Of Baboons and Men | Robert Sapolsky | EP 390

And as soon as you allow for the possibility of like your footprints lasting longer than your lifespan, this is a whole new ball game. Either in the form of there's an afterlife or in the form of I want to leave a planet for my great great grandchildren that's going to be a more peaceful, wonderful one. Whoa, that's a whole other world of like what you're doing now. The footprints you leave after you are going to matter.

Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I'm speaking with primatologist, neuroendocrinology researcher, and author of multiple books, including the upcoming "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will," Dr. Robert Sapolsky. We discuss game theory and how it applies to human behavior, the unexpected success of the tit-for-tat negotiating principle, the role of the neurochemical dopamine in reward reinforcement and the anticipation of the future, and the potentially objective reality of transcendent ethical structures operating within the biological domain.

So I was reading, um, in some detail. I've read a number of your other books, I've followed your career for a long time, and I'm very interested in primatology and in neuroscience, so that makes for interesting reading as far as I'm concerned. The thing that really struck me in "Behave" is the sections on game theory, and I wanted to start talking about game theory because first of all, the terminology is strange because game theory—I mean, you could hardly imagine something that might sound more trivial than that. I mean, first of all, it's games, and second of all, it's theory. But there's absolutely nothing whatsoever that's even minimally trivial about game theory. It's unbelievably important, you know.

And I kind of stumbled across it sideways. I was reading work by Yak P.P., who did a lot of work with rats, and P.P. showed that if you paired rats repeatedly together, juvenile males, and you allowed them to play, the little rat who had to invite to play once dominance had been established, he would stop inviting to play if the big rat didn't let him win 30% of the time in repeated bouts. Say, and I thought, "Oh my God, that's so cool," because what you see there is something like an emergent morality of play in rats merely as a consequence of the repeated pairing of the same individuals, you know, across an indeterminate landscape.

And that's an unbelievably compelling and stunning discovery because it indicates something like the emergence of a spontaneous morality. Now you talk about game theory. Do you want to review for everybody, first of all, what game theory is and then what the major findings of the field are? We can talk about tit-for-tat and the variations, but please let everybody know what game theory is and why it's so important.

Sure, maybe I'll just emphasize the point you made right from the start that this is not fun and games. Game theory was mostly the purview of war strategists and diplomats and people planning, you know, mutually assured destruction. So, uh, this was rather serious stuff. At some point, the biologists got a hold of it and especially zoologists, and the sort of rationale was like; you look at a giraffe and you're some cardiovascular giraffe person, and you do all these calculations about like if you're going to have a head that's that far above your heart and you're going to have this body weight and blah blah, what you're going to have to have a heart with its walls that are this thick or this like vascular properties. And then the scientists go and study it, and that's exactly what you see. Isn't that amazing? Isn't nature wonderful?

Or like you look at desert WFTS and you do all this theoretical modeling stuff and figure out if they're going to survive in the desert their kidneys have to retain water at this unbelievable rate. And then people would go and study it, and that's exactly how the kidneys work. Isn't that amazing? And it's not so amazing, because like if you're going to have giraffes shaped like giraffes, the heart has to be that way. There is an intrinsic logic to how it had to evolve and if you're going to be a desert rodent, there's an intrinsic logic to how your kidneys go about living in the desert.

The whole notion of game theory as applied to evolution, animal behavior, human behavior, etc., is there's an intrinsic logic. The logic of our behavior has been as sculpted by evolutionary exigencies as the logic of our hearts and the logic of our kidneys and everything else in there. And by the time it comes to behavior, a lot of it is built around when is the optimal time to do X and when do you do the opposite of X.

So you talk about—alright, so let's review that for a minute. So your point, as I understand it, is that there's going to be necessary constraints on the physiology of an organism and those constraints are going to be reflective of its environment and the peculiarities of its morphology, and you can predict that a priori. And then when you match your predictions against observation, at least some of the times they match. There's an analogy between that and behavior in that you can analyze the context in which behavior occurs and the physiology of the organism. You do that in particular in "Behave" as you map out the nervous system from the hypothalamus upward toward the prefrontal cortex.

There's going to be an interaction between context and physiology that's necessary. The context of behavior isn't the mere requiting of primordial and immediate needs. The context of behavior is in part the reciprocal interactions that occur in a very large social space between many individuals, many of whom will interact repeatedly, and there's something about repeated interactions that's absolutely crucial.

So one of the things you point out, for example, is that—and this was also true of P.P.'s rat studies—if you just put two rats together once, geez, the big rat might as well just eat the little rat because what the hell, you know, maybe he's hungry and the little rat can be a meal, and there are circumstances under which that occurs. But if the rats are going to be together in a social environment and they're also surrounded by relative rats and friend rats, then the landscape of need gratification starts to switch dramatically.

Because you don't just have the requirement of satisfying the immediate need of the single individual right now; you have the problem of iterated needs across vast spans of time in a complex social environment. And a wonderful jargon for it is the shadow of the future—which, right, right—talk about that, which is a wonderful poetic way of—yeah, exactly, that notion.

Yeah, well, the future has a shape too, right? Because the farther out you go into the future, the more unpredictable it is. But it doesn't ever deteriorate exactly to zero predictability. And I know there's a future discounting literature. What do they—that's associated with time preference that also calculates the degree to which people regulate their behavior in the present in accordance with likely future contingencies.

One of the things you point out—and this is one of the ways your book is integrated, I believe—is that as you move upward in the hierarchy of the nervous system toward the more recently evolved brain areas, let's say toward the prefrontal cortex, the more you get the constraint of immediate behavior by future, uh—what would you say? Future contingencies, right? And you describe that in "Behave" as difficult. It's very easy to fall prey to an immediate impulse; anger is a good example of that, or maybe fear, right? That grips you and forces you to act in the moment. But you want to constrain your impulses, which would be manifestations of brain circuits that are much more evolutionarily ancient. You want to constrain those with increased knowledge of multiple future possibilities in a complex social landscape, and those are also somewhat specific to the circumstance.

So the prefrontal cortex also is more programmable, because the relationship between the future and the present varies quite substantially with the particularities of the environment. But the fundamental point is that in the game—in game theory—is that the consequences of your immediate action have to be bounded by the future and by the social context.

So I was thinking about something here recently. You tell me what you think about this because you write a little bit about religious issues in your book too, although not a lot but some. So I was thinking about this notion that you should love your enemy as yourself or that you should treat your neighbor as if he's yourself. I mean one of those is an extension of the other, and I think there's actually a technical reason for that. Tell me what you think of this logic.

So the first question might be, what is yourself? The self you're trying to protect. And one answer to that is it's what you want right now and what would protect you right now. But another answer is, yeah, fair enough, you know, now matters, but there's going to be you tomorrow and you next week and you in a month and you in a year and five years.

And what that implies is that you yourself are a community that stretches across time. And you, as that community, you're also going to be very varied in your manifestation. Sometimes you're going to be like top lobster and dominant as hell, and sometimes you're going to be sick and in the hospital. And there's going to be a lot of variance in who you are across time.

And so if you're treating yourself properly in the highest sense, you're going to treat yourself as that community that extends across time. And then I would say there's actually no difference technically—and maybe this is a game theory proposition—there's no difference between that technically and treating other people well. Is that your community across time, just like the community is a community, and the ethical obligation to yourself as an extended creature is identical with the obligation that you have, all things considered, to other people.

So I'm wondering what you think about that proposition, if that makes sense to you, if you think there might be exceptions to that.

Um, that makes perfect sense because that immediately dumps you into the, "Are there any real altruists out there?" Scratch an altruist and a narcissist, sort of thing. Anything within the realm of self-constraint and forward-looking pro-sociality and all of that—somewhere in there is running in between the lines is the Golden Rule, and in the long run this will be better if I do this. And what defines species is, you know, two lobsters can do game theory dominance displays, but we are the species that is dominated by the concept of in the long run with the lu, or the more frontally regulated among us.

But that's absolutely the heart of it. And which has always struck me, sort of—it’s very easy to like dump on utilitarian thinking because it's always easy to say, "Oh my God, so would you push your grandmother in front of the runaway trolley?" and it just feels wrong. And would you convict an innocent person if that's going to make society better? In all of those scenarios where utilitarian thinking just sticks in your throat, it just doesn't feel right.

And where the resolution always is, is utilitarian thinking in the long run. If it's okay to do this, what are we going to decide is okay to do tomorrow, and what right slope are we going to be heading down? And it requires a sort of deep distal, not just proximal, utilitarian mindset. And when you work in the shadow of the future and in the long run, suddenly, what winds up being, you know, the easiest possible solution to maximizing everyone's good looks a whole lot more palatable.

Yeah, well, those strange questions that come up when people, they pick these contexts where utilitarian thinking seems to involve a paradox. I mean, those are paradoxes of duty, and they do come up, but that all—what that indicates—and I think this is what you're pointing out—all that indicates is that there are often conflicts between what seems morally appropriate immediately and what seems morally appropriate when it's iterated. And sometimes those conflicts are going to be intense, and of course those are the ones that we have a very difficult time calculating, and no wonder.

But I would also say, though, those are also the times when intense negotiation is necessary. You know, like if you and I are in a situation where my immediate good and our long-term good are in conflict, then I better talk to you a bunch to find out what at least you know about what the most livable solution is, even if we can't do it perfectly. And the fact that there's going to be conflicts doesn't invalidate the general necessity of having to consider iteration.

Now you talk a lot in the book about tit-for-tat, and so why don't you outline that for people too, because lots of people listening, again, this is one of these things that just sounds—it sounds trivial when you first encounter, especially the computer simulations, but it's absolutely, it's of stunning importance once again. So do you want to outline the science behind these iterative game competitions and the fact that tit-for-tat emerged as a solution, and then the variations around that too? Let's get into those.

Well, first off, just to sort of build on one of your points there—repeated rounds. Repeated rounds. Repeated rounds of an unpredictable number. If you're going to have competitive interaction with someone, do you stab them in the back or do you cooperate? And your starting point is you're never going to see this person again, and they have no means of telling anyone else on Earth if you were a jerk or whatever, the only real politic thing that anyone could ever do is don't cooperate. Stab them in the back if you have only one round that you're going to interact with.

And then you get this horrible regressive thing that if you're going to interact with them for two rounds, what's the logical thing to do on the second round? Stab them in the back, so you've already defaulted into knowing that the second round is going to be non-cooperation. So what do you do in the first round? You already know the second round is a given, so you might as well stab them in the back on the first one. And if there's three rounds, you go backwards, and at every one of those points, if you're hyper-rational, no matter how many rounds ahead of you there are, if you know how many there are going to be, the only like uber-spocky and logical thing to do is to never ever cooperate.

Where the breakthrough comes in is when you don't know how many rounds there are in the future, and that's where you get selection for cooperation. That's where you see a world of differences in social species who were migratory versus ones who were not. If I do something nice for this guy, is he going to be around next Tuesday to help me out? Not if he's like a Syrian golden hamster. He's migratory; he's going to be gone. On the other hand, if he's a human living in a sedentary settlement, yeah, maybe if I could trust him or not.

So yeah, the key point of an unknown number of rounds in the future, because you never know, you know, putting it most cynically, how much of a chance they're going to have in the future to get back at you if you were a jerk right now in the present.

So that emphasis on unknown number of rounds—what you allude to is like the poster child, the fruit fly of people who do game theory studies, the prisoner's dilemma, where essentially there's a whole story that goes with it, but you have to decide are you going to cooperate with someone or are you going to stab them in the back. And the way it works is if you both cooperate, you both get a decent reward. If you both stab each other in the back, you both get punished to a certain extent.

But if you manage to get them to cooperate with you, but you stab them in the back, they get a tremendous loss and you get a huge number of brownie points. And conversely, if they've suckered you into being cooperative and then they stabbed you in the back, you're way down.

So this whole world of when do you cooperate and when do you do anything other than that, always within this realm of multiple rounds but unknown number. So this guy, Robert Axelrod, who's like this senior major figure in sort of political science, teamed up with this evolutionary biologist, W.D. Hamilton, one of the Gods in that field, and they said, well, let's talk to a whole bunch of our friends— a whole bunch of our friends who think seriously about this stuff—and tell them about the prisoner's dilemma and have each one of them tell us what would their strategy be when playing the prisoner's dilemma. How would you do an unknown number of rounds and maximize your wins at the end?

And they asked like Nobel Peace Prize winners and Mother Teresa and prize fighters and warlords and mathematicians, and they collected just a zillion people's different strategies, and then they ran this round-robin tournament on this like ancient 1970s computer of just running each strategy against all the other ones, a gazillion rounds to see which one worked best, which one won, or in the terms that evolutionary biologists quickly started using, which strategy drove all the others into extinction.

And the thing that flattened everybody was you had these people putting in these algorithms and probabilities and fuzzy logic and God knows what, and the one that beat all the others was the simplest one out there, tit-for-tat. You start off by cooperating; if the other guy is a jerk at some point and stabs you in the back, the next round you tit-for-tat him back. You stab him back. If he goes back to cooperating, then you go back to cooperating. You've forgiven him. If he keeps on being a jerk, you keep on being a jerk.

And even though what you see is by the person being a jerk, they're always one round ahead of you, and that seems pretty disadvantageous, you're always going to be one step behind the individual who stabbed you in the back. When you get two jerky cheaters together, all they do is constantly stab each other in the back, and they get the worst possible outcome.

And what you see with something like that is with tit-for-tat, if you're a nice cooperative guy and start off with that assumption, you lose the battles with the jerks, but you win the wars because right, right, cooperators find each other, and this strategy out-competed everyone. Everybody couldn't believe it because of how simplistic it was, and that was exactly it was straightforward, it was easy to understand, its starting point was one of cooperation, giving somebody the benefit of the doubt from the start. It was nonetheless not a sucker; it was punitive. It was capable of retribution. And if the other player who had like sinned against them corrected their ways, it was forgiven. And it was as simple. And this out-competed all of the other strategies.

What everyone sort of in the zoology world went about saying at that point is, oh my God, do animals go about tit-for-tat strategies when they're in competitive circumstances where they've got to decide am I going to cooperate or am I going to cheat and that sort of thing? Has evolution sculpted optimal competitive cooperative behavior in all sorts of species to solve the prisoner's dilemma problem? And people went and looked, and it turned out, like, what do you know? Evolution had sculpted exactly that in all sorts of species with like phenomenal, interesting findings where if you like experimentally manipulate one animal to make it look like they're not reciprocating in something that somebody else just did for them, everybody punishes them one round afterward and they go back to cooperating again and everyone forgives them.

That's tit-for-tat. Fabulous example of this—I am forgetting his name, Wilkinson—studies bats. Bats—some bat species, they all do communal nesting stuff. All the female bats have all their nests together. And they're communal in this literal sense—they're vampire bats, which means they fly out at night and they like get blood from some cow or some victim or whatever. And they're not actually drinking the blood; they're storing it in their throats.

So they come back to their nests and what they do is they discourage the blood to feed their babies. And the hugely cooperative cool thing about the species is it's cooperative feeding—not just among like sisters, but through that everyone feeds each other's kids. That's great.

So they've got this whole collaborative system, and it buffers you against one animal's failure to find food one night and like everyone scratches each other's back, and it works wonderfully. Now make the bats think that one of them is cheating, one of them has violated feeding—all each other’s kids’ social contract. When the bat comes out of the cave or whatever, you like net it and get a hold of the bat and you pump up the throat sack with air, and you put her back there in the nest, and she doesn't have any blood, but everybody's looking at her saying, "Oh my God, look at how big her throat sack is! Look at all the blood she has, and she's not feeding my kid! She's reneging on our social contract here!" And the next round nobody feeds her kids for one round.

Oh my God, that has evolved—the optimal prisoner's dilemma strategy of tit-for-tat. This was like phenomenal! What people then began to see was, out in the real world, straight tit-for-tat is not quite enough. But suppose you get a signal error, and this is straight out of, I don't know, we're roughly the same age, I don't know if you grew up reading all those like cold war terrifying novels, if there's a glitch... oh yeah, what was it? Fail-safe or something? We're going to drop an atomic bomb on Moscow by accident, and the only way to prove to them was an accident is they get to drop on New York.

And tit-for-tat and all of that, and what that introduced was the possibility of a signal error. You're operating, but there's a glitch in the system, and the other individual believes you just stabbed them in the back. According to a recent report, Planned Parenthood continues to rake in billions despite dwindling clients. The biggest takeaway here is that Planned Parenthood is generating vast profits, including millions in taxpayer funding, with the help of Preborn. You and me, we are stealing their clientele, meaning the babies they are trying to kill.

Preborn operates on a very slim budget as they rescue over 200 babies' lives every day, and they receive no government funding. Preborn's network of clinics is situated in the darkest corners, competing head-to-head with the abortion giants. They need our help now more than ever. When you donate $28 to Preborn, you will offer a free ultrasound to an expectant mother caught in crisis. Once she hears that heartbeat and sees that precious life, her baby's chance at life doubles.

If you would like to sponsor a precious baby's life, your gift will be tax-deductible and will go directly towards saving babies' lives. Dial pound 250 and say the keyword "baby" or visit preborn.com. All gifts are tax-deductible. You will never regret saving a child's life. That's pound 250, baby, or visit preborn.com.

Yeah, I think virtualization probably increases signal error, by the way. You know, I've noticed that. Well, I've noticed that when I've put together business enterprises that you can virtualize the cooperation. But if any misunderstanding emerges, it tends to cascade very rapidly. And you don't have—you know, one of the things you also point out in "Behave" is that it isn't only that you're playing a sequence of iterated games with people; you're playing multiple sequences of multiple different iterated games.

And so one of the things that happens if you're face-to-face with people as opposed to virtual is that when you're face-to-face with them, this is probably the key importance of the issue of hospitality, which is very much stressed, for example, in—well, it's stressed in the Old Testament, but it's stressed in traditional communities—that if you're actually in an embodied space with people, you can play multiple games with them: games of humor, games of food exchange, games of music, dance, celebration. And so you can test out their capacity for reciprocity in multiple situations.

And so then if there's a signal error, you can mitigate against it because you know that you've tested the person out in all sorts of different circumstances. But when you virtualize things, it's very narrow. The channel is now very narrow.

Yeah, and so I'm very concerned about a lot of virtualization too because the other thing I think the virtualization is doing is enabling the psychopaths because you can do a lot of one-off exchanges online with no reputation tracking, and that seems to me that that enables the people who use—what did you call that in your book? There's a particular kind of strategy?

Well, it's the stab you in the back strategy essentially, and if you can't track people's reputations across time, then you enable the people who are essentially the psychopathic manipulators. And there's actually an emergent literature on online trolling and dark tetrad traits, so I'm afraid we're enabling the psychopaths with the virtualization of the world, and that's a terrifying possibility because they can take everybody out.

So yeah, so now you were talking about modifications of tit-for-tat. Well, you bring up sort of the artificial and the dangers there. Okay, somebody suddenly from out of nowhere stabs you in the back. Is this for real, or is this a signal error? And one way of like getting out the other end of it is a vertical one. Have you just had a gazillion rounds in common with that person and things have gone okay? Have you built with them out of this game?

But what you outline is instead the horizontal one. Okay, I haven't had a gazillion rounds of this game with them, but we're also break bread together, and we also did this together, and we also have our cultural share instead of lateral examples of iterated games that you could build trust on. That's another way of solving it, and the virtual world collapses both of those.

So what you wind up seeing, when as soon as you put in a signal error, it could collapse the entire system. So people then had to figure out how to evolve protection against signal errors as soon as that's possible in your game theory universe. And what you have to bring in is this radical, like upending notion of forgiveness.

Should it be like forgiveness? Automatically turning the other cheek? Absolutely not. It should be based on your prior history and all these algorithms of the more rounds in the game you've gone in the past with cooperation, without the person doing something jerky. The faster you were willing to forgive them for what seems to have been a betrayal on their part and possibly a signal error instead and building up of trust, building up of social capital.

And of course, what that opens you up to is exactly what you bring up, which is a good sociopath knows exactly how many inches they need to push it and still get under this umbrella of well, that's a little bit worrisome, but forgivable. Forgivable at that point when you have a reciprocal system that's a wolf in sheep's clothing, a sociopath can exploit it like mad.

But at least that was the way of protecting yourself against that to some extent. Build in, you know, a shared culture might actually be the abstracted equivalent of a multi-situational—as in an abstracted multi-situational game. Because like, if I live in your neighborhood, let's say, and I don't know who you are, but I know you live in my neighborhood and nothing has happened that's untoward in the 10 years that we've been living near each other, then I can reasonably presume that you're pretty much like all the other people in my neighborhood, including the people I know,

because if you weren't, you would have caused trouble. And so you know, you also talk in your book about the fact that we have a proclivity to demonize the foreign, let's say, right? To fail to differentiate the foreign into the individual, which is a better way of thinking about it. But one of the ways that we probably circumvent that with regards to shared culture is that we presume that people who are like us—which means they share our culture—are playing the same game as us.

And because nothing has gone wrong when they've been in the vicinity, we can assume that they're individuals rather than the dragon of chaos itself, let's say. We can extend to them the a priori luxury of being individuated instead of being treated like the barbarian mob, right? And so that's not prejudiced precisely, it's just the extension of the inclusion of a game into everybody who shares our culture.

And it would make sense that thing—the thing is, the less someone is part of your culture, let's say, the less abstracted evidence you have that they're direct participants in a reciprocal game rather than stab-you-in-the-back psychopaths—which they could be, right? Because that's about 3% of the population, and maybe higher under some circumstances.

So you also talk in your book about something very interesting, which is something that's really puzzled me, is I've not been able to figure out how honest cultures get a toehold, right? Because as you point out, first of all, there's some evidence that the default response of very immature individuals, two-year-olds, let's say, isn't cooperative. Two-year-olds are not cooperative. They are in some very bounded circumstances, but they can't play shared games very well. That doesn't mature until the age of three.

And so it's sort of a Hobbesian landscape among two-year-olds. I know there are exceptions to that. But then as the brain matures, then the capacity for shared game starts to emerge, right? But the fundamental question is—and you do point to this in "Behave"—is well, if you have a whole society of cheaters and backstabbers, which is maybe the default Hobbesian situation, how the hell do you ever get a cooperative landscape started, much less a landscape where the default response between strangers is honest and trusting?

Now you point out a little bit—I think maybe what you were pointing to in "Behave" is the initiation of low-risk trading games. Like, I read about this jungle tribe, I think it was in South America, and they initiated trade with a foreign tribe on their border in the following manner. They knew where the territorial boundaries were, just like wolves know, just like chimpanzees know. You know, there's a rough fringe and boundary that's sort of no man's land. They used to go there and leave some of their arts and crafts or their tools; they just leave them on the ground, and then they'd retreat, knowing that the other people were watching them.

And then the other people would go and grab some of these cool things, and then the other people, being not completely dim, would leave some of their trinkets and tools lying on the ground. And that's, you know, kind of low-cost. They weren't going to leave their most treasured possession to begin with. They leave something that's sort of interesting, but they... yeah, exactly that, exactly that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but what's cool is that that requires—and you pointed this out—that requires that initial movement of faith, right? You have to presume the possibility of humanity on the other side. Then you have to take a sacrificial risk, and it can be small, you know, not a stupid sacrificial risk but a reasonable one, and that can get the ball rolling in an upward, soaring cooperative direction.

That's kind of what kids do, by the way, when they come together to start to initiate play when they're about three years old. They'll play a real simple game to begin with, you know, one that you could maybe play with a one-year-old, and then they ratchet up the complexity of the game, right, to the level where it’s, uh—what would you call it?—maximizing their adaptive progress. And if they find a kid that they can do that with, then that kid becomes a friend, and that friend is reciprocally iterative interactions.

So the great—and you've honed in on the central question, which is in a world in which there's nothing but backstabbers, how do you jumpstart it? Because if somebody suddenly stands up and like recites the Sermon from the Mount and says, "I am going to start cooperation," everybody else is going to say, "You know, what a schmo," and stab him in the back after that, and he will forever be one step behind.

How do you jumpstart it? One of the ways that you point out is the like tiny, tiny incremental upping of the investment and the chance you're taking. Another one, like evolutionary biology, people love this—founder populations. Founder populations. This is an old population ecology term. A land bridge disappears, something where you get a population that gets isolated. They get cut off from the main population, and what happens over time? They get kind of inbred, and thus you get a lot of like cooperative stuff built around all being relatives and such and they establish a high degree of cooperation.

And then I don't know, whatever, the land bridge comes back, they go back and they join the general population, and at that point, they are this cohort of cooperators who have figured out how to do reciprocity, how to do trust, how to do all that stuff, which means they're a cluster of optimized tit-for-tatters, meaning they're going to outcompete everybody else until everybody else signs up on now becoming the good guys.

Okay, so let me ask you about that. Here, so I got a proposition for you. This is relevant to your speculations on the religious front, and I want to bring Sam Harris into this too. So I was reading, for example, I was reading the Book of Abraham because I'm writing a book on biblical stories, and God promises Abraham that if he abides by the central covenant, that his descendants will outnumber everyone else's descendants.

And I have a sneaking suspicion that that's a narrativization—that's a terrible word—it's a translation into story of the tit-for-tat reciprocal altruistic motif, which is that if you abide by this higher order sacrificial principle, and I'll return to that sacrifice idea, if you abide by this higher order sacrificial principle, all things considered across the longest possible span of time, your descendants will outcompete all other descendants.

And one of the things that's very cool about that story—so when God reveals this truth to Abraham, who's decided to act in a proper sacrificial manner, right? He's sacrificing the present to the future in the optimized manner. Then God says, "Look, don't be thinking that this is going to be straightforward because your descendants are actually going to struggle for a number of generations, but if you can hold out for the long run, and it’s four generations in this particular story, then you can be certain that the pattern of adaptation that you've chosen is going to work well for you but also very, very well for your descendants."

And so, you know, I know that Sam Harris, who's very concerned about the problem of evil, has been trying to ground a transcendent morality in objective fact, and I think I can admire Sam's motivation and his concern with great evils, like the evils of the Holocaust, for example. I think his attempt to ground morality in objective fact is misdirected partly because I think a much more fruitful place for an endeavor like that is actually in game theory, because there is something there, right?

I mean what we're basically pointing out is that the structure of iterated interactions—there is a structure of iterated interactions, right? There's an emergent reality. And as you said, you could model that with tit-for-tat competitions in a computer landscape, and that turns out to be ecologically generalizable. So there's actually an underlying ethos in iterated interactions.

Now, you can imagine that as the human imagination observed interactions over vast stretches of time, it started to aggregate imaginative representations of that ethos and to extract it upward. And it seems to me that that would dovetail with the maturation and domination of the prefrontal cortex because what's starting to happen is that you're using long-term strategies to govern short-term exigencies, and that's a very difficult thing to do because, of course, the short term sometimes screeches and yells extraordinarily loudly.

But part of what the religious enterprise seems to be doing, as far as I can tell, is mapping this pattern of sacrifice of the present to the future and making the proposition that that is the all-things-considered optimal adaptive strategy. So I don't know what you think about those sorts of suppositions.

I think that's perfect. I mean when you look at like dopamine, its role in gratification postponement, and dopamine is anticipatory—all of that—this is the whole literature built around lab rats and lab monkeys. And wow, it works just like in us in terms of being able to sustain behavior in anticipation of reward. Isn't that amazing? Just like us. But we do it for an entire lifetime in anticipation of the afterlife.

That's on a scale that's very, very human. It has always struck me, like, I could not possibly be on thinner ice getting into comparative religion stuff here. But it has always struck me that the sort of Abraham and the covenant and the people of the sick with us and it's going to be great. You've got this dichotomy between religions where something amazing has happened and it's so amazing that you just have to join, and everything is about recruitment.

And then you have the religions that are about retention because the reward is going to be amazing if you stick it out with us. And like traditional nomadic pastoralist religions is about retention because you've got a big problem because you're wandering all over the back of beyond because you're nomadic and passing all these other tribes, and maybe the grass seems greener with them. So maybe it's a good time to decide to sort of switch over to those folks.

There stick with us, stick with us because it's going to be amazing when the Lord finally comes through with all his promises. That's like an ecological adaptation to nomadic pastoralism, which is where the Old Testament came from. And what you also get from that is—and we're going to throw in something extra—so you can't decide to slip away at night and become like a Canaanite or something. We're going to mark you in a very fundamental way that you could never pass yourself off as one of them.

We're going to invent circumcision so you can't fake them out on that either. You better stick this retention, retention, and there's a great reward coming. And everything about the New Testament is something phenomenal happened. There's really good news, and isn't this so cool that you want to join us?

And I think the whole like developing a frontal cortex for it's going to come, it's going to come if you hold your breath.

Yeah, yeah. Why is much more a product of religions of retention rather than religions of recruitment?

Yeah, well, that bridge that you're drawing between the long view and dopaminergic function is extremely interesting. I want to go back to that part in your book because you're pointing out that the dopaminergic system doesn't just signal reward; it signals the presence of what would you say? It signals that your theory that reward is likely to occur under these conditions is correct, right?

So it's reinforcing. What it's doing is actually reinforcing the potency and integrity of a predictive system that's actually predicting positively, and you would want that reinforced. I'm curious about this issue of sacrifice in relationship to cortical maturation because one of the things—this is like a definition of maturity, you might say—is that the more sure you are, the more you are able to forgo comparatively immediate gratification for probably larger but deferred gratification, right?

So you start to tilt in the direction of the future rather than the present. Okay, so in the story of Cain and Abel, for example, so Cain and Abel are the first two human beings, right? Really because Adam and Eve are made by God, so forget about them. Cain and Abel are the first actual human beings. That's when work is invented, right? Because sacrifice and work are the same thing. When you work, you're not doing what you want to in the moment. When you work, what you're doing is not doing what you want to in the moment so that the future will be better or so that your family can thrive, right?

It’s deferred and social, it's deferred and communal. It's like the definition of work. And then the idea is that if you work properly—whatever that means—and that's what Abel does, then your sacrifices are going to be rewarded by God, whereas if you hold back and take the psychopath route and pretend, then you're going to be deeply punished. But the fundamental issue there, and this is the question that I have for you, is that it seems to me that there's a very tight relationship between the insistence that sacrifice is necessary and maturation and the emergence of the prefrontal cortex as a deferred, as a predictor of deferred future reward out of the landscape established by, say, the limbic system that's much more concerned with immediate gratification.

So it's sacrifice compared to immediate gratification, and then there's a discussion of what constitutes proper sacrifice. Exactly. And that's where, like you, you study dopamine neurochemistry and this receptor subtype of the dopamine receptor and blah blah, all of that.

And when you really look at the system, what you have to come away with is we humans have the exact same neurochemical system as every animal out there, and we have a totally unrecognizably different one because we mobilize the same damn molecule and the same like mesolimbic cortical pathways. And we do it so that our great grandkids will have a better planet, and we do it for an afterlife.

Like, we do it on a—well, do you think there's any difference between that and the idea of an afterlife? Like, I mean, if I'm thinking six generations into the future, why wouldn't that be represented symbolically as something like an afterlife? Because it is an afterlife; I'm dead. And if I'm trying to conduct my behavior in a manner that's so moral that it's actually echoing properly a thousand years into the future, I don't really see any difference between that practically speaking in my conception that my behavior should be governed by something like infinite regard for the potential future.

I mean it's tricky, right? Because you have to discount the future to some degree to survive, but all things considered, you're still trying to set up a situation where your behavior in the present maximizes the utility of your behavior across all possible iterations out into the future. And as soon as you allow for the possibility of like your footprints lasting longer than your lifespan, this is a whole new ball game, either in the form of there's an afterlife or in the form of I want to leave a planet for my great great grandchildren that's going to be a more peaceful, wonderful one.

Or even in the form of like every time you sit at, like, a typical funeral where everybody's going through the usual eulogies of like distortedly amplifying the good traits of someone and ignoring the bad, what's going through your head is, how do I want to be remembered? Whoa! That's a whole other world of like what you're doing now. The footprints you leave after you are going to matter.

And like all the versions, we have—we would like to think the students we train, we would like to think people 300 years from now would think we composed the most amazing, like, Mass in B minor, and that's satisfying. Yeah, we've invented a whole weird world of being able to have anticipatory motivation built around stuff that's going to last longer than us.

And in some ways, you could be like a Paul Ehrlich and think about what's going to happen to the planet in the century from populations, or you could think about the afterlife, but any of these are like radically human domains. That's that extension of knowledge—of knowledge out indefinitely into the future, right? Which is something that seems to characterize human beings and that might also be a consequence of cortical expansion, right? The discovery of that infinite future.

Yeah, yeah. And so, okay, so let me ask you a question. Let me ask you a question about that too. Yes, I'm not exactly clear. I've spent a fair bit of time studying the dopaminergic system and its relationship to reward and reinforcement, but I wasn't as clear as I would like to be about the role of dopamine in anticipation of future reward. And I, like I said, I read that in your book and I started to understand it, but I don't completely understand it.

And so now dopamine will signal if you lay out a structure of behavior and that structure of behavior produces the desired outcome, you get a dopamine kick that feels good, which is sort of the generalized element. But the dopamine also preferentially encourages the neural structures that were active in the sequencing of that behavior to grow and flourish. And that's the distinction between reward and reinforcement. But you talk about anticipation, and I know I'm missing something there. So will you walk me through in a little bit more detail how the dopamine system works in relationships specifically to anticipation of the future rather than just responding, say, to successful behavior?

So, you know, unpacking this a bit: exactly what you were referring to. Like take a rat, take a monkey, take a college freshman in Psych 101, whatever, and give them a totally unexpected reward from out of nowhere, and you can show that there's activation of dopaminergic reward pathways in the limbic system. And you can do that with functional imaging; you could do that with something invasive with your lab animal, whatever.

Okay, dopamine's about reward. It's completely about reward. Give somebody cocaine and they will release more dopamine than any vertebrate in all of history has ever been able to do. And yeah, it's about reward until you then get a little bit more subtle with your paradigm. And now you take that, you know human, rat, monkey, and put them in a setting where you've trained them in a contingency. A little light comes on, which means now if they go over to this lever and hit the lever 10 times, they'll then get a reward signal.

Work, reward, signal, work, reward. And as soon as they've learned it, when does dopamine go up? And what we think we just learned in the first example is when you get the reward—not at all! It goes up when the signal turns on because that's you sitting there saying, "I know how this works. I know how that light means. I'm on top of this. I know that lever pressing. I'm really good at it. I'm in familiar territory!"

Exactly! And I have agency, and this is going to be great! It's about the anticipation. So why have agency? Why use that phrase? Because that's very interesting, right? Because agency implies that—well, it implies now that you're master of the situation, right?

Is that, you said you're on top of it. So is it the signaling that you're in it? It's got to be something like the signaling in a domain—the signaling that you're now in a domain where your behavioral competences are matched to the environmental demands, right? And that would be on being—that's like being on sacred ground in a very, very fundamental sense, right? Because you know what to do there, and it seems logical.

And then you see this gigantic piece of vulnerability and illogic in the system, okay? So the light comes on, dopamine goes up. It's about anticipation, really significantly. If you block the dopamine rise, you don't get the lever pressing. It's not just about anticipation; it's about the work you're willing to do, driven by the anticipation. So that's motivation, that's goal-directed behavior, all of that.

Now you throw in this extra wrinkle. Like, well, we've been talking about our circumstances. The light comes on. You do the work. You get the reward. You do the work. You get the reward—100% predictability, and you have a complete sense of mastery and agency over it. Now, the grad student switches things to—you do the work, you press the lever, you do the work on that, and you get the reward only 50% of the time.

It's not guaranteed. And beautiful work this I think, Wolf from Schultz at Cambridge, who like pioneered all of this, showing at that point as soon as the buzzer, the light comes on signaling it's one of those circumstances again, you get a much bigger rise of dopamine than you got before. Why?

Now let me ask you about—okay, so let me ask you about that. So what that seems to indicate to me is that you've now entered an environment where that's quasi-predictable, but now there's novelty, and the advantage to having the dopamine signal kick in when novelty makes itself manifest is that it signals that there's also more to be learned here through exploration that might signal extreme future reward if you can just map the territory properly, right?

Because it's good to have a good thing, but it's even better to have a potentially better thing, and novelty does contain—does that— is that what's happening?

That's exactly it. The most proximal thing that's going on in your head when suddenly dopamine goes 10 times higher is you've just introduced this word into the neurochemistry: you've introduced the word, "maybe." And right, maybe is intermittent reinforcement, you know—that's incredible.

Yeah, yeah! And what's always between the lines with maybe is exactly what you're outlining. If I keep pressing the lever, I'm going to figure out what the maybe is about and be able to turn—I’m going to master this. I'll be the new master of a new territory then, exactly. And the longer they can dangle the maybe in front of you, and the more they can manipulate you into thinking that what feels like a 50% chance of getting reward, in reality, it's on tenth of a thousandth percent chance, but they understand your psyche sufficiently.

So that's intermittent partial reinforcement, and that's why it grips you because it falsely signals it, right? It falsely signals novelty, treasure, and you can manipulate that. Now, you pointed out something extremely dangerous in your book, right? Because I’d thought about this in terms of building the ultimately addictive slot machine.

You showed that if you're playing a slot machine and the tumblers line up, almost line up two out of three or four out of five, then you're much more likely to get a dopamine kick. So you could imagine a digital slot machine where you have multiple tumblers, where you code it to the player so that the machine knows that it's the same player playing, and that the proportion of almost lined-up tumblers increases with gameplay.

So then you'd have intermittent partial reinforcement combined with a novelty indicator that indicated that you were obtaining a false mastery over the damn game. God! You'd have old people glued to that nonstop because as soon as you switch from just going with maybe— incredibly powerful though that is—you switch over to almost, yeah right, do that like asymptotically and people will press lever press till like they die of starvation at their slot machine in Las Vegas, right?

Comes over and feeds them for free. Yeah, right. Not okay. And so, so as far as you're concerned, so that's so cool. So imagine that! So I was thinking in mythological terms too because so there's a hero element that's emerging there because the hero in mythology is the person who goes into unknown territory and masters it.

Right. And the hero is a broad symbol character because the hero isn't just the person who goes into unknown territory, masters it but also gains what's there and then distributes it reciprocally. That's the whole hero mythology essentially. And so your point is that the dopamine system kicks in in part as a consequence of predictability so that shows that you know what you're doing when you're in a place that's going to give you rewards.

So you're in a garden that's fruitful, but it's even better if there's an intermittent element of the reinforcement because it shows you that there's fruit there that you have left to discover. And if you go down that pathway, you're going to be hyper-motivated to go down that pathway. So you want to be in a garden where there's fruit, but where the possibility of more fruit also lurks, and where that possibility is dependent on the morality and what would you call it? The daring of your actions.

Now, I would say that that pattern, if someone—if a female is observing that pattern of interaction in a male, that male is going to be maximally reproductively attractive.

Well, I think that probably depends on what species we're talking about, just to become as—oh, sorry, meant people. I meant human beings. Okay, so just to be a pain—and now come back and say, well, I think that probably also depends on the culture. But yes, and that is heroism. I mean the path of the hero is they have setbacks. You press the lever 10 times and you don't get the food pellet. And what the dopamine system is about is then saying, I'm going to press the lever twice as much, 10 times as much more fervently.

I'm going to cross my toes, I'm going to wear my lucky socks and underwear, I'm going to CH—you know, ritualistic whatever of orthodoxy, because I'm willing to come back and try even harder. And then you surmount your setback. And that's your path of the hero. And you know, that's what dopamine is doing there. That's why you don't give up at the first setback.

And that's why ultimately getting a reward predictably every single time you press the lever gets boring after a while, and gets—yeah, well, it shows you that there's nothing left to discover. It's that... so that's interesting, interesting.

Because imagine if the optimal garden is one that's fruitful but where the possibility of more future fruit also lurks, then when it's reduced to merely being fruitful, there's an element of it that's dull, right? Because there's no more future poss... there is predictability and that's fine; it's better than privation, but it's not as good as an infinite landscape of future possibility.

Right, right, so... you know, Dusky, oh, so go ahead. If in addition not only do sticking it out get you more mastery and eventually almost becomes definite and all that, but if also you're set up so that your sense of self becomes more solidified. Because you're sticking with it, because you're... your metaphorical ability to look at yourself in the mirror and all—if that's an added layer of what you've been like acculturated into—whoa, that's... yeah.

Yeah, you bet that! So there's an analogy there. There's an analogy there with what you might describe as the admirability of fair play. So imagine that you have a son who's playing a hockey game or a soccer game, and he's like—he's the star, but then when he scores a goal, he celebrates a little too narcissistically, and he hogs the ball on the field. Right?

And then if his fellow players make a mistake, he gets pissed off and has a little tantrum, and you take him off the field and you say, "Look, kid, you know, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose; it matters how you play the game." And he says, "What the hell do you mean? I'm clearly the best player on the team! If people send me the ball, I score! We win! I'm not passing the ball to these losers because then we lose! What the hell are you talking about, Dad?"

And you don't know what to say, but what you should say is, "Look, kid, the reason it doesn't matter whether you win or lose but how you play the game is because life is a sequence of never-ending multiple games. You're a winner if people want to play with you. And if you're a little prick when you win any given game, and if you whine and complain because you've lost, even if you're an expert at that game, no one's going to want to play with you, and you're a loser."

Right? And that's—the idea is that I think it's analogous in a very profound sense to that prefrontal maturation that puts the future above the present, but I also think it's analogous in a deep way to the pattern of behavior that we talked about, and I don't know exactly why this is, but I know it's there somewhere—that's characterized by this wanting to be in the place where future reward beckons, as well as present reward.

You know those things are going to stack; they have to stack on top of each other, right? Because otherwise, there's going to be an intrinsic contradiction in the ethic, so there has to be an accord between that fair play ethos and that exploratory ethos. Maybe that is in play, right? If you're a good player, and you're out there on the field, you're not just trying to score the goal, you're also trying to play with various ways of scoring the goal—you’re playing with your teammates.

And so maybe it's in that play that you optimize exploration plus reward-seeking at the same time, and you do that communally. And maybe that's signaled by the system of—you know, Jack P.P.—the other thing he did that's so damn cool is PEP outlined the neural circuitry of play. He was the first scientist to do that, to show that there's actually a separate circuit in mammals for play, and so, and it's not exploration, exactly, right? It's not exactly the same circuit that mediates exploration, but it's allied with it.

So I don't know how that fits into dopaminergic reinforcement, but I know that play is intrinsically reinforcing. Well, two threads from obviously completely different universes of showing the power of this—exactly the point you bring up, which is in multiple games and multiple players—in formal game theory, like you, you choose—you foster cooperation if there's third-party punishment if you can, right? For being a third-party punisher.

All these different layers—but one of the things that really, really chooses and selects for cooperation is if people have the option to opt out of playing with you. Yeah, that's freedom of association, man. That's why that's a fundamental freedom!

Exactly! And every mother is a good game theorist in that regard when she's saying, "If you do that, you won't have any friends!" Like that, that's incredibly—like that's one of the best lessons your dopamine system can get either from the game-theory end or from your mother, that the long-term goals look very different when you're simultaneously involved in, um, ten different games at once with very different time courses.

Well, that's also relevant to that bat story you told, because one of the things I've been thinking about too, so there's a gospel phrase that says that you should store up your treasure in heaven and not where rust and moths and so forth can corrupt it on earth. And so—and here's what it means, as far as I can tell, and I want you to tell me what you think about this in light of our conversation.

So the bat that has the pouch full of blood has that blood right then and there, and that's a form of treasure. Now the problem with that blood is that it's a finite resource, and hunting—which is what the bats are doing—is sporadically successful. So even if you're a great hunter—and this is true with hunter-gatherer tribes for human beings— even if you're the best hunter, you're going to fail a fair bit of time when you're out, especially if you're on your own.

Hunting is collective, and your success is erratic. So even if you're a great hunter, then you might say, "Well, what would make you the best of all possible hunters, as far as your family was concerned?" And that wouldn't be your skill at hunting; it would be your skill at distributing the fruits of your hunting among the other hunters so they're so goddamn thrilled with what a wonderful guy you are that every time they hunt you get some food for your family.

And so what you do is you store your treasure in your reputation, and your reputation is actually the open book record of your reciprocal interactions across hunts, right? So, you know, go ahead, open book—that's a small community. If you're the one who hangs back and pretends to have to tie your shoes, right, at the scariest part of the mammoth hunt, they're going to know about it.

People are going to be talking about it over the far-open book. And like the agricultural transition, human industrial one of the biggest consequences is you can have anonymous interactions; you lose all the open book conforming and forcing of reciprocity because anonymous you can get away with it. But in like a setting like that, that's absolutely the constraining thing.

And you know what's the term? The best among hunter-gatherers—the insurance is somebody else having a full stomach!

Yeah, right, precisely! Precisely! Well then, you use—well, so then you use other people's bodies as your bank of future food. But even more abstractly, it isn't even their bodies; it's their mental representation of you as a reciprocal player.

And so if that's associated with—imagine that's— that's a reputation. So that's actually rep associated with your ethos, and with the tracking of that ethos. And if that ethos is something like, "generous long-term-oriented sacrificial player of multiple reciprocal games," then all of a sudden, you're protected against the exigencies of fate, because even if there's local failure in the food supply, people are so thrilled about your generous reciprocity that you're going to be provisioned even under the worst of all possible circumstances.

So, you know, those economic exchange games where you identify two people—you say, "Look, you're going to give this person a sum of $100, but they can reject the offer if they don't believe it's fair." You play those cross-culturally, and the typical offer is $50, right? It's about 50/50.

But you know, I've wondered too if the best offer isn't 60, especially if you're doing it in front of a crowd, because if you imagine you—where and the best graduate supervisors do this, by the way, if you air continuously slightly on the side of generosity, then my suspicions are is the accrued long-term reciprocal rewards of that would pay off better than just a 50/50 arrangement, right? And you could maybe see that with your...

Yeah, yeah, exactly that. Well, I think you see that with your wife too, right? Is maybe you want to treat the people around you slightly better on average than they treat you, because that way you're making the whole pie expand.

And including your own reputation—then you get some interesting cultural stuff comes in because they've done all sorts of cross-cultural studies of like ultimatum game play and all of that and see tremendous cultural differences in whether it's 50/50, 51/49, 90/10.

Then you see there's a handful of cultures out there where you get punishment of generosity. Somebody makes this viewed as an overly generous offer, and you punish them for it. Oh my God, what is that about? And that's this like pathological sort of retribution sort of thing. You're punishing them because if they get away with being generous like that, people are going to start expecting you to do this!

Yeah, yeah, I see that in families that are pathological all the time. If someone makes a positive gesture, they'll get punished to death because of what that implies for the potential future behavior of all the other miscreants. And what are those cultures like? Some of the ones where, like God help you, if you wind up being part of one of those ex-Eastern Bloc countries, have the highest rates of this paradoxical punishment for generosity.

Oh, this guy's just G to make us look good, and then everybody's, whoa, that is a troubled society. Well, that's a vision of hell, that's for sure, where you're punished for—that's what Nietzsche said about punishment. It's such a brilliant line; he said, and it was, "Look, if you're punished for breaking a rule, there's actually a form of relief in that." Because when you're punished for breaking a rule, that validates the entire rule system, and that's what used to predict the world.

So there's a relief in being justly punished. So what Nietzsche pointed out was if you really want to punish someone, you wait till they do something virtuous and then punish them for that, right? And that's a good definition of hell. Hell is the place where people are punished for doing what's truly virtuous.

Yeah, and you, like you said, you don't want to be in a society like that. That's as maybe that's not as bad as it gets, because things can get pretty bad, but it's pretty bad.

Well that's, that's a pretty good predictor of societies with incredible rates of child bullying and spousal abuse and substance abuse and social capital that's gone down the drain, and that's what those cultures are like.

Um, yeah, that's a pretty bad world in which generosity is explicitly and enthusiastically punished by the like crowd of Yahoo Peasants who have to, like, Fork at that point.

You know, one of the things that I've talked to my clinical clients about and my family members too, and a little bit more broadly lecturing maybe, it has to do with this initiation of an expanding and abundant tit-for-tat reciprocity, is that like if you're really alert in your local environment, you can see people around you playing with the edge of additional generosity.

So they'll—people will make these little offerings, and that's a good way of thinking about it, where they just go out of their way a little bit in a sort of secretive manner. You know, they'll sort of sneak it. It's like a, it's like a student who writes you an essay and dares to sneak in one original thought just to see what the hell happens, you know?

But if you jump on that and you notice and you reward people for staying on that edge where they're being a little more generous and productive than they usually are, you can encourage people around you to get to be just doing that like mad. And they like you a lot for it too because actually people are extremely happy when they're noticed for doing something that puts them on the edge of that generous expansiveness and then rewarded for it.

So even if you're in a society that punishes that, you can actually act as an individual to differentially reward it. That's what a good mentor does, and it's always a cost-benefit analysis of how much am I willing to incrementally risk to start arousing things even further.

That’s exactly it. One of the most like fascinating wrinkles in it in terms of like accounting for like the world's miseries and stuff is when you think about like dopamine—what are the things we anticipate? Well, if you're a baboon—and I spent like 33 years of my life studying baboons in the wild during summers—if you're a baboon, your world of pleasures and anticipation are pretty narrow.

Like you get something to eat that you want, you get to mate with someone that you want, or you're in a bad mood and there's somebody smaller and weaker who you could like take out on with impunity. Like that's basically the realm of pleasures for a baboon. And then you get to us, and we have all that, but we also have like liking sonnets and we also have taking cocaine and we also have solving Fermat's Last Theorem and we also have, you know, we've got this ridiculously wide range of pleasures.

Like we can—we're the species that could both secrete dopamine in response to cocaine or winning the lottery or multiple orgasms and also secrete dopamine in response to smelling the first great flower in spring. And it's the same dopamine neurons in all those cases. And what that means is we have to have a dopamine system that can reset incredibly quickly because some of the time, going from zero to 10 on the dial is you've just gone from no nice flower smell to nice flower smell, and some of the time going from zero to 10 is you've just conquered your enemies and gone over the Alps with your elephants or something, and this is fabulous.

We have to constantly being able to reset the gain on our dopamine. Well, you point to something else there that's really cool too, is that so now, you could imagine a garden that has fruit in it, and then you could imagine a garden that could even have more fruit in it. But then you could imagine refining your taste so that you can now learn to take pleasure in things that wouldn't have given you pleasure before. That's what artists do, is they offer people a differentiated taste.

So, you know, if you think of a landscape painting, it's like there are certain visual scenes now that we regard as canonically beautiful, but it's virtually certain—I mean, I know there's an evolutionary basis to that to some degree, but it's virtually certain that our taste for beauty is at least in part informed by the brilliant geniuses of the past who were able to differentiate the world more and more carefully and say, "Look, here's an act, here's actually a new source of reward."

Right? People do that when they invent a new musical genre or a new form of dance, right? So not only can we multiply the rewards indefinitely if we're pursuing the proper pathway, but we can differentiate the landscape of potential rewards, I would say, virtually indefinitely. Now that would be part of that prefrontal flexibility that can modify our underlying limbic responses too, even though we're, you know, running down the same dopaminergic trackways, let's say, that the poor baboons run down, which is totally cool and so human and all but has like this massive tragic implication, which is the only way you could use the same dopamine neurons and same dopamine range from zero to maxing out for like both H and like Lottery is the system resets.

It's got to keep resetting. And what that means is it constantly resets, it constantly habituates. And what that means is, like, the most tragic thing about the human predicament—whatever was a great unexpected reward yesterday is going to feel like what you're entitled to today and is going to feel insufficient tomorrow.

So Dobie, in "Notes from Underground," he wrote one of the world's most compelling critiques of what would you call it? Satiating utopianism. So Dobie said essentially, if you gave people everything they wanted, nothing to do but eat cakes, lie around in pools of warm water, and busy themselves with the continuation of the species, so sort of ideal baboon life—that people would purposefully eventually purposefully rise up and just smash all that to hell just so something interesting would happen, because that's the sort of crazy creatures we are.

But you know, you said that's a tragedy, and you can understand that, right? Because it means that today's satiation is tomorrow's unhappiness. But by the same token, it's also the enabling precondition for the impetus to discover new landscapes of reward and new forms of reward, right? Because if you didn't habituate to what you already had, you'd—well, I think you'd fall into a kind of infantile satiation, and maybe you'd just fall asleep, right?

Because if you're completely—this is the difference between satiation and incentive reward. If you're satiated, then you just fall asleep. Consciousness isn't for satiation. Consciousness is for expansion, something like expansive exploration. If we didn't habituate to reward, we would just satiate, and then we wouldn't need to be conscious. It's something like that.

I mean, this is a huge like half-full, half-empty thing. We're the species that's always hungry because yesterday's excitement is not enough tomorrow, and that means it's never going to be enough. And we're the species that then invents technology and poetry and the m and wheels and fire and everything.

Yeah, like it’s this double-edge. Okay, so I'm going to go back to this Abrahamic story because it's very interesting in this regard, right? We talked about it already in relationship to the possibility of a particular ethos coming to dominate an evolutionary landscape, but something very interesting happens at the beginning of the Abrahamic story, and Abraham is the father of nations, so this is a good classic narrative example.

So Abraham is actually fully satiated at the beginning of that story because he's like 75 and he has rich parents and all he's done his whole life is like lay in the hammock and eat peeled grapes, and like he has everything! He has absolutely everything. And then this voice comes to him and says, "This isn't what you're built for; you should get the hell out there in the world," right?

And Abraham hearkens to that voice, so to speak. He leaves his satiated surroundings, and he goes out into the world, and actually what happens is quite catastrophic. It's certainly not—it’s not a simple comedy, the story, because he encounters war, war and famine, and the Egyptian tyranny, and the aristocrats conspire to steal his wife.

And he has to sac—he's called upon by God to sacrifice his only son. It's like it's quite the bloody catastrophe, but the idea in the story is that the path of maximal adventure is better than the path of infantile satiation.

And so you might say human beings are eternally dissatisfied. I mean, that's one way of looking at it, or you could say, well, there's an abstract form of meta satiation, let's put it that way. That's the same as being on—it's like a bloodhound being on the trail. It's the pleasure of the hunt; it's the pleasure of the adventure; it's the pleasure of that forward-seeking, right?

And I like to think about it like Copus, you know, except that what Copus is doing is pushing a sequence of ever-larger boulders up a sequence of ever-higher mountains. It's not the same—it’s, you know, it's this continual movement upward toward some unspecified positive goal. And then the ultimate satiation isn't the top of any of those mountains; it's the sequential journey across that sequence of peaks.

And I suspect that's what that dopamine system is actually signaling when it’s... that would make sense with regards to anticipation. It's the happiness of pursuit rather than the other way around. And that's incredibly addictive in that regard.

You know, you can't get rats in a normative social environment addicted to cocaine; you have to put them in—a—you have to isolate them in a cage. So one of the things that's also worth contemplating—and this is relevant to your last book and maybe your next one—is that because you're looking for a solution to something like the human propensity for violence, you know, you might say, well, if we're not on the true adventure of our life, which would be signaled by optimal dopaminergic function, let's say, then we're going to look for all sorts of false adventures.

And some of those false adventures are going to be addictive, and some of them are going to be downright pathological. You know, you talked about the baboons who take pleasure in pounding the hell out of this—the weak guy that's sitting beside them. It's like if you're not on the track with your nose to the ground optimizing the firing of those exploratory and playful dopaminergic circuits, you're going to be searching everywhere for a false adventure, and that can come in all sorts of pathological forms, and often, like, one of the falsest ones is getting what you were yearning for.

Yeah, right? In terms of that. Why do you say that? Why do you say that? Why did that come to mind? Because, like, "May you live in interesting times!" Right? But one of the greatest curses you can place on someone is to give them precisely what they've always thought they wanted.

And, yeah, things get a little more nuanced than that, and they're—I love Borb stories—his "The Immortal," where a traveler, journeyer going through these deserts and jungles and all of that searching for this mythic tribe of immortals. And he eventually finds them because they found this river that you drink from it and you're immortal.

And they've been immortal, and how cool is that? And they're perpetually on the move because what they're doing is they're now looking for the fabled river that will give them mortality. Immortality turned out to be a total drag, and they're going out of their way with how pointless this all is, so this is their new quest, because it turns out like what they wanted wasn't quite what they really wanted.

Well, you know, there's an old Jewish story about God—it's a cone, it's like a Zen cone, except it was the ancient Jews that came up with it. What does the God who is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent lack? And the answer is limitation.

Yeah. And so one of the corollaries of that is God—in a sense—twins is that the absolute lacks limitation. And so for there to be totality, the absolute has to be paired with limitation, and that's because limitation has advantages.

It's very paradoxical that limitation has advantages that totality lacks. And you can see that even in the creativity literature because the creativity literature shows quite clearly that creativity is enhanced by the placing of arbitrary limitations. Like, there's an archive online—this is very funny—there's an archive online devoted to nothing but the luncheon meet spam, and there's like 50,000 haikus written about spam.

I think of course MIT engineers set this up, because of course they would. But it's such a comical example because it shows you that paradoxically, when you impose limitations—and that might even include the limitations of mortality—that you produce a plethora of creative consequences emerging out of that.

And it isn't obvious—and this is what you were pointing to—it isn't obvious that if you transcended that absolutely that you would be better rather than worse off. I mean, it's a tricky question because we're always looking to be healthier and to live longer, and no wonder. But there is something to be said for limitation and the fact that you have to transcend that in an adventurous manner, right?

It gives you... maybe life is the game that a particularly daring God would