2017 Personality 06: Jean Piaget & Constructivism

0:12this one's particularly complicated so because with Piaget you enter a whole

0:18new domain of of axiomatic thinking that's the right way to think about it

0:22say each of these people that were discussing each of these theories comes

0:25out the construction of the world from a different perspective and it's it's

0:28really fundamentally different it's different way deep down at the level of

0:32fundamental assumptions and so Piaget who's a who's probably the world's most

0:37famous developmental psychologist but although he didn't consider himself a

0:41developmental psychologist he considered himself a genetic epistemology and what

0:46that meant was that he was interested in Paestum ology which is how knowledge

0:51structures work and genetic means formulation of and so he was interested

0:54in how children formulate their knowledge structures in the world and he

0:59was a constructivist because he believed that human beings construct the they

1:05don't only construct the representations of the world and it's deeper than that

1:09it's more like they construct the world itself now it depends to some degree on

1:12what you think of as the world and of course that's so there's a reality

1:16definition issue that's nested at the bottom of this and it's a very complex

1:20one and so I'm going to have to walk you through it piece by piece now Piaget was

1:24a genius he was he wrote a paper I believe on mollusks when he was ten and

1:29had it published in a scientific journal and he was offered the curatorship of a

1:33museum as a consequence of that and his parents had to write the museum

1:37directors and tell them that he couldn't curate the museum because he was only

1:40ten and so that gives you some idea about Piaget and he's published many

1:44many many books and many of them haven't been translated into English yet and so

1:49he was quite the he was quite the you know large intelligence creature and he

1:56studied all sorts of things so I'm gonna tell you a little bit about

2:00constructivism I'm gonna start with a quote from Piaget and it's uh it's he's

2:06some book some of his books I found quite straightforward and some of them

2:08very difficult and I think it's often because of the quality of the

2:11translation this happens to be a relatively difficult section I don't

2:15think it's translated that well but whatever we're going to go through it

2:18I'll explain it to you a little bit so Piaget said the common postulate that's

2:22assumption of various traditional epistemology

2:25theories of valid knowledge is that knowledge itself is a fact

2:29and not a process and then if our various forms of knowledge are always

2:34incomplete and our various science is still imperfect that which is acquired

2:39is still acquired and can therefore be studied statically hence the absolute

2:44position of the problems what is knowledge or how are the various types

2:47of knowledge possible under the converging influence of a series of

2:51factors we're tending more and more today to regard knowledge as a process

2:55more than a state any being or object that Sciences attempts to hold fast

3:00dissolves once again in the current of development it is the last analysis of

3:04this development and of it alone that we have the right to state it is a fact

3:09what we can and should then seek is the law of this process quotes we are well

3:13aware on the other hand of the fine book by kuhn on scientific revolutions now

3:17there is an awful lot of information in that paragraph so we'll unpack it a

3:22little bit before we go on now one way of looking at science is that it's a

3:28collection of facts right that's that's what Piaget is stating to begin with and

3:32that we assume that the facts that science has gathered are facts and

3:37Static but if you observe them across time what you find is that scientific

3:41facts tend to shift and transform because scientific theories that are

3:44applicable in one century let's say turn out to be less applicable in the next

3:49now there's been a lot of argument and discussion about this because the fact

3:55that facts change seems to indicate that they're not so self-evidently fact and

4:00there are people and perhaps Kuhn would be among them who believe that science

4:06consisted of the juxtaposition of paradigms so those are sets of axioms

4:11within which something operates and the paradigms he considered them often in

4:15commensurate you couldn't move from one to another because the axioms were

4:19different there was no necessary no what what might you say there was no

4:22necessary means of communication between them but and and and Piaget knew of

4:28Thomas Kuhns work that's the scientists structure of scientific revolutions

4:31which was published in 1962 it's a classic text in the philosophy of

4:35science and and what Piaget soon more was more like a I would say

4:41more like a classic view of science where so for example when Newton came up

4:46with Newtonian physics there was a set of propositions upon which Newtonian

4:51physics was based and then when Einstein transformed those propositions what

4:55happened was that Newtonian physics became a subset of Einsteinian physics

4:59and so the way that Piaget looked at the development of factual ideas at least in

5:05part was that you'd come up with a set of ideas that were facts and then that

5:09would be superseded by a different theory within that within which that

5:12original theory would be nested and so that what happens that each theory in

5:16some sense although it transforms it becomes more complete as the scientific

5:21progression continues now Kuhn didn't precisely believe that although exactly

5:25what Kuhn meant by a paradigm shift because Kuhn originated that term isn't

5:30clear but he didn't seem to actually believe that science had this capacity

5:34to present a series of facts and then alter the underlying presuppositions and

5:39then to nest that within a broader series of facts like you would assume if

5:42you were thinking about the relationship between Newton and Einstein

5:45so Newtonian physics is a subset of einsteinium physics so now that's kind

5:50of how Piaget thought about how human beings developed knowledge he believed

5:54that we came up with well let's say you wanted to chop down a tree that might be

5:59a good example I mean you could use a dull axe made of bronze and it's like

6:04well that would chop down the tree it'd be a lot of work though and then maybe

6:08you replace that with a sharp steel axe that's designed like a wedge so that you

6:12can really hack down a tree with it or maybe you replace it with a saw and so

6:16the it's not like the bronze axe could chop down the tree but the steel axe can

6:20do a better job in the saw can do even a better job and so the way that Piaget

6:25thought about the transformation of human knowledge structures from from

6:29infancy onward essentially was that infants would produce a representation

6:33of the world that was sort of low resolution but quite tool like it would

6:37work in the world but then as they progressed the nature of those tools

6:41would become refined that sometimes transform completely so some sometimes

6:46imagine that a child would use in a sense a low resolution picture of

6:50something and then they would increase its resolution

6:53as they filled in the details that would be assimilation that's the page idea

6:58notion of assimilation you're using the same basic theory but filling in the

7:01details and then now and then you'd have to switch to another picture entirely

7:05and that would be more like accommodation that's where you'd have to

7:08transform your internal structures completely in order to properly

7:11represent an act within the world and so that's the basic difference between

7:14accommodation and assimilation so assimilation is like micro alterations

7:19and accommodation is transformation of the knowledge structure itself and so

7:23that's part of so what khun pointed out was that there'd be a set of facts and

7:28then there'd be an anomaly arise of some sort so like at the end of the 19th

7:32century the only remaining anomaly was at least one of the remaining anomalies

7:36was that no matter which direction you shine a light beam in and no matter how

7:42fast the platform on which you're standing is moving the light beam has

7:45exactly the same velocity which seems impossible so you know if the earth is

7:49moving this way around the Sun and you shine a light off the earth you'd expect

7:54the speed of light to be the speed of light plus the speed of the earth and

7:57then if you shone it the other way then you'd expect the speed of light to be

8:00the speed of light - the earth speed but that isn't what happens no matter how

8:04fast the platform on which the person shining the light is standing the speed

8:07of light is always the same to every observer so and people kind of thought

8:12of that as that wasn't the only anomaly but that was one of them

8:15thought of that is the only anomaly left in physics at the end of the 19th

8:19century and turned out that was a bad one how long there was some other ones

8:22as well like the fact that light tends to behave as a wave and a particle more

8:26or less at the same time which doesn't seem possible so there's a couple of

8:29things left over in Newtonian physics that the Newtonian physics couldn't

8:32explain but by the end of the 19th century there were famous scientists

8:35saying yeah well we got this all wrapped up there's really nothing left to

8:38discover and then Along Came quantum mechanics and Einstein Yin relativity

8:42and bang the whole world was like really different and quantum mechanics is much

8:47more comprehensive theory of the world then Newtonian physics all of the

8:51electronics you used wouldn't work if quantum physics wasn't correct roughly

8:56speaking and so that little tiny anomaly blew into something that knocked the

9:01slats out underneath from underneath the entire axiomatic structure of Newtonian

9:04physics it showed it was wrong at its fundamental levels

9:07even though it turned out to be a subset a correct subset of something that was

9:11much broader and so you can kind of think of that as that's what kids are

9:13doing as they progress they develop a theory that accounts for a certain set

9:16of you could say fact but this is another place it gets tricky and then

9:21they modify those and make them more and more refined but now and then they have

9:24to under grow quite a transformation not be a stage transition in Piaget and

9:29thought that that's the stage transition idea and that would be akin in some

9:33sense to a kuhnian scientific revolution now what Piaget is trying to state here

9:37is that because you there's this weird problem with facts which is that they

9:43tend to transform across time you know like if you go take a biology course

9:46right now in 20 years pretty much everything you read you learned or very

9:50much of what you learned will turn out to have been wrong and that's kind of

9:53weird because it isn't wrong right now and you think well how can it be wrong

9:56in 20 years and that that's a really complicated problem and in order to

10:01solve that you kind of have to think about facts like tools instead of them

10:05as thinking about them as objective independent realities because a bad tool

10:10can still work as a tool whereas a bad fact just kills you stone dead and so

10:15there's any ways in any case that seems to be a completely unnecessary phenomena

10:22Oh God there's no reason for that that's just

10:57sheer spite as far as I can tell mm-hmm okay so so here's one of psays

11:05propositions and and it is that because facts flux in some sense across time

11:12you're looking for something that doesn't change across time to call it a

11:15real fact and so what Piaget is trying to point out in this let's call it

11:18introductory paragraph is that the one thing that doesn't change is the manner

11:21in which people generate facts rather than the facts themselves so the

11:25ultimate fact is a fact about the way people generate facts all right and so

11:29psays theory in part is a is a theory about how knowledge is acquired and

11:34transformed and so it's not that no it's not a study of the knowledge itself it's

11:38a study of the process by which the knowledge is generated and he believed

11:41that that process was unchanging at least with regards to human beings and

11:45so you could think of the Piaget alien genetic epistemological mystery as being

11:51how is it that people form and transform representations of the world and one of

11:55his conclusions about that is that there's a standard process and then the

11:58reason that I'm telling you about Piaget right now is because as far as I can

12:02tell the standard Piaget daeun description of the manner in which

12:05knowledge is acquired and transformed is the same thing that's represented in the

12:09mythology of the shamanic transformation which is that there's a state of being

12:13and then it's derp up disrupted by something chaotic and there's a

12:17disintegration period and that's the space between the stage transitions for

12:21for children in which time they're often upset because their little theory about

12:24the world isn't learning it isn't working anymore

12:27and then in that chaotic period they adjust themselves to new anomalies and

12:32anomalies or what occur when you act in the world and what you want to happen

12:35doesn't happen right because that means there's something wrong with your

12:38knowledge structure if you act and then something happens you don't want to

12:42happen something's wrong with the way you're representing the world or you

12:46could say something's wrong with the world but good luck with that although

12:49you know people can modify the world as well as modifying their belief

12:52structures and people do that a lot but so this the piagetian stage transition

12:58as far as I can tell is a micro case of the broader idea of the the existence

13:03an orderly state its dissolution into a chaotic state because something

13:07unexpected has occurred and then it's retransfer Meishan into a more

13:10integrated state now Piaget would say well the initial state and the chaotic

13:15state and the final state aren't the ultimate realities the ultimate reality

13:19is the process of moving through those stages and that's how people acquire

13:23knowledge and that's you could say that's the central element of human

13:26beings and I would say that's a that's another reason Tatian of the hero myth

13:30because the hero is the person who notes uh normally notes something that's

13:35changed that's outside of explored territory encounters it defeats it let's

13:40say or get something of value from it and then recasts it into the world

13:45shares it with the community restructures of the world and so that's

13:48the central story it's it's not the central story of human beings but it's

13:53it's close enough for for our purposes at the moment so okay so that's what

13:57Piaget is about how do human beings encounter

13:59the world and and what happens when they do that now the thing about the world

14:04for Piaget is it's also a complicated place it's not exactly the set of it's

14:09not the set of all objective facts that remain to be discovered because Piaget

14:13is a constructivist and he's more of a pragmatist than he is precisely a

14:18scientific realist and so that's a complicated thing very very complicated

14:22thing I don't know if any of you and maybe this is completely irrelevant I

14:26don't know if any of you listened to my argument with Sam Harris but Sam Harris

14:30is a scientific realist and I was trying to make at least in part at Piaget Ian's

14:34point but he was having none of that that's for sure but but Piaget makes the

14:39point and so you know I'm going to let him speak in some sense as we proceed

14:43through this and and well you'll see why he does what he does so if all knowledge

14:49is always in the state of development and consists in proceeding from one

14:52state to a more complete and efficient one so that that implies a hierarchy of

14:59states right that you move from one knowledge structure to the next one

15:02which includes the previous one and is better and it's better because it covers

15:06more territory that's how you know it's better it does the same thing the old

15:09tool does plus some additional things so it's a definition of better it's a good

15:14thing to have a definition of better and worse

15:17all knowledge is always in the state of development and consists in proceeding

15:20for one state to a more complete deficient one evidently it is a question

15:24of knowing this development and analyzing it with the greatest possible

15:27accuracy which is something I happen to agree with but that's partly because I

15:31read Piaget and and I think I understand what he meant and he's quite the thinker

15:35and so I'm gonna see if I can like clue you in a little bit about this because

15:39it's it's well it's exceedingly complex you know and most of the time when

15:43people talk about Piaget they just talk about his surface experiments they don't

15:46talk about what he was actually up to and what he was up to was well he was

15:50trying to figure out how people represent the world and learned and

15:54that's not only it's not only that you know this is another thing people don't

15:57know about Piaget is that he was trying to reconcile the chasm between science

16:02and values that's what drove him through his entire intellectual life he was

16:06attempting to bridge the gap between science and religion that's another way

16:09of thinking about it and and that was explicit he knew that that's why he did

16:12everything he did and so the thing that's so cool about Piaget I think is

16:16that he actually started to provide what you might think about as a rational

16:20basis for morality it's not exactly rational that's the thing because it's

16:25rational rational belief like scientific realism has a certain set of

16:29presuppositions at its core and Piaget doesn't use those presuppositions to

16:34solve the problem get a problem so deep the gap between what is and what ought

16:39to be that's the David Humes problem you can't derive a naught from it is just

16:44because you know a bunch of things doesn't give you an unerring guide to

16:46know what to do about those things there's a gap there and Harris and

16:51people like him say that gap is illusory but most philosophers including David

16:56Hume including Piaget these are heavy-duty people including Heidegger

17:01would would disagree with that they don't believe that that that that gap is

17:05non-existent and and and Harris believes that you can nest values within science

17:09and and that's the proposition that he continually puts forward like most of

17:13the so-called new atheists but it's a hell of a lot more difficult to do than

17:17you think that's for sure and so anyway so how is Piaget purporting to manage

17:22this well one thing he does is he for Piaget it's really important that you

17:28have a body and that's one of the things that's four

17:30cool about his thinking so you could think about him as an early exponent of

17:34embodied cognition it's like he's not exactly a Cartesian a follower of

17:39Descartes he doesn't really believe that you have a spirit or say a rational mind

17:42that is in some sense separate from your body which is an implicit presupposition

17:47of a lot of a lot of of philosophical claims Piaget really sticks you in your

17:52body and the other thing that Piaget claims is that your abstract knowledge

17:56is actually determined by the structure of your body and that it unfolds from

18:00your body up into abstraction and that's what happens as infants transform into

18:04adults first of all almost all their knowledge is embodied and what that

18:08means is that it's not look there's a couple of different kinds of memory like

18:13the most the most fundamental distinction you might think of is

18:17between procedural representation procedural memory and and

18:21representational memory so when you remember your past that little movie or

18:25that runs in your head or maybe the facts that you can recite about your

18:28past that's episodic memory that's

18:30representational but procedural memory is different procedural memories how you

18:34walk you don't know how you walk that's how you ride a bike it's how you play

18:37the piano it's how you type so it's it's automatic right it's built into your

18:42nervous system it's built into the nerves that innervate your musculature

18:46and there's completely separate memory systems now one can represent the other

18:51which is interesting the representational system can represent

18:54the output of the body which is basically what you happen what happens

18:57when someone tells a story even when you tell a story about your own life but the

19:01contents of procedural memory precede the contents of representational memory

19:07and they're shaped in different ways so for example part of the wisdom that's

19:11encoded in your body is there because of things you've practiced but it's also

19:15there because you've practiced things in a social environment and so while you

19:19practice those things the effect of the social environment shaped the way you

19:22learned it and that's encoded right in your neurons

19:26it's not representational it's encoded in the way you do things it's encoded in

19:30the way you smile when you look at someone or frown or when you do that and

19:34that's all implicit it's not under your conscious control it's not even in that

19:37system and so Piaget figured this out and so one of the things he said was

19:41that you start as an infant by building your

19:44cedral memory not your representational memory that's partly perhaps why you

19:49can't remember your infancy you know I actually don't have that kind of

19:52representational memory there what you do is you act you learn to act you build

19:56your body so that it can move and you do that partly by experimenting with your

20:00own body but you also do that by experimenting with your body in a

20:04context that's shaped from the beginning by the presence of other people so for

20:08example you know what child learns how to breastfeed its mouth is pretty wired

20:12up right at birth hey and and the rest of its body isn't wired up very much at

20:16all but its mouth is and you might think well that's just a reflex and that

20:20Piaget would agree with that it's a built in it's something built in that

20:24that a baby can do right at birth but even in the act of breastfeeding the

20:27baby has to learn how to modify that reflex so that it gets along with its

20:33mother so even at the very beginning with the most you might think the most

20:37primordial acts there's a sociological and influence and there's a mutual

20:42dynamic going on that's really really important it's really important and so

20:45in some sense for Piaget the structure of society is implicitly built into the

20:51structure of the procedural memory system and so one of the things you

20:54might think about that and Piaget makes much of this because he looks at the

20:58relationship between play and dreams and imitation so he's kind of a quasi

21:02psychoanalyst one of the things that means is that coded in your behavior

21:10coded in your behavior is is this is the social structure in which you emerged

21:18and it's coded in a way that you don't actually understand you just know how to

21:21act and then you can figure out how you're acting and you can extract out of

21:25that some of the social rules but you don't you don't that doesn't mean that

21:29you know the rules it meant that the rules were built into you here's the way

21:33of thinking about it like a wolf pack wolf pack knows how to operate together

21:37it knows how to hunt right and each wolf knows where every other wolf is in the

21:40dominance hierarchy but they don't know they know that they don't have rules

21:44right they don't have a code they don't have laws what they have is behavioral

21:48regularities patterned behavioral regularities and those are like a

21:52morality they're very very in fact that's exactly what they are a dominance

21:56hierarchy of animal that aren't representational you know

22:00that don't have language at least they don't have language the dominance

22:04hierarchy is a kind of morality it's a way of it's a way of setting up

22:08individual behavior within a social context to maximize cooperation and

22:12minimize competition and so well so Piaget would say that you know the

22:16origin of more and and Fran's de Waal who's a great primatologist by the way

22:20Fran's fr ansd de w AAL he's written a lot of books about the emergence of

22:26morality and chimpanzees in particular and you know he follows the same line of

22:30logic it's that the morality emerges out of the interaction between the

22:33chimpanzees and it's bounded by the necessity that the actions take certain

22:38forms so for example if the chimpanzees act in a way that each of them kills

22:42everyone else it's like that's the end of it

22:44it's the end of the game so that's not a very functional morality it's it doesn't

22:49produce survival of the individuals it doesn't produce flourishing of the

22:53individuals certainly it produces extinction of the individuals and the

22:56death of the group so as far as do all would concerned from an evolutionary

23:02perspective that sort of mode of interacting is a dead end and so one of

23:05Pia Jays claims implicit claims is that and this is one of the things that's so

23:10brilliant about Piaget is that the interactions between people the social

23:17interactions between people necessarily emerge within a kind of bounded space

23:23and the space is the space of the game so we're always playing games always and

23:29a game you might think about a game as a microcosm of the world and a small

23:34child's game is a tiny fractional microcosm of the world but then you get

23:38up into adult games and you could think about those maybe as multiplayer online

23:42games that's one good representation but even more sophisticated things like

23:45being a lawyer say are like working at McDonald's or any of those things those

23:49are also forms of game and and that P and people negotiate the rules and that

23:55game is nested inside sets of broader games and so for Piaget that the game

24:01that killed the games the children play kind of transform inexorably and and and

24:07what incrementally into the games that adults play and and a

24:11a game that's playable as an adult is a functional game it's it's an acceptable

24:16game and one of PJ's claims is that not only do people start playing games

24:21unconsciously in a sense and implicitly then they start to play games more

24:26consciously they actually they actually represent the games to some degree at

24:29least in their actions then they start to learn the explicit rules of the game

24:33but only later after they know how to play it and then at the highest stage of

24:38moral development they start to realize that not only are they players of games

24:42and followers of a rules but they're also producers of rules so it starts you

24:48start out not being able to play a game at all then you can play a game with

24:51yourself then you can play a game with a few other people then you can play

24:54rule-governed games with lots of people and then you realize that you make the

24:58rules and you can make new games and that's the highest level of moral

25:02development according to Piaget it's varrick's brilliant it's it's bloody

25:06brilliant he's the first person that I ever really encountered who was able to

25:10put the notion of an emergent morality on something you know broadly

25:15commensurate with a scientific perspective but you have to understand

25:18that in order to do that he had to sacrifice a little bit of his notions of

25:22scientific realism and that's what makes him a constructivist and so and so we're

25:26going back to constructivism so he says at the beginning and this is the

25:30beginning of the development of knowledge does not unfold itself as a

25:33matter of chance but forms a development so he said there's not only do knowledge

25:39structures change across time and they're embedded in the social world but

25:42the manner in which they change across time actually has a bit of a structure

25:45and so that would be the Piaget lien stages of development just so you know

25:49now people have debated ever since Piaget proposed this if those

25:53developmental stages are fixed and necessary and if he identified them

25:58properly and even and as well whether or not they could be sped up which he

26:02always called the American problem could you speed up these stages of development

26:06and there's a lot of argument about whether those stages exist in the manner

26:10that Piaget described there and whether they're fixed at all of that but that's

26:13still the fundamental elements of his the fundamental element of his theory so

26:20and in since the cognitive domain has an absolute beginning which means you were

26:25you're here now but at one point you weren't so there was an absolute

26:28beginning to to you as a phenomena it's to be studied at the very stages nor

26:32known as formation that's his rationalization for being a genetic

26:36epistemology right someone who studies the formation of knowledge structures

26:39across time like an embryologist someone like that right who developmental

26:43embryologist the first aim of genetic epistemology is therefore if one can say

26:47so to take psychology seriously and to furnish verifications to any question

26:51which each epistemology necessarily raises yet replacing the generally

26:55unsatisfying speculative or implicit psychology with controllable analysis

26:59and so basically what he's saying there is that you can guess in a sense like

27:03Freud did about developmental psychology Freud kind of projected backwards from

27:07his patients into the dim mists of childhood and came up with like a what

27:12would a hypothetical developmental sequence and Piaget said well we're not

27:15going to do that we're going to go run experiments on kids often individuals

27:19but sometimes multiple individuals we're gonna we're going to observe exactly

27:23what they're doing he watched his kids in their cribs for example unbelievably

27:27intently and with great he was like an ethologist which is a person who studies

27:32animal behavior observational II like Fran's de Waal he was like an ethologist

27:36of children not exactly an experimental psychologist although also an

27:40experimental psychologist and he more or less established the field of

27:43developmental psychology so he said well let's empirically analyze how children

27:48learn and then maybe we can figure out how this knowledge process unfolds and

27:52we don't have to guess about it we can we can use controllable analysis and so

27:56you could say he introduced scientific methodology even though he wasn't a

27:59scientific realist he introduced scientific methodology into the study of

28:03child development but more importantly into the study of how knowledge

28:06structures unfold across time so he was a philosopher as well but a strange type

28:11of philosopher because he was interested in how philosophy itself emerges in the

28:15mind of the child and so that's what Piaget was up to and so quite quite

28:19remarkable and he had incredibly wide range of interests befitting someone who

28:23probably had an IQ of like 190 I mean he was seriously smart guy like way way

28:29outside of the normal range and so this is the sort of questions he was trying

28:32to answer well how do you on what do you base your judgments cuz you make

28:36judgments about things better or worse well how how do you come up with that

28:42ability how does that emerge and on what basis do you make the judgments

28:47there's a famous ruling on pornography that I believe the Supreme Court of the

28:51United States laid down and one of the justices wrote something that's become

28:55infamous or famous depending on how you look at he said well I can't define

28:58pornography but I know it when I see it and and that's and that's a notion of

29:04the incomplete ability of the representational system to represent the

29:07contents of implicit perception or the procedural system you can know that you

29:13know something but you that doesn't mean you can describe why it doesn't mean you

29:16can describe how you know it and you don't how do you focus your eyes like

29:20you don't know how you focus your eyes you just focus them you know how do you

29:24smile like this well maybe less ugly but you know you you can't describe how you

29:31do it you can't describe the musculature you can represent the output of the act

29:35and you can do it but you can't represent it and you're just stuffed

29:39full of skills like that which is another example of the way that you're

29:42way more complicated than your understanding of you you know one of the

29:47things people often ask is how can we use the rat as a model of a person

29:50because like you know a rats not much of a person depending of course on the

29:54person but the the real answer to that is well compared to what like compared

30:00to your understanding of a person a rat is an excellent model of a person so

30:05it's not as good a model of a person as a person is but compared to imagination

30:10let's say it's incomparably better and you know that's because we share like I

30:15don't know what 98% of our genes or some damn thing with rats it's like it's

30:20really up I think we share 90% of our genes with yeast for God's sake you know

30:24and so we're a lot more rat-like than yeast like so and I think with chimps

30:29it's over 99% you know so it's not a bad model obviously it's not perfect but it

30:34always depends on what you compare it to you know and you hear animal rights

30:37activists say things like well we can replace that with computer simulations

30:41it's like no we can't because you can't simulate what you don't know or at least

30:46not very well so that's a silly idea you know even though they have a point it's

30:50not so great to torture animals to death and all

30:52but what are his norms well that's a good question where do norms for

30:57behavior come from you have norms when they're violated it annoys you doesn't

31:01mean you know what your norms are but you do kind of get a sense of what they

31:04are when they get violated that really upset me well what does that mean

31:08well you don't really know you might have to think about that for like six

31:11months why you got so upset about that but you can notice that you got upset

31:15and that means that you do have expectations and norms let's say but you

31:19don't know where they came from now obviously in part they came from your

31:22intrinsic structure but also a core they're a consequence of your learning

31:26but even more importantly they're our consequence of your learning in a social

31:30environment so all of those phenomena which exceed your comprehension

31:34determine the nature of your norms and often you only detect them when they're

31:38violated so because why bother paying attention to something that works

31:42you just don't know one does they take it for granted it's almost the

31:47definition of something working it's like you know you think I'm driving my

31:51car to school and you think you're in a car but you're really not in a car

31:55you're in a thing that gets you from home to school and you can pretend that

31:59that is so annoying you can pretend that

32:20so you might think well the thing that I'm I'm in is it's kind of a weird

32:24example is it is this object with objective qualities that you call a car

32:29but but that isn't exactly how you actually perceive or act towards it what

32:33happens is is that as long as it's doing what it's supposed to do which means

32:37that its function is intact not what it is but its function then you can use a

32:42really low resolution representation of the thing the car is just what gets you

32:45from point A to point B right and so the fact that you don't understand the damn

32:49thing at all is completely invisible to you but it isn't when it quits as soon

32:54as it quits it becomes a car it's like bang car oh my god I don't understand

32:58this thing at all now what do I do well you panic a little bit right

33:02because well what do you know about your car nothing nothing nothing at all and

33:07worse than that now the car has become an intersection between you and

33:12whoever's going to fix your card so that introduces a whole bunch of human

33:15elements into it like are they going to figure out what's wrong with it are they

33:18going to rip you off is your car ever going to work again are you going to get

33:21to work what's going to happen tonight so all of a sudden that thing that you

33:25were in that was a car turns into this massive complex unbelievably complicated

33:31thing and that's actually what it is your initial representation of it it's

33:35like it's really low resolution it's like one bit and then bang it breaks

33:40down and poof complexity complexity complexity everywhere and that

33:45complexity that's what the world's made out if you remember we talked about

33:49William James and that crazy nitrous oxide induced pseudo hippie poetry that

33:54he was writing in the 1890s when he was talking about chaos

33:58well that chaos that he was talking about out of which him order emerges

34:02that's the same thing as that complexity that's hovering in the background and

34:06children have to operate in a world that's actually that complex but they're

34:09not smart enough and neither are you so they build partial representations that

34:13sort of work and the parents scaffold them so the way children manage that's

34:18like children they don't know anything but stay they're still alive so what's

34:21up with that you know part of it is the child is laying out

34:25one of its procedures in the world in accordance with its understanding and

34:29something goes wrong what does the child do cry

34:33right it defaults it defaults to this distress cry and what happens is the

34:38adults move in with their superior skills and their enhanced understanding

34:43and they mediate between the partial knowledge of the child in the actual

34:46complex world and without the child that's why if you take your child to the

34:50mall and just leave you know it doesn't take very long for them to get really

34:54really really really upset you know depending on the child some of them

34:59almost instantaneously you know one day I was in the Boston Airport with my

35:04daughter she was about three and three and a half maybe and my son he was about

35:07two and we were there to pick someone I was just packed and so I had them by the

35:12hand you know and I were told my daughter a bunch if she ever got

35:15separated from me in a crowd just to sit down immediately wherever she was or as

35:20close there by it I would find her don't move well somehow I got separated from

35:26them and I looked behind them and they weren't there and I found out later she

35:30followed someone else who looked like me from behind and she I found her in about

35:35three minutes you know which is a long time man if you're three years old at

35:38that Airport she was sitting there like paralyzed you know but her brother was

35:43with her he didn't care at all and the reason he didn't care is because as far

35:46as he was concerned she was an adult but as far as she was concerned she was an

35:51abandoned kid in an airport you know it was very hard on her and it's because

35:56the you know she was protected from the complexity by her primordial

35:59representations and my presence but as soon as my presence disappeared the

36:03complexity came flooding back and just overwhelmed her that's chaos and

36:08uncertainty and then she'd cry and the cry says help I'm out of my league I'm

36:12drowning I'm drowning you know intervened and so that's how kids in

36:17part can get along in the world with their incomplete knowledge

36:19representations always huh also how you get along in the world because you're

36:24incomplete beyond belief but you got all these other people around you in the

36:26whole damn society filling in the gaps and so you walk around like you know

36:32what you're doing but you don't you know you just hardly know at all you know if

36:35you can fit into that system great you've got it on your side and you can

36:40use it to fill the gaps that's also partly why people are so concerned with

36:43maintaining their social identity like the real identity on

36:47talking about some surface identity but you see because you have set up a set of

36:53expectations and desires about how you want the world to unfold and you do that

36:57within a social context and as long as your desires and the actions of the

37:03community match which means you're at home roughly speaking as long as they

37:07match you stay emotionally regulated you like that that's why you can stay calm

37:13in here it's like your desires are being played out by everyone else because one

37:17of your desires is that none of these crazy primate starts brandishing a knife

37:20for example or even twitching or any of that sort of thing you don't want any of

37:26that and if it starts happening it's like you get weary very quickly and

37:30maybe you look and maybe you won't and maybe you'll freeze maybe you'll get the

37:33hell out of there or maybe you'll get aggressive but that match has to

37:37maintain itself intact or your entire nervous system gets dysregulated and the

37:41reason for that is that as soon as that match is disrupted the underlying

37:45complexity and chaos of the world reveals itself and so does your

37:48inadequacy and then your body defaults into predator mode and and the fact that

37:54you don't know anything and that everything is really complicated becomes

37:57very evident to you very quickly and people hate that it's the worst thing

38:03that can happen to them the bottom falling out of their world and so that

38:07happens more when your fundamental presumptions about things are are

38:10challenged and then you have to solve the problem of what constitutes a

38:14fundamental presupposition you know how do you know which presupposition is

38:17peripheral in which one central and you can tell in part because the more upset

38:22you get about something the more central it is that that things about to your

38:27entire structure of belief and that's one way of getting into that unconscious

38:30structure of belief from a psychoanalytic perspective so what are

38:33the things that happens to me for example as a therapist is I'll be

38:36talking to my clients and they'll be talking about something difficult and

38:39all of a sudden they'll cry and they often don't know why so I stopped them

38:43right there it's like something went through your mind something happened and

38:47the cry indicates that you've moved beyond your domain of competence out

38:51into the unknown world all of a sudden into chaos what's that chaos what

38:55exactly happened and people you know they're usually embarrassed that they

38:59cry but often make remember what flitted through their mind

39:02and it's a represent it's a it's some encounter with the chaos beyond their

39:06conceptual systems that produces that emotional response and then we can dig

39:10into that find out oh that's a trauma especially if it's more than a year -

39:13how fold and those can be of various depths and profundity you know sometimes

39:18they're so bad that the person just breaks down completely and they never

39:22put themselves together you know that's when something's just walloped you it's

39:26hit you right at the bottom of your axiomatic structures so to speak right

39:29at the trunk but when you're doing therapy with people and you watch how

39:32they respond emotionally you look for those tiny eruptions of negative emotion

39:36and those are like holes in their conceptual structure and those have to

39:40be sewed up by their man you in the process of dialogue you figure out okay

39:45there was a bit of unexplored territory there that manifested itself it produced

39:49an emotional response in you that indicates that you've reverted in some

39:52sense to childhood that would be the Freudian interpretation now we have to

39:56figure out what it was that that's in that hole what caused that tear and then

40:00we have to go back and articulate it and analyze and study it until we can sew it

40:04up and then and art and and get to the gist of it to make it into a adaptive

40:09story and then you can leave it behind and it actually produces neurological

40:14transformation as you do that the memories in some sense actually move

40:17their psychophysiological location you could say their location in your psyche

40:23but you can also note that the brain systems that are handling the memories

40:27aren't the same so they're much more limbic they're way

40:30lower and closer to the emotional centers when it's still raw trauma and

40:34by the time it's fully articulated it's more represented in an articulated story

40:38a causal story and that's partly why writing about emotional events actually

40:43helps you overcome them so and it's possible that writing about how it is

40:47that you overcome emotional events in general is actually the best kind of

40:51therapy right not how do you solve a particular problem but how is it that

40:56you orient yourself in the world so that you solve the class of the fact that

41:00there are problems right that's that's the ultimate story and I think that's

41:04the hero myth and I also think that that's the knowledge generating process

41:07that Piaget is talking about you that's because you have you're constantly

41:12overcoming problems in the world and the problems are that you don't know

41:15enough to get what you want from the world and so you get that mismatch

41:19mismatch there's you've got whole brain systems

41:21that are designed to do nothing but detect that mismatch like crucial

41:25central brain structures and we'll talk about that a lot when we get into the

41:29into the physiology so all right how does on what does an individual basis

41:34judgments water is norms how are they validated how do you know if you're

41:38right about your norms what's the interest of such norms for the

41:41philosophy of science in general that's a really tough one it's like well you

41:45have norms and expectations as a human being and because of that they they have

41:50a determining influence on the manner in which you conduct science so for example

41:56here's one of the problems with a straight realist view so we could be

41:59having a discussion and I could say well you know that tile is to the right of

42:03that tile and then I could say well this brick is smaller than that brick and

42:08then I could say you know the roof is white really quite white there and start

42:11back there and like after about 20 statements like that you're just going

42:15to want to slap me and the reason for that is that well those statements are

42:19perfectly valid representations of fact but there's an infinite number of facts

42:24and most of them are irrelevant and that's the thing that's the thing the

42:29facts have to be relevant like if you come to a lecture and all the person

42:33does is tell you irrelevant facts what happens you've been in lots of lectures

42:37like that what happens when you start fantasizing about something that might

42:41be more worthwhile you know or you go to sleep because your

42:49brain is a lot smarter than you are it figures hell if all we're gonna get

42:53exposed to here is an infinite infinite number of irrelevant facts we might as

42:57well have a nap until something important happens so it's true it's

43:01exactly how it works now this is gonna get big isn't that what happens next

43:05No so okay so and then how does the fact that the child children think

43:11differently affect our presumption of fact itself children live in the world

43:16they think differently about the world but yet they survive and so well I

43:20already mentioned a partial solution to that adults intercede you know around

43:24the edges around the borders children do this all the time a so it's called

43:28referencing and they do it two ways so for example if you're in a room with

43:32your child maybe to wait and mouse runs across the child will orient to it watch

43:37it track it that's pretty much unconscious and the mother let's say

43:41will do that too and then the child looks at the mouse and then looks at the

43:44mother and the reason is is because the child doesn't know what the mouse is and

43:49so then it looks at the mother to read from the mothers face which is a

43:52projection screen of emotions how to classify the mouse in terms of import

43:56and if the mother is like all calm about it and gives the kid a pad it's like you

44:00know okay whatever you know not a danger that's what the

44:05mouse is first danger not danger it's way after that that it's a mouse

44:11you think no it's a mouse to begin with it's like these things are not so

44:14straightforward they are not so straightforward so anyways if the mother

44:18climbs up on the table it has a screaming fit then the child's already

44:21prepared because of this anomaly to be emotionally responsive the child looks

44:26at the mothers face it's got terror on at the mouse child takes small danger

44:30big danger it's like phobia phobia phobia now all kids that won't happen to

44:36you because some are very emotionally robust but if they're very Charles very

44:40high in neuroticism trait neuroticism the probability that they'll develop a

44:44permanent semi-permanent fear of the mouse is extraordinarily high and that's

44:49what should happen because the mother tells you what the mouse is and in the

44:53face does it's a mouse it says safety danger and that's the first thing you

44:58want to know about something is it safer is it

44:59dangerous and that's a tricky one eh because whether something is safe for

45:03dangerous is not exactly an objective fact there's a guy named JJ Gibson who

45:08wrote a book called NACA logical approach to visual perception which I

45:12would highly recommend and his claim in that book it's a real work of genius I

45:16believe is that when you see when you walk towards a cliff you don't see a

45:19cliff you don't see a cliff and infer danger what you see is a falling off

45:25place and you infer cliff and you can tell that some of you have vertigo you

45:29go up on the 26th floor out into balcony and it's like you don't want to go near

45:33the edge maybe you feel like you're gonna throw yourself over because people

45:36have that kind of what if what if I fell or what if I jumped over it's like stay

45:40away from that it's like that perception of the danger precedes your perception

45:45of the balcony and the object now you know that's how your brain is wired the

45:50dangers first object second so in people with blind sight who I've talked about

45:54before who think they're blind they can't see then they tell you that they

45:58could still detect fearful faces and you could detect their detection by

46:01measuring their skin conductance and so their eyes are mapping right on to their

46:05fear and reflex systems without any intermediary of objective perception

46:08whatsoever so don't be thinking that what you see in the world is the

46:12objective world and then infer its meaning it could easily be exactly

46:16backwards and it looks like if you look at how the brain is set up that it is in

46:19fact actually backwards or at least parallel but but the but the danger not

46:24danger perception has to be very very very very fast and so it precedes the

46:30more elaborate cognitive interpretations even the perceptions because it actually

46:34takes a while to see something because it's really complicated to see something

46:38and so you can't just wait around to see the damn thing before you act you just

46:42not fast enough so they say if you're a pro tennis player the time it takes the

46:47ball to leave your opponent's racket to get to you is not long enough for you to

46:51plan any motor act so what you're doing is you've got them what you dis inhibit

46:56the motor act by looking at the stance of your opponent and watching and by the

47:01time they hit it you're already prepared for the response because you just not

47:04it's coming at 120 miles an hour it's like it's going fifty feet you don't

47:09have the reflexes for it so your your your eyes are making

47:13body ready without in some sense without your conscious perception you become

47:17conscious if you make a mistake right in fact that's kind of what consciousness

47:21is for it's like detect error fix detect error fix

47:25that's consciousness it's not plan what you're going to do next although it's

47:28not that simple either other problems that Piaget was trying to address well

47:33what water numbers what does it mean for there to be space what what do we mean

47:38when we when we talk about time how do we how did we come up with that concept

47:42what does speed mean how do we know an object is permanent how do we know that

47:48an object stays the same across sets of transformation so that's a very classic

47:52piagetian problem so let's say you give a kid a bowl of clay and then you crush

47:56it so it's now a cylinder is like is that the same thing or is it a different

48:00thing and the answer is well it's the same thing and it's a different thing

48:04but there's something about it that remained constant across the

48:07transformations and so one of the things that Piaget is trying to figure out is

48:12what remains constant across transformations because you might think

48:16about that is a real fact protons are like that right they remain constant

48:20across transformations and so we assume that they're pretty damn real and they

48:23last I don't know how long protons last it's like I don't know what it is it's

48:27some tens of billions of so don't worry your protons are going to just sit right

48:31there and behave you know so they last for a very very very long time across

48:35sets of transformation so we can regard them as real he was interested in why

48:39children play and why there are patterns in play and how that's related to dreams

48:44and he was really interested in the fact that we imitate other people and this is

48:47another part of Piaget staggering genius in my estimation because he was one of

48:51the early developmental thinkers who understood that our capacity for

48:56learning was not so much mediated by language as it was mediated by our

49:00capacity to use our bodies to represent the bodies of other people and that's

49:05mind-boggling it's a mind-boggling idea so you know you hear monkey-see

49:10monkey-do but it's actually not true they're not very good at imitating

49:13octopuses or octopi they can imitate actually so if you give a octopus a

49:20bottle with a cork in it and there's a crab in the cork it can figure out how

49:23to get out the cork and sneak out the crab but if you get an octopus to watch

49:27it our octopus do that it'll learn to do it

49:29faster those things are smart and that's partly that's because they're all

49:33tentacley right and so they actually have something they can do something

49:36with like our hands there's our tentacles you know an octopus I can

49:41operate in the world because they have tentacles and and you know you hear

49:44about the superhuman intelligence of things like dolphins and whales it's

49:47like ya know they're basically test tubes you know what what are we gonna do

49:51now tap a city it's like no they're not gonna do that

49:55they can't manipulate the world so whatever their intelligence is it's way

49:58different than ours okay imitation so partly what you're doing all the time is

50:04imitating other people all of you are imitating each other right now

50:07you can tell because look around you're all doing exactly the same thing so it's

50:13it's mass imitation and that's really a huge part of social structure is that

50:17we're constantly imitating each other and so that means that your body and her

50:21body are very much matched physiologically right now you're in the

50:24same state and you can tell because you basically have the same expression and

50:28as long as all you crazy primates violent primates have the same

50:33expression on you can pretty much be sure that all of you are thinking and

50:38about to do approximately the same thing and so you can keep that match between

50:42your desire slash expectation and reality happening and that's why we have

50:47a face it's so that other people know what the hell we're up to and that's why

50:50you're always watching people's faces because you want to see what they're up

50:53to and that's why you have white surround your iris gorillas don't and so

50:58that's because I can see exactly where your eyes are pointing because they're

51:01highlighted by that white and I'm unbelievably good at detecting the

51:05precise direction of your gaze and so if you stand on the corner and look up the

51:09buildings other people will stand beside you and look up because they think well

51:13that guy would be standing there pointing his eyes into the sky unless

51:16there was something of interest to a primate like me and so this classic

51:20social psychology experiment you'll get people gathered around trying to figure

51:24out what the hell it is that you're pointing your eyes at right because that

51:28indicates intense interest interest in something valuable that I might be able

51:32to share partake in if I can figure out what it is that you're up to and so all

51:36your ancestors who didn't have nicely defined eyes they all got killed or they

51:40didn't mate and that's why you have these beautiful white eyes

51:43with this like colorful iris in the middle it's so that people

51:47can tell what the hell you're up to and they're more likely to cooperate with

51:50you more likely to mate with you and less likely to kill you which is you

51:53know probably a good thing all things considered and so you know if you look

51:58at the same thing that someone else is looking at you're imitating them and one

52:03of the things that's interesting is that if you're looking at the same thing that

52:06someone else is looking at and you would have at the same value structure then

52:10your emotional responses are going to be very much akin to one another and you

52:14can tell that when you go to a movie and you watch the hero and you embody the

52:18hero while you're doing so and the emotions that you produce inside of you

52:22by imitating the hero on the screen enable you to figure out what the hero

52:26is going through and you can learn from that and so that's a very complex form

52:30of imitation and we do that when we tell stories or we watch stories and those

52:34stories are really complicated because as we already outline they're not just

52:38factual representations of someone's action during a day their

52:42representations of the important things that the person did the meaningful

52:46things and so when you go see a movie all you're doing is watching meaningful

52:50things if the movies any good and you know that because well if the movie

52:56isn't meaningful well then you leave your board right it's and the fact that

53:02it's meaningful is what keeps you in the seat and you don't necessarily know why

53:05in fact you often have no idea why it's meaningful

53:08it's like watching Pinocchio rescue is farther from a whale it's like what the

53:13hell you know how I is that meaningful well you don't know but it is so moral

53:19concerns well we already talked about Piaget is concerned about morality oh

53:23boy this is really not good

53:40okay here's a proposition constructivist proposition knowledge does not begin in

53:45the eye by by which he means they're kind of two ways of looking at the world

53:50there's more but we'll start with that one is is that all of your knowledge

53:54comes from outside sense data okay and now that's kind of a behaviorist claim

54:00and before that it's a it's an empiricist claim and then the other

54:05ideas no that can't be right because you have internal structures that enable you

54:09to look at the world and interpret it and so and and some of those might be

54:14implicit axiomatic like the fact that you have two eyes and you look at the

54:17outward into the world and that you can hear and that you can touch it's like

54:21the fact of those senses isn't dependent on the empirical reality for those

54:25senses to manifest themselves they're already built into you and people like

54:28Kant for example made the proposition that we had a priori knowledge

54:33structures and that we use them to interpret the world and so it's

54:36different than him it's different than empiricism and so what

54:40Piaget is saying well it's neither of those are right exactly it's not like

54:44you will learn everything from the world through your senses and it's not as if

54:48you project everything onto the world as interpretation it's something in-between

54:53and it's a dynamic it's a dynamic and so and it's like bootstrapping

54:57that's the right way to think about it you know when your computer boots up

55:00that means bootstrapping its off and then a bunch of simple

55:04processes occur and then out of those simple processes some more complex

55:07processes emerge and then out of those some more complex processes emerge and

55:11all of a sudden your computer is there well that's kind of what Piaget thinks

55:15happens to you you bootstrap yourself and so you have got a couple of reflexes

55:19to begin with like the sucking reflex for example and you've got some

55:23proclivities like maybe you can sort of flip your hand or or you develop that

55:27and you have reflexes so you know if you blow on a baby for example a baby you'll

55:32go like this it's built into it it's like an it's a it's a startle reflex

55:37essentially so that startle reflex is there right from the beginning so whole

55:40body reflex and you know if you stroke the bottom of their feet their feet will

55:44sort of curl up and if you put your finger in their hands even a newborn if

55:48you put your finger in their hands you can lift them right up and it's sort of

55:52well clinging ape you know because chimpanzee infants

55:57cling to their mother for like five years and so without reflux is still

56:00there so the kid comes into the world born with these simplistic low

56:05resolution procedures that enable it to get a foothold on the world and then out

56:10of that the child emerges and that's so the constructivist idea is that well it

56:16isn't like you have your heads full of fully developed axiomatic structures and

56:20it isn't that you get all your knowledge from the world it's that you have a bit

56:24of structure there to begin with that gives you a toehold on the world and

56:27then you act in the world and as you act you generate information and out of that

56:33information you make the structures inside of you and you make the world

56:38that's a constructivist idea is that you take whatever's there this tremendous

56:42complexity and you sort it into you and the world and so and so that that goes

56:48back to that William James idea about that initial chaos and it's a hard

56:52conflict it's a hard hard concept to grasp because that isn't really how we

56:56think you know we think that there's an objective world and there's a subjective

57:00world and that the objective world is just there and the subjective world is

57:04maybe a subset of that but that is not piagetian presupposition it's not a

57:09presupposition of phenomenologist sin general who we'll talk about later

57:13but so here's one example of how to think about this in a sense it's like

57:18you know you think as Piaget said you kind of think that your representations

57:21of the world are fixed so we'll go back to the you're in a long-term

57:24relationship and the person betrays you a scenario right so you've been with

57:29this person 10 years you assume fidelity and faithfulness and honesty and all of

57:34that you you weave a shared narrative you both inhabit that it structures your

57:40existence and regulates your emotion then you find out that the person has

57:43not only betrayed you once but multiple times it's like okay what you thought

57:48isn't what happened but here's the weird thing you see because you interpreted

57:53the world obviously within the confines of that relationship and you hadn't you

57:58know obviously you had an interpretation but there was also a world that's the

58:03world you thought you lived in it's like those were facts well all of a sudden

58:08those aren't facts they're not at all facts and so what happens that's that

58:12descent into the underworld it's like all of a sudden what happens is that

58:16past that you thought was fixed now becomes this weird mixture of fantasy

58:21because you're wondering what what what what is it that happened then and you're

58:25gonna run through all sorts of fantasies some of them are gonna be really dark

58:30you know really dark about what happened in the state of the world and all that

58:33and those are unconscious fantasies and that's mingled inextricably with the

58:37world right because you don't know the facts anymore which kind of suggests

58:42that maybe you never did know them and that's pretty strange thing because you

58:46know you're operating as if you've got this factual representation of the world

58:49but it can be upended like that and so that makes you think well what about

58:53these facts like they're kind of they're kind of hard to get a handle on you know

58:58and you see this a lot in court room in courtroom situations because of course

59:03what the court decides is what happened and the answer is we don't exactly know

59:09because you can keep making the context of interpretation wider and wider so you

59:14know maybe you bring your partner to court because they've betrayed you let's

59:18say and you're trying to get a divorce settlement predicated on that but then

59:21they tell a bunch of stories about how you were just as miserable as you could

59:24possibly be and that anybody with any sense would have betrayed you and never

59:28told you about it because you know that's just what a normal sensible

59:31person would do and so then the question is well were you actually betrayed and

59:36if you were well who was it that betrayed you was that your partner was

59:39it you or is it your bloody mother or your father who taught you act that way

59:43or who didn't teach you it's like it's a hell of a thing because you can just

59:47keep altering the interpretive context and within it the facts shift around and

59:52then you might say well they're not facts it's like yeah yeah you can say

59:56that but it's it's more complicated than that by a large margin

1:00:01anyways so PJ's notion is essentially that well this is how I interpret it

1:00:08this is sort of this is my thinking in some sense but I'm offering it to you as

1:00:12a scheme for helping you understand Piaget it's like junior Rome Bruner

1:00:17famous famous cognitive psychologist said we seem to have no other way

1:00:22of describing live time SEP except in the form of a narrative and a narrative

1:00:27as far as I could tell I think this is the same thing as one of PS J's

1:00:32knowledge representations as far as I can tell there's a representation of you

1:00:36and there's a representation of the future and there's behaviors that you

1:00:40use to transform one into the other and so when Piaget talks about so this is

1:00:45kind of where the mind meets the body that that's how it looks to me it's like

1:00:49you have a conception of you and you have something you're aiming at you want

1:00:53to have happen those are both representations but when

1:00:56you act in the world those aren't representations anymore those are

1:00:59actually actions and some of mine transforms into body when you act out

1:01:03your notion and that's that's sort of how the mind is linked to the body as

1:01:07far as I can tell and so what Piaget says is that the behaviors are built

1:01:12before the representation and so we're going to take a look at that so here's

1:01:18here's a Piaget a notion of assimilation and accommodation whereas other animals

1:01:24cannot alter themselves except by changing their species

1:01:27so that's through Darwinian means right so what happens is a bear is a kind of

1:01:32solution to a set of problems and they're the problems that the bear's

1:01:35environment presents and the bear is just a bear so it's sort of like bears

1:01:38were ten thousand years ago and the only way the bear can solve a new problem

1:01:42basically is by generating new random bears which is what it does wouldn't

1:01:45reproduce us and hoping that one of those more random bears is a better fit

1:01:49for whatever random change might occur in the environment that's the whole

1:01:53Darwinian issue right you can't predict which way the environment is going to go

1:01:57and so what you do is you take your structure and you vary it and you throw

1:02:01those out into the world and some animals do that expensively so they have

1:02:07infants that they have to program to that specific environment but it takes a

1:02:10lot of investment and some creatures do that cheaply like mosquitoes it's like

1:02:14they don't care for their kids but they have a million of them so like who cares

1:02:17if nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine hundred ninety eight die there's

1:02:21still twice as many of you as there were so those are two different reproductive

1:02:25strategies and you could think about all those mosquito offspring as new mosquito

1:02:30ideas in embodied form and most of them are bad ideas and so the environment

1:02:34just wipes them out Opia Jays point is we do the same thing

1:02:37with our cognitive structures and that's the thing that's so interesting about

1:02:40people in some sense that we've internalized the Darwinian problem and

1:02:45so when you think about the future what you're doing is generating a

1:02:48multiplicity of potential environments and then you're generating a sequence of

1:02:53avatars of yourself to live in those fictional futures and then you watch

1:02:57what happens as that Avatar lives in each of those those fictional futures

1:03:02and if the Avatar fails you don't act that out it's bloody brilliant it's

1:03:07brilliant that's what our brain does it's like it

1:03:09hypothesizes potential futures it runs simulations and it kills them and that

1:03:15can be really painful but it beats the hell out of dying yourself or maybe

1:03:18sometimes you won't think so because it really can be painful but it's it's it's

1:03:22something that as far as we know only human beings can really do right we

1:03:26invent possible futures and invent possible future selves and kill them off

1:03:30in our imagination and that's what you're doing in an argument that's what

1:03:34an argument is it's like well here's an avatar a representational avatar you

1:03:39know that's based on certain axioms and all articulated and you articulate yours

1:03:43and we'll have them have a fight in which everyone survives we'll accept as

1:03:47true and we'll move forward and act that out and you know arguments can be pretty

1:03:51damn intense but hypothetically they're not as intense as acting out a stupid

1:03:56idea that's the thing right better to have some conflict and reach resolution

1:04:01in an abstract sense than to embody your stupidity and die and so you know it's

1:04:07sort of a trade-off between anxiety and and an annihilation or pain

1:04:27whereas other animals cannot alter themselves except by changing your

1:04:29species man can transform himself by transforming the world and construct

1:04:33himself by constructing structures and these structures are his own they're not

1:04:37eternally predestined either from within or from without also Piaget you know

1:04:43he's well he's a constructivist he believes that there's something that

1:04:46your biology brings to the table and and and sets up the parameters let's say

1:04:50within which you can play games but within those parameters there's a very

1:04:53wide range of games that you could play and so it's not a biological determinism

1:04:58even though it's a biological framing and you can think about it like a chess

1:05:01game you know let's let's assume that the rules of chess are biologically

1:05:05determined just for the sake of argument you can still play a near infinite

1:05:09number of chess games and so it's the same with you you come into the world

1:05:12with a set of built-in axioms that's sort of your body and your nervous

1:05:16system but you can play a very large number of games within that set of

1:05:20frames and one of the things that's very interesting about that something that's

1:05:24very mysterious to me is this is a game that I played before with students so

1:05:29I'm gonna play it with you if you don't mind so we're gonna play a game you

1:05:31ready okay you move first right exactly you don't know what to do right and

1:05:37that's well that's so interesting because I basically made the

1:05:40presupposition that you could do anything you're completely free and what

1:05:44do you do you throw up your hands it's like you don't know what to do I'm so

1:05:47free it's like free to do what well that's not freedom it's it's just

1:05:52nothing but if I said well look what we're gonna do instead is when I move my

1:05:56arm right you're gonna move your arm right so let's do that okay so I'm gonna

1:06:00go like that you're gonna good and then I'll go like that and then we'll have a

1:06:04little dance yeah yeah so you can play a game like that with it with a kid

1:06:09instantly and they like that they've got that man and so I've got so I've got

1:06:14some pictures of that I'll show you that in a bit but even a newborn baby you

1:06:18stick out your tongue they can stick their tongue out back and now do you

1:06:21think about that that's just absolutely mind-boggling that they can do that and

1:06:25they really can they really do seem to be able to do that right at the moment

1:06:27of birth and so you know you hear babies have no theory of mind it's like ah yeah

1:06:34no they can imitate that's pretty bloody amazing man like you haven't seen robot

1:06:39that can do that yet although there are robots now that you can teach by moving

1:06:43their their arms you move their arms and then they'll do it and so you can

1:06:48actually program them by moving them and then they'll just repeat it and so

1:06:51they're getting damn close to imitation they're really getting close and then

1:06:55look the hell out man because they're gonna be imitating each other as well as

1:06:58us and they're gonna do it so fast you just won't be able to believe it so

1:07:04that's coming the organism adapts itself by but materially constructing new forms

1:07:09to fit themselves into those of the universe where as intelligence extends

1:07:12this creation by constructing mental structures which can be applied to those

1:07:16of the environment that's that there are winny an idea that I just mentioned you

1:07:19know the guys that are building the autonomous cars like they don't think

1:07:21they're building on Thomas cars they know perfectly well what they're doing

1:07:26they're building fleets of mutually intercommunicating autonomous robots and

1:07:30each of them will to be able to teach the other because their nervous system

1:07:33will be the same and when there's ten million of them when one of them learned

1:07:36something all ten million of them will learn it at the same time so they're not

1:07:39gonna have to be very bright before they're very very very smart because us

1:07:44you know we'll learn something you have to imitate it's like god that's hard or

1:07:48I have to explain it to you and you have to understand it and then you have to

1:07:50act it out we're not connected wirelessly with the same platform but

1:07:55robots they are and so once those things get a little bit smart they're not going

1:07:59to stop at a little bit smart for very long they're gonna be unbelievably smart

1:08:04like overnight so and they're imitating the hell out of us right now too because

1:08:08we're teaching them how to understand us every second of every day the net is

1:08:13learning what we're like it's watching us it's communicating with us it's

1:08:16imitating us and it's gonna know it already knows in some ways more about us

1:08:20than we know about ourselves you know there's lots of reports already of

1:08:24people getting pregnancy ads or ads for infants sometimes before they know

1:08:30they're pregnant but often before they've told their families and the way

1:08:34that that happens is the net is watching what they're looking at and inferring

1:08:37with its artificial intelligence and so maybe you're pregnant that's just

1:08:41tilting you a little bit right to interest in things that you might not

1:08:44otherwise be interested in the net tracks that then it tells you what

1:08:47you're at what you're after it does that by offering an advertisement so it's

1:08:51reading your unconscious mind so well so that's what's happening so

1:08:58all right so what's the motive for development dis equilibria

1:09:03that's a Piaget lien term well this is a life is suffering idea it's like why

1:09:07learn something cuz you're wrong who cares it makes you suffer you care so

1:09:13you know if you run out a little scheme in the world a little action pattern you

1:09:18don't get what you want if you're especially if you're two years old you

1:09:21burst into tears and cry and why is that it's because you don't know what you

1:09:25don't know where you are and you don't know what you're doing

1:09:27it's like time for some negative emotion it indicates that you're wrong and

1:09:31that's terrible in some sense because it all it almost always means that to learn

1:09:36requires pain now I don't believe that exactly because people are curious you

1:09:44know and to go out and be curious and to learn new things can be very exciting

1:09:48and so what it seems to be is that there's there's a rate of learning

1:09:53that's too fast and that hurts you that's what makes you cry but if you get

1:09:58the rate just right you're just opening up enough novelty so that you can

1:10:02benefit from the possibilities that gives you a dopamine kick fundamentally

1:10:07you can benefit from the possibilities without being overwhelmed by the by the

1:10:11unexpected element of it and you can tell when that's happening and this is

1:10:14one of the coolest things as far as I'm concerned this is and I learned this

1:10:17partly from Piaget it's like you know in order to withstand suffering let's say

1:10:23your life has to have some meaning okay well that that means a bunch of things

1:10:26it means that part of the way that you overcome suffering is by making the

1:10:31suffering into something meaningful and I don't mean that metaphysically I mean

1:10:34it technically you made a mistake it causes you suffering you learn something

1:10:38about it you don't make that mistake again

1:10:40it's real adaptation it's not it's not defense against death anxiety or

1:10:44something like that it's real adaptation but more importantly the reality that

1:10:50you learn through pain is the oldest reality will say it's it's really old

1:10:54it's as old as nervous systems and so you've adapted so that you've learned to

1:11:00transform your knowledge structures in a way that will minimize your potential

1:11:04exposure to future pain they at a rate you can tolerate or maybe

1:11:09even enjoy and so what's happening is you don't actually like being static it

1:11:14bores you but you don't like being thrown into chaos it's like no a little

1:11:19bit of that's fine what you want is you want to be opening up your knowledge

1:11:23structures on the periphery to transformation voluntary transformation

1:11:27that's voluntary exploration and letting those things manifest a little bit of

1:11:31interesting chaos and so you have a little bit you put a little feeler out

1:11:35there that you're willing to let die and it comes apart and you gather a bit of

1:11:39information it comes back together stronger and you do that all the time if

1:11:42you're if you're smart and you're looking for new information foraging for

1:11:46new information and that means you keep taking little bits of yourself apart and

1:11:50reconstructing them and overtime that keeps you alive and active you know part

1:11:55of the reason you're alive is because you're dying all the time right all the

1:11:58cells in your body like if they don't die you get cancer and that that's it

1:12:02you're done you're a very very tight balance between death and life at every

1:12:07every single level including the cognitive level and it's not that fun to

1:12:11learn something because you have to kill something you already know in order to

1:12:13learn it that's another piece yet in observation because you're always

1:12:17interpreting something within a structure and if that interpretation is

1:12:21wrong even in a microwave you have to kill that structure and it's a

1:12:25biological structure it actually hurts to kill it but maybe you can generate

1:12:29something new in its stead and if you get the dynamic right let the rate right

1:12:34then you find that exhilarating not painful and that's and that's well you

1:12:39can tell when you're doing that as far as I can tell you can tell when you're

1:12:42doing that because you're engaged in the world in a meaningful way and what your

1:12:46nervous system is doing is signaling to you that you're not in a static place

1:12:51that's death you're not in a chaotic place that's death your balance between

1:12:55the static and the chaotic such that the static structures are transforming at

1:13:00exactly the right rate to keep you on top of the environmental transformations

1:13:05and so you're surfing you know in Hawaii the surfers surfing was sacred well

1:13:10that's why it's like do you can you tell someone how to surf well you can't

1:13:14because they have to go out there and dynamically interact with the wave but

1:13:18they can stay on top of the wave and that's

1:13:20what you have to do and if you're staying on top of the wave properly then

1:13:24it's exhilarating and that's the kind of meaning that that it rejuvenates you

1:13:29literally it makes you able to tolerate the suffering in life and it's not

1:13:33metaphysical precisely it's because that is what you're doing at that moment

1:13:37you're you're overcoming your limitations and of course that's what

1:13:41you have to do in order to to know and to learn because you want to be doing

1:13:45both of those things at the same time that's what you do when you play a game

1:13:48properly your parents say it doesn't matter whether you win or lose this is a

1:13:52PSAT and observation it's how you play the game what does that mean well it

1:13:57means that you should play the game in a manner that increases the probability

1:14:01that you're going to be invited to play many games in the future perfect so you

1:14:05master the skills of the game but at the same time you master a set of meta

1:14:09skills which is the skills that remain constant across transforming sets of

1:14:13games and that's what it means to play fair that's a bloody basis of morality

1:14:18as far as Piaget was concerned it's so damn smart you know because you think

1:14:23all interactions have this game-like quality they're sort of bounded and but

1:14:29there are commonalities across all the games and you want to extract out the

1:14:33commonalities and you want to learn to inhabit the universe that's made out of

1:14:37the commonalities between games and that's what it means to be a good person

1:14:41roughly speaking you know it varies to some degree from culture to culture

1:14:44obviously because each culture is a game unto itself but there's something that

1:14:49transcends that that's the nature of games across game contexts and you know

1:14:55that you know that because you can tell the difference between a game and and

1:14:58something that isn't a game instantly everyone knows and it's not like there's

1:15:02only one kind of game there's hockey say and there's there's a world of warcraft

1:15:09I know it's way out of date but so am I so it's not surprising so but the fact

1:15:14that those things are very very different in many many ways doesn't stop

1:15:18you from identifying the underlying commonalities you know they're games and

1:15:22they're they're like stories in a sense so and that's a piagetian that's a

1:15:27piagetian observation very very smart so why do you develop well it's because

1:15:36your your previous idea their your previous frame micro frame let's say

1:15:40doesn't fit the circumstance and so something happens it you go like this

1:15:45what's up well the world isn't what you thought and there's something wrong with

1:15:50your knowledge structure this is partly what's makes Piaget a pragmatist you see

1:15:54the pragmatist American school of philosophy William James and his

1:15:57followers they knew that we had bounded knowledge we don't have infinite

1:16:01knowledge and so they thought well that means we can't really be right about

1:16:04anything because we're definitely wrong and so how is it that you can operate in

1:16:09the world given that you're always wrong and the answer is you you set up a

1:16:15procedure that has rules for what constitutes true within the procedure

1:16:20itself so you play a game and at the same time you set up the rules so you

1:16:24might say well is this joke funny and then the answer is well do people laugh

1:16:30now when I tell the joke do they laugh and if the answer is yes then it's funny

1:16:34enough you've you've you've taken a particular definition of funny you've

1:16:39transformed it into a local phenomena and if your behavior matches the

1:16:45prediction in that local area you say well that's true enough is it like

1:16:48transcendently funny well maybe you'd have to tell it to 200 different groups

1:16:53of people to figure that out but mostly it's it's funny enough so that when I

1:16:57predicted what would happen when I told the joke that's what happened and you

1:17:00don't predict it by the way you desire it it's not the same thing because

1:17:04prediction has no motivation in it but desire does and we're always motivated

1:17:08always always motivated so well here's a way of thinking about the Piaget teen

1:17:15system so two-year-olds they're very chaotic and they bounce between one

1:17:22highly motivated emotional state to another and so the first thing that the

1:17:26two-year-old has to do is get his or her act together more or less inside and so

1:17:34you know two-year-olds still have tantrums and they still cry a lot and

1:17:37and they still run around like mad being joyful crazily which you have to train

1:17:40out of them right away because it's nothing but disruptive and it's one of

1:17:43the most painful things about being a parent

1:17:46like 90% of the time you're going stop having fun stop having fun you know and

1:17:51then you turn into a teenager and your parents get what they ask for and so but

1:17:57because positive emotion is so impulsive and so chaotic it's really hard to

1:18:01manifest itself it's manifested within it within a predictable environment and

1:18:06so you're dampening down your child's enthusiasm non-stop it's but it has to

1:18:10be regulated because happiness is impulsive and chaotic and people don't

1:18:14like to think that because they think well we should be happy it's like Mannix

1:18:18are happy but they're maniacs that's where the word comes from like they're

1:18:22just you it's not good they're too happy way too happy like someone who's way too

1:18:30stoned on math or on cocaine and I mean that technically because it's it's

1:18:34they're very similar they're very similar biochemical states so and and

1:18:39cocaine produces happiness pretty much in its pure form

1:18:43so does meth very rapidly and so it's just not good you know you lose judgment

1:18:49you happy people you don't have good judgment they're too happy maybe they

1:18:53get dopey it's like you know it's like irrational stock market bubbles oh boy

1:18:58it's always going to go up it's like no no it's not always going to go up but

1:19:05that's what you think when you're happy anyways the two-year-old has to get all

1:19:09these motivational systems sort of hammered into one thing internally now

1:19:14in some sense from the PIA jetty in perspective that happens within the

1:19:17child he thinks of the child is egocentric but and that that development

1:19:21takes place internally and then it's not till a child's let's say about three

1:19:24that it can learn to bring its controlled unity into a unity with

1:19:29another controlled unity and make a game that happens around three and so what

1:19:35happens is that instead of the child only pursuing his or her goals

1:19:38although modulated by the social environment the child is able to

1:19:42communicate with another child and establish a shared goal and that's what

1:19:46happens when they play and so obviously you play Monopoly that's what you're

1:19:49doing but when you play peekaboo you're doing the same thing it's like

1:19:54with your parent you're actually playing with object permanence dad's go on

1:19:58oh look dad's here haha he's there dad's gone that's here yeah

1:20:02it's gone dad's here like a kid man you can do that for like

1:20:05three hours they never get tired of it because every time you reappear it's an

1:20:10it's a miracle unis watch babies it's so funny like you go like this and they go

1:20:15then you talk back holding like they're so happy they're just overjoyed and then

1:20:20you take yourself away and they're like what's going on what's going on bang you

1:20:24reappear they don't have a real memory you know it's like reality is

1:20:28manifesting itself in all its freshness moment by moment and and they can't

1:20:33remember there are neurological conditions that do that so sometimes and

1:20:37there are people who that this has happened to so they get hippocampal

1:20:40damage and so they can't move short-term information into long-term

1:20:43storage and there's this one guy it's very interesting case he was a concert

1:20:48pianist and he had hell of a neurological injury and he could still

1:20:52play the piano he couldn't remember eight he couldn't he had amnesia and he

1:20:56couldn't move information from short-term storage into long-term

1:20:59storage so as far as he was concerned it was it was always like ten days before

1:21:04he had his accident he never got passed out he was stuck in that moment and then

1:21:08but he could still play the piano and but was so interesting you watch him

1:21:11there were films of him before he sat down to play the piano he'd have like a

1:21:14seizure and then he could play the piano procedural memory that was intact and

1:21:18then at the end he'd kind of have a little seizure and then he'd go back to

1:21:21being who he was but he had these notebooks and all he did was write in

1:21:26them over and over the same thing it's as if I have never seen this before it's

1:21:30as if I've never seen this before it's as if I've never seen this before

1:21:35so he's in this ecstatic state where everything was novel and new and pure

1:21:39and paradisal but there was no continuity and so when his wife would

1:21:43come to visit him he would just be overwhelmed to see her overwhelmed every

1:21:47time and even if she just left the room and came back in it was exactly the same

1:21:51thing it's just like the kid it's like no object permanence and every time the

1:21:55face appears it's it's a staggering and you can see that in the reflexes of the

1:21:59child and that's that's without object permanence and so that's what Piaget was

1:22:04talking about with regards to object permanence it's very very cool so

1:22:09anyways the two-year-olds a collection of these sort of random motivations more

1:22:13or less gets his or her act together by about three

1:22:16if they're being socialized properly and that means that the parents are doing

1:22:20their best to make the child acceptable to other children that's your damn job

1:22:25as a parent you have to understand that because if your child isn't acceptable

1:22:30to other children they won't play with your child and then your child will be

1:22:35lonesome and isolated and awkward and they will never recover because if the

1:22:39kid doesn't get that right between two and four it's over

1:22:43they're never gonna learn it the other kids accelerate forward that kids left

1:22:46behind and it's not a good life for that kid they don't learn how to play with

1:22:50others and then they're done and there's a huge literature on trying to rectify

1:22:54antisocial children say from the age of four on it's like no you can't and you

1:23:00can go ahead and read three four hundred papers on rectification of antisocial

1:23:05behavior and figure it out for yourself but I did that for about five years and

1:23:08it was a while ago but I know the literature hasn't changed so you got to

1:23:13get it right between that period you got to get the kid together enough so they

1:23:17can control themselves well enough so that they can adopt a mutual frame of

1:23:21reference with a peer so that they can start using that to scaffold their

1:23:25development further and become more and more sophisticated in social

1:23:28interactions and that's what you're you're acting as a proxy for the social

1:23:32environment as a parent that's what you're doing now a gentle proxy an

1:23:36informative proxy maybe even a merciful proxy but a proxy nonetheless because

1:23:42they're not going to be around you forever they're gonna be out there among

1:23:45people who don't really care about them and if they don't have something to

1:23:48bring to the table at least the ability to cooperate they're gonna be lonesome

1:23:52and isolated and that's not going to be good well here's an here's an here's an

1:23:57idea so as you're moving from what is to what should be you're in this little

1:24:01frame of reference this little game this little Piaget alien game sometimes you

1:24:05get what you want or predict that's on the left-hand side that makes you happy

1:24:10and it validates your frame so if the frame keeps working across different

1:24:14circumstances you get a reward from that the reward produces a dopaminergic kick

1:24:19that makes you feel good but the dopamine also enhances the strength of

1:24:23the circuitry that underlies that particular representation that's what

1:24:26reinforcement is it's different than reward reward is

1:24:30what you feel let's say roughly speaking reinforcement is the effect of the

1:24:34dopamine bathing the neurological tissues to make it stronger and grow and

1:24:39so if the neurological tissue underlies a sequence of actions that produces a

1:24:42desired outcome there's a biochemical kick that strengthens the nervous

1:24:47structures that were activated just before the good thing happens and so

1:24:51that's how something you know that's valuable gets instantiated and if it

1:24:54fails instead you get punished pain anxiety and that that starts to

1:25:00extinguish that circuitry and we don't know how that works exactly we don't

1:25:05know exactly if those circuits then start to die because they can degenerate

1:25:09across time or if what happens is you build other circuits that inhibit them

1:25:13so it's like you've got this knowledge structure it's built into you and once

1:25:17it's there there's not really much getting rid of it but you can build

1:25:19another one that tells it to shut up that's sort of what happens when you're

1:25:22addicted to drugs so cocaine bathes the tissue that was

1:25:27active just before you took the cocaine with dopamine and so that gets stronger

1:25:30and stronger and stronger and stronger and so you're basically building a

1:25:34cocaine seeking monster in your head and that's all it wants and it has

1:25:38rationalizations and it has emotions and it has motivations and it's alive but it

1:25:43wants one thing and the problem is once you build that thing especially if you

1:25:47nail it a couple of hundred times with the powerful dopaminergic agonist like

1:25:50cocaine that thing is one vicious monster and it's alive and it's in there

1:25:55and you can't get it to go away the only thing you can do is build another

1:25:59structure to shut it up but the problem is is that as soon as you get stressed

1:26:03it interferes with that new structure and the old thing comes popping back up

1:26:07not good I wouldn't recommend it and the faster acting those dopaminergic

1:26:14agonists are cocaine is a good example but so is math the faster they hit you

1:26:19which is often why people inject them instead of snorting them say the faster

1:26:23that transformation from steady state to dopaminergic path the bigger the kick is

1:26:28and so you know so speed of introduction of the substance matters which is why

1:26:33you drink shots instead of drinking say wine or beer because alcohol has you

1:26:37know very similar very similar effects so

1:26:41all right so if you get what you want well then you feel good but not only do

1:26:52you feel good but the frame itself is validated and if you don't get what you

1:26:56want well then not only do you not get what you want but the frame itself

1:26:59starts to come apart at the seams and the question part is how far should the

1:27:03frame come apart how deeply should you unlearn something when you make a

1:27:07mistake god it's a very very very hard problem and I'll show you a partial

1:27:12solution to it this very useful thing and this is a pia jetty an idea - let's

1:27:17see yeah I'm gonna go to this for a minute so so I'm gonna decompose

1:27:24something for you and and this is partly to give you an introduction to the way

1:27:28behaviorists think but it's also to help unpack how the pia jetty in oceans work

1:27:33and so from a piagetian perspective high-order abstractions are actually

1:27:37made of what's common among actions and perceptions so and those things are

1:27:42unified in some sense so an abstraction isn't what's common across sets of

1:27:46objects it's more like what's common across sets of perceptions and actions

1:27:50and so that's a hard thing to understand but but this will help you understand

1:27:54okay so let's say you want to be a good person it's kind of abstraction all

1:27:58right and then you think well what does it

1:27:59mean to be a good person it's a box it's an empty box no it's a box and it says

1:28:06good person on outside but it's full of things it might even be full of

1:28:09transforming things so but you know what it means you say good person you kind of

1:28:14know and you kind of know but you know if we started talking about details we

1:28:17might start to argue but it's like pornography you know what when you see

1:28:20it okay so what does it mean to be a good person well we could decompose it

1:28:24we could say well if you're one way of being a good person is to be a good

1:28:28parent and you basically say that being a good parent is a subset of being a

1:28:32good person right because person is bigger than parent and maybe it'd be to

1:28:37be a good employee and to be a good sister and to be a good you know to be

1:28:41to be a good good partner sort of on the same level of abstraction so you

1:28:46decompose good person into your major functional roles let's say and you're

1:28:51good at all of them whatever that means well let's say if you're a good parent

1:28:55well you have to have a good job because otherwise you starve and so do your

1:28:59children so at least you have to financially provide in some manner

1:29:02that's a subset of being a good parent it's not the only subset and then to be

1:29:06a good to have a good be a good parent you also have to take care of your

1:29:10family and so you could decompose that into play with baby or complete meal you

1:29:16might say well if take care of family you can either order a meal or you can

1:29:20cook one it's like good for you and so then you're cooking a meal and you think

1:29:25well what do you decompose that into well now you're starting to get to the

1:29:29micro level say because let's say you're making broccoli so you take the broccoli

1:29:33out of the fridge and you put it on the cutting board that's actually action

1:29:38that's not abstraction it's actually something you're doing with your body so

1:29:42the abstraction grounds itself out in micro activity actual action that's the

1:29:46connection between the mind and the body and so you're cutting broccoli right but

1:29:51that's not abstraction and so if you take apart these higher-order moral

1:29:55abstractions what happens is you decompose them into action perception

1:29:59sequences and they're embodied now Piaget is basic claim is you build the

1:30:03dam abstractions from the bottom up that's his that's the fundamental Pia

1:30:07jetty and claim it so the kid comes into the world with some reflexes and starts

1:30:11building a body of embodied knowledge out of that interaction with other

1:30:16people and then they start playing games and that abstracts but but they move

1:30:21from the bottom of the hierarchy which is actual micro actions up to the top of

1:30:25the abstraction world and so it's this is how you boot yourself up little bitty

1:30:29stories what little bitty stories at the bottom cut broccoli you know and then

1:30:36cut corn here set table do dishes complete meal take care of your family

1:30:40be a good parent be a good person and you know one of the propositions that I

1:30:46am offering you in this class is that to be a good person you're actually not

1:30:49stuck in one of these to be a good person means that you're the thing that

1:30:52transforms these things continually and so that's what's at the top of the

1:30:56hierarchy and that's basically the hero story which is you're in a state of

1:31:00being and it normally occurs you allow it to demolish you and then you rebuild

1:31:05and that's at the highest end of the moral hierarchy and that's also a sense

1:31:09reappears Yeti and claim so so let's think about emotional regulation because

1:31:14this is a really good schema for understanding emotional regulation how

1:31:18upset should you get and how do you calculate it because if you make a

1:31:22mistake you wake up in the morning in your side hurts okay you it's the first

1:31:26symptom of pancreatic cancer you're dead in six months

1:31:28100% chats or you know you pulled a muscle well which is it you might say

1:31:35well the chances of the pancreatic cancer or low but they're not zero and

1:31:40like infinite times any proportion is a very large number so you might be

1:31:44thinking why don't you just have a screaming fit any time ever any little

1:31:48thing happens to you which is exactly what happens by the way if you're two

1:31:51years old right that is what you do so and it's because you don't know you

1:31:56don't know like things fell apart what does that mean could be anything well

1:32:01that's no good well so let's say you're arguing with your with your partner you

1:32:05know and they I don't know if they make a lousy meal or maybe no meals and

1:32:09you're kind of sick of it you know and so you say you're a bad person and

1:32:15what's the evidence not only are you a bad person but you've always been a bad

1:32:20person and the probability that you're going to improve in the future looks to

1:32:23me to be zero it's like what's the person supposed to do punch you right

1:32:28really because there's no room in there for any discussion you're done it's like

1:32:34you're horrible and you don't change and you've always been horrible and you've

1:32:39never changed and you know inferring from that into the future

1:32:43you're gonna stay horrible and you're not going to change well any argument

1:32:46can go there immediately it's a really bad idea and it happens all the time and

1:32:51this is why people can't have a civil discussion you know they can't say

1:32:59here's an example so you've got your four-year-old you want them to clean up

1:33:02their room and so it's full of toys let's say they're three and a half you

1:33:09look at it you say look you know clean clean this up clean up your room so you

1:33:13shut the door and you go away and you magically hope that when you come back

1:33:15the room will be clean but of course the child has no idea

1:33:18in all likelihood at that age or maybe it's two and a half something like that

1:33:22they know what clean up a room means that's

1:33:24like way up here man it's like you told your child there's mass every be a good

1:33:29person you know and then you come back in half an hour and they're no better a

1:33:32person than they were and you get upset it's like you can't do that you have to

1:33:37say you see that teddy bear and you know that that kid knows how to see a teddy

1:33:43bear and they know how to pick it up because you've watched them see a teddy

1:33:46bear and pick it up and you know that the child knows the name of the teddy

1:33:49bear it's teddy bear and so you point to the teddy bear and you say do you see

1:33:54that teddy bear and they go yes and you say that's good

1:33:56pat pat and they get a little kick of dopamine so that's happy day for the kid

1:34:00and then they smile at you so you feel pretty good about that too and then you

1:34:04say you think you could pick up that teddy bear and they say yeah and so they

1:34:08go over there not every kid by the way but they go over there and they pick up

1:34:12the teddy bear and it's like it's a good day for both of you and then you say you

1:34:15see that little space on the shelf because you know they know what a shelf

1:34:18is and you know they know what a space is and you say take that teddy bear and

1:34:22put it in the shelf and then go over there and they put it in the shelf and

1:34:25then they look at you and you're smiling and so the probability that they'll do

1:34:28that again is now increased because but watching you smile produces a

1:34:33dopaminergic kick and you've just strengthened those circuits so I would

1:34:36highly recommend that you do that with your children and with your partners

1:34:40right you watch them like like a sneaky person and every time they do something

1:34:46that you actually want them to do you notice and you give them a little pat on

1:34:49the head yeah and then they like you that's cool but if they don't if you

1:34:54don't want them to like you because you hate them and then you won't do that but

1:34:58and you think well I don't hate them it's like oh yes you do you just think

1:35:01about the last month man there's been twenty times you absolutely hated them

1:35:04and maybe that's the predominant emotion and that's not so good over time so when

1:35:09they do something good if you really want to screw things up watch like a

1:35:13hawk and wait till they do something good and then punish them that's really

1:35:16fun that is that really messes with them and people do that all the time so if

1:35:21you really want to mock things up you can even do it more subtly you can wait

1:35:26till they do something good especially if they've never done it before and

1:35:28they're just kind of tentatively trying it and then you can ignore them that's a

1:35:32really good what that's even better than punishing them because at least when you

1:35:36punish you're paying attention if you ignore

1:35:38them it's like that's that's just perfect also takes hardly any effort on

1:35:43your part so that's an additional plus so anyways so if you're having a

1:35:48discussion with someone it's like what you're doing with this kid you know it's

1:35:51like you say maybe you're negotiating about meals you don't start with you're

1:35:55a bad person let's way the hell up here you know you blow the whole person

1:35:58schema right out from underneath them and you might as well get divorced which

1:36:02is what will happen if you keep doing that soon you'll roll it your eyes at

1:36:06each other that means you're getting divorced by the way so if you ever watch

1:36:09it he does I'm serious there's good empirical data on that once you're at

1:36:12the eye-rolling stage there's no going back so you should intervene way before

1:36:17that it's discussed that AI role once you've hit disease-carrying rodent

1:36:24status in your mates eyes there's no coming back so anyways so what you do if

1:36:30you want to have a conversation with someone that's a corrective conversation

1:36:34is you sort of take a piagetian attitude and the attitude is go to the highest

1:36:41level of resolution that you can manage so let's say and that's what you're

1:36:45doing with the kid it's like clean up your room be a good

1:36:48person it's like no they don't know any about anything about that but they do

1:36:51know how to pick up a teddy bear and then maybe you think cleaning up your

1:36:54room is a hundred things like that and so you have to teach the child each one

1:36:58of those hundred things and then they learn this is the scheme they learn

1:37:03what's the same across all of those different actions that's clean right

1:37:08pick up the teddy bear put away the Legos make your bed what those have

1:37:12nothing in common really like the motor outputs completely different but they

1:37:16fall under the heading of clean but unless you fill the heading of clean

1:37:20with all the subordinate categories of the action perception sequences that

1:37:24make up clean kid can't do it and so partly what you're doing by attending to

1:37:28your child constantly is noticing where they are in the construction of this

1:37:33hierarchy and they start way down here right and so that's why you play

1:37:37peekaboo for example it's like they can do that and you can you know you

1:37:41interact with them because you can watch you do a little something and if they

1:37:44respond you got some sense that you're you're at the same level and kids and

1:37:48playgrounds do that with each other right away so

1:37:50if you if you see two three-year-olds together say they're fairly

1:37:53sophisticated for three-year-olds what they'll do is they'll start playing a

1:37:56little primitive game with each other like door like a dog you know what a dog

1:37:59does what it wants to play it kind of goes like that and and that's what kids

1:38:03do and that's what adults do too it's a plague

1:38:07it's play it if it tastes like I'm ready but you're smiling it's not like I'm

1:38:10ready it's and so you can tell the difference between a play fight and play

1:38:14and kids can too so it's an invitation to play and so if you're interacting

1:38:18with your little kid they got that play circuit man that thing's in there like

1:38:22when they're from birth I think because you can play with a kid right from birth

1:38:26at least something like peekaboo and so you're on the same wavelength

1:38:30fundamentally and then you interact with them and you see if they're following

1:38:33what you're doing is what I'm doing when I'm lecturing more or less I'm watching

1:38:37you guys and seeing if we're more or less in the same shared space you know

1:38:44and we want the space to be expanding because if it's just staying the same

1:38:48well you might as well play whatever you play on your computer it has to be

1:38:53expanding at the same time that's optimal and so when you're playing with

1:38:57your kid you put them on that developmental edge where they're undoing

1:39:01and then rebuilding their little skills you know you can do that like I had this

1:39:06memory from when I was a little kid a while back and I remembered I used to go

1:39:11over to these peoples house with my father and my mom and it was way up in

1:39:15northern Alberta and these people were Russian immigrants as children of

1:39:18Russian immigrants and they had a farmhouse way way out in the country way

1:39:22out by the way there where the railroad actually ended if you walk north from

1:39:26there you'd walk until you hit like southern Europe without fun running into

1:39:31another person it was way the hell out in the middle of nowhere and anyways

1:39:34they had a nice house it's like a warm house you know they had three kids and

1:39:38they were way older than me but it was a real fun comfortable place to go and I

1:39:42used to sit in the living room with my father and his friend whose name was

1:39:46Nick and Nick was a really playful guy I really liked him he was like my

1:39:50surrogate grandfather and I used to I don't think I was more than about three

1:39:54I'd sit there and I try to hit his foot with my fist and he would be talking to

1:39:59my dad you know and my dad would say Jordan don't bother Nick and Nick would

1:40:02say well he's not really bothering me and

1:40:04his dad was checking it out to see if I was anoint were poor if I was a fun kid

1:40:08you know cuz it's a fine line and so I tried to hit his foot and he would move

1:40:14it and now I had this memory while back and I thought wow that was a good memory

1:40:18and I thought what is going on there exactly and I realized well he's

1:40:22sharpening he was sharpening me up you know it's like I was aiming at something

1:40:26you're aiming at something if you're pointing your eyes at it you're pointing

1:40:29your whole damn soul out it you're aiming at something and you're trying to

1:40:32get your behaviors and your conceptions in line and organized so that you can

1:40:36attain that aim that's what people do you know we throw rocks at things we we

1:40:41fire arrows at things we shoot guns at things we aim at things our whole body

1:40:47is that platform for aiming and I was trying to aim at his feet and he'd move

1:40:51his feet you know but he'd let me hit it what now and then and so let's say

1:40:56you're a rat okay because like I said it rats a good model for a person let's say

1:41:00you're a little rat a juvenile male and you want to play because you want to

1:41:04play and you'll work to play and that's how we know you want to play if we're

1:41:08experimental psychologists because you're Bosch put button push like mad to

1:41:12get access to an arena where you can wrestle with another little rat and so

1:41:16rats wrestle just like human beings and they even pin each other just like human

1:41:20beings and they love that and so if you put little rat a in with a little rat B

1:41:25and little rat B is 10% bigger little rat B can stomp the hell out of little

1:41:29rat a all the time so they go out there and they have a little dominance

1:41:33competition and little rat B is gonna win because he's bigger so now he's

1:41:38dominant rat so then they play in they wrestle and little rat a loses but and

1:41:43then next time they both know that little rat a is the inviter

1:41:47because he's subordinate so he's the one who has to go up to the big rat and go

1:41:52you ready and the big rat then we'll wrestle however if you repeatedly pair

1:41:56them and the big rat doesn't let the little rat win at least 30% of the time

1:42:02the little rat won't invite him to play anymore and that was york panksepp who

1:42:06figured that out and that is mind-boggling because it tells you like

1:42:12the bit there's a there's an ethical basis for play that's so deep that the

1:42:16damn rat and their rats not known for their sense of fair play

1:42:20the big rat has to let the little rat win 30% of the time or the little rat

1:42:25will not play anymore and even rats know that it's it's so profound that

1:42:30discovery like banks have discovered the play circuit in mammals that's a big

1:42:34deal that's like discovering a whole continent like that's a big deal he

1:42:37should have got a Nobel Prize for that and to see that that's built in that

1:42:41sense of fair play that's mind boggling you know cuz that's evidence for the

1:42:46biological instantiation of a complex morality fair play even if you can win

1:42:52you shouldn't all the time well so when I'm trying to hit Nick's feet with my

1:42:56hand like I'm really paying attention and he's moving it pretty well but now

1:42:59and then I get to nail it and I'm feeling pretty good about that you know

1:43:03and he makes a little bit more difficult all the time so that my aim gets better

1:43:07and better and I'm building up my motor coordination I'm building up my social

1:43:10skills cuz I don't hit too hard and I don't cry when I miss because that just

1:43:15makes you annoying to play with right so I'm learning really complicated things

1:43:19about how to go about finessing my aim and that's what you're doing with your

1:43:23kids and what are they aiming at well they aim higher and higher so when my

1:43:28son was about two and a half we had him start setting the table it's you don't

1:43:33say you know you want to take grandma's fine china and go set the table

1:43:36it's like no you don't do that you say you know what a fork looks like he goes

1:43:41yeah see if you wanted the forks are well that doesn't work because the

1:43:45Drover's way up here right so you have to hand him a fork you say look take

1:43:48this fork and go put it on the table he's like this high you know so he goes

1:43:52over to the table and he puts the fork up here can't even see what he's doing

1:43:56he puts the fork up there and then you know he's reasonably happy with that and

1:44:00you could give him a path and then you go and give him a really sharp not no

1:44:04you don't do that you don't do that you give him a spoon and you say well go put

1:44:09the spoon beside the fork and you don't say look you're stupid kid you got to

1:44:13leave enough space between the fork and the spoon so the plate can fit there

1:44:17don't you know anything you're stupid it's like well that's

1:44:20right up here right you're a bad kid no that's bad you don't do that you go down

1:44:26here and you say well good micro routine adaptation there Chum well

1:44:32let's try it again you know when you build that up and like men

1:44:35you can't extend the kid past its point his point or her point of exhaustion

1:44:39because it's got to be a game and a two-year-old can probably only do that

1:44:42for you can watch them and some are more persistent than others but 10 minutes 15

1:44:48minutes you pushing your luck you can take a two-year-old to a restaurant for

1:44:52about 40 minutes and expect them to sit and behave but after that you know

1:44:58they're the will exhausts them all right well anyways that's Piaget in his

1:45:02nascent form fundamentally and so if you if you remember that diagram and you

1:45:06think about how that would be built from the bottom up and how there would be a

1:45:10stage transition every time those things are learned you kind of got the

1:45:14essential elements of piagetian theory so we'll see you Thursday