900
It's it's it's Darwinism incarnate, survival of the fittest.

01:59:56.300 --> 02:00:02.300
Um insofar as um fitness is a uh

02:00:02.540 --> 02:00:07.180
is relative, it's zero sum, the higher my fitness, the lower your fitness, if we have

02:00:07.180 --> 02:00:11.020
different genes, then you will get conflict and competition.

02:00:11.500 --> 02:00:14.630
Um so that's my answer to the question.

02:00:14.710 --> 02:00:16.230
I'm curious what you think of it.

02:00:17.030 --> 02:00:20.870
Um I think um

02:00:22.790 --> 02:00:24.630
I might disagree a little bit.

02:00:24.790 --> 02:00:30.550
Um so I think um I think when people are asking, well, why can't we get along?

02:00:30.710 --> 02:00:35.270
They're they're doing exactly what their evolved psychology should be doing, which is

02:00:35.270 --> 02:00:39.590
saying, Well, why can't there be uh why can't we do something different than what we're

02:00:39.590 --> 02:00:39.830
doing?

02:00:39.940 --> 02:00:40.180
right?

02:00:40.260 --> 02:00:45.380
And I think that is part of the way that the software is designed.

02:00:45.780 --> 02:00:51.700
Um, so um whenever given an

02:00:51.700 --> 02:00:57.300
intrinsic thing, is that um currently um you know, at a

02:00:57.300 --> 02:01:00.980
macroscopic level, you know, a thing can't be in two places at once.

02:01:01.140 --> 02:01:04.740
If I have, if I drink water, you can't drink the same water.

02:01:04.900 --> 02:01:10.370
Um so there is there are rival goods, there are just and there are conflicts of interests.

02:01:10.530 --> 02:01:13.970
So, and then there are also interests that overlap.

02:01:14.290 --> 02:01:16.770
And as you mentioned, you know, there's all this literature.

02:01:17.010 --> 02:01:21.170
There's a really great paper about the serial rediscovery of inclusive fitness theory.

02:01:21.330 --> 02:01:26.290
This question about why is there cooperation, you know, things like dispersal

02:01:27.090 --> 02:01:27.810
versus not.

02:01:27.970 --> 02:01:33.940
So an organism can be selected to like benefit the group per se, if

02:01:34.020 --> 02:01:37.220
it's a non-dispersing thing like bacteria, right?

02:01:37.300 --> 02:01:39.460
Because you know, like they're just non-dispersing.

02:01:39.540 --> 02:01:44.260
Um, but it's because it's actually helping the next generation of copies of itself.

02:01:44.340 --> 02:01:46.100
It's like probistically copies of itself.

02:01:46.180 --> 02:01:50.660
So even if they're not technically related, if it's non-dispersal, um, but it's just sort

02:01:50.660 --> 02:01:54.660
of it's affecting its the design's differential reproductive success, right?

02:01:54.820 --> 02:02:00.390
So um this in, you know, there's this nice paper by Stu West and other people talking about

02:02:00.390 --> 02:02:01.910
like what she talked about, like mutualisms.

02:02:02.070 --> 02:02:07.750
There's sort of a deep structure of differential reproductive success explaining why people

02:02:07.750 --> 02:02:11.510
or organisms do things that look weird or altruistic, right?

02:02:11.670 --> 02:02:16.790
And this sort of language of altruism was was a bit um confusing for a long time.

02:02:16.870 --> 02:02:18.960
And I think it's been pretty cleared up.

02:02:19.120 --> 02:02:21.280
Um when people say, well, why can't we get along?

02:02:21.440 --> 02:02:24.800
I do think, I do think that's a a perfectly valid question to ask.

02:02:24.880 --> 02:02:27.200
And I think that, or why can't we all get along?

02:02:27.360 --> 02:02:30.560
I think that I think it's a perfectly valid question in the in the two senses.

02:02:30.720 --> 02:02:36.320
One is you can still ask what's the mental software that makes um conflict possible, right?

02:02:36.480 --> 02:02:40.320
So I don't I think it still requires an explanation in that sense of the proximate

02:02:40.320 --> 02:02:41.040
psychology.

02:02:41.200 --> 02:02:45.760
I don't think it's a Darwinian uh mystery why conflict would occur.

02:02:46.000 --> 02:02:51.990
Um But even still, how why conflicts of interest happen in certain places

02:02:51.990 --> 02:02:54.070
and not others is not as always straightforward.

02:02:54.150 --> 02:02:55.590
And why not cooperate?

02:02:55.750 --> 02:02:58.070
Um is a straightforward thing.

02:02:58.310 --> 02:03:03.830
So there's there's that, and then just the the answer of um or the the the

02:03:04.230 --> 02:03:10.060
the the question on its own of well, why can't we all get along is

02:03:10.060 --> 02:03:15.340
the right question to ask from the sense of um each

02:03:15.340 --> 02:03:21.020
individual organism has a set of represented interests about the

02:03:21.020 --> 02:03:25.740
current state of the world, what benefits me, what costs me,

02:03:26.300 --> 02:03:31.660
representations of what could be exist that don't exist yet, counterfactuals, and then also

02:03:31.740 --> 02:03:33.900
like what's likely to happen in the future.

02:03:34.140 --> 02:03:39.770
And each individual in interacting with other individuals is coordinating, negotiating,

02:03:39.930 --> 02:03:42.330
well, what do we do going forward?

02:03:42.970 --> 02:03:46.090
And our interests are going to overlap to some degree.

02:03:46.250 --> 02:03:47.530
They won't in other ways.

02:03:47.770 --> 02:03:52.970
And all of these ideas about sort of like, well, who what groups exist?

02:03:53.610 --> 02:03:55.050
How do we treat one another?

02:03:55.210 --> 02:03:56.090
What are the rules?

02:03:56.250 --> 02:03:58.810
What are the assumptions about how we're going to treat another?

02:03:59.210 --> 02:04:00.250
Give resource flows.

02:04:00.330 --> 02:04:01.770
Who are we going to hurt?

02:04:02.600 --> 02:04:07.560
That narrative is very powerful, and that agreement is very powerful.

02:04:07.640 --> 02:04:12.280
It determines who's and what who is supported by who, who hurts other people.

02:04:12.520 --> 02:04:17.880
And the question, well, why can't we get all get along is I think a very

02:04:17.880 --> 02:04:23.850
reasonable insertion of why it's

02:04:23.850 --> 02:04:29.850
a it's a challenge to given what's currently happening, why can't it be that we

02:04:29.850 --> 02:04:33.290
have a different basis of socially discriminating?

02:04:33.370 --> 02:04:38.010
And I don't mean discriminating in like a discrimination sense, but like in a like uh just

02:04:38.010 --> 02:04:40.730
behaving differently, which could include like cooperating.

02:04:40.970 --> 02:04:46.940
So if there are we currently are imposing costs on a set of people, well, why

02:04:46.940 --> 02:04:47.660
are we doing that?

02:04:47.820 --> 02:04:48.860
Who's benefiting that?

02:04:48.940 --> 02:04:50.700
Do you and I really benefit from that?

02:04:50.860 --> 02:04:53.900
Or does somebody else who's telling us that we do, who's in our group?

02:04:53.980 --> 02:04:55.660
Like, are we actually all in a group together?

02:04:55.740 --> 02:05:00.940
Like let's say there's a third party and um like Bob, I don't know.

02:05:01.100 --> 02:05:01.820
Sorry, Bob.

02:05:02.140 --> 02:05:07.580
And Bob is actually getting a lot out of all three of us being belligerent towards a group

02:05:07.580 --> 02:05:10.060
of people, but maybe you and I aren't at all, right?

02:05:10.860 --> 02:05:15.870
You know, it makes sense for us to represent that and say, well, why can't we all get

02:05:15.870 --> 02:05:16.190
along?

02:05:16.270 --> 02:05:19.870
And maybe question Bob and maybe question the fact that we should all be in a group

02:05:19.870 --> 02:05:23.630
together, maybe question the fact that the people we've been belligerent towards, you know,

02:05:23.710 --> 02:05:25.470
we've been belligerent towards them.

02:05:25.630 --> 02:05:29.950
Um, and of course, it's in Bob's interest, if if it's in his interest to have us be

02:05:29.950 --> 02:05:32.190
belligerent towards him, to obscure that.

02:05:32.350 --> 02:05:35.550
So I think there's a lot of negotiation that goes on.

02:05:35.840 --> 02:05:41.760
And I think one of the great tragedies of sort of group identities generally is if you

02:05:41.760 --> 02:05:46.400
look historically or you look at any case study that's been well studied at international

02:05:46.720 --> 02:05:52.560
or interpersonal levels, the sort of um the projection of group

02:05:52.560 --> 02:05:58.560
boundaries or treating a set of agents as a group as

02:05:58.560 --> 02:06:03.600
opposed to individuals who who uh produce behaviors, um,

02:06:04.400 --> 02:06:06.890
a lot of so like retaliation, you know.

02:06:06.970 --> 02:06:12.410
So like a small number of people do something and then but they're members of a group.

02:06:12.890 --> 02:06:16.730
Um, well, w who do we retaliate against?

02:06:16.890 --> 02:06:21.770
Do we retaliate against the specific people or do we retaliate against the group that they

02:06:21.770 --> 02:06:22.250
represent?

02:06:22.410 --> 02:06:23.850
Well, what group do they represent?

02:06:24.010 --> 02:06:29.370
And then uh different agents with different interests might say, Well, actually that's an

02:06:29.370 --> 02:06:31.930
instance of this group or another group or another group.

02:06:32.090 --> 02:06:37.620
And those identities are then the basis of the retack, the attack or

02:06:37.620 --> 02:06:38.500
revenge.

02:06:39.380 --> 02:06:45.300
And in the case of like modern large scale violence, uh this can

02:06:45.540 --> 02:06:48.660
affect millions of people and kill millions of people.

02:06:48.740 --> 02:06:54.500
Um and it's not always clear that it's rationally um the the the best way to

02:06:54.500 --> 02:06:58.660
actually address the the initial problem in the first place.

02:06:58.980 --> 02:07:04.430
Um so um so so yeah, that's sort of my long winded way of of saying that.

02:07:04.590 --> 02:07:09.870
I think it is a fair question to ask in in the in these at least these two respects of the

02:07:09.950 --> 02:07:12.830
um it makes sense why an individual would ask it.

02:07:12.910 --> 02:07:15.070
And then that we can also just ask about the software.

02:07:15.150 --> 02:07:18.590
But I agree that the Darwinian question is sort of straightforward.

02:07:19.150 --> 02:07:19.710
Yeah.

02:07:19.950 --> 02:07:23.390
I mean, yeah, it seems like there's a different there are different perspectives we could

02:07:23.390 --> 02:07:24.110
take on the question.

02:07:24.190 --> 02:07:25.710
You know, one is a Darwinian question.

02:07:25.790 --> 02:07:27.390
Is there a Darwinian mystery here?

02:07:27.630 --> 02:07:28.110
Right.

02:07:28.740 --> 02:07:34.740
And the other is, well, is there a socially intelligible reason why someone would pose

02:07:34.740 --> 02:07:35.060
the question?

02:07:35.140 --> 02:07:40.580
And is there a sensible response that we could give knowing everything we do about the

02:07:40.580 --> 02:07:41.700
individuals involved?

02:07:42.980 --> 02:07:48.820
And again, we're we're back to this distinction between the Darwinian

02:07:48.950 --> 02:07:54.550
level of understanding and the folk psychology level of understanding and the uh

02:07:54.710 --> 02:07:59.510
endless ways in which they conflict with one another sometimes and complement each other

02:07:59.750 --> 02:08:00.710
sometimes.

02:08:01.110 --> 02:08:07.110
Uh and we're still trying to figure out uh the resolution between these two ways of

02:08:07.110 --> 02:08:07.750
thinking.

02:08:07.990 --> 02:08:13.360
Um, and I look forward to continuing to resolve these

02:08:13.360 --> 02:08:18.880
contradictions and explore the ways in which our folk understanding of the world is right

02:08:19.120 --> 02:08:25.120
or bullshit or incomplete, and the ways in which evolutionary

02:08:25.120 --> 02:08:30.640
theory can illuminate and shed insight on the human

02:08:30.640 --> 02:08:34.640
condition and on questions like why we can't all get along.

02:08:35.040 --> 02:08:35.360
That's right.

02:08:35.520 --> 02:08:40.630
I think that the thing I learned from this is that uh uh it's instead of asking if

02:08:40.630 --> 02:08:43.510
something's right or wrong, it's uh is in which way.

02:08:44.070 --> 02:08:44.710
Yes.

02:08:45.110 --> 02:08:45.670
Yes.

02:08:45.910 --> 02:08:46.550
Yeah.

02:08:46.790 --> 02:08:49.510
Well, on that note, uh thank you, Dave.

02:08:49.590 --> 02:08:50.710
This was a really fun conversation.

02:08:50.950 --> 02:08:51.350
Yeah, thank you.

02:08:51.670 --> 02:08:53.830
And I look forward to yeah, I look forward to many more.

02:08:54.070 --> 02:08:55.030
Sounds good.

02:08:58.630 --> 02:09:00.550
We have finished up another episode.

02:09:00.710 --> 02:09:01.510
Good job.

02:09:01.880 --> 02:09:02.280
Thank you.

02:09:02.440 --> 02:09:03.320
Good job as well.

02:09:03.400 --> 02:09:05.960
And thank you, uh, listener for listening.

02:09:06.120 --> 02:09:11.000
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02:09:11.000 --> 02:09:11.480
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02:09:11.560 --> 02:09:12.760
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02:09:12.840 --> 02:09:16.440
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02:09:16.440 --> 02:09:16.840
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02:09:17.000 --> 02:09:21.160
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02:09:21.160 --> 02:09:22.920
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02:09:23.160 --> 02:09:26.930
Um and other than that, stay tuned for the next episode.

02:09:27.010 --> 02:09:28.290
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02:09:28.450 --> 02:09:29.570
See you soon.