2014 Personality Lecture 05: Jean Piaget (Constructivism)

Talk about constructivism and I'm going to primarily discuss Jean P., although the readings extend to some degree out past his thought. P. is generally regarded as a developmental psychologist, which is not what he thought of himself. He thought that he was a genetic epistemologist, which is a term that I think has ever only been applied to him. An epistemologist is someone who studies the manner in which knowledge, um, who studies knowledge itself, and that's what P. thought that he was doing. He wanted to understand how it was that knowledge unfolded across time, and, um, more importantly than that, he wanted to understand how the cognitive structures that made up an individual developed across time.

So, that's generally why he's regarded as a developmental psychologist, because, of course, he also studied children. Now, I'm going to read you something that P. wrote. To begin this, um, he wrote an awful lot of books, and a lot of them haven't yet been translated, and some of the ones that are translated are translated pretty badly. I think this is probably an example of a fairly bad translation. But regardless of that, the point that's being made is both valid and interesting.

So, the common postulate of various traditional epistemologies, which are theories of valid knowledge, is that knowledge is a fact, say, or a set of facts. So, that you would go to class and learn a set of facts, and that is what would give you knowledge instead of a process. And if our various forms of knowledge are always incomplete, as we know they are because they're replaced sequentially, I mean, for example, recently in the domain of physics, physicists revealed to us that they really didn't understand what some massive percentage of the universe was made of.

I think I can't remember if it's 75% or 95% made out of dark matter, which has never been detected and we know nothing about it. So that's a good example of how our fundamental assumptions can be challenged at any moment. And how a fact can turn from a fact into a clear fallacy. If our various forms of knowledge are always complete, and our various sciences are still imperfect, that which is acquired is acquired and can therefore be studied statically. So, the proposition there is that you come and you learn the facts, and the facts themselves are solid bits of information and they don't change across time. And so, once you have them, you have them.

Now, of course, P. obviously doubts that, hence the absolute position of the problems: what is knowledge, or how are the various types of knowledge possible? As an alternative, under the converging influence of a series of factors, we are tending more and more today to regard knowledge as a process more than a state. Any being or object that sciences attempt to hold fast dissolves once again in the current of development. It is the last analysis of this development, and of it alone, that we have the right to state it is a fact.

What he means by that is the fact that human beings learn facts is in fact a fact, right? So, you are capable of learning things, and he thinks that's sort of the fundamental fact. People assimilate information and they transform as a consequence of it. And so studying that, as he says, what we can and should then seek is a law of this process. We are well aware, on the other hand, of the fine book by on scientific revolutions.

Now, the reason P. throws that in at the end, um, how many of you know about Thomas Kuhn's book on scientific revolutions? No one? One? Just three people? Okay, well, that's probably not good. Um, he was one of the 20th century's foremost philosophers of science. And he made a distinction between two different modes of scientific process; one he called normal science, and the other he called revolutionary science.

Normal science was the kind of science that you'll do as undergraduates unless you're incredibly lucky or unbelievably brilliant, um, or probably unbelievably brilliant and incredibly lucky. And so normal science occurs when you generate knowledge incrementally from within the confines of an already developed scientific theory. So, a normal science would be, uh, say, the big five models of personality to the prediction of some other variable, like say relationship success. You're going to uncover something new, but it's not going to shape the foundations of knowledge itself.

Now, I observed that from time to time there were discoveries that were made that shook the foundation of knowledge itself. There are some well-known revolutions in science. So, the Newtonian Revolution was a revolution in science; Einstein's work produced another revolution in science; Darwin's work, um, those are the revolutionary transformations of thought that people often consider. Did I say Darwin? I certainly should have said Darwin because his was probably the most revolutionary of all.

Now, the reason that I wanted to tell you that, and the reason I kept it in here even though it seems like a funny little additional statement pinned to the end of P.'s quotation, is that I observed that science seemed to progress in accordance with the same mechanisms that P. observed that the knowledge of children appeared to progress.

Now, one of the things that you'll learn about P., which is generally all you learn if you learn about P., is his idea that children go through sequential stages of development. Usually, people have you memorize those stages. I should let you know that P. really didn't care that much about those stages and when they occurred, and how they could be sped up, and exactly what they were; he was much more interested in deep philosophical questions, and that element of his work generally goes unrecognized by the North American psychologists who purport to understand what he had to say.

Now, because he wrote dozens of books, some of which are not yet translated, it's not surprising that people come away with a partial view of P. When you're that prolific, he was so damn smart he was offered the curatorship of a museum when he was ten because he had published a scientific paper on, I think it was on snails. But his parents requested that he turn it down. So, you know, P. was a major genius, and if someone like that puts their mind to work for an entire lifetime, and he lived to be an old man, they can produce an awful lot of intellectual material.

And it's not especially if it can't be summarized easily as a single, you know, coherent theory that you could memorize in one page. It's pretty hard for people to keep up, so it's not surprising that his thought gets reduced to, you know, a set of axioms in a sense. But, um, the devil's often in the detail with great thinkers, and what that means is that to really understand what they had to say, you actually have to read them because a lot of the information is at the sentence level of analysis and not at the summary level of analysis.

You know, if you're really smart, it's not that easy to summarize what you have to say because most of what you have to say is, in fact, informative, so you can't just throw it away; it's hard to compress it. So, anyways, this initial paragraph opens up the world of constructivism to you.

Now, the constructivists are interesting people because you often hear people ask, is it genetic or environmental? Which is, it's not a good question because it's a false dichotomy. The genes formulate structures in accordance with environmental demand right from the beginning of the organism's emergence, and so there's a constant interplay between the environment and genetics. But the environment isn't also just a thing that's out there that's like made out of lions and tigers and moose and buildings and you know, the sky; it's an information field.

And the constructivists point out rightly that partly what you're doing when you're operating in the world is interacting with this field of information and incorporating its structure into the structure of your mind and body, which is how you adapt. So you could say in some sense that you're built out of information and matter; that's a good way of thinking about it. And the constructivists are very interested in how you go about acquiring information and how you then transform that information into the sort of knowledge that you can apply to the world.

So, they're also very pragmatic, especially P, because P. regards knowledge as, um, like the prerequisite for adaptive action. So, again, he's less concerned about the facts that you know about the structure of the world than he is about how it is that you modify and adapt your behavior so that you can survive in the world.

So, that's the first postulate; that's constructivism. And then the next postulate is that there are revolutions in the internal structures that you construct that emerge as a consequence of you acquiring new information. Sometimes, that information can already be fit into a knowledge structure that you possess, but sometimes the information is so anomalous or novel that it blows out fundamental presuppositions that you've already established and forces you to not only add some information to your repertoire of information, but to reconfigure the structure you use to represent the information.

You don't like that; people don't like it when that happens; it's too dramatic and upsetting. So, which is often why revolutions in science or in any other field are first resisted. I mean, it's very complicated; the reasons people are opposed to new ideas are very complicated. There's lots of theories about why that occurs precisely, but briefly outline a good theory; there's a bunch of them, but I'll outline one.

So, let's say there's already a scientific theory, and it's instantiated in the world. So people accept it, and let's say that you are a proponent of that theory. So you might say, well, that theory, therefore, governs your worldview. And if I threaten it, then your worldview is going to fall apart, and that's going to make you fall apart. And that's not a bad theory, but here's a here's a variant of that, which is similar but which I think is better.

So, I'm a professor; let's say I have a theory. Now what I'm doing with my theory is buying my right to be a professor. So, I would come to the University of Toronto as a job candidate, and I would say, here's my theory, and here's why I think the facts support it, here's what it's good for, and they'll say, okay, it looks like you know enough about what you're doing so that you can occupy this position in this dominance hierarchy.

Okay, and I'm pretty happy about that because that position in that dominance hierarchy is pretty permanent; that's one of the advantages to an academic job. It's like, once you have it, as long as you're relatively competent and relatively ethical, then you can maintain it across time. So, it's a big deal to be granted that slot. And then being in that dominance hierarchy is not only a matter of what you believe; obviously, the fact that I'm in that dominator means I get a certain salary, and that's not hypothetical; that allows me to eat.

So I'm happy about that; it's not only psychological, and I can pay my housing payments with it and so on. So it protects me from the cold and offers me something to eat, and it gives me a certain public status. And so if some other joker comes along, say they're young, and they say, "Well, I have a different theory, and it makes your theory look stupid," then I'm not going to be very happy about that hardly because it upsets the way that I configure my understanding of the world, and that's a drag.

But I might recover from that, but it also undermines my claim; it undermines the validity of my claim to that position in the hierarchy. And so it sort of makes me an impostor; say the guy turns out to be right, it's like, poof, I'm an impostor, and I no longer really have the right to occupy that position, and someone might even point that out, although it doesn't happen very often in the case of professors; you know it happens fairly frequently in other sorts of occupations.

You know, all of a sudden, your position is made useless because somebody figured out how to automate you, and poof, you're gone. And like, that's hard on your worldview, but it's a lot harder on your salary. So, a lot of the reasons that people cling to the validity of their theory is because it gives them a claim to a certain kind of, uh, what would you call, skill set and utility that then gives them a claim to occupy a certain position in the dominance hierarchy, and that protects them from, you know, all the horrors of reality—not completely, but you know, I mean, I have health insurance, for example. Sometimes that's really, really helpful.

So I don't want some joker coming along and pointing out that my theory isn't right. Anyway, so far that hasn't happened, so that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned. So P. concludes and says, "If all knowledge is always in a state of development and consists in proceeding from one state to a more complete and efficient one, evidently it is a question of knowing this development and analyzing it with the greatest possible accuracy."

Okay, so P. figures you're an information foraging machine, so to speak, and the process that you engage in while you're forging from information to information, and then figuring out what to do with it, is typical to human beings. And there's some constancy of structure across human beings. Okay, so that's the first idea; it isn't that we all do it in a different way, even though there's individual variation, obviously.

Um, the other sort of fundamental postulate of constructivism, especially the Padian version of constructivism, is that you sort of build yourself from the bottom up starting with your body. So this is one of the things about P.'s theory that's unbelievably sophisticated, I think. So, when people were first developing models of artificial intelligence, they thought they'd be able to develop machines that sort of modeled the world and then figured out how to act in the world, sort of abstractly, and then would, after they figured out how to act in the world, would then act in the world.

But that proved to be impossible, as you can tell because we don't have, you know, ambulatory robots that can like bus tables at a restaurant, which turns out to be, by the way, a very complex job. Fast mathematical operations a computer can handle that easily, but busing a table, it's like no computer's smart enough to do that. So, that's pretty peculiar, but it turned out after like 40 years of investigation that you couldn't build computers that would operate as independent robots by teaching them to model the world, and then by having them model the potential action that they were going to undertake, and then by implementing it—that did not work, partly because modeling the world is way more complicated than anybody ever suspected; it's like infinitely more complicated.

And so some robotics engineers, such as Rodney Brooks, who worked at MIT, started building robots from the bottom up. He made these little mindless robots that really didn't even have a central processor that were action-oriented. So, like the first things he built were these little insect-like things that could skitter away from light; that's all they could do. They turn on light, poof, they'd go find some dark. And it's as if—so imagine the world to that robot was a binary place; it was either a light place or a dark place.

And then you might say, well, what did light or dark mean to this little robot? Then you have to ask yourself, well, what does meaning mean? And that's a very good question; it's one that P. answers. Meaning means to that little robot, move to a different place. So what the robot, in a sense, was doing was transforming one form of information—like versus dark—into another form, which was skittering away.

And so I love that because it's not easy to understand what meaning means until you relate it to the body. And so P.'s fundamental proposition is that the elements of your understanding are not perceptual abstractions. In fact, there's even elements of understanding that underlie your perceptual abstractions that are more fundamental. And what those are essentially are sensory motor skills—the things you do with your body. It's a lovely idea; it's extremely profound, and I think it's absolutely correct.

It does recreate havoc with the idea of disembodied intelligence, however, because for P., and also for Rodney Brooks, who, um, is responsible, by the way, just so you know, some of you have seen Big Dog. You seen Big Dog? Look up DARPA. DPA. How many of you have seen Big Dog? How many of you are terrified by Big Dog? Yes, Big Dog is this robot that's being developed by the U.S. Army that is about this big, and it's four-legged: it's got a head, and it can run faster than you, and it can run in snow, and it can run on ice, and it can run up hills, and if you kick it, it balances and stands back up.

And hypothetically, it's going to be used to transport like the heavy things that soldiers have to carry, but you know, don't believe that; that's a stupid idea. Once these things can ambulate by themselves—and they can already follow each other—you know, now they have visual systems. Um, arming them is going to be a very simple matter. And so the probability that we'll have unbelievably super-fast robots that can shoot you in 10 years is like, to me, as far as I can tell from the development, is absolutely certain. I have a friend who's a computer engineer, and he's a really good one, and he said, you know how in science fiction movies, sometimes when those robots shoot at you, they miss? He said when the robots shoot at you, not only will they shoot at where you are, but they'll shoot at the sixth place that they calculate you're most likely to dart to, and they will never miss.

So that's a lovely thing to think about, so hopefully that won't come to pass, but it probably will. So here's the sort of thing that P. was interested in. These are very fundamental questions, and he was a very deep intellect. So, he tried to go right to the bottom of the structures of knowledge to find out what was down there. Upon what does an individual base its judgments? That's a good one. How do you know whether you do A or B or what the difference is between right and wrong?

How is that instantiated in your being? What are your norms? How is it that those norms are validated? What's the interest of such norms for the philosophy of science in general? Which is a question like, well, there's a consensual reality that we all share to some degree which is why we can communicate, but there's not a one-to-one relationship between that consensual reality and the categories of science.

So, P. was interested in the similarities between our consensual viewpoint and the scientific viewpoint and the differences. So, for example, people used to hypothetically assume that the world was flat, um, and you could say, well, the reason they assumed that was because it looks flat when you look at it. So, it was an empirical observation. But obviously, there were other observations that we managed to produce that indicated that the world wasn't flat, and then our scientific conceptions and our interpersonal consensual norms became divorced from one another, and that's become a really serious problem, say, with branches of science like quantum mechanics, which, you know, they're absolutely completely incomprehensible from a pragmatic perspective even to those who formulate them mathematically.

P. would say the reason for that is that, well, when we interact with objects at the phenomenal level—which is the level that we can most easily perceive—they act Newtonian. You know, so can I take your pen? So, you know, you can sort of predict what this pen will do because it acts like other objects of about its size and shape with mass.

And so your understanding of this is actually based upon your knowledge of what will happen if you manipulate this thing with your body. You know, it's solid; you'd be very surprised if you could like put your fingers through this pen; you'd be surprised if it broke because you expect a certain hardness; you do expect it to write, although pens often don't; you expect it to be pointy. You know that you can take it apart into many objects, even though, like, you could ask how many objects is this? Well, it's one pen, right? But you could take it apart, you know, and now it's two objects, and then you can see that there's other objects in here, and sometimes you can put it back together and it'll still work.

And so, P.'s point is that what we regard as understanding—to say that you understand something—is to indicate that you can predict what is going to occur if you interact with that object with your body, okay? And that gives you your intuitive understanding of things. And so, because this is material, other, you already know something about other things that are material, right? And you can transfer it from place to place, and that's, again, an embodied knowledge because material things are those things through which you cannot put your hand, right?

You get some weird things like smoke or clouds, and like, well, are they—what are they? Are they objects? Is a cloud an object? Well, no, not really because an object is one of these things that you could sort of manipulate as a unit. Now, the categories of quantum mechanics, of course, which deal with these incredibly tiny things that are really not particles and are really not waves, they're incomprehensible to us because we never manipulate anything at that scale, and so because we can't play with it, we have no real way of understanding it because our understanding is based on the mapping of objects onto our body.

So, any object we can't map onto our body is therefore fundamentally incomprehensible. It's a very cool theory, you know, and a very body-centric theory. So, how does the fact that children think differently than we do affect our presumption of fact itself? That's a very interesting question too.

It's like, so you've got three-year-olds, and of course, they're pretty clueless about the world, and you know more, but there's the three-year-old who is alive in everything and functioning. And so then you have to ask yourself, well, if their conception of the world is qualitatively different than your conception, how is it that you can both survive in the same world? And what does that mean about what knowledge means and about the limits of knowledge? I mean, you know, I could say the same thing about you that you might say about a three-year-old, which is, well, if I took you from this place and dropped you in the jungle, you know, soon you'd be dead; first, you'd be miserable, then you'd be dead.

And so that sort of like the three-year-old's state of being, if you know, if you were supposed to take care of them and you disappeared. So obviously, even your knowledge of the world is limited by what—it's limited in its necessary generality by the context, but that also has something interesting to say about the validity of your knowledge itself; very context dependent.

So, okay, so that's the sort of thing that P. was interested in. Here's some other ones: What do you mean by number? So that's an interesting one. So, you know how they say you can't compare apples and oranges? Well, you can! So if I said, well, what's two oranges plus two apples? Four fruits! Who said that? Very good! So the way you solved that was by generalizing up a level, right?

So if I said, um, what's two desks plus two rocks? What would you say? Yes! Man, you're very good at this particular— that's an IQ question, by the way, so if you didn't get them now, you could feel disappointed and depressed. So if you got them, well, then you can pat yourself on the back, so that's good!

Yeah, so number is a funny thing because, well, as I pointed out with the pen, well, one can become many very rapidly, and many can become one! And well, the whole idea of number is extremely difficult to understand. You know, like, what is it in common between singular entities that allows you to represent all of them with one? Well, animals don't do that! They can, in a sense, they can sort of intuit three or four, which is about all we can intuit too, but once we get the nomenclature done properly, man, we can use numbers like crazy, and then they enable us to manipulate reality like mad!

So whatever it is we're abstracting from the commonality between objects seems to be something that gives us incredible power. So that's a problem. What do you mean by space? Since we know, for example, from Einstein's work that, you know, space is not an absolute in any sense, it is at the speeds we move. So what do you mean by time and speed? When is an object permanent and when isn't it? And when do you learn that? What does it mean that an object is the same across time? That's a good one.

So, you know, I don't know if there's a single molecule in your body that was there, you know, five months ago, six months ago; there's some—I don't remember what the turnover duration is, but it's fairly quick. So, it's weird because there you are, and you were there two years ago, but none of your constituent elements are the same. So how is it that you can be the same? Now, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, of Schrödinger's cat fame, solved that by claiming that you were a dissipative structure.

It's a very interesting way; that's what he thought life was—dissipative structures. A dissipative structure is the same as a—you know when you pull up the, uh, you call that?—at the bottom of the sink? Stopper! If your sink is full of water and you pull up the stopper, you know you get a whirlpool, right? And all the water spins as it goes down the drain hole, and you'll notice that that whirlpool looks sort of the same across time, even though obviously the water molecules that make it up are different.

He called that a dissipative structure; it was a pattern that maintained itself in spite of the movement of matter through it, and that's what you are, by the way. So, it requires energy to keep a dissipative structure intact. But, uh, you take in energy, so thanks to the Sun! What do you mean by chance? Um, why do you have moral concerns, and what does it mean that you have moral concerns? That you have ideas about how people should behave and how they shouldn't behave, and you have a very deep understanding of that, and it's characteristic of all human beings and many animals.

So where does that come from? And is it a developed form of knowledge? What are children doing when they're playing? What are people doing when they're dreaming? And, uh, what's the significance of the fact that you can imitate other people?

Now, I'll start with the last one briefly. Um, you know, you might think that one of the things that really distinguishes us from other creatures, animals, is the fact that we have a thumb, and that's a big one. We've got very good functional thumbs, and hoay for that! And we stand up on two feet, so we get a chance to use our thumbs and hands to carry things around and to break things and to take them apart and to swing sticks, and so on.

But there are other animals who can do that to a limited degree, and then there's our ability to talk; that's a major one. But one of the other things that really differentiates people from other animals is, you know, you hear "Monkey see, monkey do." Right? Well, that's wrong; monkey see—that's the end of that. Um, monkeys really can't imitate one another, and they certainly can't imitate any even randomly generated novel behavior that another monkey produces.

Think about it this way: you know you hear these claims that chimpanzees have culture? It's like, well, no, they don't, not really. And the reason for that, it's easy to figure out that they don't have culture. I mean, let's say chimps have been around roughly speaking for 15 million years, which is not a bad estimate because we diverged from them about 7 million years ago, and evidence is pretty clear that the thing that we diverged from looked a lot more like a chimp than it looked like us.

So, like, we've been booting it ahead madly, developing like mad, and the chimps have been laying back and eating leaves, you know? So, do they have a culture? Well, they've had 15 million years, you know; they haven't even built a hut yet! And the reason I'm telling you that is because if you're a culture-generated creature, and you only manage, say, one discovery every 100 years between all of you, if you have 15 million years to get your act together, that's a lot of 100-year segments.

And so even if the chimpanzee was building culture at the rate of 0.001% a year, if you compound that over 15 million years, you'd have the Empire State Building, and there aren't Empire State Buildings that chimpanzees are living in. And so, therefore, they don't have culture. Now they might be able to recognize their peers in the dominance hierarchy, they can do that, and maybe they can use simple tools, but the tools they use seem to be dependent on the environment that they inhabit.

You know, because some people say, "Well, some chimps use one tool and some chimps use another." But you know, if you're going to live in a rocky place, then you might use rocks, and if you're going to live in a place that has sticks, you might use sticks. But that's not because you're different; it's because the environment's different.

So anyways, chimps can't imitate one another very much. Um, but humans, man, we're ridiculous! Like, we're so imitative; it's absolutely crazy! You know, and that's so cool because what it means is that once you get a pattern of behavior, you know, you whip up a new pattern of behavior, I can watch you and I can just instantiate it in my own body, you know? Maybe a bit awkwardly to begin with, although maybe sometimes better than you can. And bang! I've got that!

And so, we're always looking around at each other, seeing what we're up to. And as soon as we see someone who's up to something interesting, then we can do the same thing! Children do that because they imitate, right? But they're even better at it! Man, they generalize across instances of imitation.

So, for example, remember when you're a kid and you're playing? Maybe you're playing house, and you're the mom, or maybe you're, I don't know, maybe you're the house cat because children will certainly do that. And so let's say the child is being the house cat, so he or she is down on, you know, all fours, zooming around like a cat, maybe meowing and, you know, rubbing up against their mother's leg and looking for milk in the bowl.

And they're not exactly imitating their cat because if they were exactly imitating their cat, they would be moving exactly the same way the cat moved. But no, they're not! What they're doing is they've observed the cat across a wide variety of environments; they've abstracted what constitutes generalized cat behavior from all of those instances, and then they can instantiate the spirit of the cat, which is sort of the movements that make up catness.

And then you, because you're so smart, you can watch them zooming around on the ground, and despite the fact that they don't have a tail or ears or fur, you're going to figure out pretty quick that that is now a cat! And children do the same thing with their parents. Like if they're playing house and they imitate their father, you know, they may, to some degree, try to imitate the sound of his voice and maybe even use a couple of his favorite phrases, but basically what they're doing is trying to act like a father rather than imitating their father.

So, it's like, I'm—it's meta imitation, right? It's, I watch you, I watch you, I watch you, I watch you. There's qualities across all those instances, I extract the commonalities, I embody it, and then when I play, that's what I'm doing! I'm figuring out how to embody the commonalities across multiple exposures! And that's, that's, you're doing that when you're like three! You're so smart!

And then, even if you're asleep, you're doing it because you're doing it in your dreams! And so human beings do that; no other animals do! So, when you're thinking about the ways that we're weird, you want to put imitation way up there on the list because you can, you know, think about deaf people like congenitally deaf people don't have much access to language. You know, say they don't learn sign language because that used to happen in the past; it's like they can still wander around in the world and fit in. Well, why? Well, because they're so good at imitating!

You know, they get all the non-verbal stuff, and that's a lot! So language is, you know, great and all that; language actually enables you to imitate across space and time. That's what it's for because, you know, maybe whip up a new action, and then you write it down in words, and then you send it to someone. And those are instructions, by the way, because that's what instructions are! You send that to someone, and then they read your code for behavior, and then they act it out!

And so language enables you to move imitation across space and time, and that's a really good way of conceptualizing language because it's a Padian way. Because sometimes we might think that language is there to describe the world, you know, in a scientific sense. George Kelly kind of thinks that—that human beings are sort of like natural scientists. But natural scientists are much more concerned with what is than with how to act.

So, Kelly's wrong. What human beings are more like is natural engineers because we're always, you know, zooming around trying to figure out how to fiddle with things much more than what they are. And as I mentioned to you earlier, a pragmatist would say, well, it's an artificial distinction because things are what they are when you fiddle with them—that's, in fact, what they are!

So, that's pretty smart! I also say this is part of the constructivist notion because constructivism is a philosophical school. He says knowledge does not begin in the eye and it does not begin in the object; it begins in the interactions. There's a reciprocal and simultaneous construction of the subject on the one hand and the object on the other.

There is no structure apart from construction, either abstract or genetic! I really like that! I showed you some of the symbolic categories in a couple of, you know, previous lectures, and I, I mentioned, for example, that one of the symbolic categories is the great father and the great kind of stands for cultural structure, whereas the great mother stands for novelty.

And sometimes the terrifying! Anyways, back to the great father, there's a precondition in constructivism that there has to be three things that exist, and they map right onto that symbolic structure. One is culture. So, when you look at something, or really when any creature looks at something, there's an inbuilt structure that characterizes the creature, some of which would be biological-built in and some of which would be acquired, that they must have in order to structure their perceptions of what they're looking at.

So you don't come to the situation blank. You know, for example, you have two eyes, so you're going to have stereo vision most of the time. You know, and you have five senses, and they're the same sense, and there's more than that! You have snake detection circuits, for example. So you're sort of primed to respond to a certain class of predators, and you like sweet tastes and sour tastes, but you don't really like bitter tastes, and so on and so forth.

Like, right from the beginning, you bring a landscape of interpretive structures in order to, uh, frame and simplify the world that you are exposed to. Now, the world itself is this sort of amorphous thing; it's amorphous because it's so multi-dimensional and complex. There's so much of it. It's like a fog that contains everything, and so unless you can frame that and simplify it and narrow it, it's very difficult for you to understand and interact with it at all!

I mean, you know, you just can't deal with everything at once. It's hard enough to deal with one little thing at a time, and you know this internal structure is partly what enables you to deal with one little thing at a time. And then, so there's you and there's the source of all information, there's the structure of you and the source of all information, and then there's the process that's you! And the process that's you is you using your appendages fundamentally and your senses to interact with things and to make them manifest new properties, right?

And so those are properties that they might not manifest without you there! And it's very difficult for you to tell when you're interacting with the world, even at a perceptual level, how much of what you observe wouldn't be there if you weren't there. Now, so, because one of the big philosophical questions is, well, what's there when you're not there? And, and that is a much more complicated question than you might imagine.

Um, the Daoist would say, well, what's there is so much an amalgam of everything at once that it might as well be nothing at all! And it's sort of a—and to give you a way of understanding that, so let's say you took every symphony that was ever written, recorded—even then you took all those recordings together, and you laid one on top of the other—and you'd say, well now I've got like every symphony at once on a tape! And then you played the tape; what would it sound like?

It would sound like white noise! It would sound like—and so you could say white noise is functionally equivalent to every single symphony that's ever been written, every piece of music that's ever been written, all being played at once. Well, so what, you know? So—and the Daoist would also say you have to remember that what something is is just as dependent on what it isn't as it is dependent on what it is! So, that's a tough one, but it's very, very smart. So the constructivist would certainly agree with that.

Now, Bruner, who is a constructivist of sorts, put a little twist on P.'s idea, which I'm going to borrow because I think it makes explaining P. easier—at least it makes it easier for me, and since I'm explaining it, that's what we're going to have to go for! Bruner said we seem to have no other way of describing lived time save in the form of a narrative.

Now, the reason I think this is a Padian constructivist claim is because P. is concerned with knowledge as it emerges from action, and action is clearly represented in narratives, right? Because a narrative is about what the characters are doing. So narrative is the way that we represent information about doing, so, and knowledge for P. is about doing. So I just put the two together, and that—and there's other reasons for it too, and that makes it simpler to explain.

So here's a way of thinking about how we put a structure on the world. So, and I've mentioned—I kind of introduced you to this idea before—so you're headed somewhere, wherever that happens to be, because you're an active organism. And so you're, you know, even if you're don't have any immediate needs, you're going to poke about at things just because you're curious.

Turns out that your dopaminergic system, which is the system that drives curiosity, fires at a certain constant rate even if you're not hungry or tired or thirsty or, you know, even if no primary needs are clamoring for your attention. So, your default comfortable state is mildly curious about everything! And so that's part of what makes you an information forager, because when you have nothing better to do, so to speak, you'll just poke around and see what happens because you never know! That knowledge might come in useful in the future!

So anyways, you're always going from point A to point B because you're—and the way you get from point A to point B, even if point B is an abstraction, because it often is, you know: I'm going towards a better future. Well, that's kind of a weird abstraction! How are you going to get there? Well, you can be sure that at the base it's going to involve movement, right? Because to get to that future, there are movements you're going to have to make.

So, see, see how I structured this? I'm going to go ahead to something—give a sec here—how should I do this? Got the example? Yeah, I have to go forward a bit here and then back. Okay, so we're going to look at this, we're going to look at this diagram, then we're going to go back.

So, um, start with an abstract philosophical concept: "I want to be a good person." Well, you might debate forever about what the good means, right? It's the sort of philosophical conundrum that you can fall into because you can think in abstractions and then you might think of it as a property of the world and as something that's subject to internal debate, which is exactly what's happened in the history of mankind. But there's another way of looking at it that's actually probably more accurate, and I would say also more useful.

And this is the way: like, so you're going to try to be a good person. Well, the Padian view would be being a good person, it's not a state of mind. What it is is an abstraction that represents, well, first other associated abstractions. Because we could say, well, being a good person is a multi-dimensional problem! That's right! You can't just be good and then it's done! It's like being a good person might mean being good at—well, what?

Well, good at being a friend, good at being a lover, good at being a parent, good at being a child, good at being an employee. You know, you could say good is what's the same across all those things! And P. would call that a scheme, just so you know because a scheme is what's the same across multiple different things. So, and the scheme is the basis of abstraction for P.

So "good person" is the sum total or the commonalities between being a good teacher, student, employee, etc. Okay, so then we'll say, okay, so now we can move the problem of analysis one level down, and we can say, okay, well, what does it mean to be a good parent? And then you'd say, well, maybe you have to have a good job because, you know, otherwise you and your child starve. But we'll forget about that one for a moment! And then you might say, well, you have to do a good job of taking care of your family.

Okay, so you notice we're zeroing in on an element of the good here, and it's still an abstraction: care for your family. That's an abstraction! So then you might say, well, one of the things you would do if you cared for your family is play with the baby, and another might be prepare a meal. So we'll take the play with the baby example.

And then there's three things you can do with your baby; you can peek at it—they like that, that's object permanence, say. There's nothing more thrilling to a baby than discovering that you're still there when you disappear! Like a baby, you can amuse a baby for hours with that discovery because it's by no means self-evident to the baby that that's a petan notion; they lack object permanence! So, as far as they're concerned, it's a hell of a shock when you disappear because they were just appreciating you being there.

And then they're just as shocked when you reappear! And you can—it's so interesting to watch them because when a baby gets startled, like when you get startled, you know, you might go like that if you're really startled; a baby, it's like its whole body is startled, right? It like—it makes a weird face and it moves its arms and its legs and then takes it like 5 seconds to recover. You know, they really have a startle reflex!

So, and they'll often laugh. I'm sure you've seen the laughing babies on YouTube because, of course, there's like two billion views of laughing babies, which is a good thing; it shows that we like babies! I think there's one that's very famous where a baby is reacting to his mother either sneezing or coughing. You know the one? God, it's absolutely hilarious; this baby just has a fit.

And what's basically happening is its mother coughs—I think it coughs, or maybe sneezes, blows her nose—oh okay, oh yeah! She blows her nose, and so she makes this weird elephant-like noise, and the baby is, like, shocked that mother could do this. And then it gets surprised at its own startle, and that makes it laugh!

So that's a really interesting phenomenon from a Padian perspective because one of the things that P. noticed children did, because they could imitate, was imitate themselves! That's how they got to know who they were! So for example, if a child would say—a child would accidentally knock that off when they're eating, well, that's a hell of a thing to discover! You know, if you move your arm just a little bit, that will fall off! That's cool!

So then maybe you can do that 60, 70 times. Well, you're supposed to be eating, and the other thing that's really cool about doing that is that Mom will immediately rush over and pick that up and put it back! And this is an excellent game; you can entertain yourself with that for like a month! And basically, what you're discovering is the relationship between your movements and gravity, right? It's like this is a major league discovery! It's no wonder you're obsessed with it!

So anyways, the point with regards to imitation is maybe the baby does this accidentally to begin with; that startles them and then is put up again! And then they think, well, that was cool; wonder if we can do that again. Then they're pretty happy about that, and then they'll keep practicing that until they get like expert at doing that! So, instead of using like gross body movements to do it, which is how they'd start, they develop finer and finer and finer body movements until they've got the whole knock-a-light thing off a table down!

And it could even be fascinating! As an adult, some of you probably played table hockey, you know, with the quarter. You know how to do that? Put a quarter on a table; it's not very complicated. You make little goals; your job is to flick the thing so that it just sits that far over the table end so that the opponent can flick it up. That's a—that's like your opportunity to score a goal.

My point is playing with how things move in relationship to friction and gravity is so engrossing to human beings that you can even make a game out of it if you're, you know, a relatively bored and stupid adult! I played that game all the time with my son, by the way, so I put myself in that category as well!

Now, what the child is doing is it'll accidentally, in some ways, bumble into something interesting, and then it recognizes that it's interesting in a sense because that's a reflex action on its part. And then once it recognizes that it’s had that reflex action, which is kind of—it's pleasurable as long as it's not too intense; it's at least interesting—then they'll try to imitate what they just did.

So part of the way you master yourself is by imitating yourself after you've accidentally done something interesting! It's so smart, so that's a Padian notion! So anyways, you're playing with the baby and you can play peek-a-boo with the baby; that's a good one. You're teaching it that you're still there even though you went away!

And you can tickle the baby, which is best done in moderation because it's not exactly clear that babies enjoy that. They just laugh when you do that so that you like them and don't throw them out the window when they're being annoying! And then you can clean the baby too, say. Those, those are elements of the care of a baby. I know that's not very sophisticated, but you know those are some of the basics.

Now, the thing that's different about play with a baby and tickling a baby is that play with a baby is an abstraction, whereas tickling a baby is an action, right? And so when you're trying to solve the mind-body problem, this is how you solve it: the mind is those abstractions, the body is the actions that those abstractions ground themselves in.

So it's not like the mind is attached to the body; it's that the mind is a sequence of hierarchically arranged abstractions, the bottom level of which are not abstractions; they're actions. There's a qualitative transformation at the bottom of the hierarchy at the highest resolution level of the hierarchy—it's action!

Now you can understand P. very easily if you understand that the way a baby develops, as far as P. is concerned, is from the bottom up. So the baby starts with it lying in its crib; it's a useless thing! It's laying there—it can't even focus its eyes! You know, it's just barely getting going, so it's sort of floating in space trying to figure out what's going on. You know, and it doesn't even know that it has arms really; it just sort of detects these things off to the side.

It'll off to bonk itself in the face with their its arms or scratch itself because you have to cut baby's nails really short because otherwise they scratch themselves because their arms are just, you know, wandering around randomly. And the baby, sorts from a Padian perspective, the baby starts to learn what its body is capable of doing, and some of that it just discovers by accident.

Now, there's no doubt some natural neurological progression that's going on, so the baby is learning along the paths that babies can learn. But still, from a Padian perspective, the baby is doing quite a bit of exploring to facilitate its neurological development. And more complex animals may be doing that in the womb! You know, trying out their legs and so on so that they can run as soon as they, you know, as soon as they get out!

So, it's not even obvious that all that sort of thing is reflexive and automatic in an animal that is more active when it's born! So the baby begins by basically—it sort of develops from the middle outward. So what’s the baby got when it first pops into the world? Well, it can't see very well, although it can focus at about 12 inches, which conveniently is about the distance that its head is from its mother's eyes if it's breastfeeding.

So, that's good for social communication! So the mother gazes at the baby, and the baby can gaze at the mother, and for some reason, they both find that fascinating! So the baby's also very wired up around the mouth so it can use its mouth quite a lot, and it can use its tongue. Those come prewired, so and this is kind of a Freudian observation—so at the beginning, the baby really is oral because that's all that works!

Like, it can smell too, you know, but it's voluntary capacity for action is really centered around its mouth. And you'll notice that babies, infants, or toddlers even love to put things in their mouth! My son, when he was a kid, he used to go in the backyard—we did feed him, so that is wasn't the reason he'd go in the backyard—and pick up acorns and stuff his cheeks with them, just like a chipmunk!

And so, you know, then we'd take him up to the bath and we'd have to like dig all the acorns out of his cheeks—and he did that for, oh God, way longer than you'd expect any sane child to do it! So, but the reason that he would put things in his mouth—and you think about this—is there's nothing that's a better exploratory organ than your tongue!

I mean, check out one of your teeth! Bloody thing feels like it's about this big to your tongue! As you'll notice if you ever get a tooth removed, it's like the Grand Canyon was just instantiated inside your mouth! Then, of course, your tongue will work like mad of its own accord to investigate every tiny little crevice in that new hole because your brain wants to know what's your mouth and what isn’t!

So that if there's something in your mouth that either should or shouldn't be there, it can tell it from you, and B, it can tell whether or not it's supposed to be there! Turns out to be very important, right? Because, well, there's tooth decay; that's a problem! But, you know, there's also insects and poison and all sorts of other things that you shouldn't put in your mouth!

So don't underestimate the degree to which you can zoom around the world like a, you know, Hoover vacuum cleaner and pick up a god-awful amount of information! And, of course, you also feed that way, obviously! And so, you know, you're checking out your mother with your mouth and your tongue in a very meaningful way too.

And while you're feeding at the breast, you're establishing the basis of social relationships! Now, this puts a bit of a warp into the Padian hypothesis because P. sort of assumed that the baby builds himself from the bottom up, right? But one of the things you have to understand is that the baby is always picking up how to behave and see in a very, very, very social context.

Even when it's so young that P. would regard it as primarily egocentric. CU what the hell does a baby know about you, you know? But the mother is teaching the child how to act right from the time it's a little tiny thing! Like if it's going to breastfeed, it has to do it in a relatively civilized manner because if it bites its mother or her mother—which a baby can do—they can really chomp you a good one if their minds are made up to do that! It's like unpleasant consequences are going to ensue!

At minimum, the mother is going to startle and, you know, stop feeding the baby, and, you know, maybe she'll put the baby down, or, or God only knows! One time when my son was very young—I guess he was about 13 months—he just learned to walk, and he walked up to my wife, who was wearing shorts, and he bit her right here. And a good chomp! He was just teething, and she reflexively shot out as a reflex, and he like—he must have flown six feet!

It's like that's how you socialize children against sudden bites, you know? So, even the smallest alterations of their behavior take place within an intensely social context. So, even at this level, society is helping guide and restrict the development of the child's motor activities.

Now, children tend to develop, as I said, they develop gross body movements first, so they kind of learn to fling their arms. So maybe you put a mobile in the crib for your baby to look at. By the way, most mobiles you'll notice maybe they're fish. So you're a parent, you're standing here, and this is the side of the fish and this is the bottom of the fish, and that's what the baby is looking at. It's like the baby is looking at lines because the fish are there for the adults!

It's like that's a stupid mobile; you get the fish turned over so that baby can see the fish! And then you make them out of like black and white because babies are very good at picking up high contrast; and that's a baby mobile rather than a mother mobile! So you've got to decide whether the mobile is for you or for your baby!

So anyways, you put the mobile above the baby, and you kind of want to put it within limb length, and then the baby will watch this thing. Who knows? Maybe it's annoyed to death by this thing; we don't know! It's like, you know, and then it'll, it'll sort of flail about like it does in a not very well controlled manner. And maybe it'll flail an arm or a leg, and now and then it'll get lucky, and it will nail one of those fish, and that'll startle it!

And so usually it'll—that it might cry then because that might have just—if it's a neurotic baby, it'll cry! It's like, "That's too much for today; take the whole bottle away!" But if it's the kind of outgoing exploratory baby, then the next thing it's really going to want to do is to figure out how to make that fish move again.

And then it'll sit there and practice flailing its leg! It's like it's throwing its leg at the fish, and if it gets lucky, it'll nail it a good one, and then that'll make it laugh! And then, you know, it'll practice doing that over a sequence of babies! Babies are persistent, man! So, when my daughter was little, she was about 18 months old, we bought her this little cardboard box that had little cardboard Disney books in it, you know?

And she didn't care what the Disney books were! What she was really interested in was getting those three books out of the Disney box, and then trying to get them back in! Because it turned out that was quite difficult because they fit tightly! So this was a great puzzle for her because, you know, she was still getting the whole cord thing going!

And she'd sit for like three hours getting those books in that box! And that was like a toy for her for a week till she figured it out! Then she was on to bigger and better things! But that's a big deal, right? You can imagine what you're doing neurologically when you're doing that; it's like first of all, you got to grip that book properly! Second you got to orient it precisely.

Third as you add the additional books to the box, the shape changes, because the books flop over, you know? Because they'll flop over diagonally, so the shape changes. You got to figure out how to adjust that! And then the book itself will open, and that'll get in the way, so you got to keep the book closed!

And, you know, the tolerances are like an 18th of an inch! So you want to master that! And, like, some people don't! I had a client once who had a very low fluid intelligence, probably 75–80; you wouldn't have known it by looking at them, but, uh, he couldn't find employment! Surprise, surprise!

There's no jobs in our society for people who are at that end of the cognitive distribution. I got him a volunteer job at one point, and his job was to put paper in envelopes. He had to fold it up in three because that's how you fold up a piece of paper, and then you have to put it in an envelope, but that actually turns out to be hyper-complex!

I probably trained him for 28 to 30 hours to do that! And because when you do it next time, or you could do it now, you just think about what you're doing, it's first of all merely by observing the piece of paper, you have to figure out how to make the first fold. And it better be damn close to 1/3 because if it isn't when you make the second fold, you're going to compound your error, and then you're going to find to your chagrin that the piece of paper does not fit in the envelopes because the envelope is exactly the same size as the piece of paper!

So if you're out by your estimate, say, a quarter of an inch in your first fold, you're out by a half inch in your second fold! It's like it's not going in there! Or if you don't fold it completely at 90 degrees, you know, so the edges line up, say you're out by a 16th of an inch, and then you do that again! So now you're out by an eighth—it won't fit in sideways!

So then you have to mangle the envelope to get the paper in there, and then by the time you're done mangling the envelope, not only does it look ugly but it will not go through an automatic sorting machine! So, and then added to that was the problem that on these pieces of paper there were often photographed staples because he was working for a charity!

So then, and, but the photographs weren't always stapled at exactly the same place on the piece of paper! So then he'd have to look at the piece of paper and he'd have to figure out where the photograph is! And then he'd have to figure out how to fold the piece of paper so that he didn't bend the photograph so that it would still fit in the envelope! And that just used to he just sweat himself to death trying to solve that problem because there was time pressure too!

So, and then there's an added level of complexity on top of that, and the reason I'm telling you this is because it'll give you some sense of how, you know, simple actions are aggregated into increasingly complex operations. Some of the envelopes were French, and some of them were English because it was Canada, and so you couldn't put a French letter in an English envelope! The French ones had to go in a separate pile, and then there was a huge stack, say, of English letters and a huge stack of English envelopes, all of which hypothetically had been stacked so that each one corresponded to the other.

But now and then, one of them would be out of alignment! So then you had to figure out whether it was the letters that were out of alignment or the envelopes? Well, that's a high complexity working memory problem! And that just brings him to a standstill!

So anyways, you know, during typical development, you develop those incredibly fine motor skills early, which is part of the reason why it's kind of nice to have your baby—or toddler—infant do something by itself! You know, like sit there with a box till it gets a little bored, and then it'll start to figure out what to do with the box! And that's part of play, and that's part of the development of its embodied conceptual structure!

So, okay, so you basically chain these things together. Now, the way that P. thought, "Well, what's the motivation for doing this?" So the motivation is essentially, well, sometimes it can be sort of random; you accidentally do something interesting and then try to repeat it. But as you sort of develop, the number of times that you do something accidentally that results in something interesting starts to decline.

Now, what part of what happens to you as you mature is that the opportunities that are provided for you by your body—as you exercise and develop it—start, you know, to really ramp up and develop. So that you can do a lot more interesting things with your body by the time you're two than you can when you're nine months old, for example! You can zoom around—which just opens up a whole universe of things to pull over and dump over and pull off tables and, you know, and there's things lying around that you can write on walls with, and you can pull out cupboards.

And it's like, it's, you know, paradise for an exploratory baby! So, but what happens is that as the child puts himself or herself together physically and develops additional skills, then they can elicit additional manifestations of novelty from the world! So, for example—well here's a good example.

So, the child finally manages to get itself upright, which is like a colossal accomplishment! You know, I mean, first of all, that's hard to do! You know, like, no, there aren't two-legged creatures in the world except for us, you know? And we're so good at this, you can even—Isn't that wonderful? I learned that when I was two!

So, you know, you can do these amazing things with your body, but the child is like trying to put itself together neurologically, and it's a hell of an operation to get this column of bone—it's like jellyfish on a bone, you know, on stock bones—and you got to get the thing to stand upright! God, ridiculously difficult! So the child manages that—there's a lot of pain and anguish associated with that, right?

Because those little creatures, they just fall down! You know, they got these little short arms, so they're not much good at protecting themselves from impact! They're just bouncing off the walls like mad when they're trying to learn to walk! Then they finally get themselves upright and totter along and fall and so on!

But then, you know, then the world turns into a different place because all of a sudden now you can stand up underneath a table! That's a fun thing to do for the first time! It's like whack! So now your new body has taught you something about the world that you did not know! So what P. would say is, well, you've got this scheme worked out, which is the standing up scheme!

And it turns out that that works pretty well if you're in an empty space, but if you're in an enclosed space with a low ceiling, the whole standing-up thing is just not going to produce the results intended! So you stand up and whack yourself, and that's a sign that it's time to update your representational structures! And so, you can think of that technically as the emergence of anomaly into what would have otherwise been a conceptually protected space!

Now, P. has this idea of equilibration. So let's say your baby crawls, and let's say it's an equilibrated crawler, which means it's kind of an expert! And babies get pretty expert crawlers by about, say, 12-13 months; they can zoom around and they know how not to bump into things, and you know how to crawl around without hurting themselves!

So when they crawl around, only the things that they want to have happen happen most of the time! And they're equilibrated at that point because their actions and their conceptions of the consequence of those actions match! They've got no problem! What they expect or want to have happen when they crawl is what happens! That baby's mastered a developmental stage!

So that's the stage idea—that's the equilibrated stage idea! Equilibration is a brilliant idea, and I'll tell you why in a minute. But then all of a sudden, the baby learns to stand up! It's like, uh-oh, an advance! But it's like a revolutionary advance, right?

It's equivalent to a revolution in science, which is why P. mentioned—it's like, well now, I'm a standing creature! The whole crawling expertise is hardly worth it at all! You know, there's some transfer of knowledge, but the new universe that's made accessible to the baby by its now dawning ability to stand forces it to revolutionize its entire cognitive structure.

Now, I want to tell you a very quick story because it's a very good one. So this is a good indication of the function of dreaming in play. So when my daughter was three, she couldn't talk very well; she learned to speak late, and we lived in Boston. And when she learned to speak, she developed a Boston accent, which we were completely flabbergasted by because we didn't have a Boston accent, and neither did any of our neighbors. Turns out there's a speech impediment that sounds just like a Boston accent, but anyway, she was—it usually goes away except in Boston.

So anyway, she was three, and when her brother was born, there's always the possibility of sibling rivalry, right? Because, and for good reason—it's like, H time to get rid of that thing! All it's doing is taking up all of Mom's attention, you know? Like that's a hard reality for a child who's under three to manage, CU, they're still pretty dependent. And it's like, well, why should they be liking this horrible, noisy, attention-grabbing interloper?

So we tried to teach her right from the time he came home, her brother—that the idea was she was going to lose something, which was some parental attention, especially from her mother. But she was potentially going to gain something which was maturity, independence, and the possibility of a new relationship. Now we could tell her that; some parents will tell their three-year-olds that, and it's like, and your three-year-old has learned to look at you when you talk.

But they're actually hearing, you know how dogs in cartoons hear people talk? It's like, whah whah whah w w w! That's how children hear you talk when you're talking about something like independence! Like, what the hell do they know about that? That's way up there on the hierarchy! But we tried to teach her to interact with the baby in such a way that she would elicit positive feedback from him and so that they could be friends.

And then we also taught her that she should take care of the baby, and that gave her something to do, so that worked! We also didn't let them tease each other—not much, you know; they're going to tease each other a bit because siblings often bloody well hate each other when they're young, and sometimes that just destroys the relationship for their whole life! It's like you don't want that because you're stuck with your damn brother till he dies, hopefully, or until you do!

So anyways, my daughter was taking care of this little guy, and you know, she used to watch him on the steps and sort of shepherd him around, and she was pretty good at it! And then, um, one day he started to walk. And she kept talking about her baby, and we told her that, well, he wasn't really a baby anymore. And we didn't realize that this was setting off a cognitive revolution of the Padian sort because, of course, she'd kind of grown attached to this baby just like mothers do.

And mothers sometimes get so attached to their babies that they really don't want them to stop being babies, and so they end up living in their house till they're 55, you know, plotting the destruction of the world. So you don't want to let that happen! So, but it was happening in a microw way with her—it's like, well, there's this baby, and I spent a lot of time getting used to it and figuring out what to do with it; now it's not a baby anymore! What the hell is it?

So she had this amazing dream, and it ties back to the shamanic stuff that I taught you guys about earlier. So this is the dream: she dreamt that the baby crawled into a hole in the backyard! Now, the way the hole got there was that a tree from the park beside us had moved into our backyard and then it had burned down and left this hole, and then the hole was full of water!

And so the baby crawled into the water and it reduced him to a skeleton! And then there was a bug in the water, and the bug pulled him out! And when he came out, he was a new creature! So it was, it was perfect! Like she came and told me that, I don't know, like two in the morning in her little three-year-old voice saying, "I got it all typed down!" But it was absolutely spectacular because it was a straight shamanic dream!

Like the tree burned down, and so that's a transformation motif! And then water is the place of rebirth! And you know the kid was dissolved into a skeleton, and the little bug that pulled him out is like a representation of the underlying process that guides transformation! Her little brain was like me trying to figure out continuity over change! That's a tough one, right? Because it's almost like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon.

It's a big deal baby to toddler; that's a big difference! You know, she's supposed to figure out, well, that's the same thing—well, no, it's not! So underneath her unconscious mind, you know, three-year-olds are not stupid even though they can't talk. They've got this brain that's like 3.5 billion years old; it's not stupid!

So anyways, um, now why was I telling you that? A specific reason—oh, well, it's another indication of how. So the transformations of cognitive structure are forced upon a child, at least in part, by the development of increasing physical ability, right? Because as you increase in physical ability and capacity, then the world transforms, and then your cognitive processes have to transform to keep up with that, and sometimes that's a radical transformation!

So P.'s fundamental hypothesis is that part of the reason that people are motivated to undergo cognitive transformations and learning per se is because, as they mature, they come into contact automatically with anomalous information—information that they cannot process from within the confines of their current world model. And because they can't process it, it interferes with them getting what they want! And so they're motivated to keep their cognitive structures updated!

So, and sometimes the revolutions occur at a micro level, and that might be like when you're learning the difference between this and this! You know, it's like it's a major difference, but it doesn't, you know, disrupt the whole fabric of your conceptual universe. Whereas a divorce might—baby transforming into a toddler might—puberty does!

It's cause, like, you just finally got used to your body! You're 12 years old, so you're sort of at the pinnacle of childhood; you're like an adult child! You know what you're doing! And 11 and 12-year-olds are often lovely creatures because they're pretty mature, and they've got their act together, and then all of a sudden, bang! Sex hormones kick in! It's like you are no longer the same thing.

And neither is anyone you interact with! And so it's like turbulence for three, four, five, twenty, thirty years until you sort of sort that out, which you never really do! And so you can see how the physiological transformations that are attended on development, some biologically predicated and some an emergent consequence of learning, disrupt the cognitive structures that people use to orient themselves in the world.

And that some of those disruptions are sort of low-key equivalent to normal science— that would be assimilation. And some of them much broader—and that's equivalent to accommodation. Assimilation means you learn something new that you can already handle using the constructs and schemas that you have at hand, you know? So maybe you have to pick the thing up like this instead of like this, but you already know this and you know that, so who cares? It's like, a little minor alteration, and sometimes, well, no! You have to readapt your whole body in order to handle the next level of complex problem-solving!

Learning to drive is like that! Learning to ride a bicycle is like that! And you can see that there's sort of a—there's not normal versus revolutionary transformations—there's sort of a continuum that that maps themselves onto that hierarchy I showed you. You know, so if at the very highest levels of resolution it's minor transformations, and up the higher levels of abstraction, you can blow out whole huge chunks of yourself.

So, it's a continuum, but P. and I sort of conceptualized it as a dichotomy! Alright, let's see. That's a map of that which you can look up! Um, oh yes! This is the—this this—this is the thing I really want to get at too! This is—it’s so brilliant!

And so P. was concerned about morality, and he's one of the few psychologists I think who, like, he nailed it! This is like the most important thing P. discovered, and maybe it's one of the most important things that a psychologist has ever discovered! It's like, how do you become moral?

Well, we already mentioned that when you acquire a behavior, you inevitably acquire it in a social context. So what that means is that right from the time you're little and learning things, the demands of society are encoded in the behaviors that you're allowed to manifest. And so, to some degree, by the time you behave the way you do behave when you're three, if you've been properly socialized, you already act out the embodied moral structure of your entire community!

So, you know when you talk about laws, you say there's a body of laws, and the body of laws used to be the king, so you had to do what the king said! But now the body of laws is an abstract conceptual representation, but those representations are actually semantic representations of allowable and not allowable behavior!

And so, by the time you're three and you're a law-abiding three-year-old—which means you're well socialized—you're already acting in accordance with the law—the patterns that characterize your being, the behavioral patterns that characterize your being have already been molded into the patterns that you manifest!

And so what that means in some sense is you're already, as P. would say, an unconscious advocate of your culture because you're acting it out. Now, here's an example of how that can be transformed into actual moral knowledge. So he, P. goes and studies kids playing a game!

So here's an example: so there's a bunch of kids, they're standing around on the playground and they're all playing helicopters! Maybe they've just got