Q & A 2018 04 April

52m read

·Nov 7, 2024

Hello, so you've lined up a very large number of questions today. So a couple of things. First of all, I have a number of YouTube videos and podcasts lined up. One with Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now, one with Warren Farrell, who wrote a very interesting book called The Boy Crisis and also a previous book called White Men Earn More, one with an animator named Nina Paley, one with a young guy named Charlie Kirk, who has organized a large number of campus youth groups more on the conservative end of things and associated with free will. So all those will be coming out in the next month and a half I would say. And so thank you for your continued support; it makes all of this possible.

I'm also going on tour. I presume some of you know that. If you go to Jordan B Peterson.com and you look up events, you can see where it's about 40 cities listed so far, most of them are in the US and a couple in Europe, Iceland, the UK. But we're announcing—we're going to announce ten Canadian cities here in the next week as well. So that's all what's going to be happening with me in the next two months. I'll be on the road with my wife that whole time, sometimes in a plane, you know, just commercial travel, sometimes in a Motorhome depending on where we're going and how. So I'm looking forward to seeing you if you come out to the events. I've been enjoying them quite a bit. It's good to be able to talk to so many people.

So, Twelve Rules for Life has sold about a million copies now, so that's really quite something. I think we've sold foreign rights in 43 countries, so it'll come out in not quite that many languages but just about over the next year and something like that.

So, all right, so you, let's get at it here. Hopefully, I could warm up and get my brain going and answer some questions. The first one, 343 people have voted this one up: could you please discuss free will and Sam Harris's and others' ideas of its non-existence?

Well, that's a good complicated question to kick things off. So, I want to tell you a little bit about how to conceptualize free will I think first, because it's obvious that we don't have infinite free will. Our choices are constrained in all sorts of ways. I think part of the reason that there's a continual discussion about free will in the philosophical literature is because just conceptualizing the issue properly is extraordinarily difficult. So I like to think about it at least in part the way that you think about a game. You know, if you're playing a game, obviously the game has rules. So if it's a chess game or a basketball game, then there are things that you can do and things that you can't do. And so it's a closed world in some sense. But the fact that there are things you can't do when you play a game also seems to open up a universe of possibilities for things that you can do.

So chess obviously constrains you to a board and to a certain number of men and to a certain pattern of rules. But the strange thing is that when you put in those rules—because rules sound like limits; they sound always like things you can't do—but when you set up a constrained world like that and you lay out a system of rules, what you do is open up an infinity, or near infinity, of possibilities. Same with music, you know, music has rules obviously, and if you follow the rules, then you can make an infinite variety of music. And so there's a very interesting dynamic that's hard to understand between constraint and possibility.

There's a deep idea that's associated with that that I read in some Jewish commentary on the biblical stories that I read a long time ago, talking about the relationship between God and man. And the idea was: God, imagine a being with the classical attributes of God: omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful. What does a being like that lack? And obviously the answer is nothing, right? Because by definition those three traits provide for absence of limitation. But then that's exactly what's lacking is limitation. And there's some strange connection between limitation and—and I was saying, say, limitation—that it's rule-governed, as I mentioned before, and the opening up of possibility.

So that isn't necessarily the case that now determine determinism and limitation aren't exactly the same thing, but they're analogous and they need to be discussed together. Okay, so—though—so that's the first thing is that whatever our free choice is, it isn't limited. It's—or it's limited. It's deeply limited.

Now here's another thing. If I take my arm and I go like this, you see, I'll do that again—now you see there's a movement like that and then my hand stopped just before my other hand. Now it takes a certain amount of time for the neural messages to go from my brain to my arm and back, and the time it takes my hand to go like this and stop is actually shorter than the time it takes a message to get to my brain and back.

So what that means is that when I plan this movement—which is called a ballistic movement—it's called a ballistic movement because it's like a bullet. Once you let it go, it's gone; there's no calling it back. I've actually organized the neurological and muscular sequences that enable that action before it's implemented. I set all that up and then it's released, and the whole thing cascades. And so once the action has been released, let's say, then I don't really have any free will because I can't stop it now.

So you think about that—it looks like there's a temporal gradient with regards to free will—in that as you look out into the future, perhaps the farther out you look into the future, the farther down the road, let's say, the more free your choices are. But the closer they get to implementation, the more they become mystic governed by standard causal processes, and there's some transition point where they change from being what we would describe as choice.

We haven't got to free choice yet, but at least a choice. There's some transition point between that and ballistic movement. Here's another way of thinking about it: like we know, for example, that people who are expert at playing the piano look ahead of where they're playing. And they're doing the same thing; they're watching the notes; they're seeing where they're going. But—and then they're disinhibited—the automated structures that enable them to play what they've practiced so thoroughly, they're disinhibited those structures, and then they go automatically, and then what happens if you make a mistake is that consciousness notes the error and then unpacks the motor sequences that have been practiced and then you re-practice them and sequence them again until they become automatic and deterministic.

So there's choice in that; you're reading ahead. But there's no choice in that once you've read ahead and disinhibited the actions, then they run ballistically. And then you could think about the same thing that's happening when you're driving in a car. You don't look right in front of you when you're driving a car because whatever is right in front of you, if you're going 40 miles an hour or whatever, you've already run over. You look a quarter of a mile down the road, and that gives you the opportunity to see what's coming and to set up a sequence of increasingly automated movements that culminate in whatever it is that you're doing while you're driving.

And so there's a gradation from choice to determinism, a temporal gradation, and I don't often see that addressed when people talk about free will. Now, Sam's issue is free will is that if you get someone to do something like lift their finger, and you scan their brains using a variety of techniques while they're doing that, what you'll see is that there's an action potential that emerges, and you ask them to voluntarily move their finger, so they're doing it, let's say, by free choice. There's an action potential that you can read off the brain that occurs before the person either moves their finger or, let's say, decides to move their finger and that occurs quite a bit before the feeling of voluntary or that voluntary act.

And so that's been read by Benjamin Libet, who did the experiments, as an indication that even the feeling of voluntary choice is determined. But I don't think that that's a very useful way of addressing the issue because the issue of when you lift your finger is that it requires pre-programming to disinhibit. Like, you know how to do this, right? You don't have to learn to do that, so you have a little automated circuit that does this sort of thing—all these finger movements and everything. You can see babies practicing them, and they develop automated circuitry that tends to be posterior left hemisphere in order to run those automated processes out.

And what you're basically doing when you decide to do something that's a routine that you've already practiced or made out of subroutines that you've already practiced is disinhibiting them, and the degree to which you might regard that as free, exactly, is unclear as are the temporal limitations. So I don't think that Libet's experiments demonstrate conclusively that there's no such thing as free will, even though there are action potentials that indicate that there is brain activity signaling even the onset of a voluntary choice.

Another thing that we might look at in relationship to that is, yeah, so we can look at it phenomenologically, and we could also look at it in relationship to how people treat one another. So phenomenologically, it seems clear that we have free choice, and it isn't obvious to me why we have consciousness if free choice isn't real, because consciousness looks to me like a mechanism that deals with potential before it's transformed into actuality, let's say.

And I think consciousness is also the faculty, so to speak, or a manifestation of the faculty that enables us to pre-program deterministic actions. So again, let's think about someone playing the piano, they're practicing, you know, after you repeat, and you repeat your finger movements if you're playing the piano—any complex motor skill is like that—you have to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it, and you're using consciousness to program it, to sequence the motor movements and to pay attention to them. That all seems voluntary, and it involves the activation of a tremendous amount of your brain because if you're doing something new, a lot of your brain is activated.

And then as you practice it, the amount of brain that's activated decreases. It shifts from right to left, and then it shifts from frontal to posterior, and a smaller and smaller area. So what's happening is that consciousness is creating little machines in the back of your head that do things in an automated manner. And the voluntas' no Sapir feels that would be the phenomenological end as if it's doing that voluntarily, and it is associated with a different pattern of brain activity.

And so, okay, so there's that, there's the phenomenological reality of voluntary choice and effort as well, because conscious programming of that sort is also effortful; it doesn't seem to run deterministically like a clock does. And then finally, there's also—and I don't know what you think about this with regards to evidence, but what constitutes evidence is not always that easy to determine, even in the scientific domain.

So let's think about how we think about ourselves and other people and how we treat ourselves and other people. You could imagine that you're like a clock running down, and that's like a deterministic model. But people aren't clocks; we're dissipative structures. A clock is something that runs downhill, but human beings—you can look up dissipative structure. I think that was an idea that was first formulated by the physicist Schrödinger. We're not clocks by any stretch of the imagination, and we take energy in and we disperse energy, and we—we're anti-entropic in a temporary sense.

So that makes us—and life is as well. Schrödinger wrote about that in a book called What Is Life. And we don't concede with the present, and we're not driven by the past. Instead, what we see in front of us is a landscape of possibility. And in my wilder moments, I think that's associated with the physical idea of multiple universes, but that's in my wilder moments; it's just a speculation.

And so what we see in front of us is an array of potential universes. And those are the universes that we could bring about as a consequence of our actions. And we make choices to the right or the left. There's a lot of mythological speculation about that sort of idea—in an ethical sense, because we decide what sort of reality that we want to bring into being.

And so we encounter potential, like God did at the beginning of time when He made order out of chaos. Chaos is this chaotic potential; we confront chaotic potential with our consciousness, and we cast that into reality. And that, now then you think, well is that really the case? Well, that's hard to say, because there are limits to our knowledge about consciousness and about reality. But if you treat yourself like you're a free moral agent with choice and that you can determine the course of your life, then you seem to get along better with yourself and to be less anxious and to be more productive.

And if you treat other people like that—that they're free agents that are making voluntary choices about how reality is going to come into being, and you reward them when they do it properly and you punish them or otherwise discipline them when they don't, when they do it badly, then your relationships with them seem to work. And then if we predicate our society on the presupposition that each individual human being is capable of doing just that, then we seem to have extremely functional societies.

And this is something that Sam Harris has been taken to task for many times: if you dispense with the idea of free will, how is it you organize your relationship to yourself, your interactions with your family, and your relationships with the broader social community? It's a very complicated issue, so I believe strongly that we have free will.

That we're responsible for our choices—those choices are constrained in many, many ways. I think there's a gradient of free will, from free out into the future, to increasingly constrained as the present manifests itself, to deterministic in the moment of action. We might think that we entered the realm of deterministic causality at the moment of action—something like that; that's how it looks to me.

So, well, at this rate, we're gonna answer about five questions. So that was a very, very hard one. So anyways, I hope that's helpful. Maelstrom, who is apparently chaos given the name, asked me, "Am I chaos or am I order?" Well, that's a good question. I would say a lot of the time I'm chaos, but I do everything I can to put things in order.

But I'm going to answer that in a deeper way. I would say because first of all, everything and everyone is chaos and order at the same time. And I don't mean that in a trait sense—I mean it in a technical sense, which is order technically speaking, in my way of viewing the world, is that domain you inhabit when what you're doing produces the results that you want to have happen. That's a pragmatic perspective from a philosophical perspective.

It's derived at least in part or is analogous to the pragmatism of people like C.S. Peirce and William James—the American pragmatists—and there's a great book on all that, if you're interested, called The Metaphysical Club. So order is where you are when what you're doing is producing the results that you intended, and that validates what you're doing, by the way. That's a pragmatic form of truth—your theory is accurate when if you enact it, then the results that you intend emerge. That's the definition of truth from a pragmatic perspective; it's a very powerful definition, and it's very much associated with the Darwinian notion of truth.

So that's worth looking into. Now obviously, there are times when you implement a plan and a worldview that goes along with that plan, and what you wanted didn't happen, and so then the domain of chaos comes up, the domain of the unpredictable and unexpected, and you have to contend with it.

And sometimes, when you are acting, you do perverse things and things that surprise you, and then things don't work out well for you, or maybe you get a surprise, and maybe sometimes that might even be positive. And that's because the chaos within you has manifested itself, and you've done something that exceeds the bounds of your understanding. And you know that can happen to people so badly that they develop post-traumatic stress disorder.

Sometimes soldiers—especially naive young soldiers—will go on a battlefield and watch themselves do something they can't imagine they're capable of doing, and then they have permanent post-traumatic stress disorder. So there's a chaos within that can manifest itself, that can disrupt whatever order you are, and you know that in minor ways because everybody's always running around doing things that aren't good for them that they know they shouldn't do and that they can't control.

And so there's a chaotic and an orderly aspect to everything—to the individual, to the family, to the social world, to the natural world. It's chaos and order at every level of analysis simultaneously, which is why the Daoists think of the world as made out of yin and yang, which is essentially analogous to the idea of order and chaos.

And now, but then there's another element too, so your order and your chaos and the place that you live—the environment is order and chaos as well—but you're also the process that mediates between the two. And what that means is you're the force that confronts chaos and casts it into order.

We talked about that in the free will discussion. That's the basis for the dragon myth, or at least part of it: the hero myth. You're the force that confronts chaos and transforms it into habitable order. There's an idea that if you do that using truthful speech, it's probably the deepest idea in the Bible: if you confront chaos and the unknown using truthful speech, then the order that you produce is good.

So that also means that you're chaos and order and the process that intermediates between them. And that's really the basis of the hero myth, so part of that is the hero story and the dragon myth: go out, confront the dragon, get the gold, bring it back, share it with the community.

And the dragon is a representation of that which dwells beyond the confines of the safe and habitable space, right? It's an image of a predator; part of what it is, although it's way more complicated than that. And you're also of the force that confronts order when it becomes too tyrannical and restructures it back to chaos and then restructures the chaos back into more beneficial order, which is what you do, for example, if you have an argument with someone, that you settle, right? Because the argument takes the orderly relation that you have with that person and then produces a chaotic interlude, which is all the pain that's associated with the argument.

And that's a dissolution into what Murchie Aliotti called pre-cosmogonic chaos, and out of that, a new order can emerge. And so the best way to construe yourself is not as chaos or as order, but as the process that mediates between them. And that's the basis for the ethos of the West: is that the human being is best represented as the individual, and the individual is that attentive and communicative entity that is continually capable of mediating properly between chaos and order.

Now this is a deep idea. You could read Maps of Meaning if you would like. The audio version of that is coming out June 12th, by the way, and I will make a video detailing the relationship between Maps of Meaning and Twelve Rules of Life. But you can construe yourself—you should construe yourself as the process that mediates between chaos and order, and you should aim to be the process that does that properly using truthful communication, because that's how you keep the elements of existence properly balanced.

And you might say, "Yeah, but is that real?" Well, if you read Maps of Meaning, there's a section on neural psychology that's also buttressed by a book written by Ian McGilchrist called The Master and His Emissary that lays out the relationship between the right and left hemisphere.

Now it’s quite strange that we have a right and left hemisphere; it's almost as if we have two consciousnesses dwelling in our being, and they're quite separable if you cut the corpus callosum that unites the two. Then the two hemispheres will act independently to some degree; you can communicate with each of them somewhat independently. So they actually view the world quite differently, and that hemispheric distinction is not only in human beings but also in animals long way down the phylogenetic chain.

Now, I made the claim partly because I was reading a man named El Cajon and Goldberg, who was a student of Alexander Luria, the most brilliant neuropsychologist of the 20th century. Goldberg made the case that the left hemisphere is specialized for what's known, and the right hemisphere is specialized for response to what's unknown.

And that maps on to this order chaos dimension, right? And the right hemisphere now, McGilchrist in his book The Master and His Emissary, has pointed out quite clearly that the left hemisphere has a tyrannical tendency—which Ramachandran also viewed in his brain-damaged patients, by the way—and that the left hemisphere is always trying to impose its logical and restricted order on the world and to make the world fit into that.

Now, it has to do that; there's reasons for that. Part of the reason is that if your theory you've worked on for 10 years makes one prediction error, you shouldn't throw the whole damn thing out; you should doubt the prediction error, right? Because you never know when your data is actually data or is just another kind of theory; we can't get into that at the moment.

Now, McGilchrist makes a very strong case, and I think a more elaborated case than I made in Maps of Meaning, but it's the same argument fundamentally—that the right hemisphere is concerned with reaction to anomaly. And so what happens in some sense is something unexpected happens—that's the domain of chaos, and that stops you in your tracks; it freezes you. And that's a predator response or prey response, actually, you're frozen; the unknown has manifested itself; you're not in order anymore; you don't know where you are and you don't know what to do.

And so—and you can't just shut down like a computer does; you freeze instead, and then what happens is that the ancient mechanisms that have helped our ancestors for tens of millions of years, or longer than that, react to that which lurks beyond the confines of the unknown kick in. And you start, first of all, that's motoric; so you freeze, and then you cautiously start to explore.

And then it's imagistic; you start making imaginal representations, metaphoric representations, dramatic representations of what might constitute the unknown. And then those representations are practiced and implemented in the world, and they become more and more fine-grained and automatized. And as that happens, the locale that they're represented in the brain shifts from right to left.

So the reason I'm telling you all this is because, you know, this is where the metaphysical and the physical unite, and this is the sort of argument that I was trying to make to Sam Harris, and hopefully we'll be able to continue doing that because I'm going to meet him three times in the next few months.

So that the yin-yang idea, the chaos-order idea, is metaphorical in some sense to say that the world is made up of order and chaos doesn't sound like an empirical statement. But strangely enough, the world to which our brains are adapted is actually the world of chaos and order. You can think about it as unexplored and explored territory too; that's another take on it.

And so then you think, from a Darwinian perspective, think about it this way: from a Darwinian perspective, there's an axiomatic presupposition, and that is reality is that which selects. Reality is the force that selects over evolutionary time. And so the force that selects over evolutionary time has selected for hemispheric specialization, bilateral hemispheric specialization, which indicates the two different modes of looking at the world are necessary for survival, right? So that's real.

And so the idea that the world is made out of chaos and order is perhaps the most real idea. Now here's something else cool that's associated with that, and this is an antidote to nihilism. I also think it's an antidote to, what would you call it, ideological possession. So when you encounter something unknown, you orient towards it, and that's an involuntary response. You could even think about it as a deterministic response; it's part of orienting you very rapidly towards predators so that they don't kill you before you have a chance to respond.

Okay, so you react because the anomalous thing is meaningful; it's intrinsically meaningful, and the reaction is first terror, with perhaps an overlay of disgust, and second curiosity. And it's terror so that you freeze and remain paralyzed; you turn to stone when you look at the basilisk or the snake or the Gorgon. You turn to stone; you're paralyzed like a prey animal, and that's so the prey predator can't see you, at least in part.

And there's other elements of the orienting reflex that are associated with predator avoidance. And then if nothing additionally terrible happens, you start to thaw out and you start to explore, and you do that with image first and then prep and then practice the appropriate behaviors and then automate those.

Now, look, here's the thing that's cool. So that orienting reflex to the unknown is it's an admixture of threat, fear, and curiosity, incentive rewards—so negative emotion and positive emotion. Now, and it's dose-dependent; the larger the anomaly—which means the larger the map it blows out when it manifests itself—think of the difference between being irritated at your marital partner because they, you know—oh, who knows?—because they relate to pick you up for work, compared to how irritated you would be if you found out they were having an affair. Difference in size of anomaly; the first one disrupts a tiny little part of your space-time orientation and the second one demolishes your past, present, and future.

And the larger the disruption, the more negative emotion, obviously. And so there’s this weird interplay between negative and positive emotion in the response to anomaly. And, but it's deeply meaningful; even if it's terrifying, it's meaningful. And then that transforms perhaps into intense curiosity, and you start to explore.

Now, the phenomena of meaning is a manifestation of the complex orienting reflex. And so you're wired so that you're not just order, and you're not just chaos; you're order continually confronting chaos, so that the order remains updated. And you might say, well, how do you know how much chaos you should confront in order to keep the order continually updated? And the answer is meaning.

See, something is meaningful—the reason that something is meaningful is because you're getting a deep instinctual signal that you're encountering normally at a rate that doesn't exceed your capability—that's also the rate at which you can keep yourself updated optimally. And so meaning isn't epiphenomenal, and it isn't some kind of delusion that rationality can and should overcome. To say, well, everything's meaningless—it's like, no, it's not. Meaning is the most fundamental instinct for adaptation.

And so that's partly why in Twelve Rules for Life, I said one of the rules—I think it's Rule 7—is do what is meaningful, not what is expedient, because meaning is a really good guide to long-term adaptation. And so then—and the other thing about meaning, which is what happens when you get the balance between chaos and order right, is that meaning is the antidote to despair.

And so if you—and there's all sorts of reasons in life to be desperate, and so if you immerse yourself in meaning, you can learn to do that; you can make that goal your highest goal. And so then the highest goal would be to be the sort of mythological hero, let's say, to embody and incarnate and imitate the mythological hero like the imitation of Christ, which is what you're called to do if you happen to be Christian.

That means that you live in meaning, and that meaning is the antidote to the suffering of life that would otherwise make you brutal and vengeful and unhappy and miserable. And like that young guy who just mowed down 12 people in Toronto, these are real things—you lose your sense of meaning; you end up in hell.

And in hell, you do all sorts of terrible things. These are dreadful realities, and it isn't as if they're not grounded in the appropriate science. So anyways, that was also a very complicated question: being gay and in a long-term relationship. We are considering kids. What are your thoughts about gay people raising children?

I think the devil's in the details, to tell you the truth, when if I was ever talking to any individuals about that. That's it. The question is, well, how would you raise them? I mean, you have problems, right? If you're both of the same sex, then you're going to have the problem of how to provide the proper model for, you know, let's say you have a boy and a girl. We know this is indisputable, and this is something I've talked to Warren Farrell about: kids in intact heterosexual families where the father is present do way better on multiple indices than kids who are part of single-parent families.

Now that doesn't mean that there are no single parents who do a good job, right? That's not the same bloody claim; those are different claims. But on average, not only do kids where fathers are present do better, but societies—even local societies where there are more fathers present do better—not only for the kids that they're fathering but the kids in the neighborhood, whether lots of intact families with fathers do better. And so I believe quite firmly that the nuclear family is the smallest viable human unit: father, mother, child—smallest viable unit. And if you fragment it below that, then you end up paying.

Now that doesn't mean that there aren't ways that you can operate in a smaller unit or a different unit effectively, but you have to contend with the fact that it's necessary for kids to have models for both sexes. And that means accepting that the sexes are different, even though there's a fair overlap between them—accepting that they're different and that both sexes play their role. It looks like what fathers do—and I talked to Warren Farrell a lot about this and I'm going to release this video this month about what fathers do—and a lot of what they do is rough-and-tumble play with the kids, which kids really, really, really like and it's really important.

As young Panksepp, a great effective neuroscientist, laid out in his studies on routes, he discovered the play circuitry. And this is something Farrell told me, which was extraordinarily interesting, is that fathers use the joy of the possibility of play as a scaffold to help children learn to delay gratification. So imagine a father spends a bunch of time playing with his kids, and they're having a great old time, they're wrestling around and pushing each other's limits to find out where they are and—and learning the physiological dance that goes along with direct contact, direct exciting contact—learning what hurts and what doesn't and what constitutes fair play and what isn't and how everybody can play and still enjoy the game, and how excited you could get before it's too much and how much you should whine and how much you shouldn't and when you can object to being hurt.

All of that has a deeply embodied level; the kids love that—they'll line up for that. And Panksepp demonstrated very clearly that rats will work to play and that routes play fair and they learn to play fair because of iterated play bouts. And that if you don't let juvenile male rats play, then their prefrontal cortexes don't develop—and they get attention deficit disorder or the equivalent in rats, and then you can treat that with Ritalin.

And so this is all very vital material. Now, if you're going to—if you're gay, let's say two men or two women, then you have the problem of what you're going to do for the contra-sexual target. And you can say, well, it doesn't matter because there's no differences between men and women. And you can gerrymander the damn question that way and avoid your amoral responsibility—or you can face it squarely and say, look, you've decided to step outside of the cultural norm and to organize a non-standard relationship, which puts a tremendous responsibility on you.

And then you have to figure out how you can provide for your children what it is that they would get in the classic minimal human unit. So, and more power to you. I hope you can do a good job of it. You know, I think there's a room in the world for a diverse range of approaches to complex life problems like having kids and finding a partner, but that doesn't mean you get to bury your head in the sand about the absolute realities of life and the fact that there are biological differences between men and women.

To deny that is reprehensible in my estimation, and besides the empirical data—the scientific data are crystal clear. So, in it, so okay, Colleum says that everything unconscious is projected into reality. How do you know if you are perceiving reality accurately or are just projecting?

Great. Yeah, well, that's partly why I'm a pragmatist. Well, there are a bunch of ways that you know. Pain tells you if you make a mistake and you hurt yourself, well then your stupid theory was wrong, right? That's what the pain says—your stupid theory was wrong, and that's a pragmatic—you see, that's another indication of pragmatic theory of truth. You lay out—look, when you look at the world, you look at the world with a set of presuppositions. I outlined that in chapter ten in Twelve Rules for Life called "Be Precise in Your Speech."

It indicates that when you look at the world, you look at it through a value structure. You can't help that, because you're always aiming at something in the world, and you're always aiming at something you want, and you're trying to get it. And so that means that you look at the world through a value structure. Now the question is whether or not that value structure is valid, and that's a very complicated question.

Okay, so how do you know if it's valid? Number one, you lay it out and you act it out; you implement it perceptually, and then you act it out. And if you get what you wanted, what the theory predicted—that's another way of thinking about it—then the fact that that behavioral routine and perceptual structure produced the intended result validates it as a tool for obtaining that result. And that's a form of truth.

Now, it might be the only form of truth, although I'm not convinced of that completely, but it might be; it's a very complicated question. Now how do you know if your stupid theory is wrong? Okay, A: it fails and you're hurt. Pain tells you, you pragmatically—your theory was wrong. So that's why you should pay attention to your own pain, because your suffering is an indication that you still have things to learn.

And maybe the suffering of other people is also that. Maybe something unexpected or unpredictable happens when you're laying out your plan, and then the anomalous manifests itself—the unexpected or chaos—and then you get anxious. Well, anxiety is an indication that your plan, your arrow, didn't fly to its mark.

So you aimed wrong, and that might mean a small error—maybe a tiny adjustment of your board might mean you just don't know what the hell you're doing at all, and everything is lost. And so anxiety tells you if your theory is wrong. And then other people tell you that, and that's why you want to surround yourself with other people, because you distribute your cognitive resources.

You distribute your problems to the cognitive resources of the social group. That's what we do when we price things, right? Everyone votes on the price of something because it's so difficult, because the price of something has to be established in relationship to the price of everything else, and that's always in flux.

And so it's a computationally impossible problem, and so we outsource it to the market, which is the free cognitive decision of millions of people, and that's how we determine price. And so one of the things you do to make sure that you're not any stupider than you have to be—blind, ignorant, biased, and all of that—is you surround yourself with other people, and you try to treat them well enough so that they can tolerate you.

And then every time that you do something stupid because one of your theories is vague or incomplete or wrong or biased or you're willfully blind, then they slap you on the side of the head; they ignore you because you're boring; they don't laugh at your jokes because they're stupid; they are irritated at your actions because you're not taking your own long-term interests or the interests of other people into account.

And so you have pain, you have anxiety, you have the reward of success—that's a positive indicator that your theory's okay. And then you have the reactions of everyone else, and if you're clued in, you pay attention to all of those things, and you try to update your order, which is your perceptions. You try to update your order constantly as a consequence of being humble in the face of your errors, which is why humility is the precondition for learning, and why it's one of the highest moral virtues.

So, and perceiving reality accurately—you don't really perceive reality, and you don't really perceive accurately; you perceive small portions of reality, extraordinarily limited in space and time. And accurately means well enough so that when you do what you're doing, it works. That's why I'm a pragmatist. I mean, there are lots of other philosophical streams that have influenced my thought: existentialism, phenomenology, to mention two others.

But the thing is you can't perceive reality accurately because you don't know everything, so—and you're full of biases and you're ignorant as hell. And so the best you can do is perceive small bits of reality well enough so that you can more or less get what you need in a relatively short period of time without screwing yourself up too badly in the medium to long term. That's pretty much what you've got, and that doesn't mean truth is impossible; it just means that it's very, very complicated to decide what truth is.

And because the question is what is truth for someone whose knowledge is limited, right? Because obviously, because your knowledge is limited and you don't know everything, saying so in some fundamental way, you're ignorant or wrong about everything. But that doesn't help because you still have to act in the world, so there are bounded truths, there're bounded truths.

And so, all right, if past experiences shape us—oh no, I missed one. You cited a tired brain, foggy thinking as the reason to stop answering questions or giving a talk. How do you combat this while working or writing daily?

Well, I eat a big breakfast relatively soon on waking; that really helps. If any of you out there are anxious, and many of you no doubt are—there'll be a large number of you who are anxious and don't eat breakfast, and there'll be a whole bunch of you out there who think, well, I don't eat breakfast; it isn't necessary. It's like, that's wrong; it's necessary. You've fasted all night.

If you load yourself cognitively or physiologically in the morning, your brain stressed will encourage your body to produce insulin. It will take all the blood sugar out of your blood, and then you're done for the day, and then you'll be anxious. And another— a lot of the rest of you too, you'll find if you're anxious—try this; it's really, really interesting experiment. The next time you're anxious, go eat something. Eat like—eat some protein and fat would be best. You could have cheese and crackers. I'm not a big fan of carbohydrates, but whatever, eat whatever you're willing to eat, but make it solid. Don't eat a peanut butter, or don't eat like a chocolate bar or something sweet. Eat something substantial: a piece of meat, a piece of cheese, some peanut butter, something like that.

And then wait 10 minutes and see if you're less anxious. And try it out for like two weeks. Every time you get anxious, eat something because then you can find out if you're anxious—yes, if your anxiety is linked to low blood sugar, and it's very likely that it is, especially if you also get irritable and foggy in your thinking.

And so—and the best way to treat that, as far as I've been able to tell (and there's a decent literature on this) is to make sure that you eat a big breakfast. And you might say, oh, well, I'm not hungry in the morning. It's like, who the hell cares if you're hungry? I didn't say enjoy your breakfast; I said eat it. That's not the same thing. You know, there's lots of things that you need to do that you don't enjoy, to begin with. You'll get hungry in six months, and then you'll start to enjoy it, so that's a massive difference.

I take small naps quite frequently. If I'm wiped out, you know, I'll go have a nap for ten minutes or 15 minutes, and then that helps quite a lot. I try to wake up fairly regular—a lot on a fairly regular schedule. That's another thing I would really recommend for people whose lives are in disarray and who are anxious: try to fix your wake time, sleep going when you sleep; that's not so important.

So you can still, you know, stay up late and have fun and all that, but getting up in the morning is really helpful. So, you know, you also have to figure out how much you can work or write. I can't write for more than about—max, my sustainable maximum for writing is three hours a day. And if I push it past that, then especially if I'm editing, I make mistakes when I'm editing, so that's counterproductive, and I can't sustain it across time.

And so, I don't really think you can do more than about three hours of extremely intense intellectual work a day, although if you have a nap, you can stretch that. But I think, at least I end up paying for it across time.

So, nap, make sure you eat, and make sure you eat protein and fat and not carbohydrates, because carbohydrates are basically poisonous. That's about—that's about, and make sure that you get enough sleep. So that's how I combat it and try to make myself hyper-efficient.

Which is also a really interesting thing to try. You know, I was talking to my agents at CAA (Creative Artists Agency) in LA, and I just hired a publicist to help me manage media in a more intelligent manner, and we're trying to think about our overarching philosophy, you know?

And I first proposed to the CAA guys that our overarching philosophy would be something like, because you need an overarching philosophy under which you nest all your specific actions, it was something like, to educate as many people as possible in the shortest period of time, which seems like a really good goal. Like, why the hell not do that?

But then we broadened out a little bit this week, which was to try to do as much good as possible as efficiently as possible. And that efficiency thing is really fun. If you guys who are listening are up for a challenge—like, one of the things that you can—I think this heightens the meaning in your life—is to try to do difficult things, right? Aim high; aim so damn high you can't manage it, and make sure you break down your aims into reasonably attainable sub-goals.

But you want to aim high, and then you want to see how hyper-efficient you can get. That's a great thing to do in your early 20s is to see, okay, like, discipline yourself. You think, okay, how much work can I do if I load myself right to the maximum? How far can I work? How hard can I work until I exhaust myself? And then you back off, obviously, because the optimal amount of working, productive engagement, let's say, is that which is sustainable across decades.

So you have to learn that, but you don't learn that without stretching yourself to your limits to begin with. And you know, if your life isn't everything it could be, and if you're suffering from an excess of meaninglessness, well, it means you're not oriented in the world of chaos and order properly. It's like you could learn to discipline yourself—look, figure out what it is that you need to do and that you want to do, and then see how efficient you can get.

Because one of the things that's quite fun is to figure out—if you have a task—I always tell my graduate students this. If they're doing an experiment, if you have a task that you have to do, it's really interesting to spend a few minutes—sometimes hours, depending on how long the task is—see if you can figure out how to do it from five to ten times faster.

It means you'll have to rearrange the way you think about it, but you can often do it—and that's how extremely productive people get. So hyper-efficient—you know, sometimes it means to delegate; sometimes it means you have to bring other people aboard. That's delegation as well. It's suppose, but there's a lot of preconceptions that you hold about who you are and who the world is that you could dispense with that would make you a way more efficient actor in the world.

And so, all right, so there—that's that. If past experiences shape us—oh no, I missed one again: you cited a tired brain, foggy thinking as the reason to stop answering questions or giving a talk. How do you combat this while working or writing daily?

Well, I eat a big breakfast relatively soon on waking; that really helps. If any of you out there are anxious, and many of you, no doubt, are—there'll be a large number of you, who are anxious and don't eat breakfast, and there'll be a whole bunch of you out there who think, "Well, I don't eat breakfast; it isn't necessary." It's like, that's wrong; it's necessary. You've fasted all night.

I'm not a big fan of carbohydrates, but whatever; eat whatever you're willing to eat, but make it solid. Don't eat a peanut butter, or don't eat like a chocolate bar or something sweet. Eat something substantial: a piece of meat, a piece of cheese, some peanut butter, something like that.

And then wait 10 minutes, and see if you're less anxious, and try it out for like two weeks. Every time you get anxious, eat something, because then you can find out if you're anxious—Yes, if your anxiety is linked to low blood sugar, and it's very likely that it is, especially if you also get irritable and foggy in your thinking.

And so, and the best way to treat that, as far as I've been able to tell (and there's a decent literature on this) is to make sure that you eat a big breakfast. And you might say, "Oh, well, I'm not hungry in the morning." It's like, who the hell cares if you're hungry? I didn't say enjoy your breakfast; I said eat it. That's not the same thing, you know?

There's lots of things that you need to do that you don't enjoy, to begin with. You'll get hungry in six months, and then you'll start to enjoy it, so that's a massive difference.

So you can still stay up late and have fun and all that, but getting up in the morning is really helpful. So, you know, you also have to figure out how much you can work or write. I can't write for more than about—max, my sustainable maximum for writing is three hours a day, and if I push it past that, then especially if I'm editing, I make mistakes when I'm editing, so that's counterproductive, and I can't sustain it across time.

There's lots of things that you need to do that you don't enjoy, to begin with. You'll get hungry in six months, and then you'll start to enjoy it, so that's a massive difference.

And then wait 10 minutes and see if you're less anxious, and try it out for like two weeks. Every time you get anxious, eat something because then you can find out if you're anxious—Yes, if your anxiety is linked to low blood sugar, and it's very likely that it is, especially if you also get irritable and foggy and you're thinking and so—and the best way to treat that, as far as I've been able to tell and there's a decent literature on this is to make sure that you eat a big breakfast. And you might say, "Well, I'm not hungry in the morning. It's like, who the hell cares if you're hungry? I didn't say enjoy your breakfast; I said eat it."

That's not the same thing, you know, there's lots of things that you need to do that you don't enjoy to begin with. You'll get hungry in six months, and then you'll start to enjoy it, so that's a massive difference.

So, nap, make sure you eat, and make sure you eat protein and fat and not carbohydrates because carbohydrates are basically poisonous. That's about—that's about, and make sure that you get enough sleep. So that's how I combat it and try to make myself hyper-efficient.

And then wait 10 minutes and see if you're less anxious, and try it out for like two weeks. Every time you get anxious, eat something because then you can find out if you're anxious—yes, if your anxiety is linked to low blood sugar, and it's very likely that it is, especially if you also get irritable and foggy and you're thinking, and so—and the best way to treat that, as far as I've been able to tell and there's a decent literature on this is to make sure that you eat a big breakfast. And you might say, "Well, I'm not hungry in the morning." It's like, who the hell cares if you're hungry? I didn't say enjoy your breakfast; I said eat it.

And then wait 10 minutes and see if you're less anxious, and try it out for like two weeks. Every time you get anxious, eat something because then you can find out if you're anxious—yes, if your anxiety is linked to low blood sugar, and it's very likely that it is, especially if you also get irritable and foggy and you're thinking and so—and the best way to treat that, as far as I've been able to tell and there's a decent literature on this is to make sure that you eat a big breakfast. And you might say, "Well, I'm not hungry in the morning." It's like, who the hell cares if you're hungry? I didn't say enjoy your breakfast; I said eat it.

That's not the same thing, you know, there's lots of things that you need to do that you don't enjoy to begin with. You'll get hungry in six months and then you'll start to enjoy it, so that's a massive difference.

I take small naps quite frequently. If I'm wiped out, you know, I'll go have a nap for ten minutes or 15 minutes, and then that helps quite a lot. I try to wake up fairly regular—on a fairly regular schedule. That's another thing I would really recommend for people whose lives are in disarray and who are anxious: try to fix your wake time; sleeping when you sleep—that's not so important.

So that's counterproductive and I can't sustain it across time. And so I don't really think you can do more than about three hours of extremely intense intellectual work a day, although if you have a nap, you can stretch that. But I think, at least, I end up paying for it across time.

And I first proposed to the CAA guys that our overarching philosophy would—something like—because you need an overarching philosophy under which you nest all your specific actions. It was something like, to educate as many people as possible in the shortest period of time, which seems like a really good goal. Like, why the hell not do that?

Q & A 2018 04 April

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