Good Life Project - The Mind Club: Who Is In, Who Is Out and Why It Matters

Episode Date: July 17, 2016

This week on The Good Life Project, our guest is social psychologist and professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Kurt Gray. Kurt studies mind perception and morality. In his research, Kurt is trying to answer questions about the true nature of human beings, from good and evil to why we attribute human-like qualities […]The post The Mind Club: Who Is In, Who Is Out and Why It Matters appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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More richly appreciate the minds of others. So it's very easy to us to ignore that they exist. It takes effort. It takes work to understand that there are other minds like you or I, and they have the same rich experiences that we do. And so to enrich our lives and to make the world better, not only do we have to connect with other people and understand that they have rich emotions, but also see those minds as worthy of moral status.

Kurt Gray, this week's guest, is a social psychologist and professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the author of a really interesting book called The Mind Club. And he has spent the better part of his career researching the mind and morality and why we do what we do. And in this conversation, we go deep into these topics. And there's some shocking things. There's some interesting things. The idea that animals, plants, and even robots may in fact have minds, and how that changes the way that we behave in the world. Really excited to share this conversation with you. And it may even give

you a little bit of a hint into how our lives may change in the future with technology. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Really fun to be hanging out with you. I spent a little bit of time exploring your work, and I'm curious about you and what's made you curious about what you're curious about too. Let's take a step back in time before we kind of dive into your current work. So you grew up in Canada as you were just telling me. Yeah. Yeah. Me and in fact, my coauthor of the book, we're both from Calgary, Alberta. No kidding. Did you know each other? No, no.

Because he was more, he was older than you. Yeah, he was 65 and right, so I'm 30. Yeah. Tell me about Dan actually. Dan Wagner's the coauthor of the book. It seems like you opened your book with sort of a one-page interesting tribute. Yeah. So clearly he was a really important person in your life. Yeah, he was definitely an inspiration to me and forged me in his image. So being an academic, it's really an apprenticeship model. And so I came to work with him and, you know, he starts out, he do his grunt tasks and then he kind of gives you ideas and kind of builds up your mind and his own image in some sense. So I feel like I have a really good sense of what Dan's mind is like because through all my interactions, you know, I, in some sense, have become very similar to Dan.

Of course, we started out very similarly. So I applied to a bunch of places for grad school and I applied to Harvard kind of funnily enough as a safety it felt like. So I thought, you know, this guy's research is interesting, but I think I'm going to go to Carnegie Mellon instead and do some decision making stuff. And then I was taking the year off to go to Australia surfing. I got back from picking grapes one afternoon as a job. We were doing that. By the way, already, this is not the typical postdoc story. Right, totally.

I was hanging out in Australia surfing, picking grapes one day. Totally, totally. So driving back from picking grapes, and then my cell phone rings, and it's Dan Wegner. And I guess he tracked down my number from my grandmother in Calgary. And he phones me and he says, you know, I looked at the application. I'd like you to come to grad school with me. And I was like, this is pretty sweet. I think it's an opportunity I can't, I can't pass up. And so I thought about it for a little while. I accepted his offer. And then I emailed him to say, I accept the offer. Now you're like bound to have me. And

I should just say that while I was surfing, I suffered this massive head trauma, which is not true. But I said, I suffered this massive head trauma. And now all I can do is basically just sit there and drool. But like I signed up. And so you're stuck with me for six years. And he said, you know, I'm thrilled to be able to clean the newspaper in your office every day. So clearly we had a good sense of humor kind of connection to start with. And it only got better from there.

Yeah. And it's interesting because I wasn't familiar with him. But seeing that you worked on the book with him, I actually went back and looked at some of his research, which is really fascinating, too. And I can see why there was this deep connection. You can sort of see this lineage through your work as well. It was interesting. It's something that I guess he became known for, which was the ironic process theory. Am I getting that right?

Yeah, that's right. It's something that we know like commonly, you know, very differently. It's, you know, like the white elephant or the white bear syndrome. And it's something that I struggled with a lot. I have tinnitus, which means I hear a sound in my head constantly.

In the early days, you know, all you're doing is telling yourself, don't focus on the sound, stop. And we all do this, you know, with different things. It's like, you know, don't focus on the sound stuff. And we all do this, you know, with different things. It's like, you know, don't focus on this thing that's bothering me. Right. Which I guess. Try not to think about book sales. Right. Exactly. The process. And it becomes the only thing you can think about. And that, I guess, was one of the big things that he was known for researching in the earlier days. Yeah. And the second thing he was

known for researching was the illusion of conscious will. Tell me about that. So he's got a book. We talk about it in our book as well, but he's got this book called The Illusion of Conscious Will. And what he argues is that we have free will in some sense in that we decide to do something and then we do it. But we don't have this kind of ultimate metaphysical sense of free will. And there's a classic study that he talks about, and it's by a gentleman named Benjamin Libet or Libet. And what the study is, is people look at an oscilloscope, you can imagine a stopwatch going rapidly around a circle. And all the subject has to do is say, move their arm and say when they got the urge to move their arm. So that's all the subject has to do. You're going to move your finger, move your arm, and then just report the time at which you decided to move your finger.

And then what he did was he looked at the brain activity in your supplementary motor area, which is the part of the brain, the kind of unconscious part of your brain, that begins to move your finger. Right. And so all he had to do then was compare the times. What came first, the decision to move your finger or the brain activity that actually

starts to move your finger? Which you're completely unaware of. Right. Right. And so what he found was that indeed your brain starts to move your finger before you decide to move it, suggesting that this like sense of free will we get every time we do something is illusory. Yeah, which is so fascinating, too, because I think we love to hang on the idea that we're in control. Exactly.

You know, that if we do something as simple as moving your finger, it's because we made a decision to actually do this. And then when you move it into the bigger context of life, you know, like the really big things. And so research like that, that shows that in fact, there may be, I guess, I don't know what you would call it, a subliminal subconscious script running. That's much more in control. It's basically what it's saying. Yeah, I think it's basically saying that our unconscious brain is responsible for both our actions and our conscious experience. So there's this like third variable in some sense, which we have no control of that makes us move and gives rise to our thoughts as well. Yeah. Which, like I said, we don't like to acknowledge.

That's true. Yeah, certainly. Because all of a sudden it's like, so you're telling me I'm a puppet. Yeah. Well, I think the way around it is to think that you're a puppet of your own brain. And so in some sense, if you think, well, I'm just my brain, that's okay. Right? Because then you're a puppet of your own brain. And so in some sense, if you think, well, I'm just my brain, that's okay. Right. Cause then you're a puppet of yourself, but most people don't see themselves as that way. Right. They see their mind is severed from their brain.

Yeah. I mean, the question that becomes for me, is there some way to alter those subconscious scripts that are running or to in some way rewire your brain so that you feel like you have some stronger sense of control or will. Maybe. I feel like what psychology usually shows us is the way to make ourselves better is to capitalize on the fact that we're basically robots. So there's this finding called implementation intentions. There's a psychologist named Peter Goldwitzer, and I have some colleagues that work on it as well. And the idea is that to get yourself to do something, what you should do is set yourself a definite plan and give yourself an instruction

so that it becomes automatic. I'll give you an example. So I say, when I get home, then instead of going to the living room and watching Netflix, I will turn left and go to my office and start working on a manuscript. That's, that's like the whole of the thing, right? You just say, if or when, then X, right? If I want to not eat that chocolate cake, then I will close the fridge door and walk over to buy some celery. And basically that conceives of us as like robots. I'm giving myself a very simple program and it turns out it works much better than trying to exert, you know, conscious will or exert self-control. You just kind of like subconsciously execute this program. So the idea is before a circumstance happens, like anticipate that this is going to arise and then sort of like give yourself an instruction in advance. And then you're more likely to kind

of run that script when the actual thing happens. Exactly. Because it'll pop up at the right time. Right. Yeah. Interesting. Exactly. Ah, that's so fascinating.

And now I have to experiment with it. It works. So this study they did was amazing. They asked college students to write an essay over Christmas and then mail it in. Which I'm, that's not exactly something college students are going to want to do, right? Never do this, right? And so they told one group just to like try as hard as you can and make sure you do it. And then I think about a quarter of people sent it in.

The other group, they said, you know, imagine the time and place you're going to write this and tell yourself when this time happens, then I will go and write this essay. That's the only difference between the groups. And in this group, 75% of students sent in the essay. So that's a huge difference from 25% to 75% based on this one simple instruction. Pretty incredible. Yeah, that's massive. It's interesting.

I became aware, I think it was last year, of, I don't know how to pronounce her name. Maybe you did Gabrielle Aitengen? Yeah, let's go with that. Yeah, close enough. Her work, which was really about how do you make things happen that are challenging. And she was looking at sort of a similar thing, but she was- So she's married to Peter Golitzer. Oh, no. The person who does this stuff.

So that's why it's all connecting in my head here. Right. And I guess they added in this step of also anticipating what you perceive to be an obstacle that would arise. And then pre-programming, like you're saying, if it does arise, what's your plan in advance to deal with it? And I guess that's the part where it made the outcome so much more likely to happen, you know, the desired outcomes that you sort of envision. Oh, that's interesting. All right. So it's all come full circle.

That's all connected. Let's kind of talk a little bit about your most recent, actually, before we get to the book that you have out now and your work around the mind, there's something else. You have a TEDx talk that was out that was fascinating to me. And it went into the connection between embodied strength, I guess, and thinking. Take me down that road a little bit because it's so interesting. Yeah. So this also connects to some stuff in the book. But the idea is that we conceive of heroes to have certain minds and certain physical capacities. Right. So when we think of someone who does good or even does evil but mostly does good, we think that they have a special capacity for agency, we call it.

The capacity for action and doing and personal strength and tenacity. And what we did in a study was test whether thinking of yourself as a hero and acting like a hero kind of through this process of embodiment actually transforms you into more of a hero. And so very simple study, we gave people a dollar and then half the people we said, keep that dollar. And the other half of people, we said, you can give that dollar to charity. And everyone did because we just gave them a dollar. And of course they can give it away. And then we asked them to hold a five pound weight just outside, like their arm at a right

angle, I guess you could say. They held a five pound weight for as long as they possibly could. And what we found was that those who donated the dollar to charity could hold the weight significantly longer than those who kept it. And it's even worked if you just thought about yourself and doing something good, like just thinking about helping someone else gives you increased personal power. So which is, I mean, on the one hand, it makes sense. But on the other hand, it's really kind of freakish. Because is there a mechanism that you've been able to identify that would sort of make that happen physiologically? So I think the mechanisms are kind of the boring psychology mechanisms of kind of self-fulfilling prophecies in some sense.

You see yourself as something and then you slowly become that and also embodiment, right? So you think a certain way and your body becomes that. But I think at the crux of it is how we perceive the minds of heroes. And that's what really drives it. We perceive the minds of heroes in a very specific way of having specifically powerful minds. And that is what makes us powerful when we become them. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense also in terms of working in that direction. And also the work of Bessel van der Kerk on sort of the somatic embodiment, like unwinding trauma and stress and PTSD in the body. And the work is really showing that you've got to unwind it physically.

You've got to unwind the embodied element of it to actually reverse engineer it to the mind. So it's kind of interesting because it makes sense that it would work both ways. Yeah. So the other thing that it brought up with me, it was just kind of interesting, is this I've always really doubted things like affirmations. Yeah. So the other thing that it brought up with me, it was just kind of interesting is this, I've always really doubted things like affirmations. Okay. But it's interesting because it would kind of explain the possible science behind why certain affirmations might actually have a physiological or an embodied effect. Yeah. I think. Or not. The way you're looking is like, I don't know about that. Yeah. So I guess I would just say, I think. as Gandhi. Like many of us, you know, we're sitting on a couch, we're maybe listening to a computer, we don't think that we could do something like Gandhi could do. I go weeks

without eating, right? I can barely, I fasted once, I made it to like 3pm, right? I like skipped lunch a little bit. But this suggests that the way you become able to do these deeds is actually just to start doing good. So if you look at Gandhi's early life, he wasn't very amazing. In some sense, he went away to school, and he just, you know, kind of did school in the UK and then he came back and then he was inspired to do good, right? To help India from free itself from colonial rule. And then by doing good, he became able to exert this kind of exceptional self-control. Right. So what this suggests is that to be a hero, don't wait to have the special abilities,

just start doing good. And those abilities will come. Right. So it's more action-based than thought or, you know, like repeating a sound or a word or space. Yeah. All right. That makes me feel good. But it's also, it's, it's kind of like, I wonder if it's self-reinforcing to a certain extent also, because, you know, if you go and do a small act, you know, you also, you get a dopamine hit and it makes you feel good and you want to do more of that. So it's sort of like, it's almost like a brain is wired to keep reinforcing doing more of that. It's totally a cycle, right? And if you become more agentic, you become more able to do good, which makes you more agentic and so forth.

So it's the positive spiral there. But I guess also, you know, we have the opposite spiral that so many people experience, which is, you know, if you don't take these actions, does it create sort of a negative effect where you're become less and less and less and less likely to do them? And I guess maybe that's implicated in some level in depression. Yeah. And we have some work that shows we did a similar kind of experiment with thinking of yourself being a victim. And we didn't have them hold a weight, but we had them put on a very itchy scarf. Like this is the worst fabric I could find.

It's like terribly, the cheapest, grossest. A sandpaper scarf. Exactly. And what we found is that those who thought of themselves as more of a victim experienced more discomfort. It really kind of caused them in some sense more pain and suffering. So the kind of mental perception of themselves as victims cause themselves more physical discomfort right i mean it also brings into into the conversation the idea of primes i read some research a while back i don't remember who it was from where a group of students you know

two groups of students where one group was told hey you're about to take a test and we know definitively that you know like men do 30 worse than women and the other group was told the exact opposite and in fact the test was identical and there was no research which was completely made up but but the results tracked what the prime was what you know the statement was to them so it literally it seems like it temporarily altered their cognitive function yeah i mean that we create the world right yeah that we act in just with our perceptions and that's uh right and that's what the book's about as well, right? Right. So let's kind of zoom into that because you have basically this treatise on the mind.

Right. Or at least in how we perceive it. Right. Exactly. So first, just bigger question, which is what kind of brought you to the point where you wanted to devote this much time and energy to creating a body of work around the idea of, quote, the mind mind so i think i'm most interested in moral issues my moral judgment moral conflict right people kill others every day because they have different moral beliefs and i wanted to know what lied at the root of that moral disagreement and the more i dug the more i realized that our moral judgments are actually based on something totally invisible and in some sense, insubstantial. And that is the mind, right? How we perceive the minds of others. And so one example that's illustrative is about abortion, right? So

many people believe strongly in their opinions about abortion and they see the other side is like villains in some sense, right? Is evil evil. But really, we all agree that babies deserve to live and deserve to be cherished. And we just disagree about the minds of fetuses, right? Whether we should see a five-month-old or a three-month-old or a two-month-old fetus is having a mind and whether we should privilege the kind of potential mind that they might have when they're four years old or 18 or becoming presidents and so forth, right? And so this debate isn't about morality. In some sense, it's really about mind perception, about who or what belongs in the mind club.

Yeah. So you just brought the term the mind club out. So take me deeper into that. Yeah. So the mind club is just that collection of entities that can think or feel or think and feel, right? So you belong in the mind club and I belong in the mind club is just that collection of entities that can think or feel or think and feel. Right. So you belong in the mind club and I belong in the mind club. Arguably different in different people's minds. They may agree. It's hard to know. I mean, that's the mind club.

Right. You can never be sure. Right. So presumably our listeners also believe in the mind club that they're in the mind club. But there's many things that whose membership is unclear. So entities like animals or machines, right? The example I use is, is people's dogs or cats, right? So I have cats and I definitely think they're on the mind club, right? I sing to my cat sometimes and I have conversations and I think they have personality and deep emotions,

but then I have friends come over and they just see like a furball that tries to like scratch them. Right. They don't see a mind. They just see a little furry robot program to act in certain ways. And I think a lot of people have that way with their own pets. Right. They ascribe a rich mind to them. But other people don't see that same mind.

And that's really what the mind club is all about. The ambiguity of mind and how that relies on perception. Right. So it's the idea of if you have a mind or other beings perceive that you have a mind, at least in their mind, you're a member of the mind club. Exactly. Yeah. It's a little bit meta there, but it's interesting, right? Cause you use the example of, um, of a cat or, or of a pet and you know, it, it's interesting because you have, I think, you know, there are pet people or there are cat people, there are dog people. And depending on who you are and your personal orientation, you may or may not, you know, be more or less likely to see your own animal or

somebody else's animal as either just this inanimate object with no intrinsic value or, you know, like reason to preserve it or protect it in any way, shape or form, or you may see it as prize member of the family. And I guess part of what you're arguing is like that the difference between that is whether you perceive them as having a mind. Absolutely. I mean, you can see that with vegetarianism, right? So people who are meat eaters, look at pigs and say, that's dinner, right? That's like a robot filled with delicious bacon, right? Whereas a vegetarian will perceive a rich mind behind it. There's an example we use in the book about turkey farmers. And there's two passages. One is a turkey

farmer who is a factory farmer. And he talks about the birds in terms of numbers, right? We lose this much percentage of birds and we care about this much yield. And another turkey farmer talks about the birds in terms of numbers, right? We lose this much percentage of birds and we care about this much yield. And another turkey farmer talks about the personality of his birds and how they're smart. And it's no surprise that the one who talks about the personality is kinder to his birds, right? He sees them as deserving moral status, whereas the factory farmer keeps them in small cages and pumps them full of antibiotics, right? Very different experiences of raising turkeys based upon mind. Yeah. So, and I guess that's really the bigger point or the bigger

conversation is that our decisions about who or what has a mind or doesn't leads to profound change in the way that we interact with, we value, we treat other people, beings, things on the planet in that way can have disastrous or really beneficial effects on the lives or not lives of those other things, but also on us. I think it's whether, and this is something that you explore also, the idea of, go back to the early pet example, right? If you live in a house and you're alone and there's a cat in the room, you know, your perception about whether that animal actually, you know, has a mind or not probably really profoundly changes your experience of the world.

Absolutely. In fact, there's a bidirectional link there. So what research has found is that the more you lack social connection, the more you kind of need a mind in your life, the more you see minds elsewhere. Right. So there's a there's a reason that when I lived alone in D.C., I really perceived a lot of mind in my cat. It's the same reason that Tom Hanks befriended a volleyball and cast away. Right. He was like bereft of human experience. And so he made it. At the same time, people who are really connected to others who feel really accepted and a part of the group can also, in a kind of bad way, see less mind in others.

So there's a study that shows when people think about how they feel connected at Thanksgiving dinner to their families, they're actually less likely to perceive mind in those of other religions and other races. So, and take me into what's the negative fallout of that then? So, the negative fallout is you're more likely to recommend that people can be tortured or even put to death because you're like, well, I have my group of people and I feel fulfilled. And so, I don't need to think about people outside that group as having minds, as being able to feel and deserving moral status. Yeah. So, it really creates, you're more likely, I guess, than to sort of have like a stronger us versus them and them being like not worthy of respect, value, treatment, preservation. Exactly. Yeah. So we split the world in terms of us and them and us's have minds and them's often don't. Yeah. Which at this point in our culture and our history and the state of the world is a big deal.

Certainly, yeah, with all the religious violence and terrorism, right? It's easy to characterize others as mindless. And in fact, psychology suggests that we take mind away from others in two ways. One of them is we turn them into animals. This is often what happens in slavery. So you see people as livestock, right? That it's your duty to protect so they can feel, but they can't think. On the other hand, there is a way of dehumanizing that you turn people into robots. So you strip their ability to feel and

believe that they can still think. And this is what happened, for instance, for the Japanese in the Second World War. They were put in internment camps. They were seen as evil and scheming, but not as the ability to feel, right? So you want to separate them and not care for them. So very different consequences. And then the worst is just total dementalization. And that's what happens in things like the Holocaust, where people are just seen as objects, right?

Things to be put on a train. Yeah, I mean, what's interesting and somewhat terrifying to me too, is we're having this conversation in the context of let's call it um a very antagonistic electoral season in the united states we have very international listenership here but you know you guys you've probably heard the news even if you're not in the united states it's been very aggressive and some people have said you know like fiercely antagonistic is probably a kind way to put it. And it seems like the things that you're talking about, like understanding the deeper layer and the messaging that creates an

us versus them scenario can allow you to either bridge a gap or deepen a gap and then use that gap to try and mobilize people for a particular outcome. Right. So I think in the gap and then use that gap to try and mobilize people for a particular outcome. Right. So I think in the American election, a lot of people feel the way they do is because they feel like victims. So we can see ourselves going back to the TEDx talk, we can see ourselves as kind of heroes or villains. And the more you see yourself as a victim, which I think many Americans do, because wages are stagnating or the opportunities aren't there that they thought they were promised, they see the rest of the world in terms of victims or in terms of villains, sorry. So if you're a victim, everyone else is a

villain or a hero. So that's why Donald Trump is a hero, right? He's a strongman or Bernie Sanders is a hero. So it's like perception of victimhood transforms the rest of the way that we perceive the world. Yeah. So if a political player or a business player sort of like understood this dynamic, it's interesting because it's sort of like, okay, now we have a technology that we can use equally for good or for evil to largely manipulate large numbers of people to into a particular outcome or action. So Donald Trump's slogan, make America great again, really implicitly emphasizes that America is not great now. And he said, oh my God, I'm a victim. Let's get back to where I was. Right. So it's interesting that that message is specifically towards a group of people who

would self-identify as victims almost. Yeah. I don't know if they would explicitly. Right. But the inner feeling is, yeah, yeah. Certainly. So interesting. I mean, my mind can spin on this conversation, go a lot of different directions, but I don't want to really take it over political because that's, I think it's, this is, it's really just about understanding the human condition. And also, I think really bigger picture, just the idea of how we interact with people and perceive their value in the world and our deep need to connect with people these days it's just really important to get you talk about i think when we talk about people we get it we'll

talk a little bit more about that um and we talk about animals i think we can say okay i could i could kind of see how it's like living breathing it's furry it's cute that i could i could you know imbue mindness or you know that's a member of the mind club. But you also talk about inanimate objects. Yeah. Take me there. So the example we open the machine chapter with, machine being a very. Very provocative example. Right.

Very provocative example is about real dolls. So real dolls are very expensive, very realistic sex dolls cost about five or six thousand dollars. You can specify eye color, hair color, tongue shape even. And this example covers this man named Dave Cat, or at least that's what he goes by. And he is dating and living with a real doll named Shishan. And so they're at home in this Michigan house and there's a reporter there and the reporter is asking Dave Cat about his experience. And Dave Cat says, you know, it's really tough. My father doesn't approve of my relationship because she shuns not alive. And that's really tough. And he says, you know, it may not seem that way to him, but for me,

she's really there for me. And he says, in the beginning of our relationship, it was just sex, all the time. But now we're just there for each other we just hold each other which if you have a living breathing spouse that may seem very empty but for him he's had such problems with you know real women i guess that his lack of social connection has made him imbue mind into this inanimate object this real doll and so machines more broadly are very interesting because they're minds that we create in things that we've created, right? So it's kind of a meta thing, right? We create a bot or an iPhone and then we see it has a mind. We see a mind in our car, which we created. It's very rich. Yeah. And it's so interesting also because,

you know, I think we like to believe that things either have a mind or don't rather than we play a role in determining whether that other thing actually has a mind or not, because it's very subjective. It comes, you know, in part, you know, we like to think, oh, cat, you know, it just it's living, breathing. It has a brain. It's got to have a mind, right? But in fact, you know, whether it does or doesn't, it's not just subjective to the cat.

It's subjective to the person who's making the decision. Right. So we say that minds are less a matter of fact and more a matter of perception. And minds are really a gift in some sense that you give another thing. And things that drive that perception, one is this kind of need for social connection. Another one is the need to understand the world. This is particularly true with machines. So when we feel like things are difficult to understand, that we're having troubles

understanding something, that's when we perceive a mind. So consider your car. If you just bought a brand new Audi, Mercedes, right? You don't give it a name. Starts up automatically the first time, drives like a wander on the highway. But now let's say you're driving a 30-year-old Chevy, right? You're give it a name starts up automatically the first time drives like a wander on the highway but now let's say you're driving a 30 year old chevy right you're starting it up it's like that car's got a name right come on old girl right got some personality you're gonna like talk nice to her right bargain with her right probably stroke the hood on a winter morning exactly exactly and right because we need to make it work. And the, the model

we have for understanding how things work is the human mind. And so when we want to figure out how something works, we give it a human mind and then we talk to it and pray to it, et cetera. Yeah. Which also brings up the idea of, of robots, which also talking about a little bit also. And there's, there is a sort of this freaky future state, which may be not all that far into the future, where when we're able to actually create machines, where a classic Turing test, right, which you also speak about, where it's indistinguishable whether you're having a conversation with a machine or with an actual living, breathing human being. At that point, does that machine, do we say that that machine has a mind or is it just, you know, we're like nothing that plugs in or has a battery, you know, could ever have a mind?

Yeah. I think, I think there's two answers. One is that explicitly we'd probably say, no, it doesn't have a mind, right? Minds are humans and machines need not apply. But I think implicitly through our behavior, I bet we'd act as if it has a mind. I bet you could probably get someone to fall in love with a machine, and then they'd realize that it's not a human, and then they'd say, well, I still love her. Yeah. Right? I mean, and I think that's the greatest test of having a mind, whether someone could fall in love with something or treat it a certain way. Right. And then emotionally, because you see this in sci-fi flicks, right? There's the classic scenario of, okay, a robot becomes so, quote, realistic that, you know, it can literally mimic human behavior and somebody falls in love.

And then, you know, it comes time to power that robot down. Is that then at that point murder? Right. Yeah. I mean, I think it probably is. And I think people feel that way. There's a researcher in New Zealand who actually asked people to do this. And it wasn't a very human-like robot, but it was human enough.

And they go to turn off. He says, turn off the robot. And they go to turn off the robot. And then the robot starts begging for its life. It says, like, please don't turn me off. Please. Like, I'll do anything. Please don't turn me off.

And so the subject's then paralyzed, right? Like, you told me to turn it off, but you're pleading for his life. And then, you know, the experimenter's like, no, no, turn it off, turn off the robot. And people are really conflicted with this, even though they know the robot's just programmed to say so. those those people in the study i wonder if they did that if um they had them tested for sort of like standard tests for um isolation or loneliness before and if that would have changed how much they were sort of like willing to respond to the robots please yeah or general empathy right yeah but then you have the opposite research you know where you know the classic experiment where you know people were told to give charges of increasing, like zap people with increasing. Milgram.

Right, exactly. And all these people just kept hitting people with higher and higher levels of electricity, which, you know, we now know is fake. But still, you know, that's almost like the exact opposite. Like no matter how much these people were pleading and screaming, the subjectors kind of turned off. They dehumanize these people or they replace somebody else's instructions. Yeah. I mean, that's the beauty of the mind club, right? You can bring in people or machines who seem not to be a member and you can expel entities that should be a member like other people. Yeah. Like I said, with everything we're talking about on the one hand, fasting, on the other hand, somewhat horrifying. We like to think that we're so much more

rational and just in control and that life is a little bit more objective well but i think the ability to feel is really what makes us human and true you know we have some research that shows that people explicitly talk about what does it mean to be human well it means to be like playing chess right being rational doing mathematics but when push comes to shove what we really want to keep when we don't want to be without ever is our ability to feel and sense and experience the world. So whether that's rational or not, it's what makes us human. Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the things that comes up when I've had a lot of conversations

with people is around this sort of what makes us human question is love. And it kind of takes me back to the robot scenario. Could you actually feel genuine love towards a robot? I think you're right. I think there will reach a point where somebody probably could. But then the question is, could the robot feel love back to you? Yeah, that's the question. Right. Yeah, with robots, with animals as well, all these things, right? Does this thing love me back as much as I love it? And to be sure, there's probably a lot of wishful thinking, even with human lovers, right? If you just really love someone, you just want to think, but it's certainly with machines and with animals, right? How we perceive them

really dictates our experience. Yeah. Yeah, man, there's a, it's going to be interesting because we're probably not that far probably Probably, yeah, not that far. From like maybe 10 years or so, I think a lot of these questions are going to become realistic scenarios. Well, the movie Her, if you've seen it, right? Yeah, right. People fall in love with their operating systems. Although I have to say as a skeptic, the reason that movie worked is because Her, the OS, was voiced by Scarlett Johansson. We can all understand falling in love with Scarlett Johansson.

Right, but somebody else is going to record every permutation of it. It's funny, I had somebody who sat down and recorded a conversation with recently was years ago, I used to teach yoga in a past life. She was a student of mine and she came from Australia and she ended up in this random job

going, like vanishing for a couple of weeks to do this voiceover work and she was never in this random job going like vanishing for a couple of weeks to do this voiceover work and she was never told what it was for. And it turned out that a couple years later, a friend of hers called and said, we were just driving and we like plugged in our directions on the GPS and you were telling us where to go. So like her voice is literally on something like 400 million devices now. That's amazing. Yeah, and she's got this beautiful Australian voice. Yeah. So you could see where you take this incredible voice

where people kind of think, okay, what are the five masculine voices that people most emotionally relate to? What are the five feminine voices that people most relate to? And how can we build that into a technology that provokes this experience? And if, I mean, the philosophical idea is if that GPS is sufficiently sophisticated,

does having her voice there mean that her mind has been duplicated? Are there 4,000 versions of her mind out there every time? I mean, that might be terrifying for her if she thinks about it. Yeah. One of the things that's actually has become a huge conversation point these days also is the word mindfulness. So how does the idea of being mindless or mindful tie into your exploration of the mind and being in or out of the mind club? So I think it ties in and that we should be in sense, mindful of the fact that minds are perceived. So it's maybe a little bit of a philosophical head trip, but in some sense, it's important to recognize that all minds are ultimately a matter of perception, right? That with things that seem like real and

facts to you, and when you argue with someone about the way something is, it's really just about perceptions. And so that lets you be more compassionate to others in some sense, because you know that you are just a person who's perceiving. But on the other hand, all we really have, this is what we kind of end the book with, all we really have is our perceptions. I mean, we are perceivers and in some sense, nothing more. And so we should also be mindful of the fact that our perceptions to us have raw reality, or have that kind of deep feeling of realness. And so it's kind of like a Necker cube, right? It flips back and forth. It's just a perception, but that perception is incredibly real to us. And I think recognizing that paradox is incredibly important to having a fuller understanding of the world. Yeah. No, I love that. And also, because it also brings up the idea that, for me, the question then becomes,

can we do things to train or alter that perception or perceptibility, you know, in order to change the way that we interact with other people or value or deval acknowledge the minds of others, right? Maybe you look silly if you anthropomorphize your pets, right? You buy your cat sweaters and you look a little foolish on Facebook. But really, I think the worse kind of sin of mind perception is an overextending mind, but not extending it enough. When you think of Syrian refugees not having the same minds as you, or people who have political or moral disagreements, right, is lacking a mind. So I think really what we should do is be mindful that other people do have the same thoughts and feelings, even if it's not obvious to us at first glance. Yeah. So would practices that in some way train empathy, train compassion, be things that would be more likely then to allow you to see more of that in others.

Exactly. Yeah. So empathy is not only appreciating others' ability to feel, but also valuing that in your own feelings. And so certainly increasing empathy should increase your perception of mind. Yeah. Which is, I mean, it's interesting to me on so many levels, on one level, I get concerned about what connection technology is doing to empathy, especially in the generation that's coming up. I had a wonderful opportunity to sit down with Sherry Turkle, who's done a whole bunch of work at MIT about this. And she was saying that a lot of times, you know, one of the big concerns is that the research is showing that the more kids are spending time on screens and interacting with each other through screens, you're seeing almost like this, you know, inverse relationship that's almost direct with empathy dropping. Yeah. Which is really concerning in this context.

Yeah. I mean, maybe it blurs the line of the mind club, right? You bring more artificial agents into it and you kind of leave humans outside of it. You can imagine it kind of like averages out mind perception. So you get more mind to sheens and less mind to people and one reason for that is because we often appreciate minds when we're face to face with someone it's hard to perceive a mind of someone who's far away if you're in a long distance relationship right it's like hard to get a kind of like visceral sense of their mind yeah and so when we like touch them right or or feel their tears fall on our face right we really get the sense that they they have experience behind there but if it's just on the screen it's much harder yeah which i think

also i mean i wonder if that argues for on the one hand technology flattens the world and it gives us the ability to communicate with so many people who are desperate you know are distributed on the other hand you know this argument i think really it really argues for go the extra mile and if there's any conceivable way you can put people in a room instead of between a pane of glass or technology, do it because the effects are big. Right. Or just develop technology enough that you can get telepresence where you can actually feel someone's touch or that you're actually in the room somehow.

That would be interesting. Are people working on stuff like that that you're aware of? I mean, there's bots to do surgery, right? Where you can manipulate things and get a sense of, of touch. And I think years ago they were thinking about how to have, because the internet always revolves around sex, how to have sex remotely. Right. So you just need the right sensors and you get the sense you're actually, you know, touching someone. Right. Yeah. That always leads technology. It's like that led streaming technology online, like just like it's always, sadly, it's leading the charge, but I mean, Hey, maybe some good will come out of it.

Right. And actually like somehow creates a technology that allows for the fostering remote empathy through tactile replication. That would be really fascinating actually. And I guess that's in part where like VR is going these days too, to a certain extent. Yeah. I guess that's in part where VR is going these days, too, to a certain extent. about how intentional things are experienced as much richer than computer things or accidental things. So take cooking, right? If you know someone baked something for you intentionally, even if you think it just objectively doesn't taste that good, it will still taste better.

So we ran a study where we gave people candies and we said, look, I picked this for you, specially just for you. I hope it makes you happy. Or I picked this randomly, you know, whatever. And sure enough, when they ate the one that was chosen for them, they thought it tasted better and also sweeter. Right. And so the same thing is true with, you know, internet sex, or we ran a study with massages, right? Massages just feel better when there's like a mind behind them. And so this is why I think it's important to kind of foster these connections with real people because the world is much richer when there's actually human intention behind them. Yeah, I love that. And again, my mind, it's like everything we're talking about here is okay, so these are ideas that you can leverage in so many different ways. And of course,

the author in me is like, huh, so then every time I hand a book to somebody, I should say, I picked this just for you. Yeah. And like, would that then in theory, like, you know, prime them to enjoy the book more or say, this is a better book than they would have experienced it as being before. Unless they don't like the book and then it's worse. Oh, so it'll just like deepen whatever the... Yeah. So the first study we did was about intentional pain. So we gave people ostensibly electric shocks that were either intentional or accidental. Right.

And the intentional shocks hurt significantly more and they kept on hurting. Got it. Which kind of makes sense just intuitively, right? Because if you think somebody is hurting you and they mean to hurt you, just intuitively kind of makes sense. It's probably going to hurt more. Absolutely. And because pain is a signal, right?

If they're hurting you intentionally, it should hurt more so you can get out of there, right? It motivates you. And same with pleasure, right? If someone's helping you intentionally, it should feel better because you want to stay there and get more of it. Yeah. I wonder if that then flows through to if somebody, you know, like if you get in an accident versus somebody deliberately hits you, it would make sense. Like would somebody experience physical pain less if they knew that it was just accidental? And by that theory, yeah, right?

Yeah, I think so. And we have some work that showed this is actually suggested by a colleague of mine when I was at Harvard. He had a sick kid. I think the kid was about one. And they had to give him suppositories, right? No kid likes suppositories. And so he wondered, he hoped that the kid would kind of know somehow that it was for

his own good and that would hurt him less. And so we ran a study like that. If you were being shocked for your own good, it's complicated to arrange that. But if you're being shocked for your own good, it turns out it actually hurts even less than if it was intentional or even accidental. Huh. It's funny. A friend of mine created this device that started as a Kickstarter and now is something called Pavlok, which I don't know if you're familiar. It's a little wristband that you can program to give you a mild electric shock to try and stop you from,

so if you move your hand to your mouth, like you were going to smoke a cigarette, that movement would trigger a shock. But he said, even if the movement doesn't trigger, you can tap a button on it to give you a shock to sort of train yourself to associate the pain with it. I wonder if knowing that you're doing this to yourself for positive reason with positive intention and somehow makes you experience the pain of the shock less. if knowing that you're doing this to yourself for positive reason with positive intention, it somehow makes you experience the pain of the shock less. I think so. I think the real trick would be to cross link people. Right.

Right. Like just get someone else to hit the button and then it hurts even more if you like have a cigarette, right? Give the button to like somebody who, you know, actually doesn't like you. Totally. Yeah. That's so interesting, right? It's almost, tell me how this would factor in too. I came out of the health and fitness world and there was at one point a club that was saying, okay, you sign up and you're going to like pay like $10,000 up front. And every day you work out, you get, you know, like, you know, 10 of it back until it's all back.

But every day that you don't work out that money, you have to designate an advance or like somebody or a cause that you hate. Okay. And it goes you hate. Okay. And it goes to them. Wow. So it's like it kind of ties into like it would hurt even more just knowing that you weren't just losing the money, but it was actually. Yeah. Well, in some sense, your like past self is screwing with you too.

Yeah, yeah. Right. It's like take this future self. You should be working on it. Right, right. This is getting a little too layered for me one of the things that you explore also which i thought was really interesting is the idea of um the silent like the thing that we might perceive as as being like a being but in some way is completely non-interactive right talk to me about that a bit yeah so we usually communicate we're

used to communicating with humans based on language so with animals we know they don't have language and so we use other cues but it's really hard for people to make sense of other people who lack language. And so this chapter is about the silent people and people who are in comas or vegetative states or persistent vegetative states. There's a whole spectrum of consciousness that exists when we're not conscious. And how people grapple with that is very interesting and predicts a lot of moral judgments. So take Terry Shivo, the famous patient, right? You can look at her and she sometimes,

or when she was alive, responded to things. So when they played the Phillies going to the World Series, there was like a pop fly and then the Phillies made it to the World Series. Terry Shivo kind of opened her eyes and turned her head to the side. It seemed like she was actually listening, but that could just be stimulus response. Right. And so how you interpret that determines whether you think Terry Shivo should be kept alive on life support or whether you should allow her to die.

It's interesting. It really changes the way that we make those big life and death decisions. You know, like in that case, does she have a mind or doesn't she is really the defining question. Like, is it still there? Yeah. You know, especially when you could look at every other function and sort of see, okay, it's okay. But for the fact that there are no brainwaves happening, like, and maybe that's a part of the conversation we should explore a little bit, which is the difference between the brain and the mind. Yeah.

So, again, because the mind is really a matter of perception, right? Everyone kind of understands that if I have no brain, then I have no mind. Or if I opened up your skull and took a Cuisinart mixer in there, right, you wouldn't have a mind very quickly. But then there's the robot. Right. I mean, they there's the robot. Right. Then there's the robot. Right. I mean, they have circuits, right?

Right. Okay. Like the functional equivalent of some kind of like, quote, brain. Right. Exactly. And so when there's some brain there, I think the problem is we don't even know as scientists what allows consciousness. Right? Is it somewhere in particular?

Is it distributed across everything? And so that kind of ambiguity of knowledge makes us ambiguous about whether there's a mind there. And I think we have all these tropes for understanding what happens when someone is in a strange state of consciousness and those come from sleep, right? So we look at someone,

they just look like they're asleep because when someone has their eyes closed and aren't doing anything, they're almost always asleep or dead. Right. So let's assume they're not dead. They're asleep. And so we think of someone in a coma as being somehow in there or dreaming. Right. We have all these ideas of what they are. And we have a hard time understanding what it's probably like to be in a coma because we've never been there ourselves. Yeah. And the way that you, you then treat that person. Yeah. I mean, so could you have somebody where, you know, like they're in a coma and, you know, all signs show that the brain is basically flatlined, but there's, you know, in your mind, because you may say that, well, the brain is not the mind. And like, maybe there's something like the mind is still like could you have a person who's living and breathing with a brain that's alive but you know like not registering any electrical signal but still have like assume the presence of a mind so there is a case of a baby's born i think they're called encephaletic and they're born perfectly formed these, but they have only a brainstem. So they don't have any brain. So it's tragic. So parents have these babies and they just look perfect like normal babies,

but they'll never grow up. And in fact, they won't live for very long. And it's very difficult for the parents because in some sense, the most utilitarian thing to do to help others is to donate the organs immediately. But it's hard for them because they look at this and they think, well, just because there's no brain, there could still be a child there. And that really represents that tension we have between what looks like a mind and what actually is a mind. Right. And that triggered this other thing to me, which is the idea of, will we reach a point in history or technology where you can functionally download somebody's brain? And then at that point, are we also downloading their mind? And could we

have it exist outside of that, you know, the animal? Right. So some people are banking on it. So there's a futurist Ray Kurzweil, who you may have heard of. And so he's hoping for, well, he's waiting for the singularity, right? So the day that computers can make themselves smarter, which can make themselves smarter, which can make themselves smarter. And then he hopes once computers are, you know, omniscient, that they will be kind to humans. You know, it's an assumption. The matrix. That's right.

We'll be kind to humans and then allow him to upload his consciousness. And so he believes that if you can kind of represent all the synaptic connections, then you've also represented his mind. And he thinks he'll still be conscious online. Right. So do you make a distinction between mind and consciousness? I think we use it pretty loosely. So I think really what we're focused on is how people conceive of the mind. And I think most people think of consciousness as an integral part of the mind.

And so it's wrapped up in there. Yeah. I want to circle back to free will. And then we'll kind of bring a full circle also. We were starting out with sort of Dan's work, which led to your work. And you talk about it in the book a bit also. So the idea of free will, there's Sam Harrison, the neuroscientist, also has a really interesting sort of take on free will, which, and I'm going to totally butcher this because he's brilliant and I'm not. But it's essentially that free will is never truly free will, but differently because in part it's based on a physiological structure that's inherited genetically.

And you're always only making choices within the bounds of the sort of, you know, the DNA that allows you to wire or not wire in a particular way. And so your free will is only free will on the context of what your sort of genetic coding allowed it to be. Curious what you think of that. Yeah, I think I hadn't thought of it that way before. It's a compelling idea that we're not ultimately free. So you can imagine if someone like God is ultimately free because he's not constrained by physical determinants, right? He can do whatever he wants. And certainly we are constrained by our genes and our neurons. But I think it's funny, I'm going to argue in favor of free will right now. But it's funny because just because you have a restricted set of things you can do doesn't make those choices that we have left any less free. Right. So you can tell a kid you can have vanilla or chocolate ice cream. Right.

And the kid won't be able to choose pistachio maybe because they don't have it. But the kid still gets to choose between vanilla and chocolate. And whether that choice is metaphysically free, I think we can argue about because, well, there's all sorts of associations with ice cream and biologically predispositions. But still, at the end of the day, the kid gets to choose the ice cream that it wants within the certain restricted set. And I think that's as much as free will as most of us want. So with your current sort of line of research and with the conversation around the mind that you've been really focusing on a lot, what's your biggest hope? Like, what do you want to really come out of this exploration? What's the sort of bigger level? I think the biggest level is to understand how important our perceptions are that we often denigrate when we talk about

perceptions as like oh it's just the way you see the world but i hope to kind of elevate those in some sense to truth and that our perceptions are what we have and they are what makes us who we are and so by valuing those perceptions we come to better understand ourselves and the world around us. Right. So it kind of takes a bet to with our mind, we create a reality. Exactly. Huh. Okay.

So coming full circle now, so the name of this good life project. So if I offer the term out to you to live a good life, what comes up? I think what comes up is to more richly appreciate the minds of others. So it's very easy to us because other minds are ultimately inaccessible to ignore that they exist. It takes effort. It takes work to understand that there are other minds like you or I, and they have the same rich experiences that we do. And so to enrich our lives and to make the world better, not only do we have to connect with other people and understand that they have rich emotions, but also see those minds as worthy to enrich our lives and to make the world better. Not only do we have to connect with other people and understand that they have rich emotions,

but also see those minds as worthy of moral status. So I think I would say for a better life, be a better mind perceiver. That's cool. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, thanks so much for listening.

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