Maps of Meaning 03 (Harvard Lectures)

You should have read by now well that little book that, uh, what's it called, "Thought, Emotion, and Memory." Should have read the three or so papers in here, maybe there's four of them, yeah, four. And also the first, well, the chapters in this book up to the end of the neuropsychology section, which is basically to page 80. So that's what we've covered today.

Now excuse me, yeah sure. I showed you a simpler diagram of this sort last week, and that's the model of the known normal adaptation. Let me show you a little cartoon here that I think is kind of funny. All right, so as far as I can tell, that's a decent but simplistic model of what it is that, you know, when you say that you know something with regards to its implications for behavior or its meaning. Because remember, that's what we're trying to specify in this class, right?

The initial introductory discussions hinged on the notion that when we map our environments as a consequence of active exploration, we map them for two reasons. We want to specify the sensory nature of the things that we encounter, and we also, but more importantly, more fundamentally perhaps — not more importantly but more fundamentally — we really want to keep track of where the meanings reside. Now this is cued by something that we'll discuss to some degree today, which is that things aren't simply given in the environment.

I mean, it's — that's the case with sensory things even although there's a lot of dispute about this. I mean that was Kuhn's fundamental point as far as I can tell in his book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," in that what constitutes the objective object seems to shift as we shift our techniques of exploration, which is why we have new scientific theories. I mean theoretically there's something at the bottom of it all towards which our ideas are approximating, but anyways it's a difficult idea.

But it's much more clear in the case of our maps of meaning because how you approach something really does determine in large part its affective significance. Right? We can all — you can all see this. Like fire for animals is dangerous, pure and simple. But fire for people has been liberating. That's, I mean, that's the most dramatic example I can think of. Right?

You switch the motivational category of the object by altering your approach to it. It's dangerous if you let it burn you. If you control it, then it cooks your food, it heats your cave, etc., etc. And it's something by an alteration in your action you've completely transformed the nature of the object, at least with regards to its utility. And that's a big part of what we consider creativity anyways.

One of the things I've been trying to figure out is what this — what is the structure of our knowledge when we say that we know something, and that's this. The known and it's a bounded domain basically that's characterized by specification of the emotional significance of what's going on in the present, at least as far as that's interpreted, and specification of what we would like to happen in the future, and then the construction of motor plans to turn one into the other.

Now I've appended or updated this somewhat from its original simpler form to show that while you're attempting to transform this into this, unexpected things might happen. Which is — and that's pretty obvious if you think about it, because if unexpected things didn't happen, that would mean that you knew everything. And you don't know everything, so that means unexpected things are always happening.

If you're undertaking a behavior that's designed to meet a certain end and something unexpected happens, well, that activates a chain of phenomena that I described later that we're going to discuss today as the orienting reflex. But basically, the bottom line is that anything unexpected is, in and of itself, intrinsically meaningful. That's really, really important.

We don't assign meaning to things so much as we do restrict the meaning that they already offer us to a specified domain. And if you think about that, that kind of reverses, as I've mentioned before, that reverses many normal psychological presuppositions, which is that we have to — that things are neutral until we discover a use for them.

Okay, so I told you the story, or you read the story perhaps, about the guy who's thinking about his performance at some meeting. He's thinking about how well he's going to do and how he's going to dominate the meeting and so on. He runs into a number of obstacles on his way to the meeting, including an elevator that won't function and people who get in his way.

And the reason I told this story in the book is just to show you how this sort of thing operates in day-to-day life. It's a pretty boring story. I mean, nothing particularly exciting happens, I suppose, until the end. Nothing exciting happens means only trivial unexpected things occur. Nothing exciting happens meaning means no emotion is released in the course of the story until the end, because all of the things that are unexpected are trivial unexpected things that all occur at the level of minor league plans.

So the guy is upset by the fact that the elevator doesn't come, but that's not such a catastrophe because he can always take the stairs. And if someone's ahead of you on the sidewalk and you're in a hurry, well you can always go around them. These are pretty minor deviations and they're interesting, and they do inspire a certain amount of emotion, but all they mean is that you have to shift from one sub-goal to another.

And then at the end of the story, well, events of a different magnitude occur. And the idea there is that well, the protagonist of the story that's outlined in the book, he's expecting a commendation for his performance in the recent meeting, and instead he gets fired.

And in a sense, you could say, well, all hell breaks loose as a consequence of that, because that information, which can't be easily denied, blows his whole world. It isn't something as simple as an event that interferes with a particular planned sequence of behavior; it's something that demonstrates incontrovertibly that his whole notion of the ideal future is impaired in some non-trivial manner.

And that his viewpoint of himself in relationship to the world is dramatically and drastically flawed. Well the thing is you don't need to know a lot of the things that we've been talking about to start to make sense out of this thing. You know that if you get fired from a job, that's a catastrophe. Or if something occurs to make you really question your own abilities, or where you're going, or where you've come from, that people find that very emotionally disruptive.

And well, the answer to, well, what does it mean by the fact that people find that emotionally disruptive is to say that things that aren't predictable have their own affective valence. And you render things predictable using a schema of this sort. And if something comes along to blow your schema, then all those things that you've rendered predictable with regards to your current patterns of behavior are all of a sudden unpredictable.

And if they're unpredictable, most particularly they're frightening. That's the first thing that comes up. There seems to be a qualitative difference in his reaction to the elevator traffic than to getting fired. Absolutely. And it seemed to be, um, to me, it seemed to be like a distinction between, uh, losing — uh, not the scenario not working anymore like losing confidence in the scenario and losing confidence in himself as a scenario maker.

I mean there seem to be very — yes, perfect yes, that's perfectly reasonable. I mean is that a useful way to dis — because I was trying to — yes, was so qualitatively distinctive because it was really different.

No, no, that's a perfectly reasonable comment. Exactly. The thing to think about, um, punishments, you know, we know that punishments produce pain, for example, they produce hurt. That's a — that's the affective state, I mean formal punishments we'll define what they are later.

The thing about people though is that we can generalize, and in animals, you can punish out particular patterns of action. In human beings, you can punish out hierarchies of action, right down to the level of the action that generates action. And that's basically what — or the action that generates patterns of action, and that's what you're talking about.

See, if you really punish someone, then they lose faith in their ability to adapt. And well, when that happens, while you're depressed. While you're not just depressed, depressed doesn't — you're not just hurt. Depressed doesn't just mean you're hurt. Depressed means, well, you're in pain.

This is literal, by the way, it's not metaphorical. About 70% of people who are chronically depressed have chronic pain syndromes, low back pain, migraine, etc. That the two things look very closely related phenomenologically.

You also lose all hope. But what does that mean? Well, we're going to talk about that a little later. But these aren't metaphors. Look, whatever you put in this box is a consumatory reward; it's a satisfaction by definition.

This is — I want to talk about this a little bit more in the neuropsych section. We know about satisfactions. Like, there's four classes of motivationally relevant phenomena: there's punishments, and there's satisfactions. Those are primary positive and negative reinforcers, in somewhat archaic behavior language, punishments and satisfactions.

And then there's cues of punishments and cues of satisfactions. Cues of satisfactions give you hope, but they're always conceived of in relationship to some goal. You lose the goal, well, you lose hope. That's what — that's exactly what happens literally.

So if your goal has come tumbling down, and the thing is, the other thing you have to realize is that your goal is always conceived of in relationship to your conceptualization of yourself. Because you always view possibility in relationship to what you think you can accomplish.

So these two things can't — that's why this is a system, you know. This cannot be conceived of except in relationship to this and vice versa. You always construe where you're going with regards to your conceptualization of your current level of abilities and possibilities, and so on, and you evaluate the utility and desirability of what you have currently in relationship to the best that could possibly be.

So it's a system. It's a system. This is the known. As long as you're operating in this territory, you're where exploration has already taken place fundamentally, so you're protected by your culture. That's one way of looking at it.

You're protected by your particular story. Anyways, that's assuming nothing really dramatically unpredictable has gone wrong.

So he referred to scenarios. So would it be right to say that that whole thing is a scenario? I mean, scenario is absolutely if that's something that — if that's we have a representation of then it's — then that's abstract. So in that sense, we are scenario makers, like we make — yes, yes, and this is the thing that's interesting.

I think one of the things that's interesting about that is that the scenario, from the mythological perspective, that's the world. That's how — that's like myth, from the mythological perspective which is concerned with meaning and not with sensory qualities.

The world is what you know, what you don't know, and the mediating process between the two. And the mediating process, by the way, is what you were referring to, because the mediating process is the thing that creates order out of chaos, or, upon occasion, that turns chaos into — or order into chaos as well.

It's the transformative process. Anyways, if you lose faith in that transformative process, that's the end of you fundamentally. I mean, life comes to a halt. And that's why, well, as we'll find out, many, many, many religious systems, if not all religious systems, attempt to catalyze identification with the transformative process as their aid to the good life.

Anyways, um, okay, so this is a story. It's a story. The story is, well, things aren't so good now but they're going to be much better in the future, and this is how we're going to bring it about. That's just your straight linear story.

That's a scenario, and you have your particular story, and you have your particular story to the degree that you share cultures. There are sub-elements of your stories that are identical.

So I was thinking about this the other day, you know, like if you read in the newspaper that Congress is going to cut off funding to cognitive psychologists who specialize in vision, then all of the cognitive psychologists who specialize in vision, to the degree that they share that story, are going to be threatened by that particular piece of news because it's interfering with their scenario.

They're going to band together as a group, and they're going to do whatever they can to parry the threat. Now if you read that all cognitive psychologists' funding is going to be cut, then your reference group is all of a sudden expanded because you've pulled in a larger number of people who share the presuppositions of your story.

And then you could say, well, if it was all psychologists, that would be a larger group, and if it was all academics, that would be a larger group, and so on. And you can see that as the threats are more and more fundamental, the groups that are affected get larger and larger.

And well, anyways, because you're including more and more people under the rubric of the same story. If your country is under attack from foreign forces, then it's the constitution in a sense that's at risk and everything — that's kind of the trunk of the presupposition tree, so to speak.

And everyone's going to unite against that threat or virtually everyone is going to unite against it. This is like a shared map of experience for normal adaptation. We're going through this scenario — I couldn't help but thinking, like people with anxiety disorders who like the ideal future would be to get on the elevator, you know, and that it would come and it would go down and there would be no problem with that.

And that's the unpredictable, that's the big problem. Like so if the elevator never comes or they get stuck in the elevator or something like that, that's chaos. Like that's the unpredictable aspect.

So I was just wondering on this chart, like how would you ma — oh well, okay, the thing is, is that any phenomena have ambivalent meanings. And this is something that I refer to in the chapter of neuropsychology, is that an event that can be construed with a particular motivational relevance from one frame of reference can be construed from a different frame of reference in a completely different manner.

So let's say you're on your way to the meeting and you have an anxiety disorder, so you're afraid of elevators. Okay, so the elevator doesn't come. Well, with regards to the story that says I want to go to the meeting, then the fact that the elevator hasn't shown up is very anxiety-provoking and perhaps frustrating and punishing.

But from with reference to the frame of reference that says, well, I'm the kind of person who can't tolerate taking elevators, it's relief that not — that the elevator not showing up brings about. And then your net motor output, so to speak, is a function of the competition between those two frames of reference.

And I don't know exactly how that competition plays out, but like virtually everything that you can possibly conceive of has motivational significances that vary with the frame of reference.

And you do this to yourself. Like you can look, this is really not complicated enough, unfortunately. And I'll draw the — the map that we'll use later, this is just a — well anyway, this is actually more like how this diagram should look.

You get the picture. Okay, now these are more or less comprehensive stories, and damage to the story can take place at any level of analysis. The higher up on the — or the more inclusive the place at which the damage takes place, the more behavioral adaptation is rendered useless, and the more phenomena are transformed once again back into chaos from whence they came.

From the mythological perspective, as you'll find out — the next thing you're going to do is read the Sumerian creation myth, and I tried to map it onto the descriptions that we've been talking about. The Sumerian creation, I had a good dream about this last night. I'll tell you about it in a minute, but the Sumerian creation myth is particularly relevant because, well, it's been said that history began in Sumer.

In a sense, it's the most ancient of creation stories that we have extant, that has been transmitted down into our culture along the line that our culture came from basically. But I dreamed last night that I told this class, although the class was slight — slightly different in my dream, that we all have Sumerian skeletons, which is kind of a weird way of looking at it.

But the point is, is that, you know, it's only been — it's only about 5,000 years that separate us from the Sumerians, and you might think, oh, you know, that's a long time. We have nothing in common with them. But there's a bunch of ways to look at that.

Like, that's only 60, 80 year old men, so we're not that — which if you think about that, they're 80 years old and then another 80-year-old man and so on, that's only 60 entire moderately long lifespans. This is nothing, you know, and it's nothing in the evolutionary perspective because we've been around as a — well, as a species exactly like we are for 150,000 years, or something similar to what we are for at least 2 million.

So like 5,000 years, that's nothing, that's yesterday. We're still Sumerians. When you read that creation myth, well, you want to think about it in relationship to the things we're talking about. The Sumerians say, well, everything emerges from chaos. Think, what the hell does that mean?

Well, it means that, it means most basically that everything that you understand comes from the domain that has not yet been explored. That's a chaotic domain because you can't say anything about it, there's no distinctions drawn. Plus, it has infinite motivational relevance. You can't specify it, that's very chaotic.

Can't — those things that you haven't yet explored are simultaneously punishing and satisfying and threatening and promising all at once, and none of those — as well, anyways, back to — so anyways, when I say things like, well, interference with a structure of this sort reduces everything to chaos and that chaos is, in some sense, equivalent to the chaos that existed before the creation of things, that's what all that means.

It's kind of a — you know, just think about it as a metaphorical language I guess. Anyways, this is a better model. So, you know, to use the university example, all cognitive scientists specializing in vision would be here, then all cognitive psychologists would be here, and then all psychologists would be here. That's one way of looking at it.

Anyways, okay, so P — yeah, yes, when you're talking you're talking about how much anxiety is caused by the absence of the elevator. Yeah, you're referring to it as a function of what your interpretive schema is, but also, uh, how much of it has to do with, uh, sort of more basic biological function of how much tolerance any given individual has for unknown?

I mean that's a tough question. I mean, it looks like there are all these — these four systems, so to speak. Well, that's the satisfaction, punishment, promise and hope systems from the subjective perspective. They all seem to have thresholds for activation.

So if your threshold for activation of your incentive reward system is low, it looks like you're likely to be extroverted, you're very happy in social situations, you smile easily, you talk a lot, etc. And that's something that's biologically determined.

And the same with regards to your response to threat, you could have a high level, a high threshold or low threshold in the amygdala. Well, but then it really gets complicated because the problem is that what you construe as threatening or promising depends on your framework of interpretation.

Nobody knows how that plays into the biology. Yeah, I guess what I was asking was whether those two things can be separated because, well, I think in principle it can be because I think it would be possible — say if you and I both went into the lab, you could say, well, we're under the same, more or less the same set of presuppositions in that laboratory circumstance.

So say they give us both a goal-directed task that's very bounded and a set of phenomena occurs and I get more anxious by physiological measures than you do. Well, assuming that we've held the framework of reference constant, we might be able to say something about the intrinsic biological differences.

But it's very — it strikes me as very difficult. But isn't the interpretation we attach to that going to be dependent on what we naturally — how we naturally react anyway? I would suspect so, yeah.

So I don't know, like I really don't know the answer to your question. I mean, it's obviously the case that you can modulate the motivational significance of phenomena merely by shifting frameworks of reference. Like you can say, well, if you're very upset, say you've just — your relationship you had has just broken up and you think, you know, well, this is finally going to kill me.

And so you have a very temporally bounded interpretation of this. This is absolutely catastrophic, and what am I going to do tomorrow? And then you think, well, is this really going to mean anything in five years? And I'll — you know, from that perspective, like how relevant is this phenomenon with regards to my five-year plan, for example?

Its relevance is going to shrink dramatically, and you might say, well, how much is it going to mean to me in 40 years? And you think, well, under those circumstances, it dwindles to absolute triviality.

And you can say, well, what is any of this going to mean in a thousand years? And then you have an existential crisis. But the thing is, you can — that's very interesting because you can modulate the motivational relevance of phenomena by shifting your framework of reference.

It looks to me that paper by John Duncan, the first paper in here, in a sense that's what he says the frontal cortex does, at least in part. I think — well, back to the neuropsych, I think the frontal cortex has hijacked our motivational systems to give us increased adaptive flexibility.

Like animals. Oh, this gets us into a big argument, a big disagreement about what constitutes an unconditioned stimulus. You know, like lots of — behaviors think there are such things as unconditioned stimuli, which are just those things that you will respond to automatically, like electric shock. You know, that's bad, it's anxiety-provoking.

Well, more particularly, it's punishing if it's of sufficient intensity, it hurts. But the problem with that is that, you know, you can take a dog, and if you give it food just after you shock it, soon when you shock it, it wags its tail. And that means that the affective relevance of the unconditioned stimulus is at least modifiable by learning.

And almost all unconditioned, so-called unconditioned stimuli have that property. So, and we know that, you know, people — people have an immense amount of disagreement about what constitutes good. For example, like anorexics don't like food, and they starve to death, so it's a bad decision. But the point is that even something as fundamental as food, the motivational relevance of that can be shifted by a shift in the framework of reference.

So you can say, well, the anorexic is caught in a situation where, well, her unbearable presence is, you know, my terribly fat body, although no one else might construe it in that manner. That's hers. And her ideal future is, I'm thin, thinner than anyone else, and that there's an associative network around thin, so to speak, that includes beautiful, well-liked, admired, rich, you know, whatever the hell you want to throw in there.

And in relation, that makes food, in relationship to the movement from here to here, something punishing and threatening because it interferes with it. And of course, well, she still gets hungry, so there's going to be a heavy, heavy dose of internal conflict. That's what internal conflict means in part, is you're internally conflicted about a stimulus if it has one significance for one of your plans and an alternate significance for another plan, and you haven't integrated the two plans into something that's into a higher order construction where there's no conflict.

So that's a problem. Um, you're saying how if you're too ruled by your ideal future it creates anxiety, such as the man start, or if you're — if you don't have a sense of an ideal future that you don't move, you have no motivation. And then you've talking a little about relativity, like perspective, a year, four years, 40 years. Is there such a thing as a balance?

Is there such — universally, what is enough of just to move you on? Yeah, well, you know, this is one of the things we're going to hope to answer over the course of the whole course. I mean, I said, well, in a sense, I said everything is relative because you can shift the motivational significance of phenomena by shifting your frame of reference.

But I also said that if you think food is evil, you'll starve. So obviously, there's those two arguments, in a sense, are in conflict. I mean, it is possible for you to believe that food is a punishing item, but if you do believe it, there will be certain consequences.

Like you won't be able to pursue any other plans because you'll be dead. So I'm interested in trying to resolve the argument that those two arguments — or resolve the problem that those two arguments set up. On the one hand, well, we need to eat, although people can regard food as a punishment.

On the other hand, you can switch the motivational valence of things by an act of will, so to speak. So it strikes me that there's a high probability that certain phenomena will be regarded as satisfactions and will take on the aspects of consumatory rewards. One of those high-probability items, for example, is food.

Now, that's why I have a quote here. I'll show you this quote from N. N said, "Anyone who considers the basic drives of man, it's a very sophisticated idea, it's 100 years old. We'll find that all of them have done philosophy at some time and that every single one of them would like only too well to represent just itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and as the legitimate master of all the other drives.

For every drive wants to be master, and it attempts to philosophize in that spirit." So I've been trying to resolve this — all these dilemmas that I've been posing. The dilemma, for example, that shock has the significance of an unconditioned stimulus but can be shifted.

It looks to me that what happens is that these underlying biological systems, like the one that governs hunger, have the capacity to grip — to gain access to the representational system that constructs these futures. So for example, you say, well, you're busy doing your homework, and you haven't eaten for a long time.

So now you're operating within a particular frame of reference, so the action of doing your homework is a — it's a motor program that's part of a larger series of goals and sub-goals, right? Graduation, career, and all that, that's what you're busily pursuing. But you haven't eaten.

Well, so what happens is that your attention starts to get diverted, which basically means that the system that's responsible for ensuring that you get enough calories has started to take control of the representational system that constructs your ideal futures.

So you start thinking about food. It's like that's another fantasy that's making itself known in the theater of your imagination. And if you keep doing your homework and don't eat long enough, while you're going to start feeling conflict because you're switching between these two control systems basically.

And sooner or later, in all likelihood, the system that mediates food intake is going to get the upper hand, and you'll say, "Oh, to hell with it," because that's your interpretation from the perspective of finishing your homework, and you'll go to the fridge and get something to eat.

So when N says, "All our drives attempt to philosophize," basically, see, this is the way — the reason I’m trying to tell you this is because it gets away from the notion of stimulus-response, because it's not your hunger isn't driving you towards the fridge. It's not like it's gripping your behavioral output.

What it's doing is positing a potential future towards which you can plan, and it has the capacity to grip that future. Now that's N's attempts at the drives to philosophize.

So you'd say, well, you think about this. We define pathology in this way often — say, well, if you're — if everything in your life boils down to food, that's your god. Say that's your ideal futures, you eating as much and as often as possible.

Well, then we would say something is pathological about your scheme of representation or your behavior. Something's pathological about your personality. While part of the reason we say that is because food is a good sub-goal, it's a necessary sub-goal, but it's a bad ultimate master. Well, the question, in part, that we're going to try to address in this classes, well, given that food, say, and sex and water and heat and shelter and all these other things are necessary sub-goals, what would constitute the ideal master?

Well, you read this — you want to read this Sumerian creation myth with this in mind. So I say these are gods; that's one way of looking at it. It's a little bit more complicated than that. They — well, here's another quote; this is quite funny, I think, too. This is from Elata, with regards to Sumerian mythology.

It is true that man was created in order to serve the gods, who first of all needed to be fed and clothed. Not such a — you know, not such a foreign conception, really. Well, the gods are construed as transpersonal processes that are eternal, fundamentally.

And, uh, man, mortal man, is created in order to ensure that their needs are fulfilled. Well, anyways, of course you're going to think at least some of you are going to think that's a bit of a leap, but it's quite interesting. You read the Mesopotamian creation myth, and part of what it entails is hierarchical competition between the gods and the eventual victory of one god, who's — that's part of the movement towards monotheism.

Marduk, by the way, is the one god that reveals himself as at the top of the hierarchy. And what Marduk represents is the capacity to explore. So the Mesopotamian creation myth is based — because Marduk, it's very interesting. Marduk carves Tiamat up. Tiamat is a dragon, and she represents chaos.

She's also the mother of all things. Marduk carves Tiamat up and makes the world out of her, makes the sky, makes the earth, makes the zodiac. He makes one, in fact. One of this is very amusing; one of Marduk's names — CU, he has like 200 names because actually he's a — he's a mixture of gods. Mesopotamian culture was made up of a whole bunch of subcultures that melded over a long period of time, and all those subcultures had their own gods, and they all got sort of mixed together to make Marduk.

So Marduk had a whole bunch of names, and one of his names, for example, was the maker of ingenious things from the combat with Tiamat, which is very, very interesting. But anyways, the Mesopotamians figured out, although they didn't know they had figured it out, they figured out that the thing to which all these other drives should be made subordinate was the thing that was Marduk.

And Marduk was the thing that carved new territory out of unexplored territory because basically they managed to presume that if you didn't arrange your life so that you could constantly generate new information, everything would come to a halt. So everything should be made subordinate to this capacity to encounter the unknown and generate new information out of it, because all of the other drives were necessary dependent for their fulfillment on that particular function.

So it's very — it's very interesting. It's once you — if you understand that, I think you understand something that's unbelievably important. That's part of the reason why I think I dreamt last night that we had Sumerian skeletons because now there's more to it than this, of course, because Marduk was also the ritual model of emulation for the Mesopotamian emperor, which basically meant that the Mesopotamian emperor was emperor because in a sense he was Marduk.

And only to the degree that he was Marduk was he granted any sort of divine status. And the emperor is the embodiment of the state, and of course our state now is a body of laws and not a human body because we don't have a monarchy anymore. But the point is, is that states only work, too, if they recognize that the property that Marduk incarnated is the thing of most central importance, which is the capacity for exploration.

Anyways, that was a good digression. All right, from neuropsychology, but you have to bounce around these things in order to get a picture of. Now, question. So you can modulate your compromises, but not all relative because, right, right, subordinated to your sense of exploration.

Well, well, that's the ideal solution, at least as far as the Sumerians were concerned. And like we're going to explore the consequences of that solution as a solution because it has a whole, a whole, a whole series of important implications. It's a solution now.

I happen to think it's really a good solution, but we'll see how that plays out. But yeah, the thing is you're not determined, so to speak, because the stimulus doesn't control your behavior. Nonetheless, there are certain — you are constrained, which is to say you have boundaries.

And I can say with a high probability in a broad variety of conditions what you are likely to consider a consumatory reward. And I can say that because you're composed in part of specialized subsystems, each of which have a stake in the maintenance of the whole unit, which is you.

So they want what they want, but they also want you to stay around, so to speak, because without you, nothing happens. And that's what the Sumerians meant when they said that men were created to serve the gods. So the relativity is modulated by the fact that you have a number of competing tasks constantly to perform.

So well, that's one way of construing it anyways. So now, question. So these subsystems or these drives, can they ever, in cases of really extreme severity deprivation, can they directly grab control of the motor output, or must they always go — must they always affect behavior through their — I don't know.

I suspect, I suspect that there's probably — there's both operating. Like in situations that are so extreme that thought would be an interference rather than an aid, then I suspect there's direct output. But I can't say any — because that's the problem with trying to reduce the brain to one system of operations. There's evolutionary redundancy in the brain, and often for a given type of response, there's more than one system that has the capability for that response.

And there are some circumstances under which I suspect behavior is directed, directly controlled. But I think this is more relevant when you're trying to weigh potential alternatives. Like, let's say if you're hungry and thirsty, and you haven't been engaged in a romantic relationship for like a year and your job is under pressure and you're not getting along well with your children, well then you have a whole nest of problems to solve and an almost infinite number of potential solutions to those problems.

And I think the role of the higher order cortical systems is to modulate the fantasies that all of these underlying systems, so to speak, might produce in order to construct the optimal outcome. That's — well here you'd say, again, this is a story. I keep telling you this is a story.

Well, that's a vision of paradise; that's what's up here as the archetypal ideal future. And a vision of paradise is that's the land of milk and honey, right, where everything is bountifully provisioned, where every motivational system is properly addressed.

Well, there's a problem with that viewpoint that Dostoevsky pointed out, though. That is, is that, well, if everything's perfect, everything's predictable. And if everything's predictable, then you're bored. And boredom is not part of perfection, so perfection is not perfection.

That's a big problem. But — and that's another problem hopefully that we'll be able to address. It's a big problem because it's a big problem because incentive reward, which is what the unknown produces, that's a cue for a reward.

Incentive reward is a more potent driving force for people, I think, than satisfaction. Think about this in regards to your own behaviors. Like often those things — say you have a goal in mind and you attain sub-goals with relationship to that goal, you're very, very excited.

You actually attain the goal, and it's nowhere near as exciting as participation in the process that led up to the goal, which is to say you're more activated by incentive reward than you are by satisfactions. And that's the thing about people; that's what we're like.

It's why we like novelties. So static conceptions of the ideal future have an intrinsic problem. It sounds much more like a difficulty being content rather — well, the problem is that getting what you want is not enough to make you content because contentment is something that transcends the attainment of determinant satisfactions.

That would be — there's more to the story than the attainment of a goal that's conceived of as a final goal. And that has something — well, content means also accepting that you always want to keep on wanting more and desiring more, even though at this point you have what you want. Isn't — haven't you reached content?

Well, I no, I think you're making a valid point. I mean, the — and fair enough. I mean, I guess what I'm talking about are systems that postulate, like political utopian systems that postulate that there is a particular manner of organizing society that will provide a final solution, a final static solution to all our problems.

A lot of more or less simplistic utopian notions do, in fact, promise that, like Marxism, I think would be a system that fits well into that sort of conceptualization — just reorganize the essential building blocks of society, you'll inevitably produce a future that everyone will find ideal, and that will be the final solution, so to speak.

So, yeah, I mean, if you know that incentive reward is one of the things that motivates you in a really profound way, again, as I've pointed out before, cocaine activates our incentive reward systems. People really like cocaine. So do animals for that matter. They'll self-administer cocaine until they die. They like incentive reward. Money is an incentive reward, for example.

So, say once you realize that, a lot of things start — a lot of weird things start to happen because you say, well for example, a perfect world therefore would have to contain novelty. Now that's a strange thing to say because novelty also induces anxiety. So you've instantly said, in a sense, that a perfect world is also one that makes you anxious, which is of course not really in accordance with the kinds of things that we would normally consider perfect.

So are you making the claim that an ideal future is a world of unlimited exploration? No, not entirely, Daniel, because see, I kind of thought that in the past. But it's more a matter of balance. You say, well, if you can represent this as the known, which is the thing that's transformed necessarily by the appearance of novelty, it's also a precondition for the capacity to assimilate novelty.

So you have to know something, which is to say that part of what makes you capable of exploring and assimilating new information is the fact that you're already composed of static structures of knowledge. So you could say the ideal has to therefore be composed, at least in part, of a balance between what's static and what's novel, so it isn't just exploration; it's also the security that makes non-terrifying exploration possible.

And the security that gives rise to the skills that make creative exploration possible. So you get someone like Einstein. I think it was Einstein who said he could see so far because he stood on the shoulders of giants. And that's a good mythological image because basically what Einstein said was that he stood on the ground that was prepared by his dead ancestors, and that's why he could see so far.

So it's a matter of balance, and you know, that's what the Oriental yin and yang symbol basically states too, is that, you know, order is necessary and chaos is necessary, and the ideal is some balance between them. That's where you're supposed to walk. But that's, that's an ideal mode of adaptation, yeah.

Which is — and so when you say ideal in that context, you're not talking about the box at the top right of — no, well then, okay, that fine, absolutely. That's why I said, well, in that little story that there's a grammar of — there's a simple grammar of the story which is, which is this, which is, you know, this is your kingdom, why is that, or your culture?

Well, you're part of the same culture as someone else if you share their story. It's as simple as that, and their story is the manner in which they have fixed motivational significance to ongoing events, including you as an ongoing event. And to the degree that you share that scheme of interpretation, you are part of that culture.

And that's because, well, it's quite straightforward, I guess, that if you and I share the same vision with regards to the value of a goal and the means for getting there, I can predict your behavior and you can predict mine. Not only that, you can rely on me, and we can cooperate.

So we've just drawn a magic circle around ourselves, so to speak, that eliminates the unpredictable and novel from our interactions, except in a very constrained manner. So you're defined territory as far as I'm concerned and vice versa. We are from the same culture, and you can make very, you know, you can make very trivial distinctions within cultures.

For example, we're both psychologists, but we're practicing in different domains. That could easily mean we could split into subcultures depending on the event that's going on because if something threatened your group, subgroup, and benefited mine, instantly we'd fragment because our stories would have switched.

So anyways, this is the more comprehensive story because you have a story, but then there's a story about how to transform your stories when that becomes necessary. And so this is a fixed story, and this is another fixed story. You notice I've structured it so that this — well, it's a square here and a circle here, which is the idea that this meta-structure remains the same, but the details shift.

That's a stage transition from the Piagetian perspective or a revolution from the Kuhnian perspective. And, uh, this is blown apart by the appearance of anomalous information. And you could think of anomalous information as the agent of chaos. It's a particularly weird way of looking at it, but it's anyways, it's anomalous information that blows this structure apart.

And in initiation rituals, for example, they catalyze this sort of transformation. Say I face you with something anomalous, I blow apart your story, you're reduced to chaos. What does that mean? Well, it means that you have all of the determinant motivational significances that you've attached to events, including yourself and other people, that's all up for grabs again.

So you're by turns depressed, anxious, elated, etc. Your emotional systems are in flux, and the reason they're in flux is because the meta-structure that kept them integrated has been destroyed. So you're now subject to the war of competing emotions basically.

So that's a descent into chaos. If it's an initiation ceremony, the members of your culture will give you a new story. Say this is the story for — these things usually happen to men, but not always. This is your story for being a man. Bang! Well, that's a new framework of reference that makes your new position now determinant.

So then you're up here and you could say, well, there are different ways of construing the ideal. If you're a patriot, you say to the degree that I identify with this, I'm perfect, I'm moral. If you're identifying — that's one form of perfection, and you can see the utility to that, and people do that all the time, even when they're identifying with football teams, for example.

But, uh, there's a more profound type of identification, and that would be identification with the process, with the capability to undergo this process. That's identification with the capacity for transformation. And that again, that ties back with your earlier comment about viewing yourself as, well, as someone who's capable not only of adhering to stories but of generating and modifying them.

That's a much — and again, well, I want you to read this next section on Mar with this sort of thing in mind because again, that's what the Mesopotamians posited as ideal. In fact, the king, the emperor of Mesopotamia, every new year when the year is regenerated, you can view this as the year, by the way from the Mesopotamian perspective.

Anyways, the king was ritually reduced to chaos and reconstituted at the beginning of every new year. And from the Mesopotamian perspective, that was equivalent to the reduction of the world, the cosmos, to its constituent elements, and then renewal. That's a common — that's the most common of mythological themes, by the way.

Okay, uh, if exploration is necessary, uh, because you and everything else is going to change whether you like it or not, then wouldn't, wouldn't the ideal be not necessarily active exploration but exploration when you need to explore? Yeah, yeah, fair enough.

You're talking about the ideal state that you — or the ideal future is one in which you're always actively exploring? No, no, you're right, your alternative reformulation is more accurate. It's exploration when it's necessary, which is to say that you need to know what you know, so you don't have to go looking for trouble necessarily or be an agent of change for the sake of being an agent of change.

But if you detect an anomaly, which you do involuntarily — that's the thing about how your brain is set up. If something anomalous happens, you notice it. Once you notice it, then it's incumbent on you to alter your story. But it's not necessarily the case that you have to be actively going about that, while it would exhaust you. In fact, I think in some ways that's what happens to paranoid schizophrenics.

I think you might think that this is another leap, but if you read Gray's article in this book, Gray has a theory about the neuropsychology of schizophrenia. What happens to schizophrenics is that novelty starts appearing all over where it shouldn't, which is to say that the inhibitory structure that stops meaning from being experienced has been disrupted.

So for the poor schizophrenic, meanings are popping up everywhere, and meaning means this signifies something, usually something threatening and something promising that attracts your attention. The poor schizophrenic, his attention is always attracted. It's part of the reason that paranoid schizophrenics are hypervigilant.

And what happens to them is that I think is, well, if you — if something appears as meaningful to you, that activates your exploration system, and that's dopaminergically mediated. Well, that explains in part the hyperdopaminergia that's characteristic of schizophrenia and the hypervigilance.

But the problem with that is that if you're on all the time, you'll kill those systems. I think that's what happens to schizophrenics when they go into second-stage schizophrenia, which is characterized by no flat affect and Parkinson-like symptoms. So, it's not so good to be on all the time, you know.

It's right because a common — a common mythological ideal is peace. I mean, and that would seem to be specifically not exploring upset, maybe when you needed to to maintain peace? Yeah, yes that's — but then there's this — the contrary argument.

That's a perfectly valid point, but there's the contrary argument, and I think this is an argument that the Red Queen in "Alice in Wonderland" made to Alice. She said you have to run as fast as you can just to stay where you are. So, which is to say that a static mode of adaptation is not — is no adaptation at all.

Systems age all by themselves, so you have to stay very active in order just to maintain things the way they are. So, but you don't necessarily have to be running all the time. I mean — right, absolutely, say you come to a sort of a peaceful existence with yourself, and you're living in the woods or something, I don't know, and you know, and you're completely happy with it. Well, you're not going to have to — you're not going to have to do a lot of active change unless your situation changes or you change.

Yeah, I think that, I mean, it's a complex — it's a complex issue because you can also, by exploration, you can also produce anomalies. It's not necessarily the case that they just happen to you, so. But you know, I’ve got no argument at all with what you say.

It's a matter of balance. I mean the point is that, well, Egypt for example stayed stable for about 3,000 years, which is to say that, as far as modern archaeologists are able to determine, there was a 30-century period where the fundamental substructures of Egyptian society stayed exactly the same.

And the Egyptians were convinced, as are many traditional societies, that change meant death. And you can understand that because any cultural innovation — cultural innovations have the capacity to undermine the cultures that produced them. So many cultures opt for stasis.

But the problem is — because they think, well, we have a good thing, let’s not play around with it. It's like biological mutations. It's a good analogy. Most biological mutations kill you.

And you think every innovation in the cultural sphere is an analogy to a mutation. But the one in every thousand mutations that doesn't kill you is necessary for the survival of the species.

So it's a very strange balance. Does that argument make sense? Does that analogy make sense? So if being bored makes you miserable, then how do you explain things like marriage? Like why isn't the divorce 100%? I'm serious!

Like, or even if you love, like I have a favorite song or like I’m married to the same person for decades. That's got — like that's got to be boring after a while. I mean, there's — well maybe it does. I don't know if it has to be.

I mean, you also have the capacity to shift frameworks of reference, it's also right. So, I mean especially with something as complex as another person, if you think you know someone else, that's only a delusion that you have about the extent of your knowledge.

So if you — if what you see is what you have habituated to, then what you see is what you have habituated to, not what's there because you don't know what that other person is like.

And perhaps they've fallen into the same damn game, which is they play out the role you specified for them, but that's your tough luck, you know? So that's a good answer with regards to marriage, anyways.

So I mean with regards to simpler phenomena, well, you know, you can move from thing to thing, and people do that. But part of the human capacity for exploration is also to see what hasn't been mapped, where you — where people think everything is understood.

But her point you brings up something interesting to me. When you fall into chaos and then you go to a new place, can you take part of the old system with you? Oh absolutely.

AB, look, look, this is another thing you want to read when you go through this next chapter because part of the — huh, the pharaoh, the Egyptian pharaoh, for example, who's a nice Mesopotamian emperor analog, although a little later down the historical chain, he was simultaneously the pharaoh who had died and the new pharaoh always.

And that meant basically that he was both Osiris and Horus, is how the Egyptians construed it. And Osiris was the old pharaoh who basically was confined to the underworld, and Horus was the process that gave new life to the pharaoh, Osiris, who was confined in the underworld.

So the new pharaoh was simultaneously everything that had already been learned plus the process that allows you to make use of everything that's already been learned in a creative manner. So of course this — that's why this structure is the same.

Say this is composed of this plus this, so which is to say that when you make — when there's a revolution in your thought, what you use is everything you already knew plus the information that has been engendered by your contact or your assimil of the anomalous information. So here I’ll just give you this — this is kind of funny, I think.

This is often represented as a serpent. The serpent of chaos for the Egyptians, that was Atum. And Atum was the most primordial of gods who ruled at the beginning of time and who will once again rule at the end of time. So he's sort of the place that everything came from.

It's a serpent, anyways. But you can see, for example, the structure of the story in Genesis of Adam and Eve in this little picture as well, because, well, anomalous information — maybe I'm jumping ahead a bit, I’ll tell you anyways.

Anomalous information is often given a feminine form, so you'll see when we go through because, well, because anything anomalous — this is a hypothetical state, this chaos, you could say it's all the unknown that you haven't encountered.

You can't say anything about that because it's not actually part of your experience, it's just a hypothesis about the source of all those things you don't understand. It's not those things themselves.

When something anomalous actually makes itself manifest, which is to say that you're following your story and something unexpected happens, then something has — something actually unexpected has happened to you.

Well, it's in exploring that unexpected thing that you generate new information. So you could think of the unexpected that you experience as the matrix of everything that you know because it's the source — it's the source of everything that you know. You have to explore it, but it's still the place where information comes from, and matrix, I use that word because it's emically related to mother.

Anyways, this is often given feminine form. Yeah, the matrix of things, absolutely. Matter as well. And, um, but anyway, so — well it's a complicated thing. The serpent gives the fruit to Eve in the story of Genesis, and that produces a complete collapse.

That's the rise of self-consciousness in the Genesis story, and Christian morality is the attempt to get from here back to here. Well, in a sense — that's another example of how these sorts of things tie together.

Let me just show you this cartoon, because I might otherwise forget it. This is quite funny. This is just a cartoon that sort of illustrates how we do respond to things that we understand, things that we don't.

Now the reason this cartoon is funny, of course, is because you don't sit around a campfire at night talking about things you understand, right? They don't have any motivational significance. That's — that's why you think you understand them, anyways.

Yeah, tales of the known. It's also, it's also well embedded in — this is also the notion that the things you have explored don't have a lot of affective valence anymore, so they're not very interesting, and it's unknown things that are interesting, I guess.

Sitting around the campfire would make it more effective to tell a story about the — it's dark all around. Right, right, absolutely. Yeah, sure, Pan rules around the campfire at night, right? Pan's the god who lives — who lives in the forest and who causes panic, basically.

And he's the god that inhabits the forest because the forest is unknown territory, and unknown territory produces a seizure of ongoing activity and is associated with anxiety. So if you have this conception of the future as, you know, being perfect and happy and that has sub-goals of being successful, and being an academic, and being a psychologist and being — and then something happens that disrupts either your interest in or your faith in your ability to do cognitive psychology, and so that particular sub-goal gets plunged into chaos.

And you come back up with this idea of being a developmental psychologist. Right, right, absolutely, you do that without affecting your larger goals, like sure you just did it in that example.

That's exactly what happens, sure. Run off, like — I mean, can it ever happen in isolation just in a sub? Absolutely, absolutely. Sure, and then it doesn't provoke that much anxiety. That's why — well happens all the time, right? Like when you're — happens all the time the meeting, and that's just a disruption of — absolutely.

Right, absolutely, and that's a treat. That's the thing that's so neat about this. And like a tree, by the way, is a very, very, very common figure in mythology. The tree of life, for example, that's — I really believe that's what it's referring to.

It's this — it's the tree-like structure of that that holds your motivational systems in check. So you can lose like minor league branches or you can lose things that are close to the trunk, which is a very big catastrophe. It's then you lose whole schemas of actions and interpretations that hold entire sections of your experience in motivational check.

So given that they have an a prior significance, you're trying to restrict that significance to some useful domain. It's always what you're trying to do. So can you only adapt to things that affect sub-goals on some level?

I mean, because you — something happens that draws into question, like let's say your most fundamental, like the trunk of the tree. Can you adapt from that, or do you just — that's part of what we're trying to address in this class. See, because you could say, well, the best story is the one that addresses the widest range of potential phenomena, right?

Say, well, mythologies collect — mythologies distill the best story. So what we're going to try to do is to understand what the best story is because the best story is the one that has the largest domain of potential relevance.

So you could say, well, what's the big problem? Well, the big problem, for example, might be the fact of human mortality because that would be the anomalous phenomena which puts the determinant significance of everything into dispute.

So how can you adapt to that? Well, again, that's the question. Say that's at the bottom of Christian morality. If you view it — well I'm using Christian morality just as an example. If you view the rise of self-consciousness, for example, one of the concomitants of the rise of self-consciousness is the knowledge of death.

I mean, the two things are very closely linked. If you're self-conscious, that means you can conceive of your boundaries. That's what it means, and you have spatial boundaries, and you know, they kind of bother you, but you can move from one place to another so that's not such a big deal.

It's the temporal boundary that's the big problem. So the question is, well, can you adapt to the fact of a temporal boundary? Well, obviously this is a very, very difficult question. But, uh, it's the sort of thing that will — H, part of what I'm interested in trying to understand is why people get so horribly twisted as they mature.

I mean, there's lots of reasons for it. They're pretty much plainly evident. Like in many ways, the world is a terrible place, and there's sufficient reason all the time for people to get twisted off the path. In fact, I think often it's more surprising that that doesn't happen all the time than it is surprising that it sometimes happens.

Well, if you're looking — if you're growing up in a family that maybe doesn't have this normal adaptation, you know, of seeing these things or, you know, get caught up in sub-goals or maybe something traumatic happens that affects one of your fundamental schemas, then that could definitely create a twisted individual.

Yeah, well, yeah, but that in itself is enough. I think that's a — that's a necessary but not sufficient precondition. So you could say, well, some people never — like if you're lucky, you at least start here. Some people never bloody well even get here. They just — they're born, and this is where they stay, and that's terrible for them.

But is it possible to stay there without being entirely insane? I mean, because anyone who functions at all has a schema because you have to have a — you have to have a — I mean, you are working toward something, even if you don't have no idea what it is.

Not necessarily — not necessarily. You have to allow yourself the possibility that there may be something that you're working towards, even if you don't understand what it is, and that's the thing that you can hold on to in the darkness so to speak.

Something you don't — that's faith from the religious perspective. And you might — I'll get to you right away. You might say, well what's that faith? The answer to that is possibility. It says even if you don't know — like this revolutionary adaptation — that's some — that's what this model represents.

You could say, well this is an image of the hero from the mythological perspective. Say, well, you may identify with that figure even if you don't know you're doing it, which is to say that when you're here, you may say to yourself, well, it's possible that if I pay attention better, things will come about.

Well, in a sense, that's what you're doing, whether you know it or not, is identifying with the capacity to undergo this process. So, and then you'd say, well, even when you're in chaos, you still have a story. Well, that's true, you do.

But you don't have to — like people — this is the problem with notions like Joseph Campbell, for example. Most New Age philosophy, they say, well, you know, follow your interests. Well, there's a lot of anomaly wherever your interests take you.

That's perfectly fine. They say follow your interest and you'll get to here. That's a load of — that's a — what would you say? A very oversimplistic and naive conception of development because if you follow your interest and you hit a big anomaly, which you will, you'll end up here.

And this is the — this is by definition the most unpleasant place that you can imagine to be. And so it isn't just a matter of, well, things are pretty damn good now and if you're just real good, they'll get a lot better. It's, well, things are, you know, however they are right now.

I don't know how each person determines that personally. And if you do what you should do, they're going to get a lot worse before they get better. So that's part of it because you need an explanation. You know, it's like why don't people do this? Why don't people pay attention to anomalous information when it doesn't take that much cognitive work to realize that if you ignore something that's real, sooner or later it's going to cause you trouble?

Well, why do people ignore it then? There must be a reason because some interpretation is better than none, that's for sure. Even a bad one, that's for sure.

Yeah, that explains a lot of the persistence of forms of psychopathology. It's like you say, well, you know, someone has — someone has a real cockeyed story and it's obvious to them that it's cockeyed because their story transforms almost everything into the determinant significances of anxiety and pain, but they'll still hang on to that like a lifeline when you offer them an alternative story that would allow the motivational states of hope and satisfaction to emerge.

Because even though this is terrible, this is worse, and to get to the new one, they'd have to go there. Right? Isn't that also, though, because they're not being a hero? Like they're escaping, and escaping just perpetuates the anxiety.

So if they're stuck in the anxiety and pain, then — yeah, well, this is why I want you to read "Paradise Lost" because Milton's "Paradise Lost" is a description of the feedback process that refusal to admit to anomaly necessarily produces.

So question, is there a qualitative difference or a difference of degree between damage to the branch and damage to the trunk? Well, it depends on how you look at it. Like, if you look at it from this perspective, there's a qualitative difference, because damage to a branch would be damage in here, it's just a matter of means; and then the qualitative difference, the qualitative shift would be damage here or here.

But if you look at it this way, it's really quantitative. And I think this is actually a more — by the way, Daniel Higgins helped me a substantial amount developing this particular representation, but this makes it appear quantitative.

And then the thing is, you can — you can say, well, maybe there's a quality — sorry, a quantitative difference between damage here and here, but there's a qualitative difference between damage here and here, because — anyways, that's how I look at it.

So it's a quantitative process that has the appearance of qualitative shift from time to time. So, okay, confusion is a lot more frightening to handle than just pain. But, um, I'm wondering why that is, um, if, um, part of what a leap of faith is, is, um, simply accepting that even if you don't understand, um, what you're doing, you're doing it for something that the possibilities that will open up to make you feel better. How exactly confusion may fit in there?

Well, often pain is bounded. So like let's say you're operating under a system of presumptions that always interferes with your interpersonal relationship. So they always end in catastrophe, but it's very predictable. The point of the story — remember the point of having a story is to render things predictable.

Now predictable pain is a hell of a lot better than unpredictable pain. And it is possible, depending on your attitude towards anxiety, that predictable pain is better than unpredictable pleasure because the unpredictable aspect of the pleasure means anxiety.

And then, of course, whether you — whether you would prefer anxiety to pain, in a sense, depends on how you construe your potential relationship to anxiety. Is unpredictable pleasure gambling, other stuff where you get reinforcement but you don't really know when you're going to get?

Yeah, yeah. And that's very — I've heard one of the most powerful reinforcement — yeah, it's intermittent reinforcement. Yeah, it's very hard to extinguish. Well, the thing about — the thing about novelty, this makes it complex, is that it's an intrinsically ambivalent stimulus.

The thing is, novel stimuli are not really stimuli. They're a class of stimuli, and they produce both anxiety and incentive reward. So the circumstances of the problem, like the gambling, determine in large part whether it's incentive reward or anxiety that predominates, and that's very situationally dependent.

So in the case of gambling, this situation is set up so that at least for those who gamble, the incentive reward outweighs the anxiety, but they both produce it while a heightened state of arousal, for example. But lots of people won't gamble, too, so that would have something to do partly with the schema of interpretation and partly with biological differences.

So similar to when you were saying that it seems that biologically we are — that we respond to incentive more than to actual reward? Well, I think that you can make an argument to that end, yeah.

So would you say the same thing then for threat and anxiety versus punishment? What would you say? Like, look, it's a lot easier for us to adapt to the fact of punishments; we just eliminate them. Like, it's very rare that any of us are in pain, but it's not rare at all that we're anxious.

We haven't been able to do much about that at all, partly because there's the existential aspect of anxiety. But whether anxiety is more motivating than pain is kind of a moot point because it's situationally dependent.

But it is certainly more difficult to rid ourselves of anxiety on any permanent basis. So for people who have already solved the problem of subjugation to pain and also the problem of most basic satisfactions — and that's the case in our culture, we're still very much governed, and almost entirely governed, I think, by anxiety and incentive reward.

So there — it's funny because there are secondary reinforcers, so to speak, but they're in some — in many ways more fundamental than the primary reinforcers.

I wanted to go back to boredom for a second because I've been thinking about this the other day, and it — boredom just doesn't make sense to me, except in terms of not moving toward some goal or other because I was just thinking about this. If you're — if you're just sitting around, I'm sitting — I'm sitting alone in a room in a chair with nothing going on.

It's only — only if that doesn't conflict with some other drive, like to go get food or something more complex or, you know, I don't know, but only if it conflicts with some other drive, am I going to be unhappy sitting there? Am I going to feel what people refer to as boredom?

Yeah, okay, because otherwise, if I don't want anything in particular at the time, I'll be perfectly happy just sitting there, you know. If it doesn't conflict with some — with movement toward whatever ideal future I have, I'm not going to be — I'm not going to be bored for, well, yeah, I mean it's true that our environment is much more constructed.

I mean, there's much less we that we have to worry about in — does that mean we're exploring more of our own construction? Anything you build creates more. You don't — because you don't know all the implications of anything you build.

Well, okay, I think that changes time, too. You have to look at your lifespan and the position that you're in right now. You're in a position where people try very hard to make everything as predictable for you as possible so you can focus on ideas, but that may not be what your life is like in —

And it also may seem that, in comparison to things that have been discovered in the past, the things that we're exploring right now are more subtle. But I think that's only because we have the advantage of viewpoint on the past to us, because those things have already been explored, they seem obvious.

But to the people who were exploring them when they were still undefined territory, they were as obscure to them as the things we explore are to us — just as mysterious. So yeah, which is to say that if you answer a question, you answer a question, but you generate two new problems as a consequence.

It's like the introduction of the computer, but it seems like the things that we're exploring now are things that we're not as likely to see as a competition for resources. Like if I want to study something, it doesn't mean that the other person can't study it.

It's sort of like if you want to own America, you have to fight the other countries and keep them away from it. Otherwise, you can't be the one to explore it. But if you want to explore some, you know, psychology, you don't have to keep other people from doing it.

It's not — you have to keep other people committed here to your education. I'm in like other countries don't think academics competitive because you don't want somebody else to publish your idea. You want to be the one to define the terms to set the — this is what you see when you read with the questions.

Does that translate into conflict? Do you actually try to keep them from studying it, or is it just that you hope that they don't so that you can be the one to? Depends. I mean, are we ever, we have a cross-generational conversation, but, the fact is you’re also so — we don't fight each other but we — yeah, but we do fight too.

Yeah, I mean the fact is, but also these are cultural generalizations. The level at which this actually takes place is the level of the individual. Some people we have a war with another country over those things or just over oil.