Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 239 | Brian Lowery on the Social Self

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

There is an image, especially in Western cultures, of the rugged, authentic, self-made individual choosing how to navigate the intricacies of the social world. But there is no mystical soul within us, manifesting as the immutable essence of self. What we think of as our "self" is shaped by our environment and our genes, and most of all by our interactions with other people. Psychologist Brian Lowery argues for a strong version of this thesis, positing that our sense of self is largely a social construct. We talk about the implications of this idea, and what it means for shifting notions of personal identity. Post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/06/12/239-brian-lowery-on-the-social-self/ Support Mindscape on Patreon. Brian Lowery received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California Los Angeles. He is currently Walter Kenneth Kilpatrick Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford University Graduate School of Business. His new book is Selfless: The Social Creation of "You." Web page Wikipedia Amazon author page Twitter

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These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Hey, everyone, it's Kelpen. I'm inviting you to join the best-sounding book club you've ever heard with my podcast, Earsay, the Audible and I-Heart Audio Book Club. Every episode, I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audiobooks available on Audible. It's the book club for your ears. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and I-Heart Audio Book Club on the I-Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

Long-time listeners will be aware of my personal point of view on questions of emergence and fundamentality. There are things that are supposed to be fundamental to the universe, ideas, concepts that you cannot do without in discussing the universe at the most comprehensive level. And then there are emergent concepts that are useful to us at maybe a macroscopic level or some other version of analysis. The word useful being very, very important here, you don't just make things up. They have to serve some purpose. Typically, in a scientific discussion, the purposes are you can make predictions. They have causal relationships to other things in the world. A table is an emergent concept. It's not anywhere in the standard model of particle physics or anything like that.

But by saying there's a table here that conveys a lot of information, I know things like I could put a cup of coffee on it or sit down and read a book in front of it and so on. So when it gets to human-level questions like the self, that's something that it's a little bit trickier to think about where it is. A more traditional way of thinking about the self would have been that it's very fundamental to what nature is, how the universe works, is that there is an essence of each human being. And maybe it changes with time or it evolves, but it's part of them. There are plenty of cultures which thinks it survives after you die. so forth. I, of course, do not want to say that. I don't think that the self is fundamental. I think it is very much emergent, but that's not the end of this discussion. When you say, okay, something is emergent, there's a lot of questions that get raised by that. Out of what does this concept emerge? Why is it useful? What are the boundaries? How can you improve the definition of it or your understanding of it? With the self, that's going to be an especially tricky thing. So we're going to think about that today with Brian Lowry, who's a social psychologist at Stanford University.

He's the author of a new book called Selfless, The Social Creation of You. And not to give too much away of it, but his idea, not coming from a physics background, of course, coming from the psychology angle here, is what we think of as the self is not immutable. It is not fundamental. It is not absolutely there in some way that can never be changed or our concepts of it can never be updated. Not only, he says, is the idea of the self-constructed and emergent, but it is really dependent on other human beings. It does hearken very much back to a recent discussion with Hugo Mercier, who says that the reason why we invent reasons and giving reasons for our actions is because we want to offer them up to other humans as reasons to believe something.

So what Brian is saying is that our notion of self necessarily involves ideas of other people and how they think about us. If you say you are a physics professor, you attach meaning to that by assuming that your audience knows what it means, to be a physics professor, what a professor is, what physics is, and so forth, and all the expectations and all of the presumptions that come along with that. And this view gives us the ability to imagine changing the notion of the self. If you want to change your identity, for example, or if you think that your identity is misunderstood and you want to correct those misunderstandings, that is allowed, but communities matter. You can't just do it by yourself.

That's the interesting implication of Brian's way of thinking. So we're going to get into it. Occasional reminders, you can support Minescape on Patreon by going to go. going to patreon.com slash Sean M. Carroll. Those are the people who get ad-free versions of the podcast and, of course, get to ask questions for the Ask Me Anything episodes. We always appreciate every little bit of support. So with that, let's go. Brian Lowry, welcome to Mindscape Podcast. Thanks for having me, Sean. Great to be here. You know, we will get into the issues that you study for a living that you talk about in your new book, Selfless. But I got to start out

talking like a physicist just for a second because we're talking about the self. The first question is, should we think of the self as part of the fundamental architecture a reality or is this something that human beings use as a concept that they invent to make sense of the world? Oh, I think of it as a concept they invent to make sense of the world. But who knows? No, that's the right answer. Don't back down. You gave the right answer. What I mean is, you know, back in the day, we might have been Cartesian's and thought that there was, you know, an essence of our minds that was not our bodies that somehow communicated with it. But these days were more emergentist constructivists, right? Like somehow this arises out of a whole bunch of things.

Yeah. Yeah, I think it's, I think the self is a social creation. And I think that we still underappreciate the extent to which we exist. because we're embedded in the social network and the we have the mind. There is the self as we understand it, ourselves as we understand them. Right. So we, even if one didn't think that even if one was not a Cartesian dualist, you might still have thought that you could think of the self as just things going on

in your brain, but your point is that we need to take the rest of the world in consideration as well. Yeah, that I don't think that even if you're a hardcore materialist, It's just going on in the brain that without the social interactions, without the interactions among different people, you don't get cells, is what I'm saying. Yeah. Okay. And the craziest physics question I have is, I mean, maybe this isn't even a question, but there is a place where this question of what the self is and how it evolves comes up in hardcore physics, which is in the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics,

which is something that I study for a living. You know, when you measure a spinning particle, many worlds says that if it could be spinning clockwise or counterclockwise, there are literally two worlds, one of which a version of you sees it spin one way and the other one it sees it spin the other way. And there are people who don't like this on the basis of saying, yes, but which one is me? As if, you know, there's an essence of them that has to flow through somehow. And I want to say neither one of them is you. We have to update our notions of personal identity in a world like that, but that's okay. Yeah, I think that's right.

I mean, you know, I used to be really into theoretical physics, too, as a layperson, apart from this reason because it's this interesting intersection between the physical world, our understanding of consciousness. That's kind of what when you think about the perception, the consciousness, and the more complex concept of self. They kind of all intersect in what you just described, right? So there is the, you know, there's the, I guess the ontology, the reality of the world. Who's two you could be spinning in both ways in one way in one world and one way in another world and you could be observing it, spend each way in these different worlds.

But when you say you observe it, what are we talking about? That's when this conscious observation kind of intersects with this concept of self because now you want to personalize that observation and say it's me or not me. Now which me is real. Like now you're going from conscious, you know, perception to something deeper, which is like personal identity. Yeah. Now you're saying that people, right? That's a kind of a leap that people don't understand.

Like conscious perception to people is not, those are not. It's not, I mean, there's a step between. Yeah, that's what I want to say, people who want to say, you know, the many worlds point of view doesn't comport with my notion of personal identity. I want to say your notion of personal identity was never that. good. That is I completely agree. Right, good and good. So thank you for indulging me with that.

Now we're going to move much on much more onto your territory here. I like the, you know, how you begin the book or in the book, early in the book, talking about the very basic idea of where the self is. I talked recently with Andy Clark, who is a philosopher and cognitive scientist who works on the extended mind hypothesis, right? That, you know, our notebooks and our computers and our wristwatches are part of our minds. And I did ask him. I said, yeah, but like, I think that I live right behind my eyeballs. And you actually have something to say about that.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. Most healthy individuals have that experience. They're like in their head, right behind that. You went just maybe three or four inches behind their eyeballs, looking out, you know, controlling the machinery of the body or something. obviously that's not true right i mean any anybody listening to this podcast like yeah it cannot be true then you have to say like then what is it and as science evolves i feel like our answers to that have evolved but they still end up being some version of still an essential self in there it's just

is the essential self you know some soul is the essential self um you know brain architecture is it neural pathways but it's still that's just a way i think for most people to still say the same thing, which is like, I'm in there as a soul. And it can extend beyond this physical being, too, right? It's something more than this. So you get that a little bit with this kind of desire for immortality, like uploading the, you know, your neural pathways and your neural network to the cloud as if that would be you, right? That's an interesting assumption, right? Are you saying that it wouldn't be you or you're open to think of it? Because it would not be you. Actually, this is a diversion, but that's okay.

That's why we're here. I am fascinated by this idea because I also think it would not be you. I have a set of reasons for thinking that. Why would you say it would not be you if you uploaded yourself into the cloud? Well, one, I think that you only make sense in the context. Like your sense of self, your identity only makes sense in the context of other people. So you'd have to upload your whole social environment, right, and for that to work. And you could argue to do that too.

But, you know, there's these interesting philosophies. games, you're like, what if you upload your brain, but you don't die? You still exist also physically. Are there to use? Is that right? And you'd say like, that doesn't sound right. There's something, there's something wrong, right? Something is, you've got something wrong. And the question is, what have you got wrong? I think what you've got wrong is the assumption that you exist as a pattern of neural firings or something like that. I don't think that's how we exist. Because you want to say that we exist more socially. or in a more embodied sense?

I think I want to say we exist more socially, but I also think this is a separate issue from, I mean, a separate point from the point that I make, but I also think we exist in an embodied way too, but that's, I think, a separate compelling argument, but it's not my argument. I mean, let's go back to the right behind my eyeballs's question. Is there a good reason why I tend to think that I live literally in my head

if I'm going to locate myself? Is that, is that pancultural? Is that universal? Does every human being think that way? or do different kinds of people think that there is a self that lives somewhere else? You know, it's a really good question. So I don't know in terms of the phenomenology how much that differs. I'm not sure.

What I know that psychologists have studied what differs is how embedded people think they are in the social network, how much they think that constitutes who they are. That varies by society. but this phenomenology of am I in there? I'm not sure how much that varies. But you do mention that there are out-of-body experiences for which we don't need to violate the laws of physics. It's our brains giving us the impression

that we're not inside our bodies. Yeah, what I love about that is it also suggests the opposite that our brains might be giving us the perception that we're in there, and that might not be true. Exactly. There's these studies where maybe you know these studies where you can create, you can reliably create the out-of-body experience. A simple way to do, well, simple, but the way, one way to do it is to put a VR headset

on someone and have them look at themselves from the backs. They see an image of themselves and, you know, outside of their body through VR. And then you stroke the person's physical back while you stroke the avatar that they're looking at back at the same time and they will start to have a sense that their self is in that avatar that's outside of their body that they're looking at. So this is an example. We don't need drugs or a sensory deprivation tank. You can just induce the feeling that you're located somewhere other than inside your brain.

Yeah. And this is the one that people know. My guess is if your listeners know our interest in this, they might know of the rubber hand. Oh yeah. I know that one, but let's assume we don't. Yeah, yeah. So that one is, so you put a hand, you put someone's hand kind of below a table, but you put a rubber hand where their hand would be.

Okay. And then you stroke the rubber hand and you see the. them their rubber hand, the rubber hand being stroked. At the same time, they see, they feel their real hand being stroke. And then after you've done that for a little bit, you go to smash the rubber hand with the hammer and people yank their hand back because their hand was going to get smashed because they experience the rubber hand as their hand. It's called the rubber hand a loose right. Yeah. And you can do that with the whole body, which is amazing. So it suggests that there's a way in which we come to understand our physical body or ourselves being in a

or our body being ours through these perceptual experiences, that it's not just how it is, it's something that our minds have to learn. What strikes me is actually how easy it is to give ourselves the impression that we're outside our bodies or that our bodies or something else. I would think that that would be possible but difficult. And it's like, yeah, it just takes five minutes

with a feather and a hammer. You know, the funny thing, the one I love most is not even these, just the embasement effect where you get people to incorporate someone else's face into their own sense of self. How does that work? That one is where you, it's the same kind of effect except instead of, I'm restrucking my hand and a rubber hand or looking at an avatar, I'm looking at someone else.

So we're sitting across tape from each other. I'm looking at your face. Your face gets stroked. At the same time that I feel my face gets stroked. And then later, I show you photos. and the photo is either a photo of you, a photo of me, or a photo of us morphed at differing levels. And I ask you, just let me know when you see it when the photo is mostly you versus not

most of you. And if you've had simultaneous stroking, when the photo is, let's say, I don't know, let's call it 52% you and 48% of me, you get it's mostly you, but when it's 52% me and 48% new, you still think it's mostly you. Only if I face a bit stroke simultaneously. So you start to incorporate the other person's face into your sense of self. Most concerts, you're in a seat. You're watching.

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Hey, everyone. It's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and I Heart audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary, massive sci-fi adventure about survival. and science, and what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth? I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections, and it's like, okay, yo, yeah, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it.

I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me. and I left it on the mic. That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too.

Listen to Eursay, the Audible and IHeart Audio Club on the IHart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I see. So there's two things going on here. One is just the photos. And there is sort of a natural, I guess implicitly in what you said, we're pretty good at picking out what it's mostly us if you don't prime us in some way. But then you do this physical action and it starts blurring a little bit. Correct. And that just suggests that it's possible to blur, right?

Like you would think you would never confuse your face with someone else's face. And this stroking thing, if I stroke you, there's a sense that there's some confusion happening. If I don't stroke you, you just been looking at this person, then you don't see that effect. And all of this, the ease of out-of-body experiences and things like that is at least nudging us in the direction of thinking that the self is something other than, absolute and objectively out there in the world. Yes, I think so. All these things suggest that there's a way in which we are constructing the self, right? It's not just, it isn't just there. There's something that's happening, right? There's some kind of process by which is being created. And I think that you mentioned in the case of the morphing into other people that there might even

be a reason why that is the case, having to do with closeness to other people, and empathy, something like that? Yeah, so they're social psychologists who talk about closeness as degree of self and other. You can think about, like, take put aside the stroking and just think about someone who's really close to you in your day-to-day life. You spend so much time with them, you get to know them like at some point, closeness is about incorporating that person's self into your sense of self, right? And this sounds, and you know, on the extreme, it seems really hard to believe, but you can honestly

started to confuse yourself with someone else's self, right? You could confuse, for example, something happened to someone else. You might think it actually happened to you, right, if you're close enough. Those sorts of confusions can happen. And in some sense, because yourselves are being entangled in a particular way they are becoming merged. That's one way to understand it. Is this related to the very basic psychological phenomenon of people being oversharers or having boundary issues. Maybe all of you want to have bound issues. Maybe that's what makes humans humans.

Maybe. My cat's definitely a boundary issue, so I don't know. I don't think it's exclusively human. Okay, so the lesson, like you say, the self, maybe it's not only not as objective as we think. It's also, there's another aspect of that. It's not as immutable as we think. The self changes over time.

and how should we think of ourselves at one time versus another time? Is that something that the psychologist has figured out? I love that question. I love that question because my answer is so ridiculous. That's why I love that question. Cool. I love that question because I think that the self is fluid. This is the most extreme version.

And I haven't been, I'm not the first one to say this by a long shot. Hume argued there is no self. There's just the illusion of continuity of self. Right. There's no self we put too much stock in its continuity for sure. The self is constantly shifting. You just don't experience it that way. And there are good reasons not to experience it that way. So it's useful to have the sense of stability, but it could just be wrong. It could just be that's just not true. It's only an illusion. I don't know if you know Lori Paul, who is a philosopher we had on the podcast and she studies

transformative experiences. So the question is, how do you make a rational choice if choosing a certain thing is going to turn you into a different person who has different values? Whose values should rule there? I don't think there's a clear answer there, but it's clearly a fascinating question. Yeah, it is. And easier one, too, you don't even need the transformed experience. You just need time, right? People who do work saying, like, how nice are you to your future self? You don't know who that's up will be, but you make decisions right now that it will affect your future self, right? How do you think about that? What's your responsibility to that person that you're not right now? Is there a right answer to this question? There is. Please tell me. Okay. Well, I did, I heard a talk once

by Philip Zimbardo, who famously did the Stanford Prison Experiment and so forth. But it was about how people have different attitudes towards time. Some people, are past oriented, present oriented, future oriented. And his claim was that you could easily test this psychologically to figure out which one you were. And it correlated much more strongly than other psychology test results with outcomes in life, careers you choose, things like that. And, you know, it kind of did make sense to me. Like, I do care about my future self more about my past self, but I think there are definitely people who are the other way around. Yeah, you know, I ask a good question. I mean, a good thought.

Like, how do you think about how much you value the past versus the present version of your self? Yeah. Yeah, you know, it's an interesting, I hadn't thought of it as an individual difference, but I think that does make a really interesting individual difference. So let's move on to where the rubber is the road here for you, this claim that the self is very social, very created by a community. I mean, let me, I'll let you lay out the basic idea here.

I mean, I think that intuitively I might have said the self is inside me and there's other things which are interactions with the rest of the world. You want to update us a little bit there. Yeah, I want to say that it's a strong social constructionist argument basically. So for those of you don't know that, it's just the idea that the self is a social construction by which I simply mean that who you are is created by. the interactions you have, the relationships you have, the people around you. And so there's not, it pushes against the idea that most of us probably feel or

way we experience ourselves as essential, essentially they are like a soul. I think that's how most of us experience ourselves. Like, again, going back to end their itself, but more important, like there's a core us. Yeah. That was somehow imparted to this physical vessel. I don't know, at conception, at birth or whenever you think that happened. And I am pushing against that.

I don't think that exists at all. It's not genetics. It's not, that doesn't make the self to self. It's the story you were born into, the story that came before your birth, the culture you exist in, the networks and relationships and people who construct that culture, the people who raise you, the friends you've met, the relationship, you add, all those things are what end up constituting your unique individual self. Is that an extremist version of something for which there's a more wishy-washy version that

says that there is something that is purely me inside me and also how that interacts with the community around me matters? Yeah, I think that most people probably have some version of there's a me and interacts with the environment and it's changed by the environment. I think that's the most people's kind of like reasonable understanding of how it works. And I push against that simply because I'm like, okay, tell me that me part. What is it? Because if you keep pushing hard on it, it just starts to, I think it starts to crumble a little bit. And I think you end up falling back on something like a soul, which they don't, they would never start with.

They would like, no, no, no, this is scientific. Like, what is it then? It's temperament or it's genetics. And, you know, these kind of things where I'm like, is that really what you mean by the self? And genetics is, I think, in particular, I think, lazy because genetics don't determine what we are. I mean, it's maybe it's potentials. I mean, certainly has some effect. it's not like I'm denying the points of biology or genetics, but it's not determinative, right?

It's not enough to tell you who a person will be. You can't rezone genes and, you know, have had conception of birth and know who they are. Like that clearly is not how it works. So, but if you want to say the self then really is socially constructed, you know, how do I, what is the definition of self that we're using here, like as opposed to, for example, identity. You know, people might want to say that their social identity is socially, constructed, but there's still something inside me that I'm making up. Yeah. And I guess, again, this is where I like to ask questions as much as make claims.

I'm like, tell me what that self is. Like, when you take away all those social identities, like, what are we talking about? Like, so I just never know what we're talking about. Are we talking about, even when people say temperament? I'm like, you only really mean how that temperament is understood or experienced, right? Like, you don't, you don't mean the temperament per se. You mean how it manifests or how it makes you you. There's some other, there's some interpretation necessary. Right. That's what I think.

Anyway, this is my, this is, this is not, I'm not going to make this as a claim about truth. I'm going to make this a claim. This is like my view of what people actually mean. So I could be wrong about that. Yeah. Oh, we could all be wrong. But it does remind me, I hate to keep bringing up old podcasts, but it does remind me of

Hugo Mercié, who he recently had on the podcast, who wrote a book with Daniel Sperber about reason and reasons and reasoning. And their claim is that the idea of having a reason for doing something rather than just doing it is uniquely human and uniquely because we want to offer reasons to other people. It is uniquely social. It's not if we lived completely by ourselves, we would not attach reasons to our actions. Yeah, that's interesting. You know what I love about these ideas.

they they contact so many other ideas, right? So this is like when it's, it really is, I think we're coming to see the importance of our social nature. And it may be in a different way. And I feel like there's something in the air around this a little bit. And maybe it's these like huge, these big societal level issues like climate change or the rise of inequality and effect on governance like democracy. And you look at these big issues now that affecting the world, and they seem to revolve around how we engage with each other as human beings, right, to some extent. So what do we owe each other? What role do we have in affecting other people's lives?

It's like moving away from rugged individualism. Like it just cannot account for or help us solve some of the biggest issues we face today. It just doesn't work, I think. And so I think we started to look and see and understand the degree, the depth of the interdependencies among human beings. So you want to say that not only is this sort of more accurate description of the self, but normatively thinking of ourselves this way is going to make us better human beings. I would hope so.

I mean, you know, I don't have a lot of hope for human beings sometimes. But, you know, I think if you accept this view that we are constructing each other and are constructed by others, it should change the kind of questions we ask and the kind of society we live in. Okay. Is what I would say. But there's not, this is, I don't, I'm not utopian. I mean, in the sense that if we got that, there'd be, we'd have tons of problems to address. And the society would have to shift in so many significant ways. that it's hard to even know what problems would arise.

Right. But I do think that that way of thinking is more accurate. Like, I do think that we are, the idea that we are individuals who can make choices that don't affect others is just on the face of it, not reasonable. Well, the other point you made, which I thought was a great one, is that the moment we're born, we have identities. We're embedded in a social matrix, and it wasn't our fault, right? Like, you know, who we are in many ways is already there and we can't really claim credit

or be blamed for it. 100%. I think the way I try to, what I say is like, we're born into a story that's already ongoing. Like, I think you have the sense of like, I'm here, now the story starts, right? And especially as a child. It's like, clearly, there was a lot going on before you showed up. You just stepped into something you didn't understand. Right.

And it's not, that's not your responsibility. Like you can't, you know, you don't determine what's going off when you get here. But while you're here, it seems like an interesting thing to imagine how you can participate in the story. And it becomes operationalized when you just imagine being asked the question, who are you? And what are the answers that we give to that? So what are the answers that people actually give as a psychologist and what are the ones that matter to you? Yeah. So, you know, this is where there's cultural differences.

So there's studies that look at these questions like I am and you stick blanks. And more individualistic societies, people will say things that are like, I am six feet tall. I am, you know, I am a basketball player or whatever, these things that seem very individualistic. And then in other societies, people say things like, I am a son. I'm a mother. You know, I'm a caregiver. So things that seem to have more of the social aspect, those are things that I care about. And I think the social ones.

And I think those are the ones that make us who we are. I think saying, for example, even when you say something like, if I said like I'm six foot tall, I think the reason you're saying that is not just to list your absolute height is to say something about your height relative to other people. Even there, even things that don't seem social, I think, really are capturing something about people's relationship to other people. When you think about the self, I think you're thinking about others. Hey, everyone, it's Cal Penn.

I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and I Heart audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary, massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science, and what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth? I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections.

And it's like, okay, yo, yeah, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't. go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me, and I left it on the mic. That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Eursay, the Audible and IHeart Audio Book Club on the IHeart Radio app or

wherever you get your podcasts. I guess one way to make this real is I've been told that if you're at a party and you meet somebody, you're not supposed to ask them, what do you do for a living? That's a boring question. There's other questions you should ask. But I don't know. I think that's the most obvious one to ask. What are your professional opinion about this? You know, I don't think here's the thing about it. I think that it's nothing necessarily wrong with the question, but I do think they're more interesting questions to ask. mostly because I think people separate their professional lives

from the rest of their lives in a way that makes the question makes the answer that people get less interesting and makes them less interesting to talk to. But wait a minute, say more about that. I think that when people think about their work, again, because they separate it from their lives and you ask the question,

what do you do for a living? What they're going to do is like click into this other person that is in some sense separated from who they believe themselves to be, right? Like they're going to tell you about their work life. And if they're not excited about that, it's going to be a boring conversation. Do you not say that you're a psychology professor when people ask you who you are? I certainly don't.

Most of them are weird when you tell you're sick. That's true. Physicist also works for that, by the way. Yeah, you know, I like that. You know what I like to ask people? I like to ask, but what are you excited about right now? Okay. That's the most exciting thing going on right now for you.

Okay. That's the kind of question I like to ask people. And that could be work. You know, most people don't respond with that, but it could be work. Well, I think, and again, this is my physicist training kicking in, but I think of this in terms of coarse graining, right? Like, if you ask a person who they are, there's literally an infinite number of two things they could say, and they boil it down to a few pat answers.

And what you're aiming for is to give answers. that convey the most information in the fewest words, right? And maybe thinking of ourselves as socially constructed selves would alter our choice for which aspects of ourselves really matter. Yeah, and I guess the question is like, what kind of information do you want, right? I mean, if you want, what I'm looking forward usually is an opportunity to close the social distance when I'm meeting someone, right? And by that, I mean, like, I want the opportunity to, for them to have an experience of being closer to me, right?

And I think that's just a more interesting interaction. And so it's not necessarily the most information, but I would say the, from their perspective, the most intimate information they're willing to give me as someone that does. Okay. That's a tricky one. Now I'm going to start thinking about that. I hope no one asks that. It might ask me anything episode. What are the most intimate facts about you?

If you wouldn't give, that you wouldn't give it. That I'm willing to give. Yeah, they don't have to be that intimate, I suppose. So when I ask about your background, for example, right? That was an entry point for you to tell me something about your life or about your music, right? That is what I'm doing is saying, like, how can I create a sense of closeness quickly? Right. How do I get it comfortable for you to ask me something?

personal. I see. You're revealing your, you're revealing your tricks. For the audience listening over audio by background, he doesn't mean my personal background. He means the video of the office that I'm in right now that we chatted about before we started recording. So this is great. I know you, I know you move from California to Baltimore. I do know that. I know that you're an aspiring basis. I know that you're married. Probably did not have an office in your previous, your podcasting office in your previous place. Did not. Just had one little tiny room that I used for everything.

Yeah, I know. The deprivation of it all. It was terrible. But yeah, okay. I mean, I don't know. I mean, when I think about myself, when I give the answers at the party when someone says, tell me about yourself,

to what extent are the answers that I'm going to give really ones that society has suggested to me over the years versus things that I've come up with myself? I think you're going to give the answer that you feel is most culturally appropriate in that moment. And so in that sense, it's going to be that not so much what society tells you you are, but what society tells you you should say. What matters. Yeah, what society says matters, right.

Yeah, because I'm talking to another person. I have an idea of what they would care about and that's going to affect what I tell them, yeah. Well, 100%. Like, you try and what human beings are really good at. trying to have smooth interactions with other human beings. Are they good at that? Really? I have not noticed.

Yeah. I feel like you're really good at this. Like, you have a podcast. You're like, you're a very personal guy. It's like you want to make your work. You don't want to be like to have a conversation. You want to go smoothly. That's what people like.

That's true. I just, it's true. All right, but okay, let's let's raise the stakes a little bit. I mean, it's a little bit hard for me because I always want to like play the devil advocate, but I'm totally on your side about many of these things. So it's always fun to see how it affects how we actually think about issues in the world. So gender, is that something that the community just made up? Um, there's a really interesting one. This is the one. I love to talk about gender because it's so, it's so interesting. And it also is the one that's most likely to get me in trouble.

Exactly. That's, that's, that's those are ratings is cold. So look, I think that again, biology, like humans reproduce sexually. So there's just a, there is a biological reality underlying sex. Gender, as I think about it, is not that. Gender is not the biological sex. It's meaning that we layer atop, usually at top biological sex. And I think that is a social obstruction, which is different from saying it's not important. It's not saying it's not real.

And it's not saying that it's, that there's no, there are no parameters that have to be respected in the construction of gender, right? But I do think that it's much more flexible than most people experience as being, that it varies more than people imagine it does, and that as societies evolve, our understandings of gender evolve. And what does it mean to say that gender is something that society uses as a role? that, you know, what, do I have a gender when I'm just by myself or is it only when I'm out there in the world? Um, I think you have a gender when you buy yourself to the extent that you have a self when you buy yourself.

I think that gender is one of the most important ways that society organizes. So, yes, well, I think that you have a gender, I don't, I think that you have a gender when you buy yourself because you have a conception of self when you're by yourself when you're by yourself. yourself but that is a function still of your your relationships and interactions you have. I think, but I do think your community constructs gender. So there's a societal construction, but I'd like to be a little bit more nuanced and say a community construction for gender. Well, it's it's very compatible with, again, bringing up previous podcast conversations with Sally Hasslinger, the philosopher who talks a lot about social construction and we talked about gender and her point is, just like you said, it doesn't mean it's not real. You know, when you

socially get together and you build a bridge, the bridge is real, but you could have built a different bridge, right? You decided to build that bridge rather than a different one. And our notions of gender and other things are similar to that. Yeah, I'm the example. I like to use the metaphorality to use is more money. Okay. Like it's real. I don't think most people would not say money is not real, but money is only, it exists as an idea, right? You don't, you don't have, there's not, there's nothing physical. It doesn't require anything physical. It's really like it's it's in our interaction and our expectations of each other. I believe in each other, right? I believe in how others will behave. That's what makes money powerful. It's incredibly powerful, but it's a construction.

Gender, I think, is like that. I love that example because it really relies on sort of a shared set of beliefs and expectations and agreements, right? Like there's, and we don't ever sign a contract. You know, you're not like asked when you're six years old, please agree that a dollar is a dollar or something like that. But like you say, you're, you have no choice. You're born into the society. There are certain rules and you do play along for the most part. And it's, I mean, it's again, yeah, you come into a story already being told and you understand it's important. So you learn it's importance. And people teach you what it's important. It's not just you just, it's from nowhere. It's like people engage with you in a way that you learn what it means to be a man or,

woman. I guess one of the things that people who are on the more socially conservative side of things worry about is the idea that people can just decide what they are. They can just decide, I'm going to identify as a dragon or whatever. And how is that just okay? Or is that so unrealistic that it happens very much? We don't need to worry about it. Or what's the give and take between me deciding what I am and society deciding what I am. So this is where it's something for everyone that be mad at me about. So conservatives don't like this idea, which I think is fun. Like being, if you're six two with a beard and a lot of muscles, you could be a woman like

that. That's not problematic from my perspective of how the world operates the way the world works. At the same time, and this is where liberals will be upset with me, no one, you just can't just decide. That's just not from my perspective. That's just not, you don't have to worry about it because it's not possible. I can't decide. Like right now, I present as a man.

I think of myself as a man. Most people I engage with understand me and believe me to be a man. So it's fine. If tomorrow I said I was a woman, that would not make me a woman, right? I can't just decide on my own to be a woman, right? This is what it means to be socially constructed and they exist within a community. So my community has to accept me as a woman for me to be a woman. I'm not a woman until my community accepts me as such.

I see. So that kind of makes sense to me. I guess one possible loophole there is what if there was a trans person who identified as a woman but nevertheless still passed as male? Yeah. Is that? I don't know seeing when they're past, this is what's important. We can talk about race two here. If they pass as male, they're still a man from my perspective.

Okay. Okay. But there is another perspective that says inside they are psychologically. identifying as female, yeah? Okay, so good. This is where, this is the nuance. This is where it gets complicated. And I'll give an example about race and then come back to gender.

Yeah, good. So Rachel Dolazol, the people remember, she was this person who was born in a white, to a white family, was a white girl, identified as black from her. What she says, like, most of her, all of her remembered life. She thought herself as black. And so she started to present as black as well, I think was in Spokane. really committed to a black community, issues of the black community, represented herself as black, understood herself as black, and then the community saw her and accepted her as black. But they didn't know that she was born into a white family's white girl.

And then at some point, it was discovered that she was born a white person. And then the community rejected her claims that she was black. Okay. So what I say about that is she, this is now ontologically, she was born white, so she was white. she then became black. She was black. And then this is the important part. I'll come back to gender now. Then she became a white woman that wanted to be black. So she became a not black woman. So I wouldn't say she was a white woman. I'd say she's a not black woman. And this is important because the way I think about it is that it's both your view of yourself and the community's view of you when they align that that determines, what you are, not what you would like to be, not what they think you are, but from all intents and purposes, again, it gets a social construction of what you are. And so when you talk about someone who's like, say, a trans person who passes as a man but thinks of themselves as a

woman, I would say that they exist in some liminal state when they're in communities that don't see them the way they see themselves. They're not really either one of the things, you know, into his ontology at that moment. So, yeah, I mean, it makes perfect sense if we're moving beyond the naive essentialism about these categories, that there are going to be liminal cases, edge cases, complicated things. And that's fine. And it's not a flaw, right? Yeah. Like, there's, you know, there's a place where it's like, I don't know, there's Molopoly, money, money.

People say, no, what it is in the context of monopoly. I mean, it's just like, there's a way in which there's these things that are complex cases. is if what you require is the agreement between the conception of self and the internal, not internal. This is another thing that gets complicated. I don't know how much to what you want, but. I want all the details. I see that as like not as a disagreement between yourself and the community, but some kind

of conflict between communities because that conception of self has to come somewhere. Okay. Right. And so there's a way in which there's some sort of disagreement between communities. That's how I think about it. That's a very good point. So we all live in more than one community. So I keep sometimes saying society, but you are politely correcting you by saying community and it matters because we can be different selves in the context of different communities. 100%. And this is easy to see, right? But then. you just have to push it. Once you see the easy case, you have to push it to the harder ones, which is you're at home for your parent.

Like, that's a very particular identity. But if you go out, I don't know, you go out for vacation and you leave the kids with your parents, their grandparents, it's a different you, right? Or if you're out having drinks with your friends, that might be a very different new than you at the office. People can understand that. That's easy to see. You just have to push it a little bit harder to see the point I'm making.

Right. But in the social media era, sometimes we cross boundaries as far as the communities are concerned, and that gets us in trouble. 100%. I mean, I think we've always crossed boundaries, but they haven't necessarily come into contact as much as they do get in social media. You know, people, some people live in very different lives in different communities, right? and social media has a way in terms of broadcasting all these lives to similar audiences, then you can get in a little bit of trouble. And I mean, how prescriptive or normative can we be here? I mean, are there right and wrong ways to identify and shape ourselves, given what the community is trying to tell us?

Like, at some point, can we just say the community wants me to be this, but I'm just not going to go alone. You know, this is, that's a, this gets into another really, um, hairy issue of like free will. And I try to, I lied that a little bit. We can talk about it. But I think, let's stay with a gender for a second. I think you can move between communities and be different selves in those different communities, right? So you might exist in a community that you feel like you don't have control over.

They refuse to accept your, the concept. of gender that you prefer, and so you move into another community, we'll accept that, and you feel more at ease. And there are many people who have that kind of experience. So I think we all move between communities and have different levels of comfort in different communities or comfort on different dimensions in some communities than others. Most concerts, you're in a seat. You're watching. Downtown Rocks at Fremont Street Experience is something else entirely. Three stages.

Live music spilling into the street. Into the crowd. Under the world's largest overhead screen. The neon's on, the night's wide open, and you're right in the middle of it. Downtown Rocks at Fremont Street Experience. All summer. All welcome. All free.

Search Fremont Street Experience for the full lineup and dates. Hey, everyone. It's Cal Penn. of Earsay, the Audible and I Heart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary, massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science, and what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth?

I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections, And it's like, okay, yo, yeah, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me and I left it on the mic. That's great. Because it served the story.

People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and IHeart Audio Book Club on the IHeart Radio. app or wherever you get your podcasts. How does this jive with the idea of authenticity? I'm going to bring up yet another recent podcast. I don't know why I'm talking so much about the self on these podcasts. Maybe it's an important idea.

But I just talked with Sky Cleary, who is a historian in some sense of philosophy. And she wrote a biography of Simone de Beauvoir, who argues that we will find meaning and mattering in our lives by getting in touch with our authentic selves. and everything you're telling me calls it to question the idea that there is any such thing, or doesn't it? Yeah, I don't know what authenticity means. Like, this is one of those things where I get it. I mean, people love the idea of, I'm me, I'm like my authentic self. Right.

There's a version. I truly just don't know what they mean. I'm not saying that there's no such thing. But the way people talk about it, the lay sense of authenticity, I think, is probably not coherent. I remember when I took an English class as a sophomore undergraduate, and I think we were reading Eugene Ianesco or something like that. And our professor was talking about the masks that we wear in different situations, different social situations. And I was young and naive at the time. I figured that he was going to go on and say, so we should remove those masks and be our authentic selves.

But his actual lesson was, you just got to pick the right mask for the right situation. There's nothing under the mask. It's just a matter of which masks you're putting on that day. Yeah, I was going to, you know, I said this and that, I will say, I said this in a recent podcast somewhere. It's like, it's masks all the way down. It's all the way down. But, but maybe I can, well, let me ask it rather than state it. Is it a coherent thought to say I can choose which mask to wear?

That has eye choosing in there. And I know that's the free will question, but which you want to do a lot, which is fine. I want to say yes, but I think the right answer is no. You know, I want to, I think I should say this. Like I experienced like most people, I think, in that I have an experience of living behind my eyes, too. I have an experience of making all these choices in life and thinking that my outcomes are affected by the choices I make and feeling constrained by this situation and that. If only they'd let me be my true self, I'd be happier. I have all those experiences.

I just don't, when I examine them, I just don't think that's right. That's certainly how it feels to me. Okay. I just don't think that's right. But, okay, I mean, maybe I think something is finally sinking in to my thick skull here. So I think I am getting something. It might be okay to talk about desires that I have or wants or aspirations without necessarily connecting them to the idea that they reflect a true self underneath.

I mean, I could absolutely say, I am not happy in this situation. I would like to change my situation. Yeah. I mean, like, you have experiences. You have feelings. The question is just like, what's the source, right? And when you locate the source is like some true essential self, I'm like, that's probably wrong. Hmm.

Right. That's what I'm saying. It's, I'm not saying you don't have these experiences or you don't have these feelings or you don't have these wants and needs. I just think it's really, really hard and may be impossible to truly identify some singular. source of those things. And certainly if there's singular source, I don't know, as a materialist,

I don't think it's the soul. Yeah, yeah. Is the temptation to identify some singular source or even just talk about a coherent self, more or less a Western slash modern invention? I mean, I know that some people talk about

capitalist societies as being more individualistic and, other societies as being more communal, et cetera. I have no way of judging whether that's true or just, you know, a fun story to tell. Yeah. So, you know, in the book, I talk a little bit about this, that they're professors of classics who argue that our conception of self is a relatively recent creation that, and say, classical in Greece, that it wasn't the sense that things emanated from your, you know,

you know, immortal soul, right? Like, that you'd have an experience, you could say, like, the gods breathe that into you, or what, what, something, something moved you, but it wasn't necessarily located in a self. And then you look at literature, there's people point out that there wasn't really, long after literacy in writing, there wasn't a tradition of writing from like a first person perspective. And so very, very late, like, people point to St. Augustine's confessions as the first major work. that takes on a first person perspective of the world. And all that to say,

they're like, no, it's not clear that our conception of self is the only one that humans have focused on as we look through history. So, no, I don't know that this is the only way for us to think. And some people will also suggest that this conception of self, this individual conception, individualistic conception of self is necessary,

possibly for a capital society. I don't know that you would say that capitalism produced it, but they certainly go hand in hand and that if you believe in free markets, as we've discussed them now, you have to kind of accept or really have deep faith

and individual choice and freedom of choice. Well, the idea of standard utilitarianism is that each person has a utility and you add them up. And there's no sort of nonlinear effects that people can individually be muddling along with society is going great or something like that. Yeah, yeah. And this is right, right?

And capitalism depends on that as well, right? This is like the best for me. My own personal greed will somehow end up producing the best outcomes if everyone else asked in their own self-interest as well. And self-interest is understood very narrowly. So I did, after, while reading your book, I googled when was the first first-person narrative? And of course, people don't agree, right? There's different claims. They never do.

They never do. But at least one of the interesting candidates is the Song of Songs in the Old Testament. Oh, that's interesting. It was very interesting to me. I'm not a really an Old Testament scholar by any stretch, but I went and read it. It's like really racy poem. These two people, like, I can see why they don't talk about it very much. But it is also in the voices of a man and a woman.

There's a chorus in the background, right? And they're expressing their desires in no uncertain terms. And it's always hard for me to imagine what it was like to be a person living back then. Like, was that considered shocking? Was that, you know, that way of talking unusual? Or was it just an oral tradition that we just don't have any access to these days? I don't know. That's an interesting one.

I hadn't seen that one, but that makes sense. And also it's hard to know exactly what. Like, I haven't read it. I actually read it a long time ago I've ever read it recently I said I have to go back and look and think is this really first person. Yeah. Those details matter.

I mean, there are people who say that Shakespeare invented the concept of a character in literature, which, yeah, I don't know. That might be a stretch. But, okay. But again,

one of the ideas that I thought was provocative that you put forward is that the idea of a self limits your personal freedom in some way. Like it circumscribes certain things that you either can do, certain capacities, certain privileges you have in the world. Tell us about that a little bit. Well, I'm curious why I was provocative because once I think, I mean, sometimes that one seems to me to be almost so obvious as to be uninteresting. So the idea, see, I'll just say the idea and then you can tell me why it strikes you is provocative. The idea is that when we say what we are, when we say who we are, when we give any definition,

A definition has to include what is inside and what is outside, right? Like, you have the definition has to exclude as well, even if it does that implicitly. And whatever we exclude when we're talking about ourselves is by definition a limit on what we are or what we can be. Okay. That makes perfect sense, actually, when you put it that way. But I guess the provocative aspect of it would have been in my mind that you're. sort of attributing these limitations to selfhood rather than other aspects of our

existence in the world. Like, I don't know, it depends on what we, I guess, if, if the self is entirely socially constructed, then maybe they all count. But I mean, obviously, how much money I have or my status and society, my job, those limit what I can do in the world. Yes. But are those, is the argument going through those being aspects? of what is myself?

No, not necessarily. I mean, sure, we could. But if you think of yourself as like a dad or if you think of yourself as a man, like take gender, by definition you're accepting limitations, right? And you can see them in your life. Like it's not just an abstraction, right? Like if you think of yourself as a man and you behaving as a man, because that's what in part it requires to understand yourself in that way, that there are things you do

with things you don't do. Now, you might have more or less stringent by some people's, you know, um, conception ideas of what it means to be a man, but you, once you say you're a man, you are accepting some kind of limitation. I guess the flip side of that is that one reason why people like traditional roles so much is that it gives them a set of clues as to how to treat people. And, and yes, it does. And how to be. hate as well, right? I mean, I think I have the chapter called Hugs and the Strait Jackets, and this is kind of the point, which is we, when we think of who we are, it's really important for us to maintain that sense of clarity about who we are. We think about authenticity.

People care about authenticity. Even though I said, I don't know what it means because it's really like integrity of self. This is who I am. It matters to me. And that suggests that those boundaries, those limitations are comforting. They give you a place in the world. They tell you what the world looks like. It's a perspective. It's a place to stand. It's a place by which you can, a location from which you can make a judgment about who you are

and what the world is and your place. And there's something deeply comforting about that. But in that is also limitation. Right. Right. I like that a lot because even though I don't agree with them, it helps me understand the anxiousness on the part of people who really want certain old roles just respected forever. I mean, it makes your life easy. You know, the decisions you have to make, the way you treat people, things like this.

If there's a script you can just run and it never deviates, then a lot of your decision making is made much easier. Yes. I mean, it's it's it's it's um it's your decision making is made um much easier and the world is made more sensible. Yeah. Right. Like it's easier to have it's hard to have meaning in the world where you don't, where you don't understand your own place in it. And when people start to disrupt the nature of that meaning, this is this is why I think there's not a live and let live on issues of significant identities, right? When people care about other people being able to change their identities because it says something about their, they're all in a place in the world, right? I mean, people are really committed to having clarity in terms of how the world operates and their place in it,

and these identities play a significant role in that. Is that something that we should strive in your personal view to get better at, to have a little bit more relaxed point of view with how other people construe their own identities? I think, yeah, I mean, my attitude toward this is like, look, if someone asks to be something I personally, like, you say, if you told me right now, like, I think myself as a woman, I'd be like, if that's important to you, I'm with you on that. Like, that, that's my personal view. I think it's important that we understand that we are in this together. That's what I think is important. And that when you ask to be a thing, whatever is, if you think of, you're, when you ask to be a podcaster, right, like, that it's a

request, that you also understand that request has consequences for me, right? It's not just what you want to be, like what you want to be does affect me. And I think there's a loss of or insufficient understanding on all sides. I think there's a symmetry. I think we, when we, when there are people who are really committed to being a certain thing, when we deny them that, and sometimes we're denying them their sense of humanity, I think that's a bigger burden to place on someone. But it's not the case that it's no burden to ask someone else to accept identity. that aren't, don't allow with the way they experience the world. Okay, yeah, I think that's a perfectly fair point.

I mean, one, I don't know, this is a trivial or profound example, but some people get upset when they see other people walking outside in public wearing a mask. They think that it is somehow insulting to them, which, you know, I kind of get it, right? Because it's kind of what they think is that they're being judged, right? Like, they're just walking down the street not wearing a mask and this other person is wearing a mask. You might say, well, let them do whatever they want. But in their minds, this other person thinks less of them because they're not being as socially conscious or safe by adopting this practice. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, everything that you do is being interpreted by someone else, right? And the way that's meaningful from their perspective, right? Not from the world as you experience it. And so if you wear a mask and I see that as like questioning me, like, or an easy example is like, you're vegetarian, go out to eat and you're like, oh, I don't eat meat. People will feel that as like questioning their choice to eat meat. And, you know, sometimes people will feel uncomfortable with that.

Yeah. I mean, we're all connected in these ways, right? Your choices and your decisions are not somehow irrelevant to mine. But maybe it's getting better in some sense or maybe like we're still struggling. to work through these things. Another thing I think of, which might be a trivial example, is that certain conventions or meetings now will have name tags that are color coded. You know, a certain code means I'm happy with physical contact. Give me a hug. Another one says, you know, we can shake hands, but don't get too familiar.

And another color says, don't touch me. And some people really get upset at that. They like, they mock that. They're like, you know, why are you trying to be so explicit? about these cultural norms that are supposed to remain unspoken and universal? Yeah, you know, I think there might be differences in the degree of clarity that people want and the degree of conformity. So clarity, and I would separate those things like clarity, because you can get clarity by having

the badges, but it suggests a lack of conformity, suggests like people are making different decisions. And I think that lack of conformity can be discomforting as well. So let's, since we're winding up near the end of the podcast here, the other big topic that you use for it just drop in there in the book that I kind of love is the fact that human beings are really aware of our own mortality. Yeah. We're going to die. And we have a understanding of that in a way that at least arguably other animals don't. And that affects who we are and who we want to be and what we want our legacies to be because we, unlike other animals, have the concept of a legacy.

So how does that feed in? What does that have to do with the self? Yeah. So I think of the self is like if you want to have a sense of meaning in life, that the self is critical. And I'll give you quickly, a psychologist think about meaning is needing three things. One is coherence, right?

You have to understand the way the world works and a sense of your place in the world. It has to make sense. The world just needs to make sense, coherence. Another is purpose. It means like you get up at the door and you have to have something to do. Like there's purpose. The third is significance. Sometimes it's called mattering. Like you need to believe that what you do

matters beyond the present moment, right? It can't just be, it matters now. It doesn't matter any any burden of that. And I think the self is critical to the first and the third. So the self is a way in which we create coherence of the world. It's a way that we understand ourselves, which is what obviously is embedded in the word. It's almost tautological. Like, we understand a sense of ourselves in the world, like who we are, how we're related to other things and other people. So the self is, I think, in large part, the way that we make sense of the world. It's coherence. And then insignificance and mattering, I think, is the most interesting because suggests the self is kind of like a time machine.

So the self allows you to think about how the past is connected to you, right? Like the past is not just the past, like the thing in terms of your ancestors, your history, the story of your porans, how you came to be, all these things are connected to you. And it also allows you, and this is the part that's really important for meaning it allows you to project yourself into the future. Right? So you can think about how the things you do right now will reverberate even past your death. and it allows you to connect to larger things.

For example, you can feel connected to the nation and include that in yourself. And then when you physically pass, if the nation persists or you believe it will, there's a way in which you believe that you will persist. So it allows for this symbolic immortality. And this is kind of what the research focuses on. The research is a theory called terror management theory focuses on this concept, that human being, are aware of their own mortality. As such, they seek ways to experience symbolic immortality. And one of the ways they do that is by connecting their sense of self to groups, ideas that will live beyond their physical being. And you can do things like in experiments where if you remind people of their death, they will tell you that, for example, their nation will last thousands of years longer than if you don't remind them of their death. these sorts of things where it looks like death commits people to concepts, communities that extend their lives symbolic looks like. I like the name Terror Management Theory. It makes it seem, it maybe is even just true that whenever self-awareness sneaked into the human mind and psychology, it's just so terrifying.

the existence of ourselves, the existence of embarrassing past events, the existence of our future demise, that most of what we have to do is just manage that terror somehow and live productive lives nevertheless. Man, isn't that the... Isn't that the... We have to, I don't know what it is. We have to learn how to play base. Yeah, something. Some of the, you know, keep our vibrations out there in the cosmos.

Exactly. All right, Brian, last question then. I always ask this question of psychologically oriented people in the podcast. So do you think that your research, your academic work in this area has changed your own psychology or how you behave or think about yourself? Oh, that's a really good question. You know, whenever I talk about this book and I'm sure it's what happened now, so that self-less, the book, I feel, more aware of how my engaged with other people affect them. And I'm much more sensitive to the interactions I have with other people.

And I feel like, I saw someone about a person. That might sound strange. And that I've tried to engage more deeply. I try to be more thoughtful about the experience of the other person, not just with me, but like where they're from or what their experiences are outside of the interaction with me. And I think it makes when I do that, it makes my day-to-day experience much better because it's surprising how much it affects what they reflect back to me and the way they engage with me.

So it really changes my interactions. And I feel like that's changed me, right? And this is the way that's kind of that. because I believe in the book, right? I'd be differently. People interact with me differently, and I'm a different person because of it. And I hope that they are better people for the interactions as well.

No, I love that. And maybe the flip side of what we've been talking about most of the podcast, which we haven't said out loud, is that if ourselves are constructed by our communities, then we are part of other people's communities, and we're constructing their selves. and that is something that we should keep, be mindful of as we interact with other people. Yes.

I mean, I think that we should definitely be mindful of that as we interact with other people. I think there's something to be gained when we, when we do that. Like, we gain something ourselves and we provide something to others. And I think societal will be better off if we really thought hard about the degree of connection among us. I think that's good advice. Brian Lowry, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast. podcast. Thanks for having me shot. I really appreciate it. What if you could have even more and more and more help to pursue your goals? At LPL Financial, we offer more ways for

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