The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 134. Maps of Meaning 06: Story and Metastory (Part 2)

Episode Date: August 30, 2020

In this lecture, Professor Peterson discusses uncertainty or anomaly. We frame the world -- or the world reveals itself to us -- as a story, with a starting point, a destination, and the behavioral means to move from one to the other. The destination is valued more highly than the starting point, and constitutes the point of the story -- the aim of the individual. Reality manifests itself within that story as what is relevant for forward movement, what gets in the way, and what is irrelevant and can be safely ignored. The largest category, by far, is the latter. Unfortunately, sometimes what has been happily classified as irrelevant rears up and gets in the way. That's a manifestation of chaos. Chaos can undermine the story, or break the frame. The degree of undermining or breakage is proportional to the time and space over which the story in question extends its operations.

Welcome to season 3 episode 21 of the Jordan B Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson, Jordan's daughter. I hope you enjoy this episode of Maps of Meaning 6, Story and MetaStory Part 2. If you guys haven't checked it out, I watched Jockel Willings podcast with Dad recently. It wasn't a recent podcast, and it goes from 28T, 26. Oh man, I don't know. Anyway, it was really fun and informative. It had some nice stories my dad shared about working on the railway that I think you might enjoy. I would highly recommend watching it. Also, if you haven't heard of Nicole Arbor and you're in need of some laughs, I would recommend watching some of her videos. She's extremely funny and very sharp. I hope you're doing well.

Season 3 Episode 21 Maps of Meaning, Part 6. Story and MetaStory Part 2, a Jordan B. Peterson lecture. So I guess the case that I was making last time, at least in part, was that one way of conceptualizing the fundamental problem that human beings face is to conceptualize it as an ongoing struggle with complexity. And complexity emerges as a consequence of sort of finite boundedness of individual consciousness and incredible excess of the unbounded everywhere else, even including underneath that consciousness, because of course your individual consciousness depends on the function, or is related to the function of things that are so complex you can't even understand it.

So there you are, surrounded by some things that you understand in an ocean of things that you don't understand at all, and including things about yourself. And it's not obvious at all how people solve that problem because in some sense, it's not solvable the fact that you don't have the cognitive resources or the conceptual resources

to understand everything that you need to understand in order to properly orient yourself in the world. Now, obviously, partly the way we deal with that is that we cooperate with other people. And so that radically multiplies our resources. Incredibly multiplies our resources. So it's something to consider always when, you know, so much of the political dialogue that surrounds us now

consists of a critique of cooperative societies and analysis of their oppressive nature. And of course, that's true because any cooperative system that specifies a certain endpoint and produces a value hierarchy of some sort also simultaneously forces things into that value system. And then rank orders people, according to the value structure. And so there's an oppressive element to it. But compared to being naked in chaos, generally, it's better.

Now, it doesn't always have to be because it can get murderous. But generally speaking, well, look, we're social animals. It doesn't matter. Our evolutionary pathway has already taken us here, and so we're individuals, but we're unbelievably social. And so that's that. So as far as I can tell, we'd have to be completely different creatures, not to fall, not to take advantage of and fall prey to the problems with social being. All right, so I think the way that the problem of complexity has been solved, and this is the best argument I know of for the truth of the Darwinian notion of evolution.

Now, I don't think that our models of evolution are complete by any stretch of the imagination. I know they're not, partly because of recent work done in epigenetics, which suggests that you can inherit acquired traits. And when I went to university, when I started going to university in the 1980s, that was heresy, really. Like, no, you cannot inherit acquired traits, but actually you can inherit acquired traits. That's the field of epigenetics studies that. And that's a radical shift in perspective, because we also don't know exactly what that means across any length of time. And when you're thinking about evolutionary lengths of time, you're thinking about three

and a half billion years, because that's the span of time over which life evolved. And so even things that don't have a overwhelmingly market potency for one generation can be unbelievably powerful across time. And then there's also the issue of sexual selection because you know you'll hear Darwinists continually describe the world and the evolutionary world as a place of randomness. And that's not true. And I don't know why they make that statement. The mutations are random or quasi-random because we don't understand mutations that well yet either. And most mutations are deadly, right? Most mutations are deadly. There's a set of them that are harmful but not deadly. And then there's a tiny, tiny proportion that could, in principle, produce some benefit to the next generation, assuming

environmental, environmental shifts say in the direction of the mutation. So, and that's there's a randomness element to that. We know that. I mean, part of the reason that you mutate or yourselves mutate, your DNA mutates, is because of background levels of radioactivity. And a lot of that's a consequence of solar activity, right? So cosmic rays come zipping through the atmosphere and they nail your DNA and produce minor alterations and that's a mutation. And if you crank up the background radiation rate, like say around Chernobyl, then the

mutation rate rises. And there's definitely a random element to that. And it's necessary for there to be a random element, because as far as I can tell, the only way you can beat a random environment is by producing random changes, right? So you know, the idea, basically, the environment isn't some static place that's selecting for higher and higher levels of fitness are not in any, not in any, it's certainly not doing that in any static way. And so it's shifting round randomly. And then, you know, you have a structure that's been, your species has a structure that's a

consequence of this immense evolutionary journey, and it's moderating itself randomly within certain parameters, the parameters being that most mutations will kill you, like alterations in your fundamental form generally tend to kill you, so they're incremental. And so the mutations are random and they match, hopefully they ratchet the randomness in the environmental shift and so you can more or less keep up that way. But then there's additional complicating factors and they're not trivial and one of them is whatever epigenetics does, we don't know anything about that yet, but the second one is sexual selection.

And sexual selection is no joke. It could be the primary thing. It's certainly one of the primary things that's driven human evolution. And I think you can say that, you think about the environment, again, let's think about the environment. So you have a dominant hierarchy, and that's really an old structure.

The dominant hierarchy is 300 million years old, because it emerged pretty much whenever there was a nervous system, an emergent nervous system, and whenever animals had to occupy the same territory, they automatically organized themselves into something approximating a dominant hierarchy. So it's a very, very, very, very old structure. It's older than trees. It's older than flowers. It's old. And as far as real goes from a Darwinian sense, permanent is real. And so when you, you can say, well, you know, our burial ancestors adapted themselves to trees. And so the tree was along, around long enough to be a feature of the environment.

But the dominant turkey has been around a lot longer than trees. And you can think of the dominant turkey both as an adaptation to the environment, because you'd kind of think about the dominant turkey as a cultural construct. But if a cultural construct lasts long enough, then it becomes part of the environment. And so the dominant turkey is part of the environment. And what seems to happen roughly speaking, and this is an oversimplification, but we'll go with it, is that males have a dominant turkey.

And there's a relatively small number of males that are relatively successful. And those successful males have preferential access to female reproductive capacity, either because of the females actively choose the the more dominant males, which is very, very common, or because the more dominant males chase all the less dominant males away,

so that even if the females don't exercise choice, which they often do, then the only males left around that can serve as reasonable mating partners are the more powerful ones. And so you think you've got two really radical determiners of evolution. As a consequence of that, one is that each, I'm not talking about female dominance hierarchy at the moment, but I can talk about them, but that's why this is no oversimplification. But what happens is that the males obviously are selected for their ability to move up dominance hierarchies, obviously, because the ones that are at the top of the dominance hierarchy reproduce

preferentially. And so that means the male dominance hierarchy becomes a method of selection. But then allied with that is the female proclivity for choice on whatever dimension the dominance hierarchy happens to be arranged. And so then female sexual selection also becomes a radical non-random selector of what genetic material is going to move into the next generation. And so I failed to see how any of that can be separated from the emergence of complex nervous systems and mind over the course of evolution, because people aren't creatures, aren't making random choices.

They're not random at all. So we even know such things like, imagine a peacock's tail. You know, it's covered with eyes, which is quite interesting, because eyes, of course, attract attention, and lots of animals have evolved eye-like markings, like moss. There's moss that, when they unfold their wings, they have two big eyes on the back of them, and that's to keep birds from eating them, right, because the birds don't like being stared at, so they stay away from the moss. But so a peacock's tail is nothing but eyes, and so it's very attractive, and it's shimmers,

and there's something about it that's beautiful, which is quite interesting, too. The females have obviously been selecting the male peacocks for beauty. They have this insane tail. Well, so the evolutionary biologists have thought, well, what possible utility could that tail be? Is it just maybe the females got fixated on tail, so to speak?

And you know, you gotwin-effect loop going there, and the male peacocks just got bigger and bigger tails, and it's just like an evolutionary dead end. It's a positive feedback list system that's gone out of control. But they have done things like look at the symmetry and breadth, say, or the symmetry and size, and overall quality of the male peacocks tail as a marker for physical health.

So reduced parasite load, for example. And it does turn out that the healthier male peacocks have better tail display. And so what the female seem to be doing is using some marker or some set of markers as a proxy indicator for health. And I think you could say with reasonable, you could say reasonable that,

reasonably, that female human beings do the same thing to male human beings. And there's some of that vice versa too, like we evaluate each other for example, for symmetry, which is one of the elements of beauty, because healthier people tend to be more symmetrical. And lots of animals use symmetry. Butterflies, if butterflies won't

mate with another butterfly, if it deviates from symmetry, by the tiniest amounts you can imagine. So symmetry is a marker. And there's other markers, like shoulder width to waist width is one and waist width to hip width is another. That's usually what males use that to evaluate females in part. So there's lots of markers of health, but it also looks to me like the data worldwide seems to indicate that women, so imagine that women may to cross dominant hierarchies and up socioeconomically speaking, and on average across cultures, women go for men who are about four to five years older.

You know, it varies. In the Scandinavian countries, that shrunk a little bit, but not that much. And in other cultures, it's bigger. I would say that depends to some degree on difficulty of establishing economic independence, right? Because in richer countries it's easier to have enough economic independence if you're a male to be a useful participant in the process of having children. But it doesn't matter, cross culturally, it's still across and up, where a man made to cross and down, they don't care much about socioeconomic status.

It doesn't seem to be part of their selection method, generally speaking. So, I think that part of that is also the ability of women to select for male health. It's something like that because it isn't only that, because if you're healthy and energetic, you're much more likely to be successful, because it's very hard to be successful if you're ill, obviously. I mean, so because the competition's just too high, and both genders, both sexes,

select each other for attractiveness, both select for intelligence, both select for personality, although there are differences there in terms of what's stressed. But so I think you can derive a couple of things out of this. And this is where I think people are different than other animals.

Importantly different is that, so imagine that there's tremendous selection pressure towards the production, let's say, of men who are good at climbing male dominance hierarchies, or are climbing the male dominance hierarchy. But the thing that's so interesting about people is that we've multiplied our dominance hierarchies. If you take an animal that's got a rather static behavioral pattern, then there's a single hierarchy. Elephant seals are a good example of that, so elephant seals, the males are absolutely massive.

They're way, way bigger than the females. And they basically have heroms, roughly speaking. And they use physical prowess as their marker of status, essentially. And obviously size is a huge part of that because otherwise the male elephant seals wouldn't be as massive these things. They're absolutely enormous. And so it's just power. Slash health, maybe aggression, something like that. It's whatever makes them more suitable for the kind of physical combat that elephant seals engage in.

So, and the degree to which power is associated with dominance status in those sorts of situations seems to be associated with the size differential between males and females. So the more power is an issue with regards to male competence, the larger the males are compared to the females, and the more likely the males are going to have a herm relationship with the females. And you see that a little bit in human beings, because men are bigger than women. They're not overwhelmingly bigger. That's sexual dimorphism.

And you know, there's some men that are smaller than some women. But on average, men are taller. They have more upper body strength and so forth. So there is a power element to male competition. But it's not as extended as it would be among animals, say like elephant seals. So in the elephant seal, you see maybe there's one stable set of traits that's being selected for that makes the males more likely to reproduce. But human beings were very weird creatures because we're so conceptually flexible.

And so what seems to have happened, maybe we started, males started selecting each other for endomans' competitions for something like cognitive flexibility and conscientiousness. It's something like that. So that would be the ability to abstractly represent the world and then the ability operate effectively within it to represent yourself socially in a way and then to carry through with that because that enables people to trust you. So it's something like that. And so that produced cortical expansion and then women were selecting men who were good at that and not produced cortical expansion. And then there's an arms race between women and men with regards to intelligence. So the women kept up or they certainly kept up with intelligence as the evolutionary cycle continued. But as the evolutionary cycle continued. But one of the consequences of selection for cortical expansion and increased cognitive flexibility

was that the number of dominance hierarchies that human beings could produce started to multiply. Because there's all sorts of ways that you can be successful. You think about how many ways you can be successful in a modern culture, and you can be successful in dimensions that aren't really even associated with each other. So you can be successful socially. That's what an extrovert would do. You could be successful in terms of intimate relationships. That's what a agreeable person would do. A disagreeable person would be more successful with

regards to competition. A person who's high in neuroticism would be would be trying to protect themselves and to establish some sort of security, an open person would be looking for a flexible creative environment. And so there's this multiplicity of, of ways that you can establish a dominance hierarchy and be successful in it. And if you're creative, you can come up with your own damn dominance hierarchy, which is exactly what you're doing if you're creative, right? You spin up a game that's your game, and then you make the rules. And that's hard because if you make a new game with new rules, it's hard to monetize it. But you could be the best at playing that game, and so that's a huge advantage to being creative if you

can pull it off. So then you think, well, what's happened among human beings is the multiplication of the set of possible dominant hierarchies has become very broad. And then you could say, well, what's driving selection now is the ability to be successful across multiple sets of dominance hierarchies. And that accounts at least in part for our cognitive flexibility. And so that's really what a human being is. A human being is a creature that has high potential for succeeding across a very wide range of potential human dominance hierarchies. And so that gives us our transformative psyche.

That's the niche that that's the niche that we've both produced and occupied. And I think it's out of that that hero mythology emerges fundamentally because I think what the hero is, the mythological hero, is a representation of that part of the psyche that's particularly good at being successful across sets of dominance hierarchies. It's a very, very biological way of thinking about it. And I thought about this for a long time. I can't see any way that that just can't be the case.

And how else could it work? If we had a fixed behavioral pattern like beavers, you know, you're the most successful beaver if you build the best dam, it's like fine. And you know what's going to be selected for it. But that isn't what people are like. And it's also why we're so multipurpose, you know. We have hands. What's a hand for?

What's the evolutionary function of a hand? Well, you can't specify that. You could say, it's something like, well, a hand is useful for doing a whole bunch of different things with. Well, and mouth, tongue, same thing. What are words for? Well, it's the same thing. Therefore, they're for communicating a very wide range of information. It's something like that. So we're these weird general-purpose animals. You know, we're these weird general purpose animals. We're not great at any one thing, but we can swim better than most terrestrial animals. We can run faster than most animals,

and we can certainly run longer, like a human being can run a horse to death over the course of a week if they're in good shape. So we're really good at being a multipurpose entity, like a rat, where they call rats witty species because they can be anywhere. They don't have a specific niche, like, you know, there's animals down in the Amazon that they're specialized for like one tree, you know, or one type of tree in one tiny little area. That's not what human beings like, because we're like cockroaches or rats, which is nasty comparison,

but we can go anywhere and thrive. And so being particularly good at that, being particularly good at being able to go anywhere and thrive also seems to me to be a canonical element of the hero mythology. So, okay, all right. Now, So, so, okay, all right. Now, I started to introduce all those topics because I was trying to address the issue of how it is that we've come to deal with the fact that things are so complex that we can't deal with them. And so a huge part of the answer to that is the Darwinian answers. One is, well, you keep up with things you can't keep up with by changing unpredictably. So, here's an example. You know, sometimes if you're driving down the road and there's a deer on the road, maybe you'll run into it and it'll, instead of jumping out of the way, it sort of jumps randomly and then you run into it, you think, well, that's a pretty stupid strategy. It's like natural selections at work there, but it turns out that deer jump randomly when wolves are chasing them. Well, why would you do that? Well, because you can't predict it, right? If something horrible is after you

acting unpredictably is actually a pretty good strategy, and that's basically what mutation does. It means the horrible thing that's after you always is the rapid transformation of the environment, and the only thing you can possibly do in that case is capitalize on chance. Okay, so that's one thing. So that's partly why the Darwinian story, I think, has to be right because the environment does move unpredictably, and the only way you can keep up with something that's unpredictable is to generate variance and hope that one of them has drawn the lucky lottery card. But then there's these additional issues which is that we're also, we also seem

to be tightly selected for the capacity to cooperate and compete so that multiplies our cognitive ability. That's a huge part of it. And then we're also, we also seem to have constructed ourselves, so to speak, through sexual choice into these general problem, general purpose problem-solving creatures. And so we've internalized some of the Darwinian process. So you think, well, most animals will produce variants of themselves physically. And then most of those variants die. But human beings have built a lance, built a mechanism, let's

say, that's like a game engine. I think that's a really good, you know, how there are game engines now that people have devised, their computational devices, and you can take a game engine and you can generate games with it, like computer games. So the game engine is a mechanism for producing games. Well, that's what our brains are like. Our brains are game engines for producing games. And so what happens is that when you think you produce an avatar of yourself, you produce a fictional world

in that that avatar inhabits. And maybe you produce multiple fictional worlds and multiple avatars. That's the you that could be tomorrow, which is what you're doing when you're planning. And you walk the avatar through its potential roots and those that look good, you keep and those that don't look good, you kill. And so, you can then you can embody the ideas that you keep and act those out. And hopefully the idea is that when you embody them, you're successful and you don't get killed. And so we're select, we've also, when we've been selecting each other for cognitive

prowess, we've been selecting ourselves for the ability to generate avatars out of ourselves and kill them instead of dying. It's unbelievably brilliant. And that's really akin to the human discovery of the future, right? The future is a place where variants of you could exist. It's something like that. And other animals don't seem to be able to do that. So we're very sneaky, and well, so far,

it doesn't seem to be working too badly, although we haven't been around for very long, right? I mean, human beings of our particular subspecies, about 150,000 years, something like that, which is from an evolutionary timeframe. It's like, it's nothing. You know, it's two thousand eighty year old men. It's not very long, you know, if you think about it that way.

Okay. So, now what I want to do is draw a relationship between that developmental process, that evolutionary process, and the emergence of these underlying motivational systems. It's something like this. So, you imagine, you go back in time to the emergence of the development of nervous systems. So, there's cells that creatures use to produce motor output, and there's cells that creatures use to produce motor output and there's cells that creatures use to map the patterns around them onto themselves. And so those are that sensory, that's the sensory layer, so to speak. Imagine, sensory layer, nervous layer,

motor layer. In simpler animals, you just have sensory motor cells. Then they diversify sensory layer, nervous layer, motor layer. In fact, that's actually what you consist of when you're first developing a muteral after the blastocyte stage, when your cells differentiate. That's the differentiation, sensory layer, nervous layer, motor layer.

So then you think there's a sensory layer. Now what's that sensory layer doing? Think about the world as consisting of patterns of all sorts. Like maybe there's an animal in the ocean and it's being subjected to wave motion. And so its sensory systems map the wave motion onto the motor output. So if you look at a sponge, for example, sponges are good examples because they're sort of half unicellular animals and half multicellular animals. You can take a sponge and run it through a

colander and separate it out into cells, say, in salt water, and it'll assemble itself back into a sponge. So it's sort of at the, yeah, amazing, eh? It's kind of what you do in utero. The cells somehow know enough to communicate with another two, and I want Yeah, amazing, eh? It's kind of what you do in utero. The cells somehow know enough to communicate with another two.

And I want another to organize themselves into an organism. It's unbelievable. We have no idea how people do that, because when you're in the initial form, blastocyte form, all those cells are identical genetically. And then all of a sudden, they differentiate. And they move to the places they're supposed to go. We have no idea how the hell can that happen?

These cells are all identical, except for their position. So they're obviously communicating with one another in some unbelievably complicated way and saying, well, you're this sort of cell and so you're gonna differentiate that way. God only knows. But anyway, sponges can do this. Now, a sponge isn't complicated enough to have the sensory

layer and the nervous layer and the motor layer. It's just sensory motor cells, if I remember correctly. But what the sponge is trying to figure out is, it wants to get water through its pores inside, because that's how it eats. And so there's wave motion constantly. And so what's happening is the wave motion is a pattern. And the sponge is reacting to that in a patterned way. And that's really, it's really useful to

think about what you're responding to as patterns instead of objects, because we think we react to objects, but objects are actually a specific subcategory of pattern. And so, because it also helps to explain perception. It's like, what does it mean for you to see something? Well, it means a bunch of things, but one of the things it means is, when I look at that thing, it manifests itself to me as a gripable object. I mean, that's built into the way I see it. So, if you think about the way that you see that on the surface there, you can tell that it's separate from the surface because it has a bit of a shadow.

And it's a different color. And it's obviously shaped for a hand. And so that thing tells you when you look at it that it's a grabable object, well, it's hand shaped. Like a stone tool would be. And so the things around you in the world manifest themselves as patterns of utility. That's the appropriate way to think about it.

You say, well, what does this thing mean? Because that's a hard question. Well, one of the things that your eyes do is like, imagine you've got this representational surface at the back of your retina. It's made out of pixels, roughly speaking, right? Those are the cells. And what it does is map that pattern onto your retinal pattern, and then the retinal pattern propagates itself as a nervous pattern, along your optic nerve, and then that manifests itself as a neurological pattern, and that neurological pattern manifests itself as an action pattern. And so the meaning of the object is the action pattern that is mapped onto the,

onto the percept. And so what does this mean? This is what it means. I think this is a Piagetian observation. It's like one or many, two, right? There's separately manipulable entities. And so the concept of number is in fact predicated, at least in part, on the idea of singular usability. But you're mapping it. It's like, well, what is this? It's a key. Well, what does that mean? Well, I'm mapping that shape into this motion for that action. Say, well, it's not just a key. It's a weapon, right?

And so that's because I've mapped it onto a different output pattern. But if you think about perception as the matching of patterns onto patterns, it makes way more sense. You can really start thinking about how perception works. Because then you can also start thinking about unconscious perception. So, you know, the blind side experiments show, for example, that if you've had cortical damage, so you think you're blind, you can't see objects anymore. But I show you a picture of a frightened face, you'll show a skin conductance response to it. And you think, well, how the hell can that happen? It's like, I have to see the face in order to infer the emotion

in order to have the reaction. It's like, no, you don't. You don't need that at all. You need a pattern recognition system that maps that right on to in a mig-delic output that produces physiological readiness. You don't need the perceptible entity, because you think you see something, and then you think about the thing,

and then you evaluate the thing, and then you act. It's like, you do do that, but there are parts of you that don't do that at all. Way faster parts, more primordial parts. And so, another example would be Darwin's trick with the snake that I told you about. He'd go to this museum that had a cobra in a glass cage. And the cobra, he'd put his face up to the glass cage and the cobra would strike out of him. And he'd go

like this. And there was no way he could control that. Well, it's because the part of him that saw the snake wasn't the part that was doing this. There's a part of him that does this to snakes. That's what it does. And it's way faster than the you figure the to see the snake, you have to, the image is obviously the image. The pattern is portrayed on the retinot, propagates backwards, to see it. It has to be elaborated up through a very complex set of neurological connections. That takes time. And so your dad, while the thing that snake means this, that's like three neurons, super fast. And so what is a snake at that level of representation? It's like a snake is that, which makes you do this. And then you could also say that at that level of representation,

everything that makes you do this is the same thing, right? Because the same would be defined by the pattern that you manifest in response to that entity. So then your nervous system is layered, very, very, that's sensory layer, neurological layer, motor layer. As you become more complex, the sensory layer differentiates into the different sensory systems, and the neurological level multiplies in terms of its potential number of connections. So what happens is that you can map patterns that manifest themselves in multiple different ways, in multiple different ways, to multiple motor outputs. So you start with a fixed action pattern, which is just like the sponge reflex. What's the world to a sponge?

The world is what makes you go like this or like that. That's it. That's the whole world. The sponge has compressed the entire world into pores open, pores closed. That's it. Two states. And then, well, once the nervous system gets differentiated,

and the senses get differentiated, so there's specialized kinds of cells. Then you can detect more forms of patterns. You can produce more patterned output to that, but even more interestingly, and this is where the nervous system starts to come into play, the mapping of the pattern onto the output is no longer one to one. You can use the same pattern, roughly speaking, to produce all sorts of different outputs that are context dependent, because you might say, well, so, okay, I picked that up. You say, well, he picked that up.

It's okay. Well, what about that? You think, well, he picked it up. Well, yeah, I did, except the pattern of musculature that I use to do this is by no means identical to the pattern of musculature that I use to do that. I mean, the fact that the orientation is different is actually extraordinarily important.

So, well, my point is, is that with sufficient nervous complexity, you can take the same thing, so to speak, and map at all sorts of different ways. And human beings are unbelievably good at that. Okay, so now, go back to when things were simple. So there's single-celled organisms, we'll say, and then they start to differentiate to some degree, and they start to propagate. And so, then the environment starts to shift because the fact of the prevalence of all of these competitors means the environment isn't exactly the same as it was when that

system first evolved, new problems emerge. And so, then there's selection pressure on those creatures to diversify to some degree. And then the diversification produces a transformation in the environment, and then there's pressure on those new entities to diversify some more. And so you get this weird bootstrapping process. Maybe the environment is one thing when there's 10 of you, but a completely different thing when there's a thousand of you. Right, so just sheer multiplication is going to transform the environment. And so then because the environment has now become more complex than it was, there's selection pressure to produce diversification in the underlying organisms.

And that took a long time to get off the ground. Like there were single-celled organisms for a huge span of history. I mean, if you look at evolutionary history, the amount of time that there were single-celled organisms is far longer than the time that there's been since the Romalti-celled organisms. It's like Moore's law, you know, the law that governs the increase in computational power. You can trace that back to about a year, 1400, something like that. So it's been going on for a very long time. And maybe you can make the same case from an evolutionary perspective. It's like the flat part of the curve is really long.

But once it starts to move up, it starts to move up really fast. And obviously, that's the position that we're in now. So single celled organisms for a long time, then they started to diversify. And then you could imagine, well, from the single celled organism, you start getting multicellular organism. And then it ends up with this tripartite structure,

sensory layer, nervous layer, motor layer. And then that starts to differentiate, and every time there's a differentiation, that's conserved. And that's these systems, the motivational systems. He merged a long, long time ago, as emergent solutions to emergent problems, and you've conserved all of them. I mean, you've conserved your snake reflex, which is like three neurons long. So that's really, really primordial, but you've conserved, you've conserved function at almost every temporal level.

So there's parts of you that are quick and dirty, and parts of you that are slow and sophisticated, and a lot of the contents of consciousness is slow and sophisticated, so it can't help you out in an emergency. But it can do, what consciousness seems to do is take your structure, it analyzes the world's, for, let's say, mismatches between what you want and what's happening, and then it either helps you alter the world, so those mismatches go away,

or it turns inward and modifies the structures that you're using. So if you're playing the piano, you've got this automatized routine, it has very little to do with consciousness if you've practiced enough, and you make a mistake, you stop, and you note the mistake, you stop and then you slow it down and then you re, you practice the, the new thing, then you speed it up, then you speed it up, then you speed it up. And as you're doing that, the neural representation shrinks

until you've developed this little specialized machine and then you run that a few times and now you can ignore it, you can look at the notes and just play and away you go. And that's kind of what consciousness is doing all the time. You're laying out an automatized routine. And then if that doesn't produce the intended outcome, you stop, you become conscious really, because it's nothing like an error to make you conscious. Then you do a high resolution analysis of the space

in which the error emerged. You rematch your motor output, your perceptions, and all of that to make that error go away and away you go. And so your consciousness is continually, your consciousness seems to be continually building your unconscious, your procedural unconscious. And so to some degree, the purpose of consciousness is to make you functional unconsciously, right? Because that's way

better. You don't want to be conscious of most things because it's just what you're going to do. Be conscious of your digestive processes. It's like no. If you're good at something, you hardly have to be conscious of it at all. So consciousness is something like an error detection and rectification system, something like that. And so you can say, well, you could practice being conscious because what that means in some sense is you're always attending to your errors. Not seems to be a really intelligent thing to do if you don't take it too far and collapse yourself. Because if you're always attending to your errors, you're always improving your automated adaptability, something like that,

right? Pay attention. See if things are working out the way that you want them to, and if they're not, modify your approach, your perceptions. Okay, so you've conserved these systems, and the systems emerged to solve the problems of emergent complexity. And you end up at birth with all of these conserved systems. And so those would be proclivities that would enable you to manifest necessary realm of behaviors in the social, natural, human environment, something like that. So you're basically prepared for that. And I told you, we went through what those were last time.

And you can break them down into self-maidments, motivations, and self-propegation motivations, something like that. So, okay, now the question is, how do those manifest themselves? And that's where we get, that's where we can make a shift, say, from evolutionary ideas and biological ideas to narrative ideas.

So, I've made the case for you that you exist within this thing. I've never figured out exactly what to call it because you can call it a game or you can call it a frame of reference. It's a pretty good one or you can call it a story or you can call it a unit of perception. But that's not exactly right because it's more than perception. It's really this, it's a really, what it is, is a micro personality. It's your personality as it manifests itself at the highest possible resolution. That's what this is. And so, if I'm, you know, say I set myself the task of moving those keys from there to here.

So, my perceptual frame is, it's this thing. I think, well, what's the world? Everything else can be ignored. I need to make an object out of my hand. These keys, that tiny spot on the table, and my goal is to transform this pattern into that pattern and it's a pattern because it maintains itself across time, right? It's not like smoke or cloud it persists so there it is there it is there it is there it

is that's a pattern that's extending across time. So I have this goal, which is the transformation of this into that, and that goal, so that would be roughly speaking, the goal is point B, but you can't just think about this as something that's a goal, because it isn't just a goal. There's a goal, which is the end, which is the end state of this entire process. The end state is, I've moved the thing from here to here, I've transformed this into this, and I've done it using action.

So that's a useful thing to know too. I have an abstract notion, that's my decision that I'm going to get the world to manifest this pattern instead of this one. Okay, so that gives me my target. That's an abstraction. But when I actually do the transformation, that's not an abstraction because now I'm using actual action, actual behavior. And so I take this abstract micro personality. This is the part that's operating on this tiny little section of the world.

I make the transformation and as soon as I do that, another thing happens, which is I don't need that anymore. I move to the next one of those, whatever it happens to be. And so one of the things we're going to have to figure out is what is the relationship between these things? Because you're always in one of them, and they're scalable. It's like when you're doing a specific action, it's really high resolution. And that's kind of where you want to be operating. When you know what you're doing, that's where you want to be operating, roughly speaking. When you're trying to do something new, but it's scalable.

And so the framework, which is constructed in part from these motivational systems that emerged over evolutionary history, the framework specifies the current condition, the desired condition, and the behavioral manifestations that are necessary to make the transformation. And so you can't think about it as a drive, because its instincts are often thought about as drives, or as a goal. It's not correct, because the thing actually determines your perceptions. It determines what objects manifest themselves to you in the world, or what patterns. That's another way of thinking about it. It's like when I'm looking at this, it's hard to watch your own perceptions, but when I'm looking at this, I really, I can see that chair, but if I didn't know it was a chair,

I wouldn't be able to tell by my visual input. I can kind of see this one. Although I really can't tell what color it is. That one's slightly clearer. This is pretty blurry here. Like I can't see my fingers if I'm looking at the keys. I can't see my fingers unless they move. And I'm very, very focused on that. So what happens is that all the rest of the world turns into a low-resolution representation that vanishes on its periphery. The resolution increases as I move towards the central part of my visual field. And here it's sharp enough so that I can actually see the letters on that key. So my desire, which I am indicating by the point of my eyes, is specifying the objects that I see and specifying their level of resolution.

So you can't just call that a drive or a goal. That's not right. It's the mechanism that makes the world manifest itself to you. So that's an unbelievably crazy thing, is that the world manifests itself to you in keeping with your goals. Now that doesn't mean that you can make the world do any old thing, because it pushes back, right? It objects to you. So but still, it's a very strange thing.

Okay. So fine. So it specifies your perceptions, your target, the current reality, and the likely procedure that you're going to use to make all of that interrelated. But it does more than that. So we're going to look at it from a couple of different perspectives. So the classic and archaic way of thinking about perception is the world's full of objects, you see the objects, you think about them, you evaluate them, then you act on them. It's like, no, that isn't how it works. First of all, the world is not made out of objects. The world is made

out of, I think, the world is made out of tools and obstacles. And it's because you can't not perceive the world in relationship to you. What you perceive actually are the meaning of objects. You perceive the patterns. A tool is something like a meaningful pattern or a useful pattern. It's something like that. And so look, look. Again, you look at, I might say to someone, describe this room. Now, you're going to pick a level of description that's very particular.

You're going to pick one that other human beings could understand. So, it's going to be predicated on your size, for example. And so, you're going to be predicated on your knowledge that that other person is a lot like you and has a lot of the same underlying structures and motivations. So, and that's an implicit predicate of your description. So, we're going to say, well, it's kind of an ordinary classroom. It's got 20 rows of tables that each have five chairs at it. And each of them does have five chairs. There's some posts that hold them up.

There's a couple of speakers. There's a podium. There's a screen. There's some additional chairs. There's a scattering of people. There's some electronic equipment. And so you know, of course, that there's an infinite number of things I could be describing in this room. Right? Like I could be describing, there's a lot of color variation in that tile.

So if I look at it, I can see that it's unlike the other tiles, because the light is reflecting off it. So it's got a shiny white element. There's about, God only knows, a million different scratches in it, each of which are unique. I can't even really tell what color it is. It kind of looks like an off grayish green. But if I was painting it, to get a reasonable representation, I'd have to have to have at least six or seven shades of green ranging from quite dark to almost white.

And that's only if I look at it from here, if I look at it from here, well then you get the point, right? I mean, there is an infinite number of details in this room. There's an infinite number of facts in this room. That's also why I don't believe that you can derive an ought from it is. It's like, you know, that's the old humian issue, right? You cannot derive ethical guidelines from an is. It's like, you know, that's the old humian issue, right? You cannot derive ethical guidelines from factual knowledge. And I think the reason for that is,

which facts are gonna pick? How are you gonna select them? There's an infinite number of them, even in a constrained situation. So merely by attending to some and not attending to others, you're already using an ethic, because you can't attend to one thing and not another without being in sconce in one of these value structures, because the value structure is what determines the direction of your

attention. So you can't make the argument that you're using the infinite number of facts that are available at your disposal to govern how you're looking at the facts. You're not. That isn't what you're doing. It's not possible to do that. So what do you do? Well, you describe the things in the room that would be relevant to other people. Otherwise, you're going to bore them to death. They're going to think you're insane. So, or an artist maybe, because an artist might do the kind of concentration on a detail that I just described, but he's obviously, or she's obviously trying to paint the thing or represent it somehow. So, it's still a tool like, well, why do you want to know that they're tables?

Well, because you said it to them. Why do you want to know if they're chairs? Because you sit in them. You know, what about the screen or the camera equipment? Well, they're all usable tools. And so, that's what you describe. You describe the world at the level of usable tool. Or you might also say, you know, look out for that girl who's third in the third row. She's trouble. And so you might call out someone if you're describing the room because there's somewhere in that room that if you go, you're going to get into trouble. And so those are sort of the things that seem to me

to be relevant. There are tools that move you along your way, facilitators, that's another way of thinking about them. And there are obstacles that get in your way. And there's a tiny set of those. Otherwise, you get overwhelmed. You're not gonna go anywhere where it's all obstacles, right? You don't even want to be in that place. You want to be in a place where it's mostly this.

And then there's the biggest category though. This is what's cool. This is, and this is so important, is the biggest perceptual category is that which is not relevant at this time, because it contains everything, you know, like when you're writing on this pad, you assume the entire world around you is constant, and therefore you can ignore it. It's everything out there. All the transformations that are taking place, you turn to zero, and you just focus on maybe the space that's occupied by a single letter, the whole world shrinks down to just that single letter, and everything else is ignored. Well, what happens if something goes wrong?

This is the thing, this is why this is important. What happens if something goes wrong? An indeterminate set of those irrelevant entities has now become relevant. That's the problem. Is the invisibility disappears. And so, for example, you're all treating each other in this room right now as ignorable entities, roughly speaking.

You could all be blobs from a perceptual perspective. And if you look at how you see the room, except for the person that you're focusing on, everyone else is a blob, and some of them are virtually invisible blobs. And that's fine, because you're adequately represented as a blob and some of them are virtually invisible blobs. And that's fine because you're adequately represented as a blob, unless you do something that disturbs the ongoing flow of gold-directed action, just like the gorilla thing, right? So the damn gorilla was invisible because it didn't get in the way, even though you'd think of course you'd see a gorilla. It's like everything that doesn't get in the way is invisible, except for that small fraction of things that you can use for your purpose. And that's how you

perceive. So it's so mind-boggling that because it puts perception into the realm of ethics. It isn't what you'd expect. You see what you're aiming at. And you know that. You know that. You're standing on a street corner and you look up. And soon there's 10 advanced chimpanzees like you right beside you looking up to see what the hell it is that you're aiming at. Because they assume just by watching you that if you're focusing your perception on something and you're fixated on it, that it's relevant and important, it's tool-like or maybe obstacle-like. It's relevant for some reason. And so, we live in a landscape of relevance. And that's a mind to me, that's an absolutely mind-boggling idea because that is way different than living in a landscape of facts. It is not

the same thing, even a little bit. And there are philosophers who pursued that idea quite, well, I would say, too quite an incredible degree. Heidegger is probably the one who's done that more than anyone else, but the 19th century pragmatists were very interested in that as well. But because you think, you know, the classic scientific idea is something like

you perceive a universe of facts and derive conclusions and act. It's like, no, you don't. You perceive a landscape of pre-categorized relevance that's dependent on your ethic, Jesus. It's so peculiar that. And so that brings up real questions like, what ethic best structures your perceptions. Well, that is the interesting idea as far as I'm concerned. Okay, so then we can make this a little bit more interesting, I think, is the right way of thinking about it. Okay, well, so you've got tools and obstacles,

but they're not dead, that's the other thing, because we're in an ethical landscape, because we're in a motivated landscape, whether something is a tool or an obstacle actually matters to you, and we can actually define matter. Matters a weird word because there are, there's matter and then there's the things that matter.

And you could say the world is made out of matter or you could say that the world is made out of things that matter. And I would say you act like the world is made out of things that matter. You might say, I don't believe that, I believe it's made out of matter, but no, you don't because that's not how you act. It might be what you say you do, but it is not what you do. So why do things matter? Well, first of all, irrelevant things don't matter, and thank God for that, right? Because if everything mattered, it's, well, you're either,

you're either in the midst of an LSD trip or your schizophrenic or you're in real serious trouble. So you want most things to be irrelevant. Now that's kind of dull and it takes the glory and the glamour out of the world, but from a cognitive perspective, it's definitely an advantage. So irrelevancy, man, that's critical. And a huge amount of what you have done is learned irrelevance. It's the basis of your cognitive knowledge

is learned irrelevance. What to ignore? Okay, fine, so that's zeroes things out. You tune most of the world into zero. Well, then you have this small subset of things that are beneficial to you, that you can use for the purposes of your current operation, which we'll define in more detail.

You can use that for the purposes of your current endeavor. Then you have obstacles. For example, if I'm late for class, so I'm in a particular state of mind, and I walk in here and I see that, I'm going to get a little burst of negative emotion. It's irritation. And the reason for that is that is not a recycling bin, then. It's an obstacle that some dimwit left there just to annoy me. And I mean, you know what I mean? That's how you react to the world in a situation like that. It's like, it's not a recycling bin. If it's here, and I don't

want to stand there, then it's a recycling bin. If it's there, it's an obstacle. And as soon as I look at it, it isn't that I see it and then get annoyed. It's that annoyance is part of the perception, because it's an obstacle in my pathway. The emotion comes along with the perception. It's not laden on top of it. It's not, oh, that's a, I don't think. That's a recycling bin.

That's in the wrong place. Now it's in my way. I should be annoyed. That isn't what happens. As the annoyance, my suspicions are that the damn annoyance is faster than the object perception, because it's a more primordial circuit. So you actually, now there's a great book,

if you're interested in this sort of thing. There's a great book called An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, which was written by a guy named Gibson back in the 70ss and it's brilliant. His fundamental conclusion is, I think, wrong, but it doesn't matter. The book is not only brilliant because, see, he was the guy that came up with the idea of affordance. And an affordance is something that affords some utility, and that can be positive or negative. And he thought about the world as being full of furniture roughly speaking something like that and that what you saw what you perceived

directly was the affordance and so he imagined the visual cliff experiment. So let's say I put a piece of glass over top of this the space between these two tables, no chair there. of this, the space between these two tables. No chair there. And I take a duck, and I put the duck here, and the duck walks out on the glass. The duck doesn't care. It'll just walk out on the glass. Well, it's an aquatic animal.

And so if there's depth underneath it, it doesn't really bother a duck. But if you put a human infant on there, old enough to crawl, the human infant will look over and that's not going on that glass. And you might say, well, what does it see? And you could say it sees a space between the two tables and infers that it might fall, but it's like eight months old, like what the hell? It's inferring that? No, it's not. It sees a place to fall off of. And that's Gibbs's fundamental

point is that you don't see a cliff. You see a falling off place. And of course, why wouldn't you see that? Because if that isn't what you saw, you wouldn't be here, because whatever your dopey ancestors would have wandered off, the cliff and died. The ones that saw a falling off place, they just stayed away from that. And you know, if you have vertigo,

and even if you don't, if you're up on the 35th floor of an apartment building, and you walk out onto the balcony, it's really interesting to notice your perception because you might think, well, you see the space and you become afraid. It's like, no, you don't. You walk closer to it and your body,

you perceive the damn thing with your body. You can also see it, but you perceive it with your body. It's like, don't go the hair. Don't go any closer. And you're whole, there's an automatic mapping of that place on to do this. Go away from there. And that's underneath and faster than the actual, quote, conscious object perception. So anyways, the other thing about Gibson's book that I love is he is so clear that guy, such a good writer, because he takes you through a very complex argument, but it's just a pristine

example of reasoning. The whole book is reasoning. It's brilliant, brilliant. So anyway, so if you want some background on that idea, the idea of perception of utility, let's say, that's a great place to look, but it's also worth thinking about it from a biological perspective, because of bloody well, of course you also worth thinking about it from a biological perspective, because of bloody well, of course you're going to see the world as what matters, because you're the sort of creature that cares about what matters mostly,

because you don't want to die. So you can't remove the fact that you don't want to die from your perceptions. Well, if you did, well, you can imagine what would happen if you did. You know, you do something like wander off a falling falling off place and that would be the end of you. So it's built into your damn perceptions. And so it's built into the facts that you see because there's an infinite number of facts. And so even just selecting the facts, that's an ethical issue. So it's actually matters practically too because one of the things that I've come to understand about political arguments is, well, say people say, well, the person on the other

side of the ideological continuum has different opinions that I do. It's like, no, they don't, or maybe they do, but they don't see the same facts because the filter they use to select from among the infinite number of available facts preferentially presents them with the facts that are relevant to them. And that's already built into their ethic. And so one of the horrible things about political discussions is that you're actually having a discussion about what the facts are, you say, well, the facts are the same for everyone. It's like, yeah, it's like saying, I have an infinite library of books, and you can come into it. It's like, well, you're going to pick out the same book, it seems highly improbable, and that's the problem with facts. It's like, there's

just a lot of them. You know, you try to do something like untangle the Israel-Palestine conflict. I mean, one of the things you just to start with is like, okay, how far back are you going to go? Well, I would say it depends on what argument you want to make. You know, if you want to make argument A, you go back 100 years. If you want to make argument B, you go back 3000 years. And then you could have an argument about which timescale you should use, but it's not like it's obvious. You know, is it 10 years? Is it one years? Is it six months? is, you know, is it 10 years? Is it one year? Is it six months? Like, is it, it's not 3,000 years. Is it 2,999 years? Like, where are the borders of relevancy when you're laying out the landscape of the argument? God only knows. It's intractable. And, you know, partly

the way your temperament solves that problem because because it does say, well, a creature like you with your temperament preferentially attends to this set of facts. And that will work, because attending to that sort of facts is likely to produce a reasonable outcome for you in most circumstances. And it's a way that you simplify the world and make a tremendous amount of the irrelevant. A priori filters. Okay, good. Now, the next cool thing, what happens when you see a tool, you're happy. What happens when you see an obstacle? You're unhappy. And now you understand emotions. And that's so, that doesn't take much. That's once you've got this initial framework, it's like, okay, well, what's an emotion for? Positive.

Move forward, negative, get away. In-determinate, stop, that's anxiety. Stop, you're not where you think you are. Your map isn't producing the desired outcome, it's wrong, what should you do? You don't know, stop. Because if you don't know where to go, there's no point going anywhere.

And then what, prepare that's anxiety. Stop, prepare while people hate that because, well, for obvious reasons, prepare for what? Everything, yeah, reasons, prepare for what? Everything. Yeah, very, very demanding, psychophysiologically. And that's also something that's really worth knowing. It's like anxiety isn't just a psychological state

that's unpleasant. It's like you're revved up, and your burn in resources like mad, and you're in a biochemical state such that that's optimized for quick action, but that's toxic if you inhabit it for any length of time. So not knowing what to do, that is not good. And it isn't just that it makes you feel bad,

it hurts you, it damages you, it can kill you, it'll make you age, it'll make you fat, it'll give you diabetes, it'll suppress your immune system, so you're more likely to develop cancer, it'll damage your brain, your hippocampus, it'll increase the probability that you have Alzheimer's. It's like it's no joke that it's your run in your machinery faster than you can replenish it. So it's not a state that you can be in, it's not a state you can tolerate because it's anxiety, it's anxious, but it's also not a state you can live in.

And so I don't know where I am, means everything's relevant, and I have to ramp up my capacity for action to deal with that. Bad people do not like that, we do not like not to be where we think we are, we really, really, really don't like that. And we structure almost all of our environments constantly so that never happens. You know, we're all dressed the same with tiny, tiny variations, you know. We all follow the same traffic laws. Everybody's behaving according to the proper code in this room and everyone in this building is doing

the same thing. It's like we're doing everything we can to make sure that everyone knows exactly where they are and what they're doing all the time. And that's because when we're in that state, we can advance cautiously using positive things and maintain a modicum of positive emotion. That's what we're basically trying to do. Okay, so you want to set up your world so that you're surrounded by things that move you along your way, that obstacles are minimized and that almost everything can be ignored.

Okay, so emotion, positive emotion, that's dopaminergic, that's incentive reward. You experience it in relationship to a goal. Because most of the time when you talk to behavioral psychologists, they'll tell you rewarding, reward is a satiation consequence. You're hungry, you get a piece of food, that's rewarded. It's like, that's consumatory reward.

And that shuts down the motivational system. It's satiating, it makes you satisfied. That's not the same as incentive reward. Incentive reward says, come this way, come this way. Good things are over here. Good things are over here. That's dopamine ergic. And that's the kind of reward people really like. We live for that. So when you talk about positive meaning in your life, this is an over simplification, but a tremendous amount of that is incentive reward. You're in a gold directed structure. It's a value structure. Let's say it's fairly well developed because you're sophisticated. Everything you do is linked to something else. You move ahead, it works. Yes. You move ahead, it works. Yes. And it's that constant moving ahead and the validation

of the frame that makes your life meaningful. And so that also means no value system, no positive emotion, which is another thing that's so much worth knowing. You know, the postmodernists complain about value systems constantly and they say, well, the problem with the value system is that it includes some people, winners, and excludes other people. Losers say, yes, that's true. What's the answer? Flatten the value system. So there's no losers. Fine, no winners either. And if the value system is flat, there's no point B, what the hell are you gonna do?

Where's your positive emotion? You have nothing to, you're gonna wander around being happy that the value system is flat. It's like no, you're not. Because when you flatten out value systems, you don't get rid of suffering because you can't. All you get rid of is the possibility of positive emotion. And that is not a good solution. So then you leave people with nothing but negative emotion. It's so naive. Okay, so good. So now we know you're going from point A to point B, you're doing that with an action. If things are working out, if you see facilitators along the way that you can utilize your, you

get a kick-a-positive emotion. You can even see that calibrated, like let's say you do better than expected on a test. Yes, it's like that's better than doing as well as you expected. Because what the message is is that not only am I moving towards my desired goal, but I'm moving along faster and with less effort than I thought. It's like, man, positive reinforcement. Right? You think, yes.

Well, that's it. That's meaning. That's a big chunk of meaning. And so a really meaningful event is one that gets you to the next step. And simultaneously increases the probability that you're going to get to all the steps after that. That's like a maximally meaningful event. So, you know, you get, you're opening an envelope about whether or not you got into medical school. It's like you're going like this, right? Why? Why are you shaking? It's an envelope. No, it's not. It's a portal,

right? It's a portal. And what's in that envelope either puts you that way into one world or that way into another. And you think you're looking at it, you think, well, that's an envelope. It's like your body isn't thinking that, not for a bloody second. It knows perfectly well that that's a portal. And you open it up, it's like collapse, the whole, what would you call it? That whole avatar-related future just goes, shh, ashes, or bang, it springs into reality. And you perceive that, and you perceive all of that almost instantaneously,

and that produces that radical transformation in emotion. You're not reacting to the envelope, or maybe the envelope isn't what you think it is, or maybe the envelope isn't what you see. And that's more accurate, that's way more accurate. The envelope is way more than what you see. Okay, good. will open way more than what you see. Okay, good. Let's break for 15 minutes, okay?

And then we'll go ahead with the next part of this. Well, so that's just a transformation of the previous diagram. While you're moving around long from what is to what should be, we'll say, as long as things are working out should be, we'll say. As long as things are working out, well, then your mildly happy. And if they don't work out, well, then that's another problem. You see, these are different sizes. There's a reason for that.

And that's because negative emotion has more potency, unit for unit than positive emotion does. And so what that means is that people are more reactive. People hate a small loss more than they like an equivalent gain. And so we're tilted to some degree towards bias for negative emotion. And that is also dependent on temperament because somebody who's very, very low in neuroticism, that's basically anxiety and emotional pain, susceptibility, something like that. So that would be the threshold for experiencing

a certain level of anxiety or emotional pain, but also the length of time that would take to recover. It's something like that. And so, but for the standard human being, loss hurts more than gain rewards. And so, well, it's useful to know that because it helps you, it helps you understand yourself and other human beings. Even if you're trying to motivate someone to do something, loss avoidance is often a powerful motivation as well as gain. So, all right,

prevention, fundamentally. Okay, so now here's another way of thinking about this. And this is a more abstract way of thinking about it. So we talked about the idea that the world might be divided into tools and obstacles and irrelevant things, most of which and irrelevant things, that's a huge category. And it's the one you don't want to have disrupted. And also that the obstacle category produces more emotion than the tool category. But here's another way of thinking about it. And this is thinking about it more from a purely emotional perspective. When you think about the world as tools, it's dead practical.

And it's sort of grounded in the idea of motor usage in some sense. But you can think in an analogical fashion about the same system in a slightly different matter, you're in the situation that you're in right now, and that's not good enough. And so that's another thing that's kind of interesting about people. Is there a chronically dissatisfied with the way things are? Well, that's okay, because you wouldn't be motivated to move forward if you weren't chronically dissatisfied with the way things are. Well, that's okay, because you wouldn't be motivated to move forward if you weren't chronically dissatisfied with the way that things are.

But it's kind of annoying, you know, because you might think, well, why aren't you just happy with what you have? And the answer to that is generally, because I don't know if it's going to last. And so that's part of it. And the other is, well, if the situation shifted a bit, maybe I'd have more options,

and some of that would last longer. It'd be more stable, it'd be more promising. And so you can say, well, you should be satisfied with what you have, but it's kind of really a stupid thing, in some sense, to tell human beings, because no matter what you have, it isn't going to solve your fundamental problem. So the problem isn't going away, and you can't just fool yourself into saying, well, what I have is great. You could say, I could have a hell of a lot less. And that would be bad. And most people have a lot less than me. And I should be grateful for what I have. That's fine. That's perfectly reasonable. But you're stuck in this, you're stuck with this chronic sense of unfinished business. And the reason for that is, well, you're permanently

vulnerable. So how else would you, how could it be otherwise? And even if you've got your problem solved, then there's three or four people in your family that by no means have got their problem solved. So the problem of problems never goes away. That's an existence, that's a good thing to know existentially too, because it helps you calibrate your life

properly. Because you might be thinking, well, if I just got everything together, I'd hit some plateau of satiation and stability, and then I would just be there. It's like, no, that's never going to happen. It's never going to happen. So you might as well just forget about that. What you can, it's a sysophus issue. The guy who pushes the rock up the road and up the hill and it rolls back down.

I think it was Nietzsche who said we must presume sysophus to be happy, something like that. Well, maybe you want to push your damn rock up a hill, you know, it's going to roll down again. It's like, what are you going to do? Just sit there by the rock? It's okay to be active, even if the problem you're trying to solve is not fundamentally solvable. That doesn't mean it isn't worth trying to solve. So although people can despair about it, then it's not surprising. Okay, so another way that I should have really said,

instead of predicted outcome here, this is like an old model. This would be a model that I derived from work that was done at least initially in the 60s, or even in the 40s. But, and that still underlies the thinking of, I would say the vast majority of psychologists. It isn't that you're predicting outcomes and failing. It's not that. It's that you desire outcomes and sometimes you get an undesirable outcome.

And it's really important to get that distinction correct because if you're thinking about expectation, it's just a cold cognitive model. It's like a rational model. I know the world, I understand its relationships. I can predict what's going to happen next. And that's what I'm trying to do is predict it. It's like, no, you're not. You're not trying to predict it. You're trying to get what you want from it.

And there's a prediction element to that, which is well, you know. I'm going to pick that up, so that's a prediction. And that work verifying my prediction. But what's missing there is I want to pick that up. And you can't throw that out of the equation, because as soon as you throw motivation out of the equation, then you're stuck with the mystery of perception, right? How do you organize your perceptions unless you want something? Well, you can't.

So you don't get to get rid of the want and just substitute cold expectation. It's a sleight of hand. And the cognitive behaviorists do that. They almost always do that. That's how they, well, it's not like a conspiracy or anything. It's perfectly reasonable to have a simplified model for the way that people act. But you don't want to throw motivation and emotion

out of the equation, because obviously there's or embodiment, they're so important. Okay, so forget, predict it and un-predict it, think desired and undesired. Okay, so I come walking in here and I have this low-level desire, which is to make my way to my podium with the least amount of effort necessary, and I see that that chairs in the way and it's mildly annoying. And so there's something undesired there. So the desired outcome produces positive emotion. It's promise, what's technically speaking,

you could also think about it as hope. It's related to the attainment of a goal. It indicates the potential attainment of a goal. That's what hope is or what promise is. Hope is, I can probably attain this goal. Promise is, if something is promising, it indicates to you that you can probably attain the goal. Or if someone makes a promise to you, then they're telling you that they're going to facilitate movement towards a goal. And so that's the emotional level that the Dope of the Nurgic system works on. Again, it's promise or hope or technically it's called incentive reward.

That's the technical term. But it's the indication that something good is going to happen. Well, so when I see a clear pathway, then I know I can make my goal pretty efficiently. And so it's going to produce just a, well, it's going to produce enough positive emotion to make me walk forward. That's, that's the right amount. So, and so it's interesting. So you can actually use this when you're thinking about room design or house design.

It's like, so you're in a room, you think, well, what am I going to use this room for? It's like, okay, sort that out. Well, then you want to make the pathways to that use as clear and pristine as possible, unless you want to put in some interesting variation just for decoration. But fundamentally, what you're trying to do is to set up the environment so that it facilitates the actions you intend to pursue there. If you go into your room and it's all covered

with stacks of paper and they're all messy. And the bad isn't made and there's rubbish everywhere by your definition of rubbish. Then what you're doing basically is walking into a room of snakes. And it's the same system that's responding to all of those undone things that would respond to snakes, you know, not like a cobra that's right beside you. But it's the same damn circuitry, that's the circuitry that responds to chaos. It's the circuitry that responds to the dragon of chaos that makes you uncomfortable in a room like that. It's

not explored territory, it's not a place where you can easily see the proper relationship between the tools and the obstacles, it's not a place that you can make things irrelevant, not at all. In fact, it's a place full of obstacles. How are you going to be comfortable in a room like that? It's full of things that get in the way of your goals. You're going to be nervous in there all the time. So it's like it's full of envelopes that you have in open and most of them have bad news in them. You're not going to be comfortable in a room like that. You think, well, can't you just ignore those envelopes? It's like, well, it's a stupid way of looking at it. So, promise produces hope, slash pleasure, curiosity, all the incentive reward-related emotions sort of fit in that box, and then undesired outcomes produce threat. They're threats, and they produce anxiety. But that's not even exactly right.

and they produce anxiety. But that's not even exactly right. That's in an elementary discussion of the role of comparator systems in the brain, which we'll talk about in more detail. The general notion is that the violation of an expectation produces anxiety. And that's a pretty good model. And it's got some support from the psychophysiological,

pharmacological literature, because if you give animals anti-anxiety agents, like benzodiazepines or alcohol or barbiturates, they do respond less to the violation of quote expectancy. It does dampen the response. But it's an oversimplified model and to get understanding of human behavior correct, you have to expand it a bit.

It isn't precisely that un-predicted outcome is a threat and it produces anxiety. It's that un-predicted outcome makes the irrelevant, relevant, and it produces an undifferentiated, emotional, and motivational state. It's a better way of thinking about it because it isn't just that you don't just get anxious, for example, if something goes wrong, you get anxious, you get angry, you get curious, you get frustrated, you get depressed, like it's a whole bursting forward of emotions

and motivational states. And that's because when something doesn't work the way it's supposed to, even when you just encounter an obstacle, it means that the way that you're construing the landscape is wrong in some manner. And you don't exactly know what you're going to have to do in order to fix that, unless it's a very trivial, trivial violation. And you know, it's one that you know immediately how to redress, like if I'm again. It's one that you know immediately how to redress. Like if I'm again, so I come around the corner and I look at that chair and I'm annoyed because it's in the way,

you might think, well, how annoyed should I get? And the answer should be something like, your annoyance should be in proportion to the amount of time and energy it will take to move that chair, right? Cause that's kind of like a proper perception. So it's like like I should be that annoyed. I should be annoyed enough so that I've indexed doing that. Because that does actually

take some time and energy and that actually has a cost. And the fact that I have to pay that cost should be signified by something because otherwise I wouldn't be sensitive to costs. And so the annoyance, if it's in proportion to the effort, is exactly indexed properly. Now, often, unfortunately, you don't know how to index. So you have an old car, you're driving to work. Someone bumps you from behind, and then your car doesn't work. It's like, well, how annoyed should you get? You don't know.

That's a problem. And so then all of a sudden, a bunch of things that were irrelevant, which is the whole damn car, poof, become relevant. Plus, you have to deal with this person that just ran into you. And what are they like? Well, they're stupid enough to run into you. So you don't know what else might be wrong with them. And maybe there are going to be a bunch of trouble and you have to get their insurance information. And now you're on the side of the road. And you don't know if you're going to go to work. So that's when your emotions can unravel,

because they're trying to compute the effort and time you're going to have to take in order to rectify this, and to span this, what we call it, domain that is opening up as a consequence of the problem, isn't easy to map. And so you get stressed, and you go home and you say, how does stressful day and the person says, what happened? Well, someone hit me on the highway and they go, oh, that's terrible.

They figure that out. It's like, well, I was in this little map. It was only this long. I was just going from here to here and all of a sudden, poof! I didn't know where I was or how many places I was going to have to wander around in before I could get that map working again. But the car is an invisible predicate of multiple potential future maps as well.

It's an axiom. You make the map presuming that you have the car. And the car isn't a metal thing with wheels. The car is a conveyance for moving you from point A to point B. And the fact that you have all these maps of moving from point A to B that are predicated on that conveyance means that when it turns into a car, instead of a conveyance, poof, all those maps become extremely complicated as well.

And so your body goes, well, my landscape is way more complex than I thought, up goes the heart rate, up goes the cortisol all of that right and you're more paralyzed and you can like if you're a neurotic person let's say something like that can just paralyze you you're done you have to phone someone for emergency help which means you're in a map that you cannot put your map back together you have to call on outside help in order to do it so and you might not even know how to do that. Okay, so that's another way.

Now, here's another way of thinking about it. You want to stay inside this little map because it's working. You want to get from point A to point B, and this is good. This indicates that you are moving forward. That's the first thing it indicates. And the second thing it indicates, which is even more important, and you'll never hear

this from behavioral psychologists, is that your map is correct. So every time you move a little bit forward and something that you want happens, it says, oh, the game I'm playing is the right gate. And so not only does the reward indicate progress, it indicates that the frame within which progress is being calculated is the right frame. And that's good because it's the frame that makes things irrelevant. And you want them to stay irrelevant. So if you don't move forward and you start to question the frame, that's way worse than merely not moving forward. You get a bad exam grade. What do you think? What the hell am I doing in

university anyways? It's like, probably that's not the first place you should go with that piece of information. And you think, well, why? Why is that worse? Well, as far as I can tell, your map of view as a university student is a comprehensive representation. It tells you what you should do every day. It kind of tells you where you're going in the future. And if something emerges as an anomaly, you get worse grade than you expected.

And you blow that whole map, it's like, okay, what have you been doing for the last four years? What kind of high school student were you? How clueless are you about how you were arranging your future? What's your identity gonna be if you're not gonna be a student? Where are you gonna end up in five years? It's like, so it's like a, that little grade, that bad grade is like a portal through which snakes can crawl.

And that's exactly how you respond to it, especially if you open the door too much. Well, maybe this means that I shouldn't be in university. Well, one of the rules is don't, you want to constrain the anomalous event to the minimal necessary domain. It's really, really important. You want to do that when you're arguing with your partner, which you'll do all the time.

We have an argument, well, I should never have married you. It's like, no, no, that's not the first response. That's a bad response. Or here's a really good one. You've always done that sort of thing. And you always will. It's like, oh, good, great. It's like the only answer to that is to hit someone.

Because like you're done, right? You're like that. You've always been like that is to hit someone. Because like you're done, right? You're like that. You've always been like that. There isn't a chance that you could be repaired and none of it is acceptable. It's like the person's gonna fight with you right away because what else are they gonna do?

So what you wanna do is you wanna minimize, it isn't rationalization. You wanna say, okay, this person did something that disrupted our joint map. Okay, what's the smallest possible thing they could do to put it back together? And you have to know, well, we need to make a plan so you don't do it again,

or we need to have a discussion so that you know that it wasn't a good thing to do. But I'm not gonna go after your whole character. I'm gonna say, when I come home and you're watching TV, just come to the door and say, hello, not, don't you love me or something like that? It's like, no, no, you just have to walk to the door and give me a hug or something.

And then that's good enough. And so then the other person might be able to tolerate that much corrective information, maybe if you're kind of nice about it, and you also understand that they're probably going to have something equally horrible to say about you in the next 15 minutes because you're going to do something stupid. So you don't want to open the door so that every possible snake comes crawling through because that's a pathway to depression and you actually see that happening in depressed

people is that every small event produces a cascade through their entire value system and they end up saying, well, that's just another reason that I should jump off a bridge. And they really see it that way. It's really awful because they've got no defenses. It's like, well, I didn't do so well in this course. It's like, I'm going to get a bad mark in the exam. I'm going to get bad mark in the course. That's going to screw up my ability to finish my degree. I'm never going to get into the field of my choice. It's just another piece of indication that I'm useless and that life isn't worthwhile. Bang, I'm going to jump off a bridge. And if you're really depressed, it's like each of those things hits you with the certainty of truth. It's really not good. And so you want to be careful, you want to be careful about walking down that pathway when you make

a mistake. You think, okay, what's the narrowest framework of interpretation within which I can understand this, that will require minimal behavioral change to decrease the probability that it will happen again. It's mental hygiene fundamentally. Yes. When you say that these frames are scalable, yeah. There's multiple at the same time. We'll get to that. We'll get to that. That is the next question.

It's because they don't exist in isolation. So, and that's another thing frequently. When you hear behavioral accounts of cognitive processes, they generally only focus on, as if it's an isolated thing. It's not. It's scalable. It's scalable a bunch of ways. It's scalable temporarily, because what you do now is associated with what you'll do tomorrow and not

with what you'll do next week and so forth. So it has to be scalable temporarily. And it's also scalable socially, right? So it has an effect on you. That has an effect on your family. That has an effect on the community and so forth. And so you don't want to take, it's very difficult to think through the effect

of your action and all those scaling level simultaneously, but you have mechanisms that allow you to do that. And we'll see, I think that the sense, let's assume that you're not lying to yourself constantly. So your head isn't full of chaos and garbage. And you have reasonable relationships with people in the world. I think that this is leaping way ahead.

I think that your sense of meaningful engagement with what you're doing is the psychophysiological marker that you're acting in a way that takes all of the stacked representations into account simultaneously. Because you're trying to figure out where you are. And you might think, well, that means where I am in this room. But look, this room is not a simple thing. It's nested.

It's a subset of the university. That's a subset of society. It's a subset of your life. The room is a complicated thing. And you need to figure out where you should be in the room. And you can't do that, surely with perception, because all you see is me and some of the wall, right? It's you got this little narrow portal.

And so you can't really rely on your perceptions to orient you, but you do orient yourself. And I think what you do is it's engagement. It's like does this seem meaningful and deep and engaging yes Then it's an indication that it's serving multiple masters simultaneously So both maybe both socially and also temporarily and so I think the sense of meaning is actually an instinct that meaning is actually an instinct that orients people in time and space. It's not an epiphenomida. It's the most fundamental form of perception.

And that's the only optimistic thought that I've ever been able to derive from psychology. Is that that actually could be true. It could be that the sense of meaning is an orienting reflex. And that would be wonderful if it was true, because it would make it real. You know, and it's one of the, you it's one of the devastating elements of nihilism is something like,

well, who the hell cares what you're doing? What differences are going to make in a million years? It's like your sense of meaning is just an illusion. You're a limited creature, an unlimited place, and nothing you do really matters. That's a powerful argument, especially if you're an objective materialist and a reductionist. It's a killer argument, but it looks to me like it's wrong. It's actually wrong, because meaning looks to me like it's an actual phenomenon. It does say that you're your position properly between chaos and order or something like that. It's real. So, well, so we'll see. We're going to develop that argument because if it's real, you want to know that because it gives you something to stand on.

You know, maybe it's as real as pain, but it's not pain. It's something positive, and you need something positive that you can rely on. All right, so we're concentrating now on the un-predicted outcome, or the undesired outcome, because we said, well, that's like a portal, right? It's a portal through which doubt can pour, and it's the thing that makes the irrelevant, relevant to get. And so that's why I used this little diagram. It's like, oh, oh, that's a, that's a fear phase, roughly speaking.

And I put all those stripes on it to indicate that it's not just fear, it's preparation for all sorts of different perceptions and all sorts of different motivational states. So imagine what happens when something knocks you back on your heels. It's like not only does your body prepare, but simultaneously with all that preparation, all sorts of fantasies are generated. Like, and what they are is all sorts of alternative worlds. Well, why did this happen? You go back into your past and you say, well, here's one root. Well, here's another root. Here's another root. Here's another root. Like, I don't know what I did wrong. I don't know what anybody did wrong.

But there's something back there that someone did wrong. It can take people years to sort that out. And so those fantasies are all generated. And then the same thing happens with the future. It's like, well, what does this mean? Well, it couldn't mean this. It couldn't mean that. It couldn't mean I'm getting divorced. It couldn't mean I'm losing my house. It couldn't mean I'll never talk to my kids again.

It couldn't mean that my career is going to collapse. Or maybe I'll be able to get out of this stupid job that I've always hated and something better will happen. All at the same time. So that's the response to anomaly. And the reason you respond that way is because you're no longer where you thought you were. Okay, so there's a simple way of looking at it. So what doesn't unpredictable or anomalous event mean?

And I think this is maybe the most important thing, the most important theme of the entire class might be what doesn't un-predicted or undesired outcome mean. The only thing that would be equally important is what should you do about it? But we'll start with what it means, and the answer is, well, you don't know what it means. It could mean anything.

And that's a strange category, right? The category of anomalous events contains indefinite possibility. So what the hell do you do about that? Well, you prepare to do a variety of things. You can simplify it and say, well, it's half-threat, because something bad might happen. And it's half-promise, because something good might happen and it's half-promise because something good might happen

Okay, so that's a good way of thinking about it. It's a portal all of a sudden instead of the thing being irrelevant The thing is ambivalent. It contains some slice of all possible meanings positive and negative Okay, so you're trying to sort that out. That's partly why it's so stressful, too. And anger is a good response to that, because anger is partly an advance emotion, because it's got a positive emotion element, which is why anger can be righteous, you know. But it's got a negative element, too. It's negative emotion and positive emotion at the same thing. Same time. So it's like the canonical stress emotion. So, but it's very hard on people, anger, it's very psychophysiologically demanding. So, I started with that model and then I developed it into this model, which I like better. So, you're moving from, you haven't seen this because it's not in the book.

Moving from point A to point B and you're using your actions, your known actions to get there, okay? And what happens? You run into an anomaly and it's like a hole. It's a hole through the map. It's like a hole is burned in it or something like that. And the map's no longer relevant. And so what happens?

Well your positive emotion systems are activated or dis-enhibited. That's a better way of thinking about it. And your negative emotion systems are dis-enhibited. And what might those be? Well, in positive emotion you have hope and interest and exhilaration and curiosity and confidence and in the negative emotional space you have anxiety and fear and hurt and anger and guilt and shame and disappointment and disgust like there's quite a stacking of emotions and you don't know which of those is going to be useful and relevant

and so it all emerges at the same time. Now, one of the questions that was being begged, let's say, by this discussion was the idea of the relationship between these frames of reference to one another. I'm going to describe that relationship because one of the things that I want to describe to you is how you determine how upset you should be when something anomalous happens. Because it's really hard to figure out, right? So because, well, you see this often, especially if you're unsophisticated in dispute settlement

with an intimate partner. Every little bump in the relationship is the potential dissolution of the entire relationship. That's actually why people get married, you know, just so you know. Because this is built into marital boughs. I'm not leaving ever no matter what. It's like, okay, well that definitely puts a boundary around our arguments, right? Because I can't say every time you manifest one of your flaws, which you're likely to do just as often as me, well enough of this.

It's like, that's horrible, man. If your whole life is, well, every time you get out of line, I'm out of here. It's like, how the hell are you, first of all, you're not gonna admit to ever doing anything wrong. Second, you're gonna be on your, you're like a scared cat, the entire relationship,

because, well, who knows, it could just come to an end at any moment. It's like, you know, people say, well, if the possibility of divorce is open, it makes you free. It's like, yeah, that's what you want. You want to be free, eh? Really, really?

So you can't predict anything. That's what you're after. It's a vow, and it says, look, I know that you're trouble. Me too. So we won't leave no matter what happens. Well, that's a hell of a vow, but that's why it's a vow, right? That's why you take it in front of a bunch of people.

That's why it's supposed to be a sacred act. It's like, what's the alternative? What's the alternative? Everything is mutable and changeable at any moment. Well go ahead, you live your life like that and see what you like when you're 50. Jesus, it's dismal. Two or three divorces, your family's fragmented, you've got no continuity of narrative, and it's not good for the kids, not by any stretch of the imagination. And so it's a form of voluntary enslavement, I suppose, but it's also equivalent to the adoption of a

responsibility. And there's more to it than that. If you can't run away, then you can solve your problems, because it might be, okay, well, I'm stuck with you. So how about we fix things? Because the alternative is we're going to be in a boxing match for the next 40 years. That's the alternative. So, and you think you're gonna fix problems without something like that hanging over your head, there isn't a chance, you'll just avoid them because that's what people do. It's really hard to solve problems,

especially in a relationship. We're having a fight and I find out that it's, you know, because you're abused by your uncle when you were five or some goddamn thing, you know? It's like, it's very frequent that sort of thing happens. You, there's The partner of your partner is manifesting some weird anomalous behavior. You just can't make heads or tails of it. It doesn't seem related to what you're doing at all. They don't want to talk about it.

And so as soon as you bring it up, they get mad. And then you bring it up again. They even get madder. And they tell you that you're not going to talk about that or they're going to leave. And so maybe you're really, really persistent because you're kind of a son of a bitch, and then they break down and cry. And then they have this horrible memory that comes flooding forward that's completely, you don't know what to do with it, and then you have to sort it out. So you think you're going to do that unless there's a good reason? You have to know, we better sort this out, and we're going to be carrying it around for the next 40 years.

That maybe is enough motivation, so you'll actually try hard to solve a problem. It's a lot easier to say, well, sorry, we're not going there. But then good, you'll have it every day, every day, every goddamn day for the rest of your life. Anyways, back to this. All right, so, what's the relationship between your frames of reference? Well, we can, well, let's do it this way. Let's see if I can think of a good example. Why did you get up this morning?

OK, why? Why did you want to come to class? To... Um... This class? Yeah. Okay, so why do you want to come... This is a serious question. Why did you want to come to class?

To... To get the knowledge that it's going to be... Uh... That is something I'm going to be testing on. Okay, okay. Is there any reason other than the testing that you came to class? It's okay. You can done this is not a trap. I mean, you can say whatever you want. I'm just, they're just, they're just straight questions. Okay. So let's say no for the time being or not for reasons that you can immediately

bring to mind. Okay, why does the test matter? For the degree. Okay, why do you care about the degree? To get a job. Okay, whose decision was it that you took the degree that you're taking? Mine. Yours, okay. Did your parents degree that you're taking? Mine.

Okay. Did your parents have any influence on that? No. No. Okay. Okay. What job are you after? Psychology. Clinical? Yes. Clinical psychologist. Why do you want to do that? Again, you know, I'm going to question you till you run out of answers.

You will run out of answers. So if this is the time that's fine, why do you want to do clinical psychology? To help people. To help people. Okay. Okay. Why is that more important to you than making money? Because it helps me in trying. How? It sort of makes me happy to see other people get over in their power. Okay. Okay. All right All right, good. Well, that's pretty good. You had lots of answers. So sometimes you can run people out of answers with about three questions. So all right, so small action perception nested in larger action perception nested in larger action

perception all the way out to, well, till you run out of answers fundamentally. So and that's where at the edge where you run out of answers fundamentally, right? So, and that's where at the edge where you run out of answers, that's where metaphysics takes over. Because you're not in a rational domain anymore. You're in a metaphysical domain at that point. And so, you have implicit assumptions that you don't even know about that are working on the fringes. And we'll talk about that a little bit. Okay, so then we can take a category like we'll do a microanalysis the same way. So you're at home and you're tickling the baby. Alright, so when note first that's not an abstraction, right? There's an actual baby and you're moving your fingers

and so that's not just an abstract conceptualization. It's also where your consciousness ends. You're tickling the baby, but you don't know how you're doing it. You don't know the musculature. You don't know how to manipulate the little organs and everything. You can just do it. So bang, you're out of the perceptual domain at that point. It grounds out in voluntary action.

All right, so you're tickling the baby. What are you doing when you're tickling the baby? Well, you're making the baby laugh. OK, that's one way you're playing with the baby. OK, so you're tickling the baby. What are you doing when you're tickling the baby? Well, you're making the baby laugh. Okay, that's one way you're playing with the baby. Okay, so fine. That's a subset of the activity play with baby and you can play peekaboo with the baby, you can tickle the baby, you can clean the baby, and all of that could be part of playing. And you might say, well, what are you doing when you're playing with a baby? And you'd say, well, I'm taking care of my family. And fine, and then you think, well, what are you doing when you're playing with a baby? And you'd say, well, I'm taking care of my family and fine. And then you think, well, what are you doing when you're taking care of your family?

And you might say, well, I'm being a good parent. And then you might say, well, what am I doing when I'm being a good parent? You might say, well, I'm being a good person. And then you could say, well, why should you be a good person? But we won't go any farther than that. It's sort of because you can see that that's sort of the, in some sense, that's an ultimate level of abstraction. Okay, so you could what do you do? Someone comes up to you and you're tickling the baby and you say, well, I'm being a good person.

They ask, what are you doing? I'm being a good person. It's like it's a bit just just jointed. It isn't what the person would expect as an answer. They'd expect something more local, but it's still true. And so what's interesting is that when you're doing something, that's, well, I would say worthwhile. That's probably the right way of thinking about it. You're doing a whole bunch of things simultaneously. And you're not really aware of all those things, but you are in some sense, you know, because if the person, someone might come along and say, well, what kind of idiot tickles a baby like that?

It's like, well, what have they said? Well, they've kind of nailed you here down on the micro tickle level, but they're sort of also taking a pretty good crack at this high level system as well. Now, and that's a problem. So let's say, well, good parent is a subset of being a good person, but there's all sorts of other. Maybe you have to be a good partner. Maybe you have to be a good daughter.

Maybe you have to be a good niece. You know, your ability to function as a good person is composed of a very large number of hierarchically nested subsystems. And so when the person goes only an idiot would tickle the baby like that, and they go after that, you might think, well, how upset you should should you get? And the answer is, well, how valid do you think their complaint is? So let's say maybe an only an idiot would tickle a baby like that, and you happen to be that idiot. And so, well, maybe you're not a good person. And so what does that mean? It means that the map that consists of all these nested

subsistence has now become unreliable. And so, how upset are you gonna get about that? Well, you know, maybe you had a bad day at work and you're kind of hypoglycemic and you had too much to drink the night before. And so, someone says, you know, that's not how you tickle a baby, you idiot. And you cry, well, why?

Well, it's a pretty high-level blow. And so it's the sort of thing you want to do if you want to do if you want to hurt someone. It's not a good way to teach someone because you teach them down at the smallest possible level. The micro, no, no, you don't tickle a baby like that. You tickle a baby like this. And you're doing a good job on everything else. But if you're going to tickle a baby, this is how you go about it. And the person thinks, well, you know, I'm doing a fairly good job, but I've got this little thing I have to work on,

and maybe I can manage it. And so that works. And that works. And you can have some sympathy for the person at the same time, because you might say, well, I used to tickle babies like an idiot too, but you know, it's fixable. And most of you is okay.

And that's a nice thing to do when you're arguing with someone, you say, look, here's a bunch of things you're doing right that are related to this, that are important. Here's a small thing that maybe you could alter slightly, and it would make me happy and maybe I'll return the favor at some point. And they think, oh, well, oh, maybe, maybe I'll do that, maybe. And then they practice doing it, and you can give them a pat on the head. And then you're both happy about that.

That really works with people. It really works. So, okay, so what you see is that these high level abstractions, let's call them ethical abstractions, are related to actions. They're related. And so you can see that relationship from the good person to doing something like tickle the baby properly. And then you can conceptualize it this way, that you have this massive overarching map,

which is something like the story of your life, including its extension future. And then it consists of these subordinate maps, which can be broken down all the way down to the level of actions. And so then that explains to you, to some degree, how you can do the impossible job of calibrating your emotional response. Because roughly speaking, your emotional response should be proportionate to the level that's being assaulted by the anomaly. If it's way up here, you wrote your MCAT because you

want to go to medical school. Now the envelope comes and you're shaking away. The opening, it's like you got 25%ile, just like a quarter of the people who take the test. What does that mean? This is all blown to hell, that's for sure so God only knows how many of these things are going to go to. Maybe your study habits really need to be, you know, you have to reconstitute yourself all the way down to the level of your habits. It can be devastating news. Now, one of the ways to protect yourself against something like that is like, don't have one plan, right? If you're going to stake yourself on something, you should throw a couple of alternative scaffolds up beside you so that you have somewhere to go. You want to be a doctor. Okay?

Well, you could be a nurse. It's like it's not a doctor, but it means cutting your throat. You're still doing 80% of what you wanted to do. So you want to, and you want to think about this during your whole life, man, if you're going to take a high risk, you want to scaffold yourself in other areas so that if it fails, you don't, bottom doesn't drop out and you die. And it's also very much worth thinking about with regards to setting up your life in general. It's like, if you concentrate solely on your career, you can get a long way in your career. And I would say

that that's a strategy that a minority of men preferentially do. That's all they do. They work like 70, 80 hours a week. They go flat out on their career. They're staking everything on the small probability of exceptional status in a narrow domain. But it's hard on them. They don't have a life.

It's very difficult for them to have a family. They don't know how to take any leisure activity. Like they get very one dimension. Now, it may be that that unit dimensionality is the price you have to pay to be exceptional at one thing. Because if you're going to be something like a genius level mathematician, and you want to do that for a scientist to say, it's like you're in your lab,

you're in your lab all the time. You're working 70 hours a week, radiowers a week, you're smart, you're dedicated, you're unidimensional, and that's like you're in your lab, you're in your lab all the time, you're working 70 hours a week, radiowers a week, you're smart, you're dedicated, you're unidimensional, and that's how you get to beat all the other people who are doing that. It's the only way, but the problem is you don't get a life. Now, if you love being a scientist

and you have that kind of focus of mind, well, first of all, you're a rare person, and second, you're gonna pay for it, but find more power to you. But it's a risky business to do that. You sacrifice a lot for it. And I would say most often, if you're speaking about having a healthy life, that isn't what you do.

You spread yourself out more. So you have a family, you have some things that you do outside of work that are meaningful to you and useful. You have a network of friends, those three things alone are plenty to keep you well-oriented. And then if one of those things collapses, everything doesn't go. Now the price you pay for that is the more you strive to optimize that balance, the less likely you are to be fantastically successful at any single one of them. But you might have a very, you know, if you consider your life as a whole,

that might be a winning strategy. One of the things Carl Jung said, I really like this. He thought that men went after perfection and women went after wholeness. So they're different value. They're different. There's something different at the top of the value hierarchy. So perfection would be, stake it all on one thing and look for radical success. Not all men do that because they don't. But we're talking about extremes, at least with regards to the men that do that. The wholeness idea is more like,

well, I want, it's like I want one thing in my life to be 150%, or I want five things in my life to be 80%. Well, there's a lot more richness in a life where you have five things operating at 80%, but you're not operating at any of them at 150%. And I really believe this because I've watched men and women go through their careers now for a long period of time. And one of the things that there's lots of things that produce this, but one of the things

that I've noticed is that mostly women in their 30s bail out of unidimensional careers, they won't do them. They won't put in the 80 hours a week that they would have to put in in order to dominate that particular area. And it isn't the reason that they won't do it is because they decide it's not worth it. And no wonder, because why would that be worth it? You have to ask yourself that. It's like, well, you want to be an outstanding scientist. It's like, okay, really?

Really? That's what you want because that means that's what you do because you're competing with other people. You know, they're smart, they're hard working. And if you want to be at the top, you have to be smarter and work harder than any of them. And working hard means working long hours. I mean, it also means working diligently. But in the final analysis, it's also an additive issue.

If I'm smart and hard working and I can crank out for 70 hours a week and you do it for 30, it's like, in two years, I'm so far ahead of you, you will never, ever catch up. So anyways. And I think think partly maybe part of the reason too that women are oriented that way more than men, I think there's two reasons. One is, socioeconomic status does not make women more attractive on the mating market, but it does make men more attractive. And the second is women's time frame is compressed, right? Because guys can always say, well, I'll have kids later, and they can say that till they're like 80, whereas women, it's like, no way, man, you've got to get it, you've

got to get it together by the time you're, let's say 40, but really probably by 35, but definitely by 40, because otherwise it ain't happening. And that's bloody dreadful. Like the most unhappy people you ever see, no. No. What if the common roots to extreme unhappiness is to want children and not have them. I wouldn't recommend that. You see couples who were in their 30s, one couple in three over the age of 30 has fertility problems. That's defined as an ability to conceive after one year of trying. One in three, that's worth thinking about because people are very, very unhappy if they

want to have kids and then they can't. And you're in the medical mill for 10 years if that's what happens to you. So okay, so anyways, back to this. I think what I'll do, what time is it, is it, because I'd have to open up a whole new can of worms so to speak to you, the next part. So I think actually what I'm going to do is just recap what we did and then stop. Or maybe we can have some questions, or maybe we can call it an early day. Okay, so what is the fundamental issue here?

What did we discuss today? All right, so you're in a frame, and we've laid out its characteristics. It has a goal in it. It has a current position in it. It has rules for operating within it. It governs your perceptions, which is a really critical thing to understand. And while governing your perceptions, it tells you what's useful to you and what gets in your way, but most importantly, it tells you what you don't have to pay attention to. So as long as your damn frame is functional, you can ignore most of the world.

And that means your stress level is way lower than it would normally be. Okay, so perception, motivation, all of that's integrated into those frames. And then the emotional element comes out in that when you're within a frame, things that move you forward and validate the frame are positive and things that get in your way and invalidate the frame are negative. And then the next issue is, well, if your frame is invalidated, exactly what does that mean? And you can't answer that without thinking about the hierarchy of frames.

Because if you're lucky, it just means your frame needs a minor alteration. That would be equivalent to Piagetian assimilation in some sense, right? You can stay in the frame, you just make a small adjustment. I think the Piaget median distinction between assimilation and accommodation is technically inaccurate because it's a continuum, right? I mean, if I want to grab your pen, I have a little frame that will enable me to do that. You say, well, I'm staying within the frame to move that out of the way, but actually, I'm not.

What I'm doing is doing a very, I'm doing a small micro revolution in the frame to move that out of the way, but actually I'm not. What I'm doing is doing a very, I'm doing a small micro revolution in the frame moving that, pick that up. And so it's, I think, accommodation, there's no hard distinction between assimilation and accommodation. It's a continuum. So you'd say, well, if the top end of your map gets blown out, that requires accommodation. And if it's just a little micro change at the bottom, that's assimilation. But there's no real difference between this except for scale. And there's kind of a continual scale, not an absolute dichotomy. So okay.

So anyways, back to the emotion. Something happens and it isn't what you want it. What does that mean? Well, It could mean anything. What you do is you start trying to micro adjust the frame at the highest level of resolution But then you might find that you can't do that. So you have to jump up to the next one You have to jump up to the next one. You have to jump up to the next one and each time you do that the psychophysiological cost increases so And each time you do that, the psychophysiological cost increases. So... Okay, so we talked about the cost end of the spectrum, and then we also talked about the engagement end of the spectrum.

And so the idea would be, well, if you're very much engaged, say in, let's go to that again. If you find it very engaging to play with your baby, then you might be doing it in a way that's an indicating that you're taking good care of your family, that you're being a good parent and that you're being a good person all simultaneously. And there's rich meaning in that.

And the systems that orient you with regards to meaning are saying, look, you're doing this microaction in a way that benefits the maintenance and maybe even the expansion of all the frames that exist above it. And that's exactly what you want. You want to be doing that all the time if you can. And so that implies that you want to delineate out a pretty well developed value system so that you're not acting at odds with yourself. And you also want to have that integrated within the broader society. So that society isn't existing towards you as a continual obstacle in making So, okay. Good. Questions?

Any of that not make sense or do you have any objections to it? It's funny. It's funny. I mentioned the word matter, you know, because things are made out of matter or maybe they're made out of what matters, but the word object is the same thing. You could say that the world is made out of objects or you could say that the world is made out of what objects, and both of those, both of those weirdly enough are equally true in some sense. Question. So you've had the main section for the targets with the positive aspect of the dopamine. Yes. And I'm assuming that will you reach point B in the BD opioid system? No, it's the serotonin system in all likelihood.

So serotonin seems, so the question was positive emotions mediated by dopamine when you're advancing towards something say or when you have a queue that something good is about to happen. What is the system that mediates positive emotion at the satiation level? And if I can add the negative aspect for me? Yeah. What is the circuit for that? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, let's start with the satiation issue. That seems mostly regulated by serotonin The opiate issue is there are other forms of specific reward that don't seem to be merely Motivated or merely underpinned by dopamine and the opiate system would be one of those. There's an oxytocin system as well so There are other biochemical systems that are involved in more specific forms of reward.

But the thing that's common among instances that make it appear that you're moving forward is the dopaminergic element, roughly speaking. And then one of the things that happens if you're higher in serotonin because you're more dominant is that you're more satiated all the time. That's why people who are low in the dominance hierarchy with decreased levels of serotonin are more impulsive and also more emotionally dysregulated. They're more impulsive because,

hey, you take your positive thing when you can get it. And so they're more dissatisfied, they're more looking for anything that will produce a positive outcome. And then, they're also more likely to experience diffuse negative emotion, partly because their serotonin systems are lower, indicating their tenuous status in the dominance hierarchy, meaning that everything they do that's uncertain is far more dangerous. that everything they do that's uncertain is far more dangerous.

So this is also why it's very difficult, often when you're trying to treat someone who's depressed, because you could say there's not much difference between being depressed and existing in the biochemical state that being at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy would produce. In fact, they're the same thing. Well, then the question is, are you depressed or are you just at the bottom of a dominant hierarchy? Because those are not like the symptomatology is very, very similar, but the

cause and the cure are not the same. You know, because you might be at the bottom of a dominant hierarchy because you're just everything about your life is ruined. So, and of course you're suffering, are you depressed, sir? No, not exactly. You just have nowhere to go. So, other questions? Yes. I wonder why people pursue motivations

that don't produce this presence of meaning in this hierarchy Okay, so the question is why don't why do people pursue rewards that don't produce this resonance They don't have a value hierarchy so pleasure island It's a good example those kids that were brought there were lost So they didn't they didn't have anywhere to go. They didn't have an identity. So they default to local pleasure. And that's better than none, although the problem

with local pleasure, well, as the narrative made clear, is that you better look out if you're impulsive, because it's going to kick back on your heart. And the reason is, you're only considering the immediate timeframe. And the problem is, is that things propagate across all the timeframes and so just because something works really well this second cocaine for example doesn't mean that it's a tenable solution to the class of all problems. So usually

often people pursue local pleasure because that's the best they can imagine. It's the best they've been taught. They don't see another alternative. So it could be ignorance. It can be they don't want to adopt the responsibility because part of the problem with working at every level of the hierarchy simultaneously is that it's it's well it's like dancing to a very complex wall. Let's say you have to be paying attention to a very large number of things simultaneously and doing things right. It requires responsibility. And so, you know, that's... It's a pain.

It's a weight. Part of the reason people drink alcohol is to get rid of their responsibility. I mean, that's, you know, you hear people drink because they have problems. It's like, yeah, yeah, no. Some people drink because they're anxious and alcohol is drink because they're in withdrawal, but young people drink because they're sick and tired of being responsible because it's annoying.

It's like, so I'll drink enough. I won't care about the medium to long-term consequences because alcohol, that's exactly what alcohol does It doesn't make you Inderent of the medium to long term consequences But it makes you not care about them and partly it's because it dampens anxiety So it dampens anxiety leaves your positive emotion circuits intact So then you can go out there and do stupid fun things and that's like that's a party really. Let's go do stupid fun things

That's a party but the Let's go do stupid fun things. That's a party. But the medium to learn long-term consequences are, it's risky. It doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, but it's risky. So, yeah, they don't know better. That's the answer, I would say. So, yes. I can't fully love your talking about responsibility. It seems like that. Bounds a person to a certain frame. And that's why conservatives and liberals don't get along. Because conservatives do bind themselves to a particular frame. They're conscientious and low in openness.

And the liberals say, doesn't that just bind you to a particular frame? And it's like yeah, that that's it does and that's a problem. So yes but in terms of being aware of the multiple levels It takes within a frame it takes a certain number of tolerance of the unbearable present for that to like reach the edge of that frame to force the person to see a different frame. Is that something that something's? Yes, and that's actually where I stop today. Because that's exactly right. So you're,

it's good, because both the questions you asked indicated that you're sort of at the next step in the logic process, because you asked about the relationship between these frames with, you know, in relationship to one another. And that is the next issue. It's like, there's something about responsibility and individuality that I'm curious about. Responsibility implies a connection to other people.

Okay, well, one of the things, one of the things we are going to talk about in the class is how you address the problem that you just described, which is that this is the Peter Pan story, roughly speaking. As Peter Pan is this magical boy, Pan means, Pan is the god of everything, roughly speaking, right? And so it's not an accident that he has the name Pan, and he's the boy that won't grow

up. And he's magical. Well, that's because children are magical. They can be anything. They're nothing but potential. And Peter Pan doesn't want to give that up. Why? Well, he's got some adults around him, but the main adult is Captain Hook.

Well, who the hell wants to grow up to be Captain Hook? First of all, you've got a hook. Second, you're a tyrant. And third, you're chased by the dragon of chaos with the clock in its stomach, right? The crocodile. It's already got a piece of you. Well, that's what happens when you get older. Time has already got a piece of you. And eventually, it's got a taste for you. And eventually, it's going to eat you. And so hook is so traumatized by that that he can't help but be a tyrant. And then Peter Pan looks at traumatized hook and says,

well, no, I'm not sacrificing my childhood for that. So that's fine, except he ends up king and lost boys. In Neverland, well, Neverland doesn't exist and who the hell wants to be king of the lost boys. And he also sacrifices the possibility to help a real relationship with a woman, because that's Wendy. And she's kind of conservative,-class, London dwelling girl. She wants to grow up and have kids and have a life. She accepts her mortality. She accepts her maturity. Peter

Pan has to content himself with tinkerbell. She doesn't even exist. She's like, she's like the fairy of porn. She doesn't exist. She's the substitute for the real thing. And so, but the dichotomy that you're talking about, it's very tricky because there's a sacrificial element in maturation, right? You have to sacrifice the pluripotentiality of childhood for the actuality of a frame.

And the question is, well, why would you do that? Well, one reason is it happens to you whether you do it or not. You can either choose your damn limitation or you can let it take you unaware when you're 30 or even worse when you're 40. And then that is not a happy day. And I see people like this and I think it's more and more common in our culture because people can put off maturity

without suffering in immediate penalty. But all that happens is the penalty accrues. And then when it finally hits, it just wallops you because when you're 25, you could be an idiot. It's no problem. Even when you're out in a job search, it's like, well, you don't have any experience and you're kind of clueless.

It's, yeah, yeah, you're young, you know, it's no problem. We can, that's what young people are like, but they're full of potential. Okay, well, now you're the same person at 30. It's like people aren't so thrilled about you at that point. It's like, what the hell have you been doing for the last 10 years? Well, I'm just as clueless as I was when I was 22. It's, yeah, but you're not 22. You're an old infant, right?

And that's an ugly thing, an old infant. So the reason, part of the reason you choose your damn sacrifice, because the sacrifice is inevitable, but at least you get to choose it. And then there's something that's even more complex than that. In some sense is that the problem with being a child is that all you are is potential. And it's really low resolution. You could be anything, but you're not anything. So then you go and you adopt an apprenticeship, roughly speaking, and then you become at least

you become something. And when you're something, that makes the world open up to you again. Like if you're a really good plumber, then you end up being far more than a plumber, right? You end up being a good employer, not not the plumbers, I'm not putting plumbers down. It's like more power to plumbers. They've saved more lives than doctors. So, hygiene, right? So, you know, if you're a really good plumber, well, then you have some employees, you run a business, you, you, you, you, you train some other people, you enlarge their lives, you're kind of a pillar of the community,

you have your family, once you pass through that narrow training period, which narrows you and constricts you and develops you at the same time, then you can come out the other end with a bunch of new possibility at hand. And Jung talked about that, He thought that the proper, part of the proper path of development in the last half of life was to rediscover

the child that you left behind as you were apprenticing. And so then you get to be something and regain that potential at the same time. Very, very smart. Well, he was very, very smart. So that's very wise, very wise thing to know. So, yeah, sacrifice. We'll talk more about that too.

You get to pick your damn sacrifice. That's all. You don't get to not make one. You're sacrificial whether you want to be or not. That's a good thing to know as well. So even though it's rather, you know, it's a rough thing to figure out. But other questions? I have one, if you know what I'm saying. Okay. That thing you just said about noticing and more and more people live in their 20s.

Yeah. What do you think about that? Where do you think that comes from in terms of culture or living? I think universities facilitate it. Because you can go to university to not be something, instead of going to university to be something. And that's its pleasure island.

And the price you pay for it, especially in the US, is debt. And you're enticed into it because the administrators can pick your pocket. So they rob your future self while allowing you to pretend that you have an identity, right? Very nasty. And you can declare bankruptcy with your student loans in the US. It's indentured servitude.

And it is precisely pleasure islands. It's exactly that. And so tuition fees have shot way out of control. And part of the reason that universities don't make more demands on their students and let them get away with all the things they let them get away with is because they're basically why the hell would you chase them out? There are $100,000 or more. So they can do whatever they want as long as you get to sell them to the sold mines. Right.

So and that, you know, it's not the only reason because the other thing that's happened is that the rate of technological transformation is so fast now. And the rate of turnover of things is of things is that it is genuinely harder for people who are, say, 18 to 20. When I was a kid, roughly speaking, the kind of rough patch for life was probably 14 to 17, something like that. Now, I think it's 18 to 25, something like that. And I think the reason for that is that all the jobs that the bloody hippies

complained about being doomed to in the 1960s have now disappeared. Their problem was, oh my god, I'm going to have to work for a corporation and get a salary for the rest of my life. And then I'll just end up in it with a pension and that'll be my whole life. It's like, well, it seems like a lot better deal than an endless round of part-time Starbucks jobs. So some of it is that. It's just, there's a space now in our culture that is lacking for people to make that transformation from adolescence into adulthood.

And so it's just, the cost of that is forced all. It's not a good thing. It's not a good thing. Do you think this is affecting employers? Do you think it ensures a younger people for a job at least saying that they're seeing this slower maturation or this, you're saying this person's got a degree from U of T,

but for bad things that degrees aren't worth it? Well, there's a couple of problems with the degrees, is that everyone has one. That's the first one. Which is so because scarcity matters, obviously. The second thing is that the match between the degree and the workplace has become less and less self-evident. You know, what should happen when you go to university is you should learn how to think and formulate arguments. You should learn to think, speak and write. That's what the humanities are for. They're to make you dangerous, right? Because if you can think and speak and write, you're deadly in a complex job. You're exactly what's necessary. But

if you don't have that, it's like, what the hell good is the degree? So I mean, degree in English literature doesn't prepare you for a job. It could make you think right and speak, which prepares you for any complex job, and that's what's supposed to happen. But increasingly, I think that doesn't happen. And the employers are waking up to this very rapidly. So, and they're, I mean, they've already known that most for most complex positions, they have to train their people, and they're, I mean, they've already known that most for most complex positions, they have to train their people. Now they're thinking, well, why do I have to bother with the degree if I'm going to train them? If it isn't bringing anything of value, you see this, and even it feels like law. When I went to do a debate at Queen's University three weeks ago, I think, they couldn't get anybody to debate me. You know, the guy had to play

Devil's Advocate. We were talking about Bill C. 16. I thought, Jesus, that's so pathetic. I'm talking about legal matters. And I'm in the greatest university, in one of the greatest universities in the West, you know, I mean, it's in the top 200, let's say. I couldn't get someone to argue with the stupid psychology professor about law. Had to get a Devil's Advocate.

And so one of the things that was really disheartening talking to the students was, they told me four or five of them, they're not learning a damn thing in law. It's also social justice nonsense. It's like, well, good, that'll do in the profession. It's being done in any ways because lawyers are being replaced by automation. And so a lot of what they do is dig up information.

It's like, well, you can do that on your own. And forms are proliferating like mad. So the law school should be teaching you to be a monster. You better be. But you come out, you're concerned with social welfare. Oh, God. It's like, well, there's just nothing to that. It's like you can come out and say you're, you want to be nice to people. Well, that's nice. Good. You go right ahead. It's like I'll go find someone who can do something and you can go be nice to people and see how effective that is. So it's a lot of things that are conspiring in the same direction. People don't have to get married to have sex.

So we have no idea what that's going to do, although we know one thing it's done is the only people to get married now are rich, right? Which is another thing that's really comical because the feminist idea in the 60s was that marriage was an oppressive patriarchal institution. It's like, okay, fine. Then why do only rich women get married now? Because that is the case. And so for poorer women, the dissolution of marriage has been an absolute catastrophe. They are so screwed because they have kids.

So they're working. They've got their 90 hour work week, man. That's for sure. They're much less attractive to potential mates. So they get low quality men, often parasitical and predatory. So they often have like jobs in retail, for example, which are just dreadful. You don't even know what your schedule is going to be. You get paid hardly anything. You know, it's really, but if, you know, most of the women who are outspoken

feminists are on the successful end of the socioeconomic distribution, their university students or people like that, they don't even know any poor women. So they have no idea what their lives are like, and you would never know, because they're at home working, you know, they're either at their horrible job or they're at home slaving away with their kids. So it's not like they're out there

telling you what's wrong with them. So. It's a really fixed, it's like an ITA. So sometimes, you see my students a lack of, there's a lot of credible thinking, like when you put the language, it's almost like it's like a mathematical problem, a logic association with contribution to verbs, and I feel sometimes they're lacking in this basic knowledge, just kind of put two together, you know, two inches four. The best way to teach people critical thinking is to teach them to write.

And I made this little thing that I put online. It's, I don't know, maybe is it in the site 434 website? Did I post that rubric for essay writing? I don't, yeah, actually, what it's called, it's still on 434. Is it not on 434? Is that not working? No, it's not on 434.

Oh. Yeah. Oh, okay. Well, there's an essay. Oh, that's too bad. It's not on the psych 434 website, even. Because I updated it. Anyways, I have this guide to writing that's, that if it isn't on the 434 website,

it is definitely on the 430 website. And it steps people through the process of writing. Because what's happened now, it's very hard to teach people to write because it's unbelievably time intensive. And like writing, marking a good essay, that's really easy. Check A, you did everything right, right? Marking a bad essay, oh my God, the words are wrong, the phrases are wrong, the sentences are wrong, they're not ordered right in the paragraphs, the paragraphs aren't coherent and the whole thing

makes no sense. So, trying to tell the person what they did wrong, it's like, well, you did everything wrong, everything about this essay is wrong. Well, that's not helpful either, you have to find the few little things they did half right, and you have to teach them what they did wrong. It's really expensive. And so what I did with this rubric was try to address that from the production side instead of the grading side. But the best thing you can do is teach people to write because there's no difference between that and thinking.

And one of the things that just blows me away about universities is that no one ever tells students why they should write something. It's like, well, you have to do this assignment. Well, why are you writing? Well, you need the grade. It's like, no, you need to learn to think because thinking makes you act effectively in the world. Thinking makes you win the battles you undertake

and those could be battles for good things. If you can think and speak and write, you are absolutely deadly. Nothing can get in your way. So that's why you learn to write. It's like, when I can't believe that people aren't just told that. It's like, it's the most powerful weapon you can possibly provide someone with. And I mean, I know lots of people who've been staggeringly successful and watched them throughout my life. I mean, those people, you don't want to have an argument with them. They'll just slash you into pieces.

And not in a malevolent way. It's like, if you're going to make your point and they're going to make their point, you better have your points organized. Because otherwise, you're going to look like like and be an absolute idiot. You are not going to get anywhere. And if you can formulate your arguments coherently and make a presentation, if you can speak to people, if you can lay out a proposal, God, people give you money, they give you opportunities, you have influence.

That's what you're at university for. And so that's what you do is And you're in English, right? You're in, yeah, in languages, anyways. It's like, yeah, teach people to be articulate because that's the most dangerous thing you can possibly be. So, and that's motivating if people know that. It's like, well, why are you learning to write? Cause here's your sword.

Here's your M16, right? Here's your bulletproof vest. I like you learn how to use them. But it's just, it's an endless mystery to me. Why that isn't made self-evident. So that's the sort of thing that can drive you mad trying to sort out. It's like people are there's a conspiracy to bring people into the education system to make them weaker.

So I guess that keeps the competition down. Maybe that's one way of thinking about it. If your students are stupid, they're not going to challenge you. So other questions? Disagreements? I mean, it's a pretty harsh indictment of the university system. When you were talking about marriage, you get to have made a point that if you stay, which is of course a very good point, you have more

probabilities to get to a solution. But that is also a soon that you will always get to a solution. Yes, true. Yes, and some, and some and yes, yes True, well you know there used to be before the divorce laws were really liberalized there were there you could sue for Irreconcilable differences and And sometimes people do find themselves in that situation is like one person wants children and the other person doesn't It's like that's a tough one. It's a tough one to negotiate. So I'm certainly not saying that just because

you lock yourself into like two cats in a barrel that that will make you solve your problems because problems are hard to solve and sometimes you can't solve them. I was just pointing out what the cost of leaving the back door, what the cost of leaving the back door, what the cost of leaving the back door open is, and it's a big cost. And you know, one of the things I see too is that people's identities fragment

increasingly across time. You know, one of the things that you have as you age is something like the continuity of your life. You know, you have someone that you're with, you've tied your story together with theirs, you have children, maybe they have children, it's like there's this continual payoff, so to speak, in quality that you obtain from staying within that frame. And you can jump out of that, and I suppose to some degree that that provides freedom

But it isn't obvious to me that it does that for people No, but but but it's also the case that sequential relationships are unlikely to be that So look I'm not I'm not make I'm definitely not making a utopian case for marriage. I would like to hear the case where it was from you because it's really interesting. It's a strong point, but at the same time, I think there are some relationships that are really low quality. Yeah. And if we, if that's a case, then insisting on them cannot be good. Yeah, well, that's definitely the alternative argument. And of course, there are strong things to be said on both sides. But...

But see, there's some additional problems with divorce that people don't really grasp when they're young. Like, the idea that you can be divorced once you have children, that's kind of a stupid idea, because you can't. You can find a limited substitute for your initial freedom. But if you have kids and you try to get divorced, the probability that that's going to demolish your life is very, very high. First of all, it's incredibly expensive. So one or both of you is going to come out of that poor.

And your market value has declined. Let's say you're the woman who takes the kids. Your market value has declined radically. You're going to be poorer. The man, he's just a screwed because he is now an indentured servant and there's no escape from it. So it's and it's not so bad if you can negotiate a peaceful separation and some people can, but lots of times if you have a terrible relationship, it's not like negotiating a peaceful separation is all that easy. But if you're at each other's throats, good luck to you.

I think it's roughly equivalent to having non-fatal cancer. It is not pleasant. It's a 10-year process. 15-year process will cost you $250,000, and it'll tear a big chunk out of your life. And also, it will really disrupt your relationship with your kids. And you know, you bring kids into a step-parent family,

they do not do as well. Step-parents are not as good parents as biological parents, and the data on that is clear. Now, obviously, there are exceptions, because there are terrible biological parents, there are wonderful step parents, but if you look an aggregate, it's not that easy to care for children. You need everything you can binding you to them and if there's someone else's children, mostly they get in the way of the person that you love. Right? Mostly they get in the way of the person that you love, right?

Well, if I'm, let's say you have a child, I'll be right out. Let's say you have a child and I want to go out with you. Every second you spend with that child is the second you don't spend with me. And there's going to be a price for that. I'm not going to be happy about that. And if I have a child, you're going to feel exactly the same way. You might say, well, no, I love children. It's like, yeah, yeah, sure. Sure you do. I doubt it. You might love your child. And, you know, it's pretty specific the way that people love children. So, and the rate of abuse for kids in step-parent families is way higher than it is in biological families. There's not even any comparison.

So anyways, if you found this conversation meaningful, you might consider picking up dad's books, maps of meaning the architecture of belief, or 12 rules for life and antidote to chaos. If you want one that's simpler to read, I would or 12 rules for life and antidote to chaos. If you want one that's simpler to read, I would recommend 12 rules for life. Maps of meaning is dense. Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B Peterson podcast. See JordanBeePeterson.com for audio ebook and text links or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller. Remember to check out JordanBe Peterson.com slash personality for information on his personality course.

I hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you did, please let a friend know or leave a review. Talk to you next week.