2016 Lecture 04 Maps of Meaning: Anomaly

So I want to continue talking about this basic story or sub personality or game or map. So what I’ve discussed with you so far is that there are different ways that you can construe the objects and territories that you inhabit, and that modern people generally think that the world they inhabit is one that's defined by science. But I would say - I would say actually it depends on which scientist you mean because I don't believe that the worldview that emerges as a logical consequence of Darwinism is the same worldview that emerges as a logical consequence of Newtonian presuppositions.

And you know, the reason I’m bringing Newton into it is because we still think in Newtonian terms. It’s been more than a hundred years or about a hundred years, I guess, since Newton’s model was expanded by quantum physics, but no one thinks that way because you can't think that way. Besides that, the reason you don't think that way is because at the level of resolution that you exist, things behave in a Newtonian manner, so it’s in accordance with some of our natural perceptions.

Now, I started thinking this way for a variety of reasons, but I was influenced later by a guy named Gibson - JJ Gibson, who wrote a book called "An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception." He made the case, quite strongly, that what you directly perceive is the implication of situations and objects. So for example, I suppose you've all seen the famous visual cliff experiment with babies where, if you put a piece of glass across an open space and the space is evidently deep, the baby won’t cross the glass.

So there's some evidence there for relatively innate, not only depth processing. It’s not just depth processing, right? Because in order to not crawl off that, you also have to perceive that - well Gibson would say that it’s a falling off place, and he would say that's actually what you perceive. It's a falling off place, and then maybe you can extract out the idea of cliff, but that isn't what you perceive.

And you know, the sense you have when a bear is chasing you that’s dangerous, that doesn't seem to be merely psychological in a sense like it’s not merely, in a sense, not - it’s not less real than perceiving the bear as an object. An object that eats you is not the same object as an object that remains neutral to you or positive, and it seems quite clear.

This is where the Darwinian issue I think arises, that you have to evaluate with your perception because otherwise you're too slow. So anyways, I developed this diagram as a consequence of thinking about these things for a long time, and the diagram is predicated on the idea that when you begin to act in the world, you're inside a motivational frame, let’s say. That motivational frame can be instantiated or put into practice or put into place by any number of underlying motivational systems, some of them the more basic motivational systems that we share with animals going far back down the evolutionary chain and some of them more complex mixtures of emotional or motivational drives that been organized across lengthy periods of time in social circumstances.

So, for example, if you're at a bar and you're looking for someone, it’s not really reasonable to say - we’ll take the simple case. It’s not really reasonable to say that your behavior is motivated by sex because that's what happens only if you're actually in a sexual act. Before that, the motivations are multiple and they have to be because otherwise you wouldn't have the sophistication to begin a conversation with anyone. So to think of that as driven in some sense by sexuality means either to consider a much more expanded notion of sexuality or to not consider it driven in that manner.

Now, I think it’s reasonable to make the presumption that you're motivated to move ahead, and we know that for a variety of reasons. Partly that’s because if you look at the brain at the level of the hypothalamus, which is a very, very archaic and primordial subsystem in the brain, then it’s roughly divided into two parts. One part is responsible for a lot of the things we consider basic motivations, and the other part is responsible for exploration.

So the dopaminergic tracts whose operation underlies movement forward and incentive reward and what you generally experience as the sorts of positive emotion associated with hope, excitement, and curiosity, that system is instantiated in the hypothalamus, and a lot of the hypothalamus is devoted to it. So, as a very primordial system, whose operation appears to be a default, it’s a default operation if none of the other motivational systems need current attention.

Well, the other default, I suppose, is sleep or rest. You can certainly see that in animals because, you know, if you have a cat you’ll notice - of course they’re nocturnal, but they'll sleep a large part of the day, and so do dogs. So, you know, if you're not looking for a partner, if you don't want to play, if you're not hungry, not thirsty, and so on, not under the grip of any direct biological necessity let’s say, then your default position is to rest or sleep or to explore.

And the thing about the exploratory circuit is it’s really old. It’s as old as pain. It’s as old as lust. It’s as old as anger. It’s as old as hunger. It’s as old as thirst. Like it’s a really, really old system. It’s a very primordial system, and human beings are quite hyper exploratory, at least collectively, as you can tell because we keep inventing new things and exchanging new modes of being.

So, you can say in some sense that you have a drive to engage with the world and to expand your domain of knowledge. And the reason that you have that is because the human race has gambled on that as a sufficient means of ensuring adaptation into the future. You know, and it’s a strange one because most animals are very, very conservative. In fact, most human societies are very, very conservative.

So it’s certainly possible for even relatively modern human societies - let’s say those that have arisen in the last fifty thousand years - to remain relatively unchanged for periods during that time of up to ten thousand years. That seems to be what happened, for example, with regards to the original inhabitants of Australia. So it’s statis that’s the norm, not transformation. And you know, even societies that we feel were very dynamic, like let’s say Ancient Egypt, still there are indications in the archaeological record of relatively unchanged customs and practices for periods that you would count in the thousands.

So, most animals and many societies bet that just doing the same thing over and over is gonna do the trick, and human beings - well that isn't what we’re like, man. God only knows how that originally came about, you know. It was the conjunction of many, many processes and forces, and it would be very, very difficult to tell a complete causal story.

But anyways, here we are. Now, it’s reasonable to think of us as motivated to move forward and motivated to explore, and so that's the fundamental motivation for engaging with the world, apart from anything that’s strictly lower level biological. And while we’re doing that, it’s also customary for us to look at the world in terms of its utility, and I would say with human beings that it’s a very tool-based utility because you know, our brain is part of our body. Our brain is adapted to our body, and our body is adapted to our brain.

Obviously, they coevolved, and so the kind of brain we have is the sort of brain that a creature that stands upright and can manipulate the world has. We’ll see some evidence of that later. But because we’re so handy, we can speak with our hands, and we can manipulate things with our hands, and we can transform things with our hands. We can tear things apart and we can hunt and we can plant, and there's an endless number of possibilities for hand utilization.

The world appears to us arrayed out as tools, roughly speaking, and a tool would be something - it’s hard to get the word exactly right because I like tool because tool implies something that you can use. Whereas Gibson would have talked about - what did he call it? I can’t remember. It’ll come to me in a minute. The word reflects the fact that the world is presenting itself to you as something you can use.

Let me just look that up for a second. That’s very annoying. Oh well, whatever. So naturally when you lay out the world, it lays itself out into things that are going to be useful for you, things that are going to get in your way, and then things that have neither property. Under most circumstances, the things that have neither property are the overwhelming majority, and that's partly how you manage to process the world in all of its complexity with your relatively narrow processing capacity.

Most things have no significance, and they have no significance within this very, very focal frame which is if you remember the hierarchy diagram, it’s like in that hierarchy diagram, most of the time you’re operating at the level of motor interaction with the world. You’re actually engaged with the world either through articulation, but forget about that for now, or you're actually engaged moving in the world, moving it around, and interacting with it.

It’s as if you're viewing the world through a series of concentric lenses, and those concentric lenses exclude things. Then the highest resolution lens, the one that enables you to focus closest, is the one that helps you highlight those few things in the vast perceptual world of nothingness that seem to be critical for that particular operation.

So now, you can see that. I mean the most dramatic example of that - I was really personally thrilled about Dan Simon’s gorilla experiments because I’d been thinking about this for a long time before that experiment came out, and it was the clearest demonstration I had seen. I mean, there's a lot of demonstrations like that now, but it was the clearest demonstration I’d ever seen that indeed most of what your perceptual systems do is exclude.

Now what that means - this is the tricky thing - is that wrapped up in what you exclude is the entirety of being, virtually. And that's a very tricky problem because when you're excluding all of being, in some sense you're setting its value to zero. You say, “Well except for those few things that I’m concentrating on now, everything else is zero, and it’s zero and unchanging.”

And the problem with that is that lots of times that’s not right. Now, it’s right enough, luckily enough, and I suppose this is a consequence of evolution too. We’re fast enough or slow enough, depending on how you look at it, so that we can assume constancy across some span of time under some conditions.

Now, from a philosophical perspective that's inadequate. Some of you might have heard of the phrase “The scandal of induction.” Well, it’s a pointer to a very profound philosophical problem, and the philosophical problem is how do you know the same thing that happened before is going to happen next? And the answer to that is generally you don't know, and it’s a very tricky issue to come to terms with, you know.

I think you can think of things as you know, if you think about a hierarchy of resolution again. I think you can think of things as very, rather predictably, in their unpredictability. So for example, there's some indication that protons decay. But they decay over such a long time frame that the probability that that’s going to affect us is virtually zero, and there's other things that we interact with quite regularly like the sun that are stable across timeframes that make it virtually ignorable.

Well, I’ll tell you a story about that, and this is a good story to indicate how everything is nested in what you ignore. So, part of this story is fictional, but part of it isn’t. So, one time when I was in graduate school in Quebec, in Montreal, I was typing on my pre-hard drive computer and it stopped. And you know computers do that, and so what happens when your computer stops?

Well, the first thing that happens is it depends on what you're working on. That’s the critical issue, right? So what happens is that you have a reaction that's proportionate to the deemed importance of what it was that you’re working on, and there's going to be an association between that and deadlines. There's going to be an association between that and the amount written that you think you might have lost.

And then, so there's - because what you're doing is nested in a hierarchy, you know, I’m writing a sentence to write a paragraph to write an essay to hand the essay in to fulfill a requirement of class to graduate, etc. all the way up the nested hierarchy. You're going to be upset in proportion to the upset - or to the cost of this failure in terms of that entire structure.

So you do a rough estimate, eh? Because you don't really know and generally you don't assume the worst, although you might immediately, because that's the sort of situation where someone will go - they’ll get angry, or I will anyways. I’ll pound my fist on the - and then I’ll curse Microsoft usually or whoever happened to make the computer, and then I’ll remember I can usually fix computers if there's something wrong with them.

It probably all it needs to do is to be rebooted and so forth. And so what happens to begin with is a burst of emotion, and the reason for that is that the significance of the unexpected event cannot be easily constrained, and that's because there's so many things that might have gone wrong.

Now, you know, because the worst-case scenario is maybe your computer is dead, and then that’s a problem for all sorts of reasons we don't have to go into. It’s not just a technical problem, right? It’s also a political, and social, and economic problem, weirdly enough, because then when you go buy a computer, you have to figure out, well who’s the manufacturer, and where’s the manufacturing done, and what's a high-quality computer?

And it’s like good luck figuring that out because they change every month, so you just can't keep track of it. So it opens up a whole rat’s nest, or hornet’s nest of problems - or a pit of snakes, which is a better way of thinking about it. Okay, so, fine. So, my computer’s dead, so I try to reboot it. It doesn't reboot, and so I think I don't know, maybe it’s burned out or maybe there's something wrong with the plug.

So I plug a lamp into the same outlet and I try to turn on the lamp, and the lamp doesn't go on, so then I think, "Aha! I blew a fuse because this place had fuses." So fine. So I go to the fuse box, and it’s daytime, so it’s not a problem, and I look at the fuses and there's nothing wrong with the fuses.

So I think, well I’ll go down to the corner store and get a cigarette because I smoked at that time, and I’ll think about it on the way. So I go outside, and all the street lights are off. So the whole city’s come to a halt. I think, "Oh there’s a power outage."

It’s like, yeah, there was a power outage, and here's what happened. A solar flare emerged from the sun, surfacing. It was a whopping big one, and a solar flare like that sends out a wind, essentially, of charged particles that come zooming towards the Earth. We're protected from them for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the Earth is magnetic and for complicated reasons, that helps protect us from cosmic rays, which is really a good thing as far as I’m concerned.

But now and then those things are so powerful that they’ll - well here’s an example. If you have a hydrogen bomb, a big one, and you detonate it in the middle of North America in the atmosphere, high up, you’ll wipe out all the electronics in the entire continent permanently because what happens is that when the bomb goes off, there's an electromagnetic pulse and that produces an electric current that runs through the wiring, and that'll be of - very brief obviously, but of sufficient intensity to fry the electronics.

So, well that's what the sun is. The sun is a massive hydrogen bomb and so now and then it goes off with the force of, you know, millions of hydrogen bombs and then we get the pulse radiating towards us and then it sets a current in the power grid, which what happened here and takes out the whole power grid. That's what happened at that point. The Quebec power grid was down for awhile, and it was because - so that’s why my computer crashed is because the sun wasn't as stable as I thought it was.

That gives you an example of just how interconnected things are and how much you're taking for granted when you make anything invisible. I would say that part of what happens in a civilized society - we’ll say a civilized and productive society - is that there are rules of conduct in place and there are effective processes in place so that most of the time you can rely on things being like they were yesterday.

So for example, our power supply is unbelievably reliable given that it’s so intrinsically unstable. People have to beetle around nonstop just to keep the power on, but they do, and so we can sit here and ignore it, and we can concentrate on something more arcane and much more focused, but it’s also because it’s a relatively peaceful society, and we have relatively peaceful free speech and so on and so forth.

You can predict with a high degree of certainty that if you come to class, then what’s going to happen in the class - the worst that's going to happen in the class, likely, is that you're either going to get bored or hot. So that’s not so bad, you know. Alright, so you're going from point A to point B, and you see your tools.

I still haven't remembered that damn word. What the hell is that damn word? That’s so annoying. Nope. Whatever. You go along and you see these tools. These are things that are going to help get you to your goal, and whenever you see those, you get a burst of positive emotion.

Basically, that means two things, that positive emotion. Think about it as a little dopamine kick, and this is where this story differentiates a little bit from classic behaviorism. So, the behaviorists would say you get a little dopamine kick and that increases the probability that the action that you just took will be taken again in the future.

So it’s partly because the dopamine kick has a positive emotional - it provides a positive emotional experience but it’s also because the dopamine facilitates neural growth, and so if you're beetling along and something good happens to you, then your brain makes the things you were doing - the circuits that underlie the things you were doing just before the good thing happened - a little bit stronger.

But, the other thing that happens when you're beetling along and doing your positive thing is that you get a little dopamine - is that the fact that it’s working also validates your frame of reference because you know you might say, "Well, if what you're doing is lurking and you're getting what you want, how is it that you're right?" And the answer to that is well in some ways, you're right enough up the entire hierarchy.

What that means is that every time you proceed along the path that you've chosen and that's working, that entire structure gets stabilized a bit more, and that's how it should be. Now, I've tried to work out how exactly this happens and I can give you the best example by telling you about cocaine addicts. So, addicts used to have this phrase. “Monkey on my back.”

And that phrase referred to the compulsion, the compulsive sub personality that develops that's interested in nothing but more of the substance. Now, you know, you think about that as being hooked and you might think about it as a motivational drive or a biological drive, but the thing is it’s not like that. We’re just not that deterministic. An addicted person has grown an addicted sub personality.

And I mean grown. It’s not psychological. It’s psychophysiological. So imagine this. Imagine this is how it works. I’ll first tell you what happens to cocaine addicts if you take them out into a treatment center. Heroin addicts is the same thing, roughly speaking.

So you take this person who’s dependent, out to a treatment center, and with heroin, say, you have to let them go through withdrawal. And that takes about forty-eight hours, something like that, and you've seen movie representations of it, but it’s been compared by reasonable observers to having a very bad flu. So, alcohol withdrawal, by the way - that kills you often.

You have a seizure and you die. So if you're an alcoholic and you go to the hospital and you need to detoxify, they'll give you valium or something like that so you don't seize yourself to death while you're withdrawing. You know, when you have a hangover, part of that is that - part of what’s happened is you've actually lowered your seizure threshold. Something to think about if you're prone to seizures.

It’s a bad idea to have a hangover. In fact, they bred mice to study hangovers. They bred mice that could drink alcohol and then they’d get a very bad hangover, and if you showed them a cat, they would have a seizure. So, because the fear was enough to trigger seizures. So yeah, well you gotta get seizures going somehow if you're gonna study them, and that can be bred.

So anyways, you take your heroin addict, let’s say, and they get over their withdrawal, and so that means that technically they're no longer physiologically dependent on the drug. Now that doesn't mean their work is over by no means. But frequently the treatment center, as long as the person is nowhere near where they usually are, once they’ve gone through withdrawal, they can stay away from the drug quite effectively, but the problem is as soon as you put them back in the situation that they came from, and they're around the things that have been associated with heroin, let's say, they get a craving.

And the cravings haven't gone away. That's a different system than the system that went through withdrawal, and so they always relapse. Now, you think about how this craving works, and I've seen this probably most seriously, I guess, with cocaine addicts, but also with alcoholics.

So, imagine what you have to do in order to become an addict. You know, the first thing is that you have to start using the drug. Okay, but that - and fair enough. People experiment with all sorts of drugs and so, you know, that's part of human nature. You know, it’s risky and dangerous, but it’s not yet catastrophic.

But then let’s say you start using it enough so that you can't not use it. You have to use it every day or something like that, and then the next thing that happens is that it gets a little bit expensive, and so then your life is starting to go downhill because you're spending all your time trying to gather resources to get some more of the drug.

Now, what you might ask yourself is what do you have - like exactly what’s the chain of behaviors that's being reinforced by the drug? Well, somewhere along the way, you know, maybe when you're just starting to misuse it, there's part of you that's saying, “You know, really this is probably not a good idea.” And then there's another part of you that has a different thought which might be, “Oh to hell with it. It’s only one. It’s only tonight.”

And so then you take the drug, and then there's a chain leading from the thought to the drug behavior. But the drug reinforces all the way back along that chain. So what happens is that little system that thinks, “Oh to hell with it, it’s only one night,” gets a little stronger.

Now, it doesn't get as strong as the systems that are being reinforced that are activated directly before the drug hit, but the thing is that maybe you take heroin in fifty different situations, and so you're conditioning yourself to cues in all those different situations. You use slightly different behaviors and so on, so there's different things being shaped, but one of the things that's always being reinforced, even though not that much, is this thought pattern.

And the thought pattern is something like “Oh to hell with it, doesn’t matter anyways” because you have to think that in order to - especially at the beginning of a nice downhill trip. You have to think that, and so what happens is you build this monster in your head. It’s full of lies and rationalizations, and they are whatever lies and rationalizations allowed you to continue the behavior to begin with.

But you're making them more and more potent, and so you build a sub-personality inside of you that it’s a one-eyed monster, fundamentally. All it wants is the drug, and it’s armed with any number of perfectly, depends on how smart you are, you know. You can come up with a very powerful, nihilistic rational argument about why - about why life is futile and your future is dead and there's nothing better to do anyways, and you'd be a fool to engage in such a destructive society, and et cetera, et cetera.

Like, you can conjure up a very - an argument that’s virtually impermeable to rational argument, rational counterargument. Because you know, there's some things that you just can't prove. Like you can't prove life is intrinsically worthwhile, you know, because for obvious reasons.

So, now the reason I told you that is because I think it’s a good example of how things are nested inside of each other you know, and also the relationship between this very large nesting of concentric lenses, let’s say, and the way that those things are shaped and reinforced across time. Whenever you're acting locally, and something goes the way you want it to, let’s say, and not the way you expect because that's what Sokolov, and Vinogradova, and Jeffrey Gray, and the people who were looking at the orienting response first presumed.

They’d presumed that you wanted things to go the way you expect, but that's not exactly right, and it’s an important distinction. You want things to go the way you want them to go, and if it’s just expectation, then it’s just a cold, cognitive model of the world, right? It’s like robotic. Okay, A happened, now B should happen. Now C should happen.

It’s like that isn't how you think at all. You're always inside a motivational frame, and it isn't only that you expect the next thing to happen, but if the next thing happens, it matters whether it’s what you want or not. If it’s what you want, then that little system is reinforced. It’s pleasurable for you, and then the whole hierarchy grows a little bit stronger, and if it is not what you want, then you have a problem.

And that's where things get weird and interesting. So okay, so you're going along from point A to point B, and you can see tools and you can see obstacles, and obstacles are anything that get in your path. What that means in some sense is that what a tool is and what an obstacle is switches very rapidly as you change focus, and as your intent changes.

So it’s a dynamic system. Alright, and so the way emotion works in this regard is if things are going the way you want them to, then you feel positive emotion, and that keeps you moving towards your goal. And if you run into an obstacle, then you feel negative emotion. Okay, so the next issue might be well just exactly what should you experience when you experience negative emotion?

Well you might say, "Well that's a tricky question because if you encounter an obstacle, that means that something about your model is wrong because if it was right, you wouldn't have encountered that obstacle." So this is a very interesting way of thinking. It’s a pragmatic way of thinking because what it illustrates is that whenever you do something, you're acting out a theory of truth, and the theory of truth is the actions that I’m undertaking at the moment are sufficient to reach the goal that I’m aiming at, and so you set up a theory of truth with each act.

So, you're always struck with the reality of truth and error or correct and incorrect because you can't posit that a goal is worth having, and if there's a path to it that might be clear or obstructed without also saying it matters whether you know what you're doing.

Okay, so you hit an obstacle, and that produces negative emotion. Now, the problem you have here is that in principle, the reason you hit that obstacle could be that there's an error in your nested model at any level of the model. So and that's why I told you about the little story of the sun. It’s like normally you just turn your computer on and off because something has happened that’s local, but now and then, your problem is that the sun isn't as reliable as you might like it to be.

And so, you're faced with this insanely complex problem not when things go right, because when things go right, you can just continue ignoring everything that you’re ignoring, but when they go wrong, the search space that opens up before you is just about infinite. Now, that has real-world consequences.

I mean, one of the things that happens when people develop panic disorder - what seems to happen is that… I can tell you the typical story about how you would develop panic disorder with agoraphobia because the two things are somewhat separate. So generally, this happens to - it generally happens to women. It generally happens in their forties.

Women are more susceptible to anxiety and depression, and men are more susceptible to substance abuse and antisocial behavior. Figures that something would go wrong right now, doesn't it? Okay, so now what do I ask myself? Well, is this relevant? Is it going to disrupt the class? Does it mean that there's something wrong with my computer? Should I call the help people? And I’ll say no, we'll ignore it on the assumption it will continue working, and until that hypothesis fails then we can ignore it.

Okay so… So something goes wrong and this search space opens up in front of you. Now, okay, back to the agoraphobic. So what happens to her usually is generally these are people who’ve had dependent relationships, and perhaps they had a relatively overprotective family, or let’s just say a protective family. And then, they had an intimate relationship early in their life, and maybe that lasted quite a long time, or maybe they're just married to the same guy, but the - and inside that relationship, she’s relatively dependent which means probably she doesn't go anywhere without her husband, you know?

She doesn't do a lot of things autonomously, let’s say. Okay, so then she hits menopause, and you know, she’s getting some strange physiological symptoms from that of various sorts. And maybe at the same time, maybe she talks to her husband about a divorce, or maybe he talks to her about a divorce, or maybe her sister gets divorced or maybe a close friend dies, or maybe she starts to experience heart palpitations because of the menopause.

And then she thinks, "Oh my god. That could happen to me. It’s like my whole world can fall apart." So that’s one fear. "My whole world could fall apart." So that's sort of the fear of societal catastrophe - the collapse of the structure.

And then the other fear is often, "Oh my god. I could be dying of a heart attack." And so what happens to people who start to develop panic disorder is that they end up going to the emergency room all the time to be checked out by cardiologists, and the cardiologists are used to this, and they generally check people up quite extensively, but most of the time if there's something up with your heart, there's nothing wrong.

But there could be, and so then the sort of… what happens is the person who has developed agoraphobia starts thinking perhaps about what would happen if her husband died or if they got divorced, and then she starts thinking about the fact that, well she doesn't really know what she’d do, and she doesn't really know how to take care of a bunch of things and how she might take care of the finances and so forth.

And so, she has no real place to turn, and so then she makes the fatal mistake. She goes out and she starts to panic, and then she goes home. That's not good. So if you ever develop severe anxiety, the one thing you don't want to do is avoid because of it because as soon as you avoid because of it, it gets worse, and the reason for that is imagine her anxiety systems are trying to figure out how afraid she should be, and it ranges from panic-stricken to none.

Well, the anxiety systems have all sorts of sources of input because they're trying to calculate a very difficult problem because, you know, when this thing flickered, one of the things that everyone does is look around, and the reason you do that - it’s called referencing. Social referencing. It’s like, "Well how upset should I be about this? What’s going on?"

And you look at everyone’s face and you see, well they're upset or they're not upset and everybody kind of comes to an average agreement about how upsetting this is, and we do that very, very rapidly. You know, and we estimate how anxious we should be by our default neuroticism, so I would say generally speaking, if you have higher levels of negative emotion, rather than lower levels, what happens is the severity that you estimate a given uncertain event to exist to have is higher than the severity someone else might estimate if they were more emotionally stable.

And then there's another input which is, well roughly how competent do people around you and you think you are because, you know, how afraid you should be is actually somewhat proportionate to how competent you are, right? I mean, if you're a well-practiced hunter and you're out in the forest, and a bear charges you, it’s like well maybe you’ve seen a hundred bears and you know what to do, and it’s like it’s a bear and all that, but you're not gonna run.

And so then, the bear probably won't think you're prey because the bear thinks that if you run, that you're edible. Now the thing that's really interesting is that if you watch yourself run, then your brain thinks you're edible too. So that's another input because - so the anxiety system is doing this terribly difficult calibration job which is “Okay something happened. How upset should I be?”

Well, how upset are other people? What’s my physiological response? How does it compare to other times I was upset? What are my options? That's a good one because one of the things the anxiety systems really want is that it wants you to come up with a plan. It doesn't really care what the plan is, although you have to believe it because it’s not really a sophisticated cognitive system. It’s an alarm bell, and it says, "Look, something’s up here. You have to knit up your world again and put it to rest. We need to be able to ignore everything again," and if you can't do that, that thing will just go off forever.

That’s what happens at least in part to people who have post-traumatic stress disorder. They're soldiers, you know, and maybe they've gone out in battle and they've watched themselves do terrible things because that's actually one of the most common precedents of post-traumatic stress disorder, and they have no idea how to represent that in their hierarchical world model, you know, because part of your world model, a huge part of it - the “What is” part, you know, is who you are.

Well, it’s like you might find out that you're not who you think you are. You aren't even who you think you are a little tiny bit. Like there's corners and nooks and whole unexplored rooms inside of you that contain things that if they ever come out, you're done. You don't know what to do with it, you know.

And if you've dealt with someone who has post-traumatic stress disorder, it’s very frequently the case you have to - they have to learn a philosophy of good and evil in order to recover. It has to be sophisticated because they've seen these terrible, destructive forces at work, and their whole world model is just not handling it. So what happens is that the agoraphobic person runs, and then their anxiety system says well what's chasing them is obviously a flesh-eating predator, and you know it isn't exactly that it thinks that although it might have dreams like that.

They could easily have dreams of being pursued, but it’s the same system, like the system that we use to run away from things that ate us when we were thirty pounds is the same system that we now use to process relatively abstract threats. And why wouldn't it be? Look, as far as I’m concerned, this isn't even a hypothesis. It’s like we know evolution is conservative. Everything builds on what was there before.

So, what else are you gonna use when you're threatened by some abstract threat except the system that you used to use when you were threatened by a crocodile? So, it’s only… it’s exactly the way it works. So then, you know, she ends up - question? Oh no, no you have to run from something. Just running, that’s irrelevant. It’s a huge difference. If you're running towards something, that’s way different than if you're running away from something. Say you’re like anxious about an assignment and you go for a run and come back more clear-headed to work on it.

You're not running from the assignment. Are you not? No, you're just going out for a run, and that's okay. Look, let me give you an example. Well, it’s a good question. Let me give you an example. If you take a stressor of a certain magnitude, and you are interested in the response of two groups, if you let one group handle the stressor voluntarily and you force the other group to handle the stressor involuntarily, the second group will produce much more cortisol which is the primary stress hormone.

So, voluntary approach - you use different psychophysiological systems for voluntary approach than you do for retreat, and, you know, part of what you're doing when you're training someone or when you're using exposure with someone who has agoraphobia is that you're teaching them that the voluntary approach system, if you activate that, that’s a very good way of coping with anxiety. Now, they don't know that, in this situation that we’re describing, because they're not autonomous.

They haven't ever learned to rely on that system. So, you know, if you're faced with a threat, there's a variety of things you can do. You can just panic, but panic is usually distress, you know. Maybe a child sort of does that when it starts crying. And what happens when the child starts crying? Well, someone comes to its rescue, right?

So, one of the things you can do is emit distress cries and social resources will come and be gathered around you, and maybe that'll solve the problem. But that doesn't work when your heart is palpitating because who’s gonna fix that? Well often these people… If you look deeply into their thoughts maybe they're afraid to ride a subway and the actual reason they're afraid to ride the subway is they think, “Well what if the subway gets stopped between stations and I’m trapped on here and I can't get to the hospital?”

So that hospital thing is running around in their head all the time because their default strategy for dealing with threat is to seek authority, and one of the things that often sets people up for developing agoraphobia is that the authority that they rely on suddenly becomes uncertain for one reason or another. Maybe the person is going to leave, and they're isolated, or maybe the person, like if it’s a husband say, the person is - what good is that? If your heart’s palpitating and you're gonna have a heart attack? It’s a problem that can't be solved that way.

You know, people might think about that as a whole existential crisis, and it is an existential crisis. It’s like you're coming face to face with your own mortality, and that's certainly the case if you're going through menopause at the same time because that's another profound life shift that indicates you're sort of halfway done or two-thirds of the way done. Something like that.

And that's, of course, you know, you can think about that in terms of terror management as well. So it is an existential crisis, and the question is how do you deal with it? And the answer to that generally is by becoming a lot tougher than you are, and the way you help people do that is teach them there are certain dangerous situations they can approach and they can approach them.

Generally, people learn this quite quickly, you know, and so the psychoanalysts believe that if you just - this was their early criticisms of behavioral exposure - was that, you know, if you expose someone who’s afraid, say, just to an elevator, that that will help their other fears or maybe the fear will be substituted somewhere else because it’s just symptomatic. But that didn't work. It’s not right, and it’s because when you expose someone to an elevator, you're not exposing them to an elevator.

If they're afraid of that elevator, you're exposing them to their own death. So the elevator, you could say, well the reason behavioral exposure works - and it generalizes - is because it’s not easy to specify what the stimulus is. I mean, when I’m in front of an elevator, it’s an elevator. When someone with agoraphobia is in front of an elevator, it’s not an elevator.

That’s the problem. If it was just an elevator, they’d just get on it and away they go. So you know, I had one client who was afraid of elevators and the elevator opened up, and she said, “That’s a tomb.” It was just an immediate response, you know, but you could say well that was the symbolic representation that came to mind, but you could also say that well there are similarities between an elevator and a tomb.

You can get trapped inside an elevator and you could get trapped inside an elevator and die, in which case it would be a tomb, and the logical conclusion from that is that everything could be a tomb. So you might think, “Well the stimulus isn’t a tomb.” Like yeah, yeah. Wrong. It can be a tomb. It’s unlikely, but then you might also ask yourself this. If the chance that you're going to die somewhere is a hundred thousand to one, should you be upset?

And well the answer to that is dying is of infinite magnitude, and if you multiply one and a hundred thousand by infinite magnitude, you get a very, very large number. And so one of the things that makes you wonder is why the hell are people terrified out of their skin all the time? That is a very good question because by no means is it obvious that people aren’t, and I actually think - I often think that the mystery with a condition like agoraphobia isn't that some people have agoraphobia. It’s that everyone doesn't have it all the time.

So because - you know, the terror management people talk about this too is that because we’re always confronting our own mortality and a world of infinite complexity, why aren't we constantly in a state of panic? And you know, now and then you realize that. You think jeez, why aren't we in a state of panic? It’s a very unsettling realization, and why it isn't more common, that’s a very, very complicated question.

I think a lot of it is that we imitate other people, and so a lot of our faith, let’s say, in the stability of our lives and the utility and the meaning of our lives is actually instantiated at an embodied level where it’s not subject to criticism. So, for example, I’ll give you an example. There's a child two years old and there's a mother, and they're together in the kitchen, and a mouse runs across the floor.

Okay, the child orients towards the mouse, watches it zip across, and then looks at his mother or her mother. Why? Well because something anomalous has occurred, the significance of which is unstated, and it’s arousing. It’s like wow look at that, you know? You can be startled like that like “Wow look at that!” Zip! Well then you think, what does mum think of that?

And mum is thinking, “Oh that’s a mouse.” Maybe she’ll tell you about mice or maybe she’ll set a trap or something. But she’s calm, and so the child imitates that. And then you know, they've got this sense in their body that human beings can deal with mice and that’s no problem. The alternative is that the mouse comes up and the mother jumps up on the table and starts screaming.

It’s like, well you could be sure what’s the child gonna do in a situation like that is burst into tears and be extraordinarily upset. So a lot of what we’re doing when we’re little, and we watch people around us is that they model being calm. So we just adopt the implicit assumption - it’s an embodied assumption - that you can be calm in these circumstances, and luckily enough, we generally don't - that generally doesn't come unglued, but you can unglue it even by deep thought, and that happens to people quite frequently.

That would be an existential catastrophe. Alright so, let me show you something else here. So, same idea. Now, this is changed a little bit. So you're going from point A to point B, and what can happen? Well, you can encounter tools and you can encounter obstacles and you can zero almost everything out.

But you can look at it this way too. When you're moving forward, you can encounter what you predict. That should really be desired rather than predictiveness in the old diagram, or you can encounter something that you didn't predict or desire, and if you encounter something that you predict and desire, then you have positive emotion and we know why that is. You're getting to where you want to go and it validates the whole structure.

But then you run into something unpredicted. Well then, you get - that’s a threat, and you get anxious. Well, you also get exploratory. So then you might say well, how anxious do you get and how exploratory do you get, and I would say it’s proportional - imagine the hierarchy again. If you feel that it’s just an inconvenience that you can make a mild alteration and direct action and go over, you'll be mildly inconvenienced and maybe you’ll be a bit curious, but what happens is that as your suspicion that the error is occurring at higher and higher and broader and broader levels in the hierarchy, the probability that you're going to be anxious, and quite anxious compared to exploratory at least initially, starts to mount.

So, and then, all those other factors also play a role. You know, your social status, your neuroticism, your sense of self-competence. How much you've explored all those other things is a very complicated thing to address, and so alright. So then you're going to concentrate on what happens if you experience an unpredicted outcome because here's the complicated question. If you experience an unpredicted outcome, then you have a weird problem.

The problem is that you have to figure out what to do about something that you don't know what to do about, and that’s a big problem. So...let’s start with this one. Alright, so you're going. You're in the top left-hand corner. You're in this little frame, and you're going from point A to point B, and you encounter - I’m calling it now - an anomaly, and an anomaly is something that shouldn't be according to your model of the world. Now, what that does is it destabilizes that model at some level of resolution.

Now what we’re assuming here is that this is a relatively high order disruption. Okay, so I can give you some examples of that. The heart palpitation example was a good one 'cause that'll kind of unglue you. Maybe you take your child to the hospital because they have a minor illness and you find out that they don't have a minor illness, they have a major illness, or you find that out about yourself or you find that about your partner, or maybe the stock market crashes or you have a car accident or you write the MCAT and you end up in the twenty-fifth percentile like the quarter of the people who take it do, and then all of a sudden bang.

You're not where you thought you were, and you're not going to where you thought you were going and you don't know what the hell's going on, and that can be, as we said, a small revolution. You just have to make a detour around it, or it can just sucker punch you, and that's as far as I've been able to determine. That's Alice down the rabbit hole.

That's a descent to the underworld, and what's down in the underworld? Well, partly what’s down - everything is down there in the underworld, and the reason for that...it’s very complicated, but part of the reason is that when things fall apart, you don't get to ignore things anymore because you had this model that told you what was relevant in the world and what wasn't, and the real important part of that model was that it told you what wasn't relevant, and then all of a sudden something pops up and takes you down.

It’s like everything's relevant. Everything's potentially relevant, and that's terribly stressful because everything is - should I be angry? Should I be upset? Should I cry? Should I get divorced? Should I run away? Should I commit suicide? It’s like how am I come up with a new plan? Where am I gonna get money? Who’s going to help me? What’s my future going to look like? What does my past look like? What am I going to do today? What am I gonna do tomorrow?

It’s like all of these things come up, and some of that weirdness in the external world, and that would be well, let’s say that you discover that your child’s sick, and let's say the doctors really don't know what to do about it. Okay so, you've just been handed a problem of infinite complexity, and a problem of infinite complexity is like a journey through a maze that has no end. It’s a branching maze, and so what you'll find yourself doing, for example, is going on the internet and spending hundreds of hours - if you've got a research-oriented mind - hundreds of hours looking up every single research article you can possibly find on this condition, and that'll range from like the farthest out new-age ideas to the most cutting-edge science, if you can handle that.

So, you know, good luck with that. That’s an infinite search, and then that's not the only problem because - so the fact that it’s an infinite search is very bad for you because there's no way you can calculate how much time and energy it’s going to take you to solve the problem. So, that’s stressful. Why? Well obviously it’s stressful.

It means you have an infinite journey towards an uncertain goal, and you can't even handle that, you know. I mean, your journeys have to be such that they're self-sustaining, right? I mean, generally speaking, when you're on a journey of some sort, you have to obtain as much matter and energy as the journey costs, and maybe a bit more because you're storing some up for the future.

But if you've got this path of infinite complexity laying out in front of you, it’s like your body can't calibrate that, and so what it does is it throws you into emergency reaction mode, and emergency reaction mode is prepare for everything, and that's not good. And so, down there in the underworld the world itself turns into a maze of infinite complexity, but you turn into a mass of competing models, and a lot of them are based in very low-level motivation.

You're going to be angry. That’s for sure. You might be angry, god only knows for how long, you know, if it’s a particularly nasty disease. You might be angry for the rest of your life, and you know, you can be angry in a small way and accept fate, or you can be so angry that it completely consumes you and you're out for revenge against being itself, and that happens to people, and that's only one of the emotions and motivational states that are going to be hyper-activated by the response.

And so what happens is that your system collapses into the underlying basic motivational states, and so you're anxious, and afraid, and angry, and exploratory, and upset, and all of these things all at the same time, and that is your reaction to the unknown. Your reaction to the unknown is stop, because you aren't where you thought you were, and then the next thing is prepare for anything, and the way you prepare for anything is by getting ready to do whatever it is that you can do.

So, I kinda think about it as you’re in a car and you've got the gas pedal pushed right to the metal, and you've got the brake on at the same time, so the car’s roaring away, but - and you know if you take the foot off the brake, man it’s gonna move, but your foot isn't off the brake because you don't know where to go, but you're still running at full tilt, and that's not psychological exactly, right? It’s psychophysiological because you’re an energy and material burning system, and if you crank yourself up into high gear, then you're going to be burning a lot more energy and material.

What happens to people is that, well one of the things that happens is that you’ll shut your immune system off because if you're being - because it’s costly - if you're being chased by a tiger, who the hell cares if you get the flu in two weeks. It’s like shut that thing off. Everything that has to do with long-term survival, even your ability to think into the long term, is going to be shut off because your ability to think in the long term failed, and so you default back down to instantaneous impulsive modes of action and it’s the right thing to do.

You might think, "Oh well this is a hell of a time to have a cloudy mind." But - and sometimes that's the case - but you're wired up. You're trying to solve this impossible problem which is what the hell do you do when you don't know what to do, and the only answer to that is prepare for everything because you're going to gather some more information and that might tell you what needs to be done next, but you have no idea how fast it’s going to have to be done.

It might be like you need to do this right now or you don't get it at all. So then you’re down there in the underworld where all the, you know, great motivational beasts lurk and where there's an infinite path in front of you that's - and maybe you don't get out, and that's the thing too.

The thing is that this isn't psychological, and one of the real problems with modern clinical psychology and modern psychiatry - just conceptually - is that people automatically assume that if you have a problem, like if you're depressed and unhappy and anxious, well then that’s a mental problem. It’s a psychological problem. It’s like it’s a problem insofar as it’s not pleasant, but what if you're in a horrible situation?

Well, you know, the cognitive people would say, “Well you know, you just have to reconstrue it.” It’s like yeah if you can reconstrue it, man, you're not in a horrible situation, you know, and one of the things you see with the cognitive behaviorists, for example, is when they assess depression, they use the Beck Depression Inventory, and I’ve given the Beck Depression Inventory to hundreds of people, and their criteria for when you should be an outpatient in a psychiatric ward is probably the level of depression that one-third of you experienced the first year that you were in university.

I've given this instrument to lots of university students and one-third of them, at least in the first year, meet criteria for hospitalization with the Beck. So the way that cognitive behaviorist people - what do you call - evade this issue is that they just set their diagnostic instrument so low that the people that they describe as depressed actually don't have a problem, you know. So I think the cutoff for outpatient is fifteen. You know, you're not happy when you get a fifteen on the Beck, but if you're depressed, you get a sixty.

It’s like you're depressed, and then you talk to someone like that, and you find out, well maybe you're depressed or maybe you just have a terrible life, and the terrible life is - and good luck reconstruing that, man. So you're not very bright, for example, and that's a big problem, so maybe you have an IQ of 85, or maybe you have an IQ of 80.

It’s like good luck finding a job, and if you do find one, it’s not gonna pay, and it’s not going to be stable, and you're not going to get good hours, and so then, well you know, your only friend is crazy, and then your family is like distorted and twisted up beyond belief so maybe you know, your mother is a chronic alcoholic with dementia. That’d be a nice touch, and you know, maybe your friends aren't only not very good for you, they're actively bad for you because you've fallen in with some bloody psychopaths.

And because you're not particularly bright, they can get your money every time you get your support check, your unemployment check or something like that. Well, you know, you get someone like that in your practice and you think, well they're unhappy. Are they depressed? Well, no. They're in the underworld. It’s not the same thing.

Here’s depressed. Depressed is someone comes in. They're reasonably well-educated. They have a job, and when you ask them about the job, they say, “Well you know, I used to like my job,” or maybe “I even do like my job, but I just don't find that I'm motivated right now, and I can't understand why.”

Then you ask them about their marriage and they say, “Well you know, I have a good marriage,” and then you ask them about their family, and they say, “Well, I’ve got the average number of family problems, but it’s, you know, all things considered it’s not too bad.” And so, and then they don't have a drug or alcohol problem, but they score like thirty on the Beck. You think, “Hey, you can take some antidepressants. You're depressed. You don't have a terrible life.” You know, and they know that.

They often don't have any real cognitive symptoms either, although they might be reacting more negatively to some of the negative things that are happening. With those people, something’s gone astray, you know, maybe their sleep is upset. That’s often the case. So and what they're suffering from is disequilibrium of sleep-wake rhythms, so it’s gone out of whack.

So you straighten up their sleep and they're better, or sometimes they need antidepressants, but for the first person, like antidepressants might take the edge off and maybe not too, but - and what are you gonna do? You're gonna get the person to reconstrue? That assumes they have options, you know, and the problem with educated smart people is they think everybody has options because they do.

It’s like no, that’s not right. Some people have - some people have no options. They're like trapped in a corner, and no matter how hard you try, you cannot get them out of the corner. Sometimes it takes a virtual miracle before that can happen.

So the thing about the underworld is that it’s a real place. It’s a real place, and - depending of course on how you define place, but that's exactly the issue. How should you define place? Well, I would say for the sake of argument that you might as well define it two ways. You might as well use the standard Newtonian view, you know, that the world’s made out of inanimate material entities, arrayed in a certain manner because that's a very useful approach to many problems.

But then there's another perspective which is no, no, no, the meanings that array themselves in front of you in the world - those are real. And you know, I would also say - I’ll just mention this very briefly. It’s something the idea I’ve been working on for a long time is that there’s an implication of Darwinian theory, and the implication is that - we talked about this a little bit - the environment is very complex and it’s transforming unpredictably, and so what that means is you can never be right about the environment.

So right, correct is out of reach. The best you can do is come to partial - you can partially accommodate it, and so you'd say okay, well how have we partially accommodated it? Okay, so here we are. We’ve been evolving for three and a half billion years, given it our best shot, and here we have these bodies, and they're our solution to the problems posed by the transforming environment.

You might say, “Well how good a solution are those?” Well, you've got seventy years. It’s the best we’ve been able to manage in three and a half billion years is to generate up a biological platform that has enough flexibility to keep up with the environment for about seventy-five years. So then you think, so there's no final answer to the problem the environment presents.

There isn't, and it’s because it actually changes unpredictably. So there's no way of being right. Now then you might say, well what does right mean? Well, from the Darwinian perspective, from some sense, there's no other right than that you're alive and you're likely to reproduce. That's the best you ever get.

Okay so let’s say that's your pragmatic definition of right. Well then what that means is if that is right as far as right can be determined, as far as being human is concerned, then when you are reacting by fleeing or freezing when something terrible is chasing you because you perceive it as a threat, the fact that it’s a threat is right.

It’s not an overlay on reality. It’s like if you didn't perceive a predator as a threat, then you would get eaten, and so I think - you know, you can think of the Darwinian world as nested inside the Newtonian world which is how most scientists think, but I don't believe that. I think it’s the other way around.

I think the Darwinian world is the ultimate world in a sense, and the Newtonian world is just a tiny subset of that, and it’s a useful subset. It’s a tool. It’s a useful subset, but the real world - the Darwin takes precedence over all knowledge structures. That’s how it looks to me, and I don't see a way out of that argument.

So, I mean it depends to a large - Yup. So are you saying that - cause I’m trying to understand what you're saying. Are you saying that like our estimations of like the deterministic, material world is nested in an evolutionary drive to find truth so that we can make quick assumptions about our environment?

Yeah, so well here's another example. You guys can think about this for a minute if you'd like. So, let’s say that one of the logical consequences of pursuing science from a Newtonian perspective is that you learn how to create - cross ebola with smallpox, which is what the KGB was trying to do in the 1980s.

Okay, so you manage that and everyone dies. It’s like how’s that for a validation of science? You know, it’s like - because this could happen, right? Our technological capability which is fostered by this particular model could easily enable us to produce something that will wipe all of us out. And then, well, are you gonna say, “Well yeah apart from that, it was right.”

And then I’d think it’s a tricky argument because okay, let's say - but here's part of the problem, and I also thought the same thing about hydrogen bombs. It’s like well obviously the quantum view, let’s say, is accurate because if you follow it you can make a hydrogen bomb. But then you can step back from that and you can say yeah, yeah, but to make a hydrogen bomb or to cross ebola with smallpox, you have to treat the matter that you're interacting with as if it’s actually separate from everything else, and the thing is it’s not actually separate from everything else.

It’s actually connected to everything else. Now you can say, well if you treat it as if it’s separate, here’s some operations you can undertake. You can cross ebola with smallpox, but then you’ve ignored a bunch of things like maybe that's not a good idea, and then everyone dies.

And so the reductionism in the model which helps it specify its target and increase its accuracy has the corresponding negative consequence of pretending that the context within which these enterprises are being conducted can be ignored and that that’s actually appropriate, and that's a big problem.

It’s a big problem. So the evolutionary framework provides the concepts because it provides like our sense of morality. Well, it’s not only because of what it provides us. I think the reason that the evolutionary perspective has to be the one that supersedes is because you cannot model the environment.

It’s not possible. All you can do is keep up with it, and the only way you can keep up with it is through Darwinian processes - random. I mean I know it’s not a complete theory, but for the sake of argument, you have to generate random alterations, and you know, you can say well in principle, we can understand everything scientifically.

It’s like no, in principle, we can't. Everything's too complex to understand. So that's why Newtonian physics is nested within a Darwinian perspective. That’s right. Because it’s just an estimation whereas a Darwinian perspective, it’s like it’s more in line with what’s actually - It’s more in line with reality.

Yeah, whereas the Newtonian perspective comes out of a rough estimation of what reality is like. Well, Jung, when Jung was talking about the origin of the scientific mindset, you know, he traced its development back to alchemy. Here’s another reason why the scientific mindset is necessarily nested in the mythological mindset.

So what the alchemists were trying to do is mess around with matter and produce something. They argued for centuries what this thing was, this philosopher’s stone, and what the philosopher’s stone would enable the holder of it to do would be to transmute elements into gold, so that would make you rich, and it would provide immortality and perfect health for the person who discovered it.

Okay, now what Jung said - and we’ll talk about this. If I have enough energy, we’ll talk about this two-thirds of the way through class because it’s so damn complicated that some years I can't muster up enough energy to discuss it, but Jung believed that, you know, people have always been trying to cope with their mortality, right?

And that makes perfect sense. So he did an analysis of Western history, roughly speaking, and said, well what happened - there was a Christian epoch, maybe, that lasted around 1,600 years, roughly speaking, and there was an idea at the base of it and the idea was that through spiritual discipline, man could transcend suffering, but - the problem with that was that all this suffering kept happening, and you know, and there were some warps in the idea, as Nietzsche pointed out how this ceasing of suffering was only going to happen after you die.

Okay fine, then you live forever in bliss, but still, there's like black plague and babies dying and crops failing, and it’s like it just doesn't seem that you can just ignore that. And so you've got 1,500 or 1,600 years of Christianity, and you know, the whole history of Christianity behind that grinding away on this problem trying to produce a system of redemption, and it doesn't work or it works partially.

And it also ignores certain things. So partly what it ignores, you know, one of the presuppositions of, say, medieval Christianity is that the world, roughly speaking, is an evil place, and that matter is corrupt and unworthy of attention. Well, one of Jung’s hypotheses is that if you ignore something long enough, then it starts to demand your attention, you know.

It’s like a repression, and then that's especially the case if there's a problem that you're trying to solve that your current worldview isn't really solving. It’s like your attention is going to be drawn unconsciously to that which you've ignored and put down, and so Jung saw the development of alchemy as a parallel to the development of Christianity, but alchemy studied matter, which was forbidden in a sense.

It was damned from the Christian perspective. The alchemists were studying the transmutations of matter. They had an intuition that there was information locked in that. In matter. And that if you could just figure out how to interact with it properly, then you can free up the information, and they symbolized that in a dreamlike manner.

The dreamlike manner was you could discover the philosopher’s stone, and that would give you, you know, wealth, health, and eternal life. Well, as far as Jung was concerned, that was a dream, and it was like an artistic production. It was like the scaffolding of the scientific perspective because it isn't like people went from medieval Christianity to full-fledged scientists like overnight.

It took hundreds of years for this to occur. There were changes in the substrata of thought that were occurring as this was happening and Jung traced that back more than 1,600 years in the development of alchemy. And so, the dream of alchemy was that you could discover - you could master the transmutations of matter such that there would be no disease, that no one would die, and everyone was wealthy.

Well, okay that, as far as Jung was concerned, that provided the motivation for science because one of the things you might ask is well, why do people do science? I mean, most people never have, right? It’s not very old. Six hundred years. It only emerged in one place, roughly speaking. It’s very fragile and unlikely, and plus just think of what you have to do if you're a scientist.

You know, if you're a scientist and you use a microscope - a high-powered microscope - you have to spend ten thousand hours looking through that damn thing before you can see what's there, and so you think that’s a weird thing for a tree-dwelling ape to be doing. You know what I mean? It’s such a warp of our natural instincts and our, you know, our desire to make contact with other people and to be doing something exciting, and you're looking through this damn tube, you know, and it’s even painful. What the hell is motivating you?

And the answer would be, well, you think you're doing something good. You think that science is going to benefit mankind. So it’s nested necessarily in a motivated system. It isn't that you do science because you want to discover facts. It’s that you do science to discover facts so that things improve.

Isn't it? And you just can't ignore the fact that you're doing it in the hopes that things will improve. You can't just take that out of the equation and say, “No I’m purely objective.” It’s like A, you're not and you better not be because a purely objective person wouldn't be a person. You couldn't even communicate with someone like that.

Plus they wouldn't be able to - someone like that wouldn't be able to determine what was relevant - distinguish what was relevant and what wasn't relevant. You need motivational systems to do that, and I can tell you, when you're looking at a data set, there's an infinite number of things that you can look at in that data set. Literally. I mean there's no end to the statistical procedures that you can implement.

It’s like fiddling with a photo with Photoshop. It’s like man, you can fiddle with that damn thing for the rest of your life, and so what that means is that the complexity that’s there can't be dealt with objectively because if you deal with it objectively, there's no way of separating the one path through the data from all the other millions of paths through the data.

It’s not like when you're doing statistics, man, it’s not like you take a bunch of numbers and you feed it through the meat grinder and out comes the results. It is absolutely nothing like that. You're making ethical choices at every single level of the decision, and you know, if you're - and I teach my students this too. So I want them to be straight scientists, and there's lots of things that can warp you as a scientist.

And one can be you want to have a career, and the other is you want to climb up the primate, the scientist primate dominance hierarchy, and you know fair enough. You need to have a career, and maybe the ambition is worth it, but the problem with that is that can make you do things that violate the principles of the entire enterprise.

And that's happening - I mean it’s been scandalous particularly in social psychology because people do what’s called data mining and they just keep doing their analysis until something significant pops up, and then they write a story about why that’s important. I’m not cynical about that. I understand why it happens. I think it’s inevitable that it happens some because lots of people who are publishing, it’s like the first bloody thing or second thing they've ever published.

They don't know what they're doing. There's gonna be error like mad. But I tell my students, “Look. If you're going to do statistical analysis properly, you have to get yourself oriented. What the hell are you doing? What is it that you're really doing?” And you think, well I'm trying to discover something solid, and the reason I’m trying to do that is because there should be benefits from that, otherwise the whole enterprise is foolish, and you might as well be a bloody - you might as well go work in finance if you're not interested in that because - really, you're not going to make any money as a scientist and you can make lots of money in finance, and you're smart enough to go into finance.

So, if that's what you want - if you want power and money, and I'm not complaining about that, it’s like go where it is. But science isn't it. If you want to discover facts, maybe, and that maybe of some benefit at some point, then you become a scientist. Okay, so that you gotta keep your eye on the ball, and then you have to decide if pursuing that line of truth and benefit supersedes whatever you might do to build your career.

Okay, cause you're always playing that game. Always. Your whole life, and that's actually why so much of scientific research is wrong. There's error too, and there's all sorts of other reasons, and you can't expect a system to do much better than produce five percent of useful output anyways.

So, okay and then the other thing is you have to also be afraid, and here's what you should be afraid of. Let’s say that you discover something that isn't there. Okay, then you're gonna spend the next fifteen years studying it. So if you wanna spend your next fifteen years studying this thing that you've conjured out of nothing, then go right ahead.

But if you don't want to do that, then you better be properly oriented when you do your statistical analysis, and that's because statistical analysis is an ethical process, and so is science because it has to be. If it isn't nested inside ethics, fundamentally, then god only knows. It can be completely destructive.

It could be counterproductive. Like, so - ah so then there's a variety of reasons why the Darwinian bucket is sort of - it’s the outside. You don't get any farther out than that as far as I can tell. So, and it’s the Darwinian world to which we’re adapted, you know. That's why we perceive things as threats.

That’s why we perceive things as positive. That's why we perceive things as negative. You know, and we tend to think those are overlays on a deeper reality. It’s like that is not so clear, and you know, I didn't know this but when I was working out these ideas, I had never read anything that Heidegger had written.

Although his influences wormed its way into many fields and I undoubtedly picked up some of his ideas, you know, because they get embedded in other places, but certainly one of Heidegger’s claims was that Western philosophy got off on the wrong foot right at the beginning because it didn't study being. It started to think about thought, and what’s - the real issue is being. What is being?

Well, being is what you experience, and for the Heideggerians, that’s reality. There isn't a reality underneath that. Now, it requires a real shift in perspective to start to try to think that way, and I think the easiest way to do it is to think both ways, you know. Sometimes you think like a Newtonian. Fair enough, and then other times you don't.

And you need to know when to think like a Newtonian and when to think like someone who understands that the phenomena of meaning that surrounds us are legitimate, and it’s a very interesting thing, and this is one of the things that's really driven me through this material is okay so we can make a case that like lower order meanings are real.

Like if you perceive a bear or a cliff as a threat, then that's so you don't die, and it’s worked