Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Yuval Noah Harari & Mark Solms: Dawn of Future Consciousness | 100th Episode Special

Episode Date: October 20, 2022

Our emotions and animal instincts are part of who we are. How can we make sense of it better? How can nations be aware of this to sustain humanity? From the perspective of history, neuropsychology, and philosophy — Yuval Noah Harari and Mark Solms discourse on the cause of the flooding rage in society, the ''hidden'' missing piece of the advancement of science and technology, and the future fate of humanity. Professor Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and bestselling author. He is considered one of the world's most influential public intellectuals today. His books ("Sapiens," Homo Deus," and "21 Lessons for the 21st Century) have sold 40 million copies in 65 languages, including Bahasa Indonesia. He just released the first volume of ''Unstoppable Us", a brand new children's book series aimed at "liberating our future generations from our past." Professor Mark Solms — the Director of Neuropsychology at the Neuroscience Institute of the University of Cape Town. His latest book, "The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness," takes us on a journey to solve contemporary neuroscience's most giant unsolved puzzle: our emotions. He is the authorized editor and translator of the forthcoming Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. #GitaWirjawan #YuvalNoahHarari #MarkSolms -------------------------- Join the talk of other incredible bestselling authors at Ubud Writers & Readers Festival on October 27—30, 2022, in Bali, Indonesia. Use promo code ENDGAME100 and get a special 15% discount on festival passes: http://www.ubudwritersfestival.com/ticket-hub/ Follow UWRF on social media: facebook.com/ubudwritersfest instagram.com/ubudwritersfest twitter.com/ubudwritersfest -------------------------- Episode Notes: https://endgame.id/eps100notes Mark’s latest book: The Hidden Spring https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393542011/ Yuval’s latest book: Unstoppable Us https://www.ynharari.com/book/unstoppable_us/ -------------------------- Pre-Order the official Endgame merchandise: https://wa.me/628119182045 SGPP Indonesia Master of Public Policy 2022/24 November intake closes soon: admissions.sgpp.ac.id [e-mail] https://wa.me/628111522504

This is an ancient tradition. It's again an example of how, you know, we don't need to look only to technology and to science in order to advance the cause of humanity and indeed of the planet as a whole. I think that for every, you know, every dollar and every minute that we invest in developing artificial intelligence, we should also invest

at least a dollar and a minute developing the good quality. of our own minds like compassion. Hi, welcome to the 100th episode of Endgame and also the 22 Ubutt writers and readers festival. I'm Gita where you want. I'm the host of Endgame. I'm currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University. Today's episode is very special, not only because we're collaborating with Southeast Asia's largest literary festival. but also because we're joined by two absolutely fascinating thinkers, Professor Yuval Noah Harari and Professor Mark Solmes. As you all know, Yuval is a public intellectual and historian

who studies the past, the present, and the future. He's written books inclusive of Sapiens, Homo Deus, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and has recently published a book entitled The Unstopper, the unstoppable us. And Mark Psalms, as you all know, has written quite a number of books, but most recently has published a book entitled The Hidden Spring. It reveals the theory of consciousness and also the role of emotions in our mental life.

I hope you enjoy this conversation. Gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on to our show. Thank you for inviting us. Great pleasure to be here. I want to just start off with a question for Mark. Mark, if you don't mind, please explain the difference between how the mind works and how the brain works before I asked further question and more questions with the both of you going forward. Well, they are actually the same thing looked at from two different points of view. So when you wake up in the morning with your eyes closed, you experiencing your mind, this is me, I'm alive, thank heavens.

Then you stagger over to the bathroom and you look at yourself in the mirror and you see this body, which is also you. So they're just two different perspectives upon the same thing. What's interesting about the mind is that we assume that not everything in the universe has this perspective, the capacity to be able to register its own states. So the really interesting thing is why does this part of nature, the brain, why does it also have this capacity to subjectively register its own states? That's the essence of what we mean by a mind. I want to ask the both of you.

First, to you, Mark, how do you think the mind would have evolved over time? And I want to try to put this in the context of evolutionary processes throughout history, which Yuval always talks about. And how you think that would have differed from the evolutionary process of the brain? Well, I think that they're part of the same evolutionary process. I think that one of the fundamental tasks of the brain is to register the state of the body. for it's to represent in some central way how we're doing in terms of all of our basic physiological needs. So that's one of the things the nervous system does.

The other thing it does is represents the outside world and enables us to act upon the outside world. So it's a sort of intermediary between the internal states of the organism and the external world, which is where all the things are that we need in order to maintain, internal states. So the evolution of consciousness, which ties to the point that I made a minute ago, the evolution of consciousness or the dawn of consciousness was when the first creatures with nervous systems became able to register with conscious feeling as things like, I'm getting too hot, I'm getting too thirsty, I'm running short of energy supplies. What that enables a creature to do is to act voluntarily.

It can now monitor whether what it's doing is improving or the opposite, making things better or worse for it in terms of its needs. Otherwise, all you have is reflexes. You can't deal with unexpected developments. So the evolution of the mind, the dawn of consciousness, which, by the way, I think long precedes the evolution of primates and hominids. The dawn of consciousness is in its simplest form, is just a creature being able to feel how well it's doing in terms of meeting its organismic needs. Wow.

Yvall, I'm curious of your views on this. But I think what's special about human minds and human evolution and human history is that our minds can create entirely new entities in the universe, in reality. As far as we know, before us, there are just two types of reality. You have objective reality, things that exist, no matter whether we believe in them or not. No matter whether we are aware of them or not. For instance, viruses are objective entities. Even if you don't believe in viruses, even if you don't know there are viruses, they can still kill you.

That's objective. Then we have subjective entities like pain or like dreams. They exist only in our mind, only in our awareness. If I have pain, if I feel pain, and nobody else in the universe feels it, it's still real. Because it depends only on my own mind. And that's true also of animal minds. Cows feel pain, chickens feel pain. What's really unique for humans as far as we know,

and this is the basis for human history, is the ability of humans to create new types of entities, not objective and not subjective, but intersubjective. Entities that exist between many minds. For instance, money. Money is not a subjective thing. It's not my personal dream or my personal pain. If I stop believing in the American dollar,

It's still there. Billions of other people still use it. But it's not objective either. Money is not an objective entity. It's not pieces of paper or coins of gold. Most money today in the world is basically just information passed between people. And even gold coins, they have no objective value. People can't eat them.

People can't drink them. They are completely useless. But together, we imagine. that this thing has value. And as long as everybody believes in the same story, it works. I can go to the market, meet a person that is a total stranger. I've never met them before. I give them some worthless money, which again, nobody can eat or drink or do anything with.

And in exchange, they may give me a banana that I can actually eat, which has real value. Money is something that exists, not in my mind, but not in the outside world, but in the connection between all our minds. And most of the important things in history are like that. Gods exist in our collective imagination. Nations exist in our collective imagination. No animal in the world knows that there are nations, that there is Russia and Ukraine and Indonesia and Israel. It's just a story that exists in our collective imagination. I want to, you know, Yuval, you always brought up the notion that money is just a story, right?

And what took us apart from primates or animals was our sheer ability to imagine. And as a result of our imaginative capabilities or abilities, you know, we, we, we, we started developing these social skills that would allow us to attain any kind of leadership in any dimension, right? Was this something that would have evolved in a certain way that made us different from animals? To the extent that, you know, the evolutionary process of the mind or our ability to imagine was to be. was taking place in a different manner from the way the brain was functioning

or evolving? It's based on the brain. I mean, we got this ability to create imagined reality to tell fictional stories. We got it through an evolutionary process. Sometime around 70,000 years ago, more or less,

humans of our species, because of changes in their brains, got this amazing ability to tell fictional stories. stories and imagine things together. But then what you see since then is relatively little further evolutionary change. Our bodies, our brains are more or less the same as they were 20,000 or 50,000 years ago. But what really took off is an extremely fast cultural evolution, which is based on this capacity to create things by just imagine.

Again, whether it's nations or gods or money, they are extremely powerful things because they enable unlimited numbers of strangers to cooperate. Chimpanzees can cooperate in very small numbers. Maybe 50 chimpanzees can cooperate on something. Humans can cooperate in unlimited numbers. Hundreds of millions of people in the same nation, billions of people in the same trade network. And we can do that because of our shared stories. That like this shirt that I'm now wearing, somebody on the other side of the world, maybe in Indonesia, produced it and gave it to me. Why?

Because I gave them this imaginary thing, money. And they are willing to accept it because they can take it and buy other things from other people who believe in this money. And this is why we control the world and not the chimpanzees. When millions of, on an individual level, I'm not significantly stronger or smarter than a chimpanzee. But when you are in a competition between millions of people and a handful of chimpanzees, it's obvious who is going to win. Mark, what do you think? Well, first of all, I agree. I have to agree.

we are a symbolic species. We deal with the sorts of currency and the broader sense of the word that Yuval's talking about. And the adaptation in the brain, the evolutionary anatomical physiological difference between our brains and chimpanzee brains, brains of other primates, is really not that big.

So it's a small adjustment in the connectivity of what's called prefrontal cortex, which seems to have given rise to this ability to think abstractly, it's like a re-representation, removing ourselves one further step from the concrete here and now, and that in turn gave rise to the development of language, which is an entirely abstract symbolic system, which then enables all of this communication in the broadest sense that Javall is talking about. What I would like to add to what he's saying is that, of course, we rightly are very preoccupied by what makes us unique, and we do have every reason to be very proud

as a species of these remarkable capacities that Yvald's been talking about. But we mustn't forget that with the evolution of this extra little bit of prefrontal cortical connectivity, that didn't remove everything that's under the cortex. So the subcortical, and in particular the limbic and brainstem arousal systems which underpin our emotional life, which underpin both our best and our worst emotional tendencies, that those are not that different from our primate cousins. So while we celebrate our uniquely human intellectual capacities, we have to remember that they float on top of this sort of ocean of animalistic tendencies. And it's best that we take account of those, that we remember those at the same time as we celebrate our humanness.

Mark, I want to, you talk a lot about rage, right? and we're witnessing a pretty high degree of rage right now that's happening in Ukraine. Would you argue that the rage within humanity hasn't really evolved that much in the last few thousand years? Well, I think that's a very good case in point. Clearly, you look at some human behaviors, and they are absolutely indistinguishable from, the affective attacks, the rage attacks that you see in other primates and indeed in many other mammal species. And we have to control this inclination when we're living in, as you've all said earlier,

we're living in an entirely different kind of social organizations. So when you're a little band of chimpanzees, you know, rage of that kind plays a very different role in the survival of the group and of the individual, than it does in the kinds of rule-based and large civilized societies that we live in now. But I want to point out, which is an example of what I mean, when I say that we do well to understand or to remember and better understand these emotional things that lie beneath our intellectual surface, that not all aggression is rage. So, for example, we distinguish between rage or hot aggression and what's called predatory aggression or cold aggression.

Like, for example, if a lion is running after a spring buck and sinks its claws into it and eats it, it doesn't mean it's in a rage. It's just looking for lunch. And that kind of cold predatory aggression is very different from the hot aggression, which is triggered by somebody's frustrating me, something's getting in my way, something's bestanning. something's standing between me and what I want. And there are two different brain systems involved there. And then there's a third type of aggression, which I think is very pertinent to the current situation in Ukraine and Russia, which is called territorial aggression or dominance behavior,

which has to do with claiming a territory, defending that territory, trying to position yourself as high as possible in the high rock, of the group that governs the territory. And I'm not using the word govern in the political sense. I mean, even in other mammal societies, they always form hierarchies. The higher you are in the pecking order,

the greater access you have to the resources of the territory. So this sort of aggression, territorial and dominance aggression, again, is quite different from rage, and it's quite different from predatory aggression. There's a lot more I could say about it, but the point I want to make is just that us understanding these different types of aggression, what sorts of things trigger them, how they work, I think it's not going to perform miracles, but I think it can contribute to us better understanding these very unpleasant aspects of our nature. And that's the first step toward being able to better control them. What's your view, Yuval? Go ahead.

I think that historically, the worst crimes in human history are not so much related to these animalistic types of aggression. It's a completely new type of aggression, which, again, rooted in imaginary stories. The things like World Wars and Holocaust and genocides, you rarely see anything like that in small groups of social animals. we are in a class of our own, in the types of crimes we are committing, because something like the Russian invasion of Ukraine doesn't, I don't think that it really comes from some kind of animalistic rage or territoriality. When people sometimes use it as a kind of excuse, that you excuse Putin and you excuse the Russian leadership,

which cold-heartedly decided on this criminal invasion, because you say, well, you know, it's not just human nature. It's in our gene, it's in our evolution, and it's not. These types of wars, they are a new thing in the world. They are not so much dictated by irresistible urges. We should hold political leaders responsible for such decisions. And, you know, from my view as a historian is that humans rarely fight about the same things as animals. Animals fight about territory, yes, because they need the territory in order to survive.

If you have two chimpanzee groups and there is a, I don't know, a grove of nut tree or fruit trees in the middle, they fight over possession of these fruit trees because if they don't have them, they might starve to death. In the case of humans, humans at least today or in recent centuries, they almost never fight. about things they really need to survive. In almost all cases, they fight about imaginary stories in their minds. If I take the case of my own country of Israel, and I look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so it's not really about territory.

It's not true that there isn't enough territory and resources between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, so there is no option but for Israelis and Palestinians to fight over the territory. They don't really need Jerusalem in order to survive. There aren't many fruit trees there. They are fighting because they have incompatible imaginary stories in their minds, and they cannot find a common story that they can both agree on.

There is enough land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River to build houses and hospitals and schools for everybody. What they lack is a story they can agree on. And if you look, for instance, at the history of Europe over the last century, so a hundred years ago, Europeans ruled most of the world, like Indonesia was a colony of the Netherlands, most of Africa or colonies of the British, the French. Even though they ruled almost all the world, they still fought each other, the Europeans. Why?

Not because they lacked territory, but because they lacked a story they can agree on. You look at recent decades at the European Union, and Europe mostly has become extremely peaceful, even though it lost almost all the territory it controlled. Why? Because the Dutch and the Germans and the French, they found a common story they can agree on. I'm with you in that there hasn't been that much of an evolution in terms of the animalistic tendencies of a human being. But the capacity of a human being to imagine seems to have changed for the worse, right?

Fictions are being created in a much more extreme manner. Stories are being created. And I want to put this in the context of what the both of you have been working on, more particularly by Mark in a context of consciousness, right? Mark, you have been talking about how consciousness is producible or engineerable. Is there hope that we can manage the ability of human being to create stories or imagine in such a way that we can shape humanity in a much more judicious manner? Well, let me link my answer to what Yuval just said, which incidentally I agree with.

The fact that we can imagine these ideas and agree or disagree about policies, that is on top of these base instincts which are still there. So we now have a responsibility to be able to find ways of managing with each other, which incorporate an understanding that we have these base inclinations. So although those inclinations are there, it doesn't absolve us, us humans all the more so, are not absolved of responsibility for how we conduct ourselves. And our ability to imagine abstract organizing principles enables us to imagine good ones, and also enables us to imagine terrible ones.

So these sort of industrial scale wars over ideas that Yuval's talked, about comes from the very same evolutionary advances as the best of our achievements come from. Now the same applies to the question that you're asking me about artificial consciousness, which is what you're alluding to. When I say that I believe that consciousness at least in its most basic forms, and I'm sorry if I sound like a nutcase to some of our audience, because certainly a good few years ago I would have thought anybody saying this is crazy. But I'll leave aside all the scientific reasons why I now do believe that it is possible for us to engineer an artificial form of consciousness.

I say the very same principle applies, which is that can be used for the better, which is what you are hopefully nudging us towards. You're saying, you know, how might this be of benefit? How might this make us more optimistic about the future of our species? But I'm sorry to say it equally can be used to our detriment, and it also can develop in ways that are not under our control to our detriment. So like so many advances in science, think just of what we've learned about nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. On the one hand, it's something for the good. On the other hand, it's something that is absolutely catastrophic.

So although I am involved in a project which fascinates me and which I'm really deeply committed to, where we are trying to develop an agent with artificial feelings, I'm very, very anxious about what the possibilities are as to how this can be used, and also how it might be used. fire on us. So yes, the fantastic opportunities for an artificial general intelligence arising out of the now, I think, imminent capacity to develop an artificial consciousness. But they also

are terrible risks, and we have to be the kind of collective decision-making and the collective cohering around ideas that Jovell was talking about. I think we need to do this fairly soon in terms of taking responsibility for the implications of artificial consciousness. You know, the work on ushering new kinds of artificial intelligence seems to be moving in a rather exponential manner, right? And this leads to, you know, the point that Yuval has repeatedly raised in that, you know, we're likely to become more and more inorganic. How do we deal with this future where humanity is going to become more inorganic?

How do we make it in such way that there is more or a higher degree of manageability to this? I'll ask to both of you. Well, that's probably your department more than mine. Well, I think it is extremely dangerous and we should slow down because we don't understand. understand the mind well enough, and we don't understand the body well enough to start manipulating them. And the danger is that if we give, you know, corporations and armies and governments, the technology to start manipulating the human bodies and minds and create, say, connections between brains and computers and so forth, we've learned so many times from history that they are likely to try and

enhance qualities that they need while ignoring many other important human abilities and characteristics, and the result will not be upgraded humans, it will be downgraded humans. To give an extreme example from history of how it works, a lot of kings and emperors and sultans in history had this problem that if they gave a lot of power to their ministers and generals, these minister and generals might turn against them, kill them, and try to establish their own dynasty. And this was always a problem for every emperor. So many emperors around the world, in China, in the Middle East, they came up with an amazing solution based on ancient biotechnology, which was castration, and the creation of a new kind of superhumans called

Unix. That if you as the emperor of China, You take this group of men and you cut off their testicles. Then you have this wonderful tool now, people that you can appoint to be ministers and governors and generals, and they cannot establish their own dynasty. So the danger they pose is much, much smaller. And we see this all over the world. Now, from the viewpoint of the emperor,

this solves his problem. But from the viewpoint of the unique themselves, this is, of course, a terrible catastrophe, a downgrade to what they are, to the humanity. And this can happen again in the future. Armies, for instance, if you think about the Russian army in Ukraine, so the Russian army needs more disciplined soldiers who would never run away, maybe also needs more intelligent soldiers who would make better decisions on the battlefield, but it has no interest in something like compassion. It's actually better for the army if their soldiers lack all compassion.

They never object to any order, no matter how horrible it is. They don't need their soldiers to have any autistic sensibility. They don't need their soldiers to have any spirituality. What does an army need spirituality in soldiers for? So if we give armies, and this is also true of corporations, the tools to start kind of re-engineering our bodies and brains and minds, the result could be a new type of humans who might be much more disciplined than us, much more intelligent than us, but have no compassion or very little compassion,

very little autistic sensibility, and very little spirituality, spiritual depth. So looking at the world as it is now, at the political, military, and economic situation, I hope that we don't gain the ability to start re-engineering humans or creating new kinds of cyborgs or inorganic humans anytime soon. Unfortunately, it seems that the technology is coming, very fast. And this is a huge, huge danger. This is, I would say, an existential danger to humanity. Not in the sense that the robots will rise up and kill all of us,

but in the sense that our humanity will be destroyed by all these manipulations and new technologies. This is where I think Marx's work come in handy, because to the extent that you can actually not alter, but hopefully, do something about the mind that basically is all about feelings, thoughts, experiences. I mean, you sound as if, you know, we need a future where humanity has more compassion as to try to be able to manage this artificially created intelligence which could go in a wrong direction. Is there a way, Mark, to try to bring about more compassion in humanity, artificially? I'm just curious.

That last word came as a surprise to me when you said, can we enhance our compassion artificially? That I don't think is the best way to go about doing it. But I want to say one thing prior to addressing that point directly, which is that alongside everything that you've always just said about the very real imminent dangers, because my fellow countryman, Elon Musk, for example, is hell-bent on doing the sorts of things that Yuval's talking about. And these are not science fictions anymore. These are really imminent,

imminent technologies coming to the market. I want you just mention one other thing alongside that, which is, you know, currently artificial intelligence is deployed by great corporations for the most part to perform tasks. They perform boring, exceedingly complicated calculations over and over again in order to provide us with widgets or information that we need. If we now develop an artificial consciousness so that these agents, these computers and robots actually have feelings of their own, then we need to pause for a moment and think, what about their rights? You're effectively creating a new type of slave, and we have to really wonder why do we want to do that? And so speaking of compassion, this might again sound odd.

But as soon as you start speaking about sentient computers and sentient robots, you need to start thinking about their rights because now they are capable of suffering. and some of the apocalyptic sort of images that we've been given by science fiction of battles between humans and artificial intelligences, become conceivable precisely on those grounds if we don't work together. But, again, I'm at risk of sounding like a nutter. So let me address your answer, I mean, address your question directly about comprehensive. I was talking earlier about our more basic instinctual dispositions, the things that we share with other primates and indeed other mammals that lie below the cortical mantle. Those are not all of them bad things. So, for example, attachment bonding, the forming of affectionate bonds.

It's something that all mammals do. In fact, even birds do it. That's a positive pro-social emotion, including not just that I want to be looked after and cared for, but also I want to look after and care for vulnerable, dependent others. That so-called maternal instinct or nurturing instinct is just that, an instinct. It's also part of our human nature. It causes us to stress to see somebody else in pain, to see a baby crying, to not be able to put matters to rights. And perhaps the best of all of these instinctual dispositions that are pro-social in nature is play. I don't know how many people realize all mammals play. Rough and

tumble play. You see it in squirrels, you see it in dolphins, you see it in dogs, you see it in mice, and you see it in our own kids. And play is a, I mean, you just observe how much fun it is and the glee and delight and the laughter that comes with it. This is an expression of an instinctual disposition in human beings and, as I say, indeed, in all mammals. And play the way that it works, we've studied it very deeply, not only in humans, the way that it works is that you have to cooperate. There has to be a mutuality and a reciprocity. There has to be turn-taking.

There's a thing called the 60-40 rule, which is that if the one playmate tries to dominate and call the shots too much of the time and doesn't give the other one a fair chance, then they won't play anymore. They say it's not fair, I won't play with you, and then the game's over, and then the fun's over. So play is, I think, something that the better we understand that because these dispositions, let me remind you, are hardwired into our brains, they're there. and because some of them are pro-social, the better we understand them, I think the better we can utilize them for the greater good. So I don't think that we need to develop artificial ways of enhancing our compassion. I think we do have alongside, I don't want to sound like I'm just being all kumbaya. We have alongside our really horrid dispositions. We also have things like these playful attachment bonding, nurture and caring dispositions.

And so my hope comes from there. If we can combine that with what you've always talking about earlier, our ability to imagine futures, our ability to cooperate through language and other symbolic systems, and to agree on ways in which we can live together giving expression to this aspect of our nature. I think that's where the hope lies, rather than in something more artificial in the technological sense. What do you think you are? Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, again, we know so little about how the mind really works and also how the brain really works

that we are very, very far from being able to artificially just produce compassion in a human being. On the other hand, we have good ways that we developed over thousands of years. of how to develop compassion, again, whether it's through play or meditation or psychoanalysis or many other methods developed by many cultures over history, some of them very effective, and we just need to make more use of them. I think that for every dollar and every minute that we invest in developing artificial intelligence, we should also invest at least a dollar and a minute in developing our own consciousness. And developing consciousness means developing the good qualities of our own minds like compassion.

So I don't think that we need in this sense to invent something completely new. We just need to pay more attention to what we already know. Look, Yvall, I know you practice meditation. and as a relatively new student of meditation, I get this notion that if you meditate, you can tap into the subconscious, you can tap into the unconscious. Would you share the view

that this could be something that could help bring about more wisdom? Meditation is basically bringing more attention to what's already in us. It's not creating anything new. We have very little awareness of most of what is happening in our mind and most of what is happening in our body. Our attention most of the time is outside. And therefore also, for instance, we tend to blame all the problems in our life on somebody else. And meditation, in essence, it's very simple.

You just reverse the gaze. You bring more attention to observing what's happening inside me. And inside me means both in the body. You pay more attention to your breath, the sensations in your body, and also what's happening within my mind. Like if some story arises in my mind about what somebody did to me, I don't start rolling in that story. I'm just observing what's happening.

Hey, I had this memory now coming up and look, suddenly a rage is also coming. And suddenly my breath is becoming much more stronger. And I have all these unpleasant feelings in my body. And just by bringing more attention, things that were previously subconscious or unconscious, they are now conscious. And it doesn't force you to do anything specific with. with them. But when you have a better understanding of yourself, of who you are, of why you do things, then naturally you tend to have a more, how to say, a more complete view of your place

in the world, a better understanding of yourself. And your decisions tend to be better and again, more compassionate, because in many situations, you realize it wasn't them. It's something in me. So, yes, I still act in the world, but I also pay much more attention to my own responsibility for situations. You know, I want to talk about the role of social media

and how it has polarized conversations, globally speaking, and how it has... affected the emotions of so many people around the world. And I'm getting more and more concerned about the idea that the amplification of narratives that are thick with hatred, divisiveness, anger, what have you, continue to get amplified, at the expense of narratives that would have been

a lot more judicious, which are not necessarily amplified, which are necessarily sitting within the silent majority. I kind of think that this has some bearing on not the animalistic tendencies of humanity, but the imaginative or imaginary capacities of humanity to think about, you know, the wrong kind of stuff. I'm curious of the views of the both of you. Well, I'll, I'll mark here. Yeah, I think Yovall will have more interesting things to say than me on that topic.

I think it's just, I want to comment on what he said before, and then I'll hand over the baton to him to address the thing about social media. I really want to hear what he has to say about it. The, except I'll say only that it's a further example of how advances in our technology and the intelligence. that lies behind it can be used for better and for worse. I mean, social media is a wonderful thing, but my God, it's really had some negative consequences, and I look forward to hearing what Yuval says about that. I just want to say about meditation, this is an ancient tradition. It's again an example of how, you know, we don't need to look only to technology and to science

in order to advance the cause of humanity and indeed of the planet as a whole. These are ancient wisdoms. Meditative practices are rooted in things we learned thousands of years ago. And the remark that Jouvel made about us having to know ourselves, this is know thyself is an ancient Greek dictum. It's not something new. And it's been developed in Western culture, in psychoanalysis, which I want to mention here, because as you said at the outset, one of the curious things about me is that I'm both a neuroscientist and a psychoanalyst. And the reason I trained in psychoanalysis was precisely because these sorts of things, the contemplative, introspective, subjective aspects of our humanity were not sufficiently prioritized in,

my basic discipline in neuroscience and neuropsychology. There's too much focus on, you know, the design of the functionality, the mechanisms, the information processing, etc. And not enough focus on these things which are profoundly important as you can gather from what you've always just saying. So psychoanalysis is like meditation, a way of getting to know yourself and to take better responsibility for yourself, to not look outwards. Freud said the mind is like the esophagus. It wants to flow in only one direction. We want to just look outwards. We don't want to look inwards. We strongly resist knowing ourselves, but it's an enormously powerful tool. So while we're making all these advances, let's not forget these ancient and relatively old

practices which are extremely valuable for us. But over to you, Yuval, I really want to hear what you have to say about the scourge of what's going on in our social media age. No, we can start from the end and say that it's very clear that something is broken in the information system of much of the world. We see it in democracies all over the world in a very different situation. The US, Brazil, Israel, you see the same tendencies of the conversation breaking down. People unable, political rivals, simply unable to hold a conversation, which is terrible, because democracy is simply a conversation.

That's what it is. Dictatorship is a dictate. Somebody dictates what to do. Democracy is a conversation between people with different views. When people with different views cannot talk to each other, that's the end of democracy. When they can't talk, the only thing left for them to do is to fight. Then you can establish a dictatorship, or you can have a civil war, but there will be a problem. is no democracy anymore. And why is it happening? It's not because of greater ideological

divides, because actually the ideological differences in places like the U.S. are smaller than they were 50 or 60 years ago. When you look at the actual things people argue about in the U.S. today, the differences are much smaller than they were in the 1960s. So it seems to be something else is happening, and one of the suspicions is that it's because of a our information technology. And the usual theory goes like this, that in the new information space, especially in social media,

there is a constant battle for attention. It's easier than ever to produce and broadcast, but then more and more people are fighting for a limited resource, which is attention. And how do you grab somebody's attention? And this goes back to what Mark was talking about, to all our deep animalistic tendencies, the easiest way to grab attention

is to press the anger button or the fear button or the hate button. And people, you know, they learn this and they press these buttons more and more. If you say something that makes a lot of people angry or makes a lot of people extremely fearful, it grabs their attention. If somebody says something far more,

moderate, it's less important. So there is this arms race of saying more and more outrageous and frightening and hateful things. And this destroys the ability to have a conversation. So that's kind of one thing about what's happening with social media. The other thing is really just a distraction that it's so, again, it became so good in grabbing our attention that it doesn't allow us to pay attention to almost anything else. And this goes back again to what we talked about, meditation and psychoanalysis, know thyself. If you're constantly just on your smartphone or just on the screen,

this is not knowing yourself. You're flooding yourself with more and more information from outside. And in the end, like going very, very at a very deep level, you can never be happy if you don't know who you are. It's just impossible. The deep source of happiness in the world is not control over the world. People think, in order to be happy, I need to control the world and arrange it to my liking, whether on a personal level or on a global level.

And it is impossible. You cannot do that. The real source of happiness is knowing who you're right. really are, knowing the truth about yourself, about your feelings. And you can't do that unless you look inside. And if you look inside, I think ultimately the truth about human beings is not so complicated, actually. When you look inside, you see a very simple mechanism at work. In the body, there are basically just two types of sensations, of feelings. There are pleasant sensations. And there are unpleasant sensations.

And the mind reacts to these two types of sensations in one of two ways. If it's a pleasant sensation, it wants more. If it's an unpleasant sensation, it wants less. It hates it. It wants to get rid of it. And that's the whole thing. This is what is happening all the time.

And when we do manage to get something we want and we have a pleasant sensation, we don't react with satisfaction. We react with wanting more. We crave for more of that. And this is endless. No matter what you achieve, if you don't understand this mechanism, no matter what you achieve, the reaction will simply be wanting more.

And you see the whole of human history, it's just that. You think about all the amazing things we have achieved, all the enormous power we have achieved over the last 50,000 years, from the Stone Age to today. We are thousands and thousands of times more powerful. We control the world to an amazing degree. Yet we are not significantly happier than we were in the Stone Age.

Because again, no matter what we achieve, we just want more. You know, I'm in a camp that sort of believes that the real cancer was when the like button was created as to create this unnecessary notion of virality which you know people would argue is correlated with you know rising cases of anxiety depression but but let me just interrupt you the like button yeah is exactly this mechanism externalized we have a like button in

our mind anything that happens in life at any moment it's I like this I don't like this I like this I don't like this this this is what has been happening you know also with animals for millions of years we go our around the world with a like button in our mind. And the kind of amazing or terrible thing of the like button, it externalized it. In this sense, it amplified it. That instead of just observing what's happening,

people are constantly in this mode, I like it, I don't like it. I like it, I don't like it. And what we need more in life is to step back and just observe what's happening. I mean, forget about whether I like it or not. Just try to understand what's happening. So this is such an important.

Go ahead, go ahead. If I may interrupt you, sorry. I think that what Yvall's saying is so important, I really want to underscore it. You know, when he said that basically what goes on in the mind is not that complicated. There's quite a simple principle at work. And then he speaks about likes and dislikes, you know,

pleasures and unpleasures, and the simple law of effect that lies behind that, which is anything that causes me pleasure, I want to do it some more, anything that causes me displeasure, I want to avoid it. That is really the most basic mechanism upon which the mind is based. But behind that mechanism is something that we call homeostasis. Homiostasis is a basic biological mechanism, which is not only a mental mechanism. It's the thing that underpins all life forms are homeostatic. And how homeostasis works is that there's somewhere where you need to be,

a certain temperature range, a certain blood pressure, a certain oxygen level, and so on. Deviations from that are bad. They're bad for your survival. And moving back towards your viable range is good. And so the feelings that you were talking about are built upon this homeostatic. mechanism. So moving away from your viable bounds is what a bad feeling is. This is not where I need to be. And a good feeling shows you heading in the right direction. But the point that I'm wanting to lead up to, which is links back to what we were saying about meditative practices and so on,

is that actually pleasurable feelings are not an end in themselves. This is the mistake that we make, is to think that, you know, that I need more and more and more of this pleasure. Because actually, once you're in your viable bounds, you're no longer feeling pleasure. You now feel satiation. In other words, now the need is met. And that's a kind of nirvana. It's a state of no perturbation, no demand for work, no distressing feelings. Feelings both of a pleasurable and an unpleasurable kind mean you're not in nirvana.

So I think that this idea of it's enough, which you've always was elusory. to. We must remember that this is based upon also probably the most fundamental mechanism in all biology. In some respects, recognizing these simple stark facts is all we need to do. That there is a viable range within which we need to be, and that's enough. You can't do better than that. Then, yeah, well, there I've said, I've said the thing. I wanted to. Mark, let me follow up on this. Are you suggesting that our homeostasis has shifted for the worse? No, I think that we're sort of short, I think I'm saying the same thing as you've all, but he'll tell me if, if in fact I'm putting words into his mouth. But I think that we've sort of short-circuited

the mechanism. We're tricking ourselves. And, you know, it's, so to just use one example, I was talking about attachment earlier. So in the brain, there's circuitry, in the mammal brain, there's circuitry which is evolved for encouraging us to stay close to our caregivers. This is because we mammals need to be fed. We can't look after ourselves when we're little. So we attach to a caregiver, and when we're separated from that caregiver, we then feel separation distress, a kind of panicky anxiety and and we cry and we search for the caregiver that mechanism is mediated by a brain chemical called mu-opioids and the word opioid I hope it will bring to people's minds opium and opiates they are opiates are artificial forms of this brain chemical so now if

you're in a state of separation distress in other words you're longing for somebody's care and love. There are two things you can do in order to meet that need. Either you can do the work that's necessary in the world, in reality, in relationships of finding out how do I get people to stay with me, to love me, to want to be with me, to care about me. That's the great task of life, is learning how to meet our emotional needs. Or you can do something else. You can just shoot up heroin. And then you'll have the feeling. The mu-opioids will be, will be, replenished but you've tricked this you've you've cheated you've whenever you try to cheat reality reality wins so these are ultimately very very self-destructive

ways of behaving of tricking the system and you'll note the role that feeling plays there so you get an artificial feeling of our life's a beach I'm chilled out this is great all my needs are met but in fact you haven't met you need. You haven't got somebody's love and care and detention, and that path is deathly. Yeah, I'll just add to that, again, from the historian's perspective, this happens on the level of an individual who becomes a drug addict. It also happens on the level of entire countries and wars who become power addicts. Again, we go back to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the Russians justify it with their need for security.

Now, they are the biggest country in the world, and they still feel insecure. They still feel that they must have this territory in order to feel secure. And if they had this territory, it would not end there. They would want more and more. And again, it's all something that happens inside. Because again, if you look at the international situation in 2022, which country was about to invade Russia? No country.

I mean, they talk about the security needs, but can they name a country which was actually about to invade them in 2022? Were the Germans massing their armies to invade Russia? Or the French, did Napoleon get out of his grave in order to again march on Moscow? No. They had, again, in the Russian elite in their mind, they felt very insecure. They built this fantasy and threw their insecurity on names. on the West, on all kinds of boogeymen, and felt that we must invade Ukraine in order to feel secure.

And, you know, this is very much like the heroin addict. They are not looking inside to really see where the insecurity is coming from. It's not really coming from the Germans about to invade them. It's coming from within their own worldview, from within their own minds and fantasy. You know, it sounds like we need a lot more compassion going forward. And I want to seek your wisdom on how do we science compassion more into humanity, be it from a psychoanalytical standpoint or any other point of view? Well, I think that building on what we've discussed already, the need to look at the need to look at

inwards and to see what's motivating you to recognize especially unwelcome facts about yourself. You know, we don't want to face up to facts. We especially don't want to face up to unwelcome facts. But they are facts. They're there. And if you don't face up to them, they're still there. You just have less chance of being able to take account of them and therefore less chance of being able to do the wise and realistic thing. this this introspective imperative that we've been talking about knowing ourselves seeing this the subjective state of things all that's needed is a further step to recognize that you know just as much as my inner world my inner life is the center of everything for me so too is everybody else's for them you know the the we all of us are subjects we all of us have feelings we all of us have inner world we're all the same so the more that you recognize the importance and the nature of your own inner mental life

i think the the better opportunity you have the better possibility you have for being able to recognize other people are not objects they're subjects other people have feelings other people have needs just like mine and so although it might sound kind of um kind of contradictory, I think that exactly what you've always said earlier in terms of knowing ourselves, I think that, and properly recognising the reality of ourselves, of our own inner selves, paradoxically, I think that is the route to being able to take more seriously and take more account of the inner world of our, of our conspicuous. as we call them in biology. In other words, the other members of our species.

I completely agree, and I think that the key thing to understand is that not just compassion, but the whole of morality is about suffering. You have people who believe that morality is about obeying certain outside laws, whether the laws of a country or the laws of religion, religion, that there is a certain set of laws coming from outside, and I'm a moral person if I obey these laws. And these people also, they sometimes wonder, if you reject my religion or if you reject, I don't know, my culture or my nation, how can there be morality?

People will just kill and rob and whatever. And we know from history that this isn't true, that you don't really need any religion, You don't need any government in order to have morality, because morality is not about obeying a certain set of laws that is coming from outside. Morality is about suffering. It's about reducing suffering. A moral action is an action that doesn't cause suffering, or ideally even reduces suffering, helps people, helps myself,

and helps other people be liberated from suffering. and a very important insight is that when you cause suffering to others, very often you're also causing suffering to yourself. When you, for instance, if you want to kill somebody else, you don't do that unless you first develop an enormous amount of hatred or rage or greed within yourself. You don't just go around killing people for nothing. And when you observe yourself, you will find out that it's extremely unpleasant.

It's extremely miserable to feel a lot of rage. Rage is not a nice feeling. If you think about what happiness is, happiness is a state free of rage. So when I develop rage against somebody else, I may kill this person. Maybe I never kill them. Maybe I hate my boss and I constantly fume against my boss, but I can't kill him. So I'm not harming him, but I'm harming myself every moment that I keep feeding this raging flame of rage. So it's not just in order to help him.

It's first and foremost to help me to be more happy to dampen down this level of rage inside myself. And I think this is what morality and compassion is all about. And very often people think about morality in terms of a kind of you give up something, you make yourself miserable so that somebody else will be better off. You're doing it for them. But no, very, very often, it's a win-win situation. When you're nicer to other people, most of the time, you also feel better yourself. You're not giving up anything.

You're gaining something. Yvalh, as a historian, you would probably reckon that the degree of rage, the lack of morality that we're witnessing in humanity today probably would not have evolved for the worse from the past. But your concern is driven a lot more by the fact that technological innovation has gone in a much more exponential manner to the point where you seem to believe that the margin of error has gotten much smaller nowadays.

Yeah, I mean, it- Is that the right way to think about it? It's obvious when you have somebody in rage and they have a spear knife, that's very different than when you have somebody in rage and they have their finger on the button of the nuclear weapons. in enough rage and they can destroy the whole of humankind. And if now we develop even more ways to destroy our humanity

with artificial intelligence, with bioengineering, with so forth, so the danger just grows and grows. You know, you think about a figure like Hitler, so he inflicted so much misery in suffering on hundreds of millions of people, but ultimately he couldn't change humanity itself. He didn't have the tools to change the human body or the human mind. So you can say it's like a computer game that we kind of failed collectively, but then we got another chance.

Like at the end of the war, we are back to level ground. We are back to the first stage. we can try again. Maybe this time we can build a better world. But you think about the Hitler's of the 21st century, and it's different. The Hitler's of the 21st century, they will have the ability not just to wage destructive wars. With tools like AI and bioengineering, they will actually be able to re-engineer the human body and mind, which is something the Nazis dreamt about. They always talked about creating the superhumans, the new humans. They couldn't do it.

They didn't have the technology. Now, imagine a new Nazi regime in the 21st century that uses technology to re-engineer new humans. Now, even if this regime eventually falls, the new humans, the new human bodies and minds would be there. They can permanently alter the course of human evolution in a way that the Nazis couldn't, the Soviets couldn't, the Soviets couldn't, no previous regime could.

And this is a very, very frightening scenario. Wow. A friend of mine was asked, a friend of mine was asked recently what their view was about future prospects. And his answer was, I think, very apt to what Yuval's just been saying. His answer was, I'm cautiously pessimistic.

Look, we're getting to the end of our session here. I want to ask the both of you a question on democracy. We're sort of like witnessing how democracies are not functioning the way they ought to. And I want to seek your wisdom on how you think democracy could be reshaped for the better, be it from psychoanalytical point of view or any other point of view. I'll start with you, Mark. Well, you're starting with the wrong person, because again, I think this is really Yvall's department. He has so much more.

But we got to make it interesting. Yes. Give us some hope. Yes. I think that, just to say perhaps the obvious, with all of these intellectual and symbolic capacities that we started this conversation discussing, you know this has enabled us to record historically record information about what we have done in the past and what what the consequences have been and so because we have this capacity this scholarship we and increasingly so you know the the the capacity to store and and analyze the events of the

past we have simply put a better opportunity to not be condemned to repeating history the terrible historical events that Yuval was talking about of the previous century you know they are better documented better remembered better recorded than all the prior genocides that they've been throughout the history of our species and so you know please god let us learn from that the current events, when Yovol spoke of the Hitler's of the 21st century, then he said they are going to be. And I thought, well, they are being. Of course, they already are Hitler's of the 21st century among us right now. And all we can hope for, all I can hope for, is that we remember, we know, we now know what our inclin, what the potentials are, how. How, we can hope for, how.

how what we can what awful things we can do and how it ends so you know I just hope we learn from those lessons but please note that here we are talking again on a national scale or on an international scale about the thing that we were talking about on a personal scale earlier which is once more simply facing the facts looking inwards facing up to unwelcome facts This is all we need to do, to learn from our own past, from our own histories, and not to repeat the mistakes of the past. This contemplative, introspective attitude, I think, is in very short supply. And again, I think that's the answer. Yvall?

Yeah, I definitely agree. And I would add to that that people need to understand what democracy is. Democracy is not elections. Elections are just one mechanism for democracy. At worst, they can become like a ritual. There are many dictatorships in the world right now that hold elections as a kind of ritual, which is devoid of all meaning.

So what is really democracy? Democracy is a conversation. It's an ongoing conversation. It must start long before the elections and it must continue after the election. And what conversation is all about is really the ability to listen to other people, also to look inside you, and correct your mistakes.

Democracy is about self-correcting mechanisms. Election, again, is one self-correcting mechanism. We voted for the wrong party four years ago. We can now make a different vote. That's a self-correcting mechanism. It's a bit like the homeostasis that Mark was talking about, that you put your hand in boiling water, you take it out, you put it in cold water,

you take it out, you put it in like medium temperature water, okay, that's what I was looking for. So you do the same thing with political parties. And then you have other self-correcting mechanisms like a free press or like academia. The government does some crime and tries to hide it, so there is a free press that can expose it. There are academics that can give a different,

viewpoint. You have independent courts, so you can take the government to court and say this new law that you're passing, it's unconstitutional. Democracy needs a lot of these self-correcting mechanisms, so if one fails, the others still are intact and allow the conversation to continue. Dictatorships usually have no self-correcting mechanisms. Dictatorships, they put their hand in hot water, in boiling water, they don't take it. out. They put it even deeper. They blame it on somebody else. This is what, again, Putin is doing in Ukraine. He made a terrible mistake with initially with the invasion, and he is incapable of admitting that he made a mistake and correcting it. And there is no institution in Russia that is able to point out a mistake, not the parliament, the Duma, not, there is no free press, there is no free academic sphere,

there are no independent quotes, so they just double down on the mistake. And as in the body of a human being, so also in a political body in a country, I think it's really all about the ability to admit mistakes and correct them. A dictator can make again and again good decisions. It's still not a good enough

argument in favor of dictatorship because sooner or later everybody makes mistakes. For 10 years he made the right decisions some new situation comes, he makes the wrong decision. What do you do now? You can't get rid of him. He will just double down on it. So I think it's essential for the health of our democracy that people remember what democracy is. It's not elections.

It's not the dictatorship of the majority. It's an ongoing conversation which is made possible by maintaining strong self-correcting mechanisms. Wow. Thank you so much. Thank you so much to the both of you, Yvall and Mark, for attending our session today. Thank you and I hope the next time we can do it in-person. It's- In-person and I hope in Bali would love to meet up or in Cape Town, Mark, wherever you are. are. Yes. I remember very well the old days when we used to meet in person. Yes. Okay guys, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks. Bye-bye. That was the 100th episode of Endgame. I want to take this opportunity to thank you for the unwavering support for Endgame in the last couple of years. If you have time, take a look at the links in the box below,

as to try to find out how you can participate in the discovery of Southeast Asia's future narrators. I also want to take this opportunity to thank our friends at the Ubud Riders and Readers Festival in this discussion, a very rich discussion and a reality. And if you have a chance, come and join the many extraordinary thinkers and writers So we're going to be in Bali on October 27 until 30, 2022. So you can figure out how to unleash thoughts in words. Take care. This is end game.