Maps of Meaning 04 (Harvard Lectures)

So you were to have read today the section on classification. It's just a small section, right, on categorization. And then the next section on, well, it's basically on the Enuma Elish, the Mesopotamian creation myth. Okay, now that's the most fun. That's the most archaic of creation myths that we have in written form in anything approaching a state of completeness. And, uh, so it's interesting from the historical perspective, um, because it's so archaic. It's also, like, the Mesopotamians had an extraordinarily well-developed dogma, religious dogma, as far as I've been able to determine. In some ways, well, well, I think in many ways, Jewish and Christian theology are elaborations on a Mesopotamian theme.

Now, Eliade points out that the Mesopotamian creation myth, although it's about 5,000 years old in its extant form, is definitely based on oral traditions that are much older than that. So it's not like you can say that the Sumerians just originated the Enuma Elish in a very brief period of time on ground that hadn't been prepared. They just codified, uh, traditions that had been handed down orally to that date, and so we have them in written form now.

Um, the first thing I wanted to tell you about was this notion of categorization. And I think, I think this is Roger Brown, who pointed out 20 years ago or thereabouts that, um, we have always in psychology tended to think that the way that people think is the way that scientists think. And the way that we categorize things is in terms of the categories that we think are appropriate from the scientific or the logical perspective. Brown points out that this is, well, that a minimal amount of investigation, basically in the psycholinguistic domain, immediately indicated that this was, in fact, false.

And that we do not categorize things naturally the way that people do scientifically. In other words, we don't use the notion of the proper set. And he uses as a standard example of the proper set the idea of triangles. And you can tell what a triangle is absolutely. You can define what's a triangle, what isn't. There's no fuzziness about the borders, and everything either fits in the set or is outside of the set.

And by contrast, our natural categories don't seem to be of that type; they have fuzzy boundaries and they're more concerned with function, so to speak, or with affective relevance than with sensory, than with absolutely determinable sensory essence. So we categorize in a much more vague manner. And it seems to me that it's—I gave you a listing in this document of the qualities of natural categorization as they've been described by George Lakoff in his book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.

Lakoff is basically following up on a tradition that is—I'm not a psycholinguist, and this is all new news to me basically—but Lakoff has been following up on a tradition that was established by Roger Brown and Ellen Rosch, who is one of his students. And Ellen Rosch has made a big name for herself studying categorization. The thing I think is so interesting about this is that what Rosch and Lakoff describe as categories are very, very much like the kinds of categories that religious thinkers have used, that have been studied from a completely different perspective by people like Jung and Mircea Eliade.

So it's not that surprising if you think about it, because it's obvious that religious categories aren't proper sets; they're natural categories. Archaic people think in religious categories, and they've always thought that way. So it's not like, it's not that surprising. What's surprising, I guess more surprising, is that the overlap between the two literatures is not well explored or known.

So, uh, the first thing we should do, I guess, is think about this notion of categorization. Yeah, okay. Lakoff describes natural categories as cognitive models. The first thing he says is that they are embodied with regards to their content, which essentially means that they can be used without necessarily being defined, means that they are implicit in action without necessarily being implicit in description. So basically what Lakoff is pointing out is that if you act towards a number of different things as if they are the same thing with regards to your actions, then you are, in fact, treating those objects as if they're in the same category.

Because one domain of category can be fun, like significance for motor output. And you think about it, it's like what defines a chair. Because chairs vary in all sorts of ways. I mean, they vary so much that there may be very little sensory overlap between one chair and another. There's not much—the similarities between, say, a stump, for example, and the kind of designer chair that you might see in a museum. They're very different objects. But the thing they have in common is their implication for output, which is that chairs are things that you can sit on, right? They're defined by their significance and not by their sensory nature.

So, I used an example here: what makes a dog? You might say, "I can't say, but I know one when I see one," which is another indication that you'd be using a natural category. A dog is something friendly, something to be petted, and something to play with. Although such knowledge does not comprise everything that makes up what you regard as a dog.

The thing that's interesting about those ideas—something friendly, something to be petted, and something to play with—is that, in a sense, those are not precisely attributes of the dog, think of the natural category of dog. Because what you're defining a dog as, as a friend or as something to play with, you're actually defining the object in terms of your interactions with it and not in terms of the object.

And a lot of the terms we use have exactly that nature. Like "beautiful," for example. Say when you define another person as beautiful, it's very difficult to tell exactly where it is that that quality resides. I mean, people say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We know there's quite a substantial amount of cultural variation in terms of attitudes towards beauty, so it's very difficult to pin down what constitutes beauty from the objective perspective.

I mean, there have been certain attempts to do that, and they've been somewhat successful, but the point is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But it's something that we naturally attribute to an object. So a lot of the things that we consider properties of objects are actually what Lakoff describes as interactional properties. They're things that we attribute to the thing that actually arise as a consequence of our interaction with the thing.

So, like the notion of "friend." When you, when you describe if you put someone in the category of friend, you're actually describing them in terms of your pattern of interactions with them. Although you attribute the qualities that make up those interactions to them, and you do that automatically. And what I'm suggesting with regards to this study of categorization is that we do that. That is the natural way that we think. We think about things in terms of their implication for our behavioral output.

And we need to do that because that's what adaptation means. If you've adapted to something, you've structured your behavior—in essence, what you've done is structured your behavior in the presence of that thing so that it does what you want it to do. Which means basically that it doesn't threaten you, that it doesn't hurt you, that it furthers your progress towards a goal, or that it constitutes that goal itself. That's behavioral adaptation.

And, well, those things—the things that make up that category of objects to which you've structured behavioral adaptation—are explored territory. That's the domain of the known. Say in that domain is everything that you understand how to act towards. Now, what I'm trying to suggest in the course of this whole manuscript is that's how your brain works. The scientific overlay of scientific categorizations is just a thin veneer on top of that, and in some sense it's an irrelevant veneer from the perspective of emotional regulation.

Science has enabled us to describe things ever more accurately so that we can keep track of them. But still, what we're interested in is determining how to behave in the presence of things. That's what we want to know. Okay, now Lakoff points out a few other things about natural categories, and I want you to think about this in regards to the sorts of categories that we're going to talk about for the remainder of the course. He says they're characterized by basic level categorization and basic level primacy, and basically what he means by that is that we tend to view things as in a category or as objects themselves if they're the right size for us.

In other words, the world that we perceive—which is the world of experience, which is in some sense the only world you can get access to—is hum-sized. There are categories that naturally spring to mind because they're handy. That's a good way of thinking. It's like the English imperial system of measurement. We can define things in terms of the English imperial system, and it's very handy. Literally, a foot is a foot long; an inch is the length of one digit.

I mean the point Lakoff is trying to make is that the world of experience presents itself the way it presents itself because of the interaction between our physiology and whatever it is that's out there. Now, one of the things we're going to try to explore is what does it mean to say whatever it is that's out there? I mean, we tend to think of it scientifically as the objective world, which would be exactly the same as it is now if none of us were here, except that none of us would be here. The point Lakoff is trying to make is that what we define as reality is somewhat more or what we experience as reality is more complex than that.

It's an interaction between whatever it is that's out there and us, and everything that we think of as real we define in terms of our experience of temporal duration and size and weight. And I guess the only way, the only way you can get your mind around this, to some degree, is to try to think of what Lakoff is saying. In a sense, the fact that we're human and have the characteristics that we have, which are basically our limitations, means that the universe is constituted in a particular way with regards to us.

It's that we have a built-in level of analysis. It's obviously not the subatomic level or the molecular level; it's not the cosmic level either. It's hum-sized. Now, if you start thinking about what would constitute reality in the absence of a human observer, the first problem that you run into is the problem of a reference point. You no longer have anything against which to judge things like duration or size, and certainly not things like color or beauty or emotional significance. Those categories obviously disappear.

What happens to the sensory categories is not all that easy to figure out either, so I can’t—I already can’t figure it out. Richard, in his book The Character of Physical Law, discusses encoding the nature of human experience in a mathematical form and sending it to aliens so that he could reconstruct the world that we experience based on the proportion of an elemental character or an element, like an atom or something like that. And he gives a fairly good, uh, just from that, it's convincing that you could describe the world independent of human experience if you define—if you define the parameters that make up our capacity to experience.

Is that if you—you could possibly describe the world that we—the world in terms of something which is trans-human, by using mathematical symbols? Well, that's interesting. So, Fman says, but that he would define our level of analysis mathematically as well as what it is that we are experiencing. And that would give an alien the capacity to see what it is that we see. He wasn't—he was talking about a transhuman reality.

Fman doesn't, uh, subject the reality of reality to the presence of the subject. Right, right. Well, but nonetheless, that alien is a subject, I mean, and must have some sort of intelligence that is at least in some vague way like our own in order to interpret what we send out there. So he's really not—I mean there's an alien out there who has a similar enough intelligence to ours that can understand this thing that we've sent out. I mean, then they're the subject in question.

Well, it opens up the—it draws questions to— I mean, it sort of puts a question mark over the possibility of saying that reality is dependent on—that it's irrelevant or it's ridiculous to talk about reality in the absence of the human subject. Well, transhuman, yes, but trans-subject, no. Okay, well, the difference between Richard— Okay, well, I don't want to make too much of this because it isn't like it's not something that's critical to the arguments that we're going to undertake.

One of the things I want to tell you about is how mythological categories represent the category of all things that exist in the absence of a subject, which is kind of a strange category. And even in the mythological, like in the scientific world, we presume an objective independent reality. I don't want to argue—certainly don't want to argue about that because it's way too complicated an issue. But myth also presumes that something exists in the absence of a perceiver or in the absence of a subject, although the thing that exists is very difficult to define.

And that's one of the things we're going to take a brief look at today because my question is what does science have to do at all with that? Science knows the size—the size of the reference point that which presents itself up to the reference. Well, all that Lakoff is basically saying is that certain categories seem to present themselves to us more naturally than others, like the category cat presents itself to us more naturally than the category of species of cat. Because we naturally—we're naturally predisposed, so to speak, towards making an object out of something like a cat.

Now, no one knows exactly why it is that certain forms of categorization appear to us more naturally than other sorts. I suspect it has something to do with—well, you can say it has something to do with our biological hardwiring, which is not really much of an answer. It's just the way we are. We perceive certain things more accurately than we perceive other things. I mean, just to take a trivial example, in this room we'll focus all of our attention on each other's faces. Like I'm not going to spend a lot of time when I'm talking to you looking at your hands. My natural point of orientation in our discussion is your face. It's very significant for me.

And I think you see this sort of thing if you look at children's drawings. I mean, a child's drawing of a person is, you know, usually something like this. Maybe there's not even a body, but the head is 90% of the person, and the face is 90% of the head. And that's, I think, this is a protolinguistic representation of a human being. Children tend to produce these sorts of figures spontaneously.

I would say that's kind of a natural hieroglyphic that stands for a person, and the things that are most relevant about the person are the things that are focused in on by the child. It's just certain things appear to us more naturally than other things, and those things more naturally constitute our world. So as long as we're talking about size really quickly, if you return to physics and what's intuitive, you can sort of look at the—you can sort of divide the universe into three very basic levels of orders of magnitude. You can have sort of what's intuitive, is the Newtonian Universe we all live in, and you can have the cosmic order, which is sort of defined by mechanics and spacetime, and you can go to quantum mechanics, which is smaller than you could possibly perceive.

And if you look at the mathematics involved in each one, the Newtonian equations, the ones that make sense to you, that you think in, and the other ones seem like, when you read about them the first time, you think to yourself, "How could this be?" But in a sort of mathematical sense, they're all true. That's an excellent example because the Newtonian universe is intuitive. And the reason that it's intuitive from the Lakoff perspective is that the laws are in accordance with our motor patterns, our patterns of adaptation.

I mean, PSJ has pointed out that we first adapt to objects from the motoric perspective as a consequence of exploration, then we build our abstract notions about our relationships with those objects as a consequence of our established motor patterns. And that basically sums up the notion of embodied knowledge. And your point is that these other universes are counterintuitive; they're not in accordance with our experience. Well, that's partly because they aren't the levels of resolution or the orders of magnitude towards which we actually adapt our behavior.

So, yeah, okay. Anyways, you can finish reading through the properties of natural categories. They have interesting categories. I also think that, well, membership and centrality gradients is kind of an interesting category, as is familial resemblance. The idea of familial resemblance is quite interesting. Basically, what this—Rosch's big contention, the thing that she's worked on—say that we have notions of prototypes for our categories, is that there's a kind of an ideal thing that constitutes the category.

Like the category bird, people would say, for example, that a robin is a more prototypical bird than an ostrich. And you can't exactly—sorry, you have a question?

Yeah, um, maybe it's not really related to what you're saying right this but do we sort of subconsciously come up with different categories than—or find things easier to categorize than what we see? I mean, now we'd all look at each other's faces, but if you have dreams, you can sort of identify even if they look completely different. You can say, "You know, and I knew in my dream this was supposed to be your father," even though he looked like my math teacher.

And this, like, maybe are we sort of getting at a different subconscious sort of essence of people than when we in a dream? Or I don't know.

I don't know. I know what you're saying. Yeah, there must be some other category, some other way of categorizing. Yeah, I guess what happens in a situation like that is that you have two conflicting categorizations and one takes predominance. So you say, despite all these exceptions, the prototypical aspects of this, whatever it is, are still intact.

So you'd have to look at the individual differences in the dreams to be able to determine exactly how that happens. But, I mean, the prototypical Smith brothers, this is, you know, your classic example. It's that how do you identify family members as coming from all from the same family? So, well, you have all these Smith brothers, and there's five of them, and you can all tell they are brothers, but they don't share the same complete set of characteristics.

The prototypical brother maybe has six characteristics, so you might say, "Well, a big nose would be one, and a heavy mustache would be another, and a beard would be a third, and big ears would be a fourth, and heavy eyebrows would be a fifth, and glasses, say, would be a sixth." So that's your prototypical Smith brother. But to be recognizable as a Smith brother, perhaps you only have to have two of these characteristics, and the rest can vary.

So this character would have big ears and the eyes and maybe the mustache, but he'd have a little nose and no beard. And then this character would have the glasses and a big nose and the mustache, the little ears, and say, a beard. Anyways, you get the idea. And they don't share— they're not like triangles; you can't precisely define the characteristics that the Smith brothers have. Theoretically, they all relate to this central prototype which we abstract from our experience in some complex manner.

So the notion of—what else is interesting? Well, the other thing about natural categories is that instead of being distinct, like proper sets, they can overlap. And this is part of the reason that—well, knowing this helps you make sense out of mythological categories, because they shift with context. Unfortunately, that makes them difficult to interpret. For example, one of the most basic divisions of the world from the mythological perspective is masculine versus feminine, and that's related in a very profound way to explored territory versus unexplored territory.

The problem is that whether or not something is masculine or feminine tends to depend on the context of interpretation. So, for example, if you talk about an island in the ocean, then the island is masculine and the ocean is feminine. But if you talk about an island in the sky, then the island is feminine and the sky is masculine. So, even though the island is theoretically objectively the same in both circumstances, its affective classification shifts with context.

Now, you might think, well, that's a bizarre property for a categorization to have. But the thing is, we do this all the time. This is actually how we derive meaning in large part. It's always context-dependent. Like most of the words you know, you don't know because someone told you the meaning of them; you know because you derive the meaning from a context. You see a novel word in one context, and then in another context, and then in another context, and you can derive the meaning from analysis of what's common across the context.

Maybe you could define a novel word if you saw it in ten different sentences; you'd have enough information there to figure out what the word means. And the meaning of the word shifts with the sentence, and the meaning of the sentence shifts with the paragraph, and the meaning of the paragraph shifts with the essay. That's why you can pull things out of context and reverse their meaning often.

So the fact of context-dependent meaning is not that much of a mystery. Does everything have effective significance? Like, I'm a little confused because when you see a door or something, okay, now someone can say that they see a door and it has, you know, they—it has sensory, you know, information like it's a door, you open and close it. But they feel nothing towards it, right? But does it have a value?

Does only its emotion—does it always? That's what last week, for example, we talked about the relationship of things to your story, right? You have your story, and, um, like if part of your ideal future is so— it doesn't have—it doesn't have any relevance unless it interferes with the story.

Not only interferes with if it aids. You think—look again, whatever— it looks to me like your cortex evolved in part to modulate the automatic reactions of your limbic system to stimulate to make you more flexible. It looks to me like what's happened is that what your cortex has done is hijacked your limbic system in this way. It says you can put anything you want into the goal box. But as soon as you put it there, it's a consumatory reward.

Doesn't matter what it is. Now, you have a lot of underlying biological systems that have their own idea about what should be here. But you can still put whatever you want in there; it's a consumatory reward. Now, as soon as you do that, everything that you encounter is construed in relationship to that goal. So the door is only relevant if you need to get through it to get to where you want to go.

Right now it’s not relevant. At the end of class, it will be absolutely. And you shift the significance of things by shifting your framework of reference. And what we're trying to define is what constitutes a framework of reference. That's one thing. What is a framework of reference? I would say in terms of natural categories, everything within here is of one type of thing, and everything outside of it is of a completely different type of thing.

I tried to define that as the known and the unknown. Or you could say as—and I really think this is—I’ve been trying to chase—see, categories have this central prototype, and there's all sorts of mythological categories. Masculine is one category, and feminine is another. Sky is a category, and Earth is a category. Matter is a category, and water is a category.

These things overlap in some odd way. Like, sky tends to be related to masculine, for example. I've been trying to chase down what's at the core of these mythological categories. And that's why I come up with these terms known, unknown, and then there's the process of mediation, that's the knower, or you could say—and maybe this is even more fundamental—the unknown is unexplored territory; the known is explored territory, and the knower is the explorer.

And that's how we conceive of the world. The world is made of this and this and this. That's it. That's how our brain naturally organizes things. How come? I was a little confused—how come the heavens or the sky is considered masculine? And hence we would think known territory, because compared to the earth, it seems like it's more unknown.

Good question. Good question. Um, I'll have to think about that. Part of the answer—there's two masculine categories, and that's part of the answer. The explored territory tends to be the king, usually the old king, like Osiris, for example. Whereas the known tends to be masculine as well. That's usually the Sun. That's Horus, say, or Muk, and these are usually sky gods. They're assimilated to the sun. The sun is assimilated to—so that's basically the answer to that.

The sky is the domain of the sun. The sun is masculine. Why is the sun masculine? Well, because it's associated with consciousness, illumination, enlightenment. It rules during the times when we are conscious. It's also the thing that fights the dragon of chaos in the night, packs its way out of the belly of the beast, and then is reborn again in the morning. So that's the answer to that question.

I could think of a way that the sky could be explored territory relative to the Earth for people who never thought of going up in the sky. The sky is not something you move through but something that's over you, and to that extent it is explored. It's very predictable. And even if you move a great distance across the Earth, the sky stays relatively the same. Whereas the Earth changes radically. Right?

Yeah, that could be as well. It's also the case, you have to remember, and this is one of the things that makes analysis of mythological symbols tricky. They do shift with context and they're not always culturally stable. For the Sumerians, the sky was male and the Earth was female. But for the Egyptians, the sky was female and the Earth was male. That's more rare but does happen.

What seems to be—well, so you have to look for the prototype that's at the core of this to try to make sense out of the shifting relationships. So the Mother Earth notion is more common, but the Fatherland is also a mythological notion, right? We fight for the Fatherland; we fight for the Motherland. Those two ideas have slightly different slants.

It seems that to call the explored the predictable and the unexplored the unpredictable might be just as fundamental. Yes, yes. Fair, fair enough, fair enough. That's—that’s a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it as well. And that's basically where you see the neuropsychological overlap instantly because we do know now that your emotional systems are prior hardwired to respond to the unpredictable. That's a domain.

Now it looks to me like in terms of neuropsychological function that the left hemisphere, the linguistic hemisphere, is specialized for habitual patterns of action. It looks to me like it's the hemisphere that rules in known territory. You say, well, your brain is actually wired up so that it has one set of responses that are useful when you know what the hell you're doing, and then it has a whole other set of subsystems that are useful when you don't know what you're doing.

And when you do know what you're doing, it's the linguistic left; that's you. And when you don't know what you're doing, it's the limbic-dominated right hemisphere that appears to mediate your actions. Now, why would I say that? Well, it's partly because we know the right frontal cortex responds to punishment and threat.

And punishment and threat are the a priori phenomena that appear with the appearance of the unpredictable. So the right hemisphere is what governs your behavioral responses when you encounter something you don't that you can't predict in terms of its more cognitive functions. Well, it governs anxiety, that's for sure. It may govern pain; that's not so clear. But it looks like it's—a high possibility of it—depression, anyways.

Um, it's also the part of your brain that's good at recognizing patterns and generating stories. And my guess is—you can think about this— if you encounter something you don't understand, the first thing you try to do is to figure out how it's like other things you've already encountered, which is basically to say that when you're first trying to adapt to something that you don't know how to predict, you try to apprehend it in familiar patterns.

Say, well, even people do this with the sky. You know, that's how we get constellations, this mass of undiscovered territory that constitutes the night sky. You chunk it into patterns, and that makes it identifiable. Then you have stories that revolve around the patterns, and you start to move the information from the domain of the unknown into the domain of familiar territory.

And when you think about it, the right hemisphere is the hemisphere that seems to be specialized for stories and for fantasy. And it is fantasy's hypothesis generation, as far as I can tell. Fantasy is the, um, story of, well, maybe it's like this, and your right hemisphere seems to be good for that. So then you have a nice set of functions.

It's the thing that is activated when you encounter something unpredictable. So it stops you, makes you shut up and look. And then the next thing it does is it starts thinking; it's specialized for global pattern recognition, wants to give you a quick and dirty answer. What's out there? Well, the hemisphere thinks, well, it's like this, it's like this, it's like this, and it gives you a picture.

So you get something like Kelly, who we'll encounter a little bit later, who's a monster that inhabits the unknown that's basically composed of determinant things that are frightening. So, like, Kelly, who's the goddess of the unknown, she has a staring face, big teeth, she sits in fire, she has eight legs like a spider. She's a picture of the thing that lives out there in the unknown.

Anyways, okay, back—can you elaborate more on how the left hemisphere works in the—it seems to be more specialized for information that you already know how to handle. And it also—it's also good at handling linguistically mediated information. And by the time you've chopped up the world into units that you can describe with words, you've already done a pretty good job of adapting to it.

You can even abstractly represent it. If you're still—like I think action is a form of categorization. If you really don't know something, all you know about it is that in its presence, you should stop or run. That's a form of categorization; it's a pretty generalized information.

Right by the time you've explored something really thoroughly, you can describe it in words and you can communicate it, and that seems to be part of what the left hemisphere does. But it's also responsible—you think about it this way—the left frontal hemisphere is also responsible for the generation of positive affect.

Now, you only generate positive affect in the presence of cues of consumatory reward, in the presence of incentive rewards. Now, an incentive reward is something that indicates that you're getting closer to your goal. Okay, now established territory is basically full of indications that you're getting closer to your goal. That's why it's explored, right? Because you've already transformed it from something unknown and threatening into something that you can use to get to where you want to go, and the left hemisphere does that.

So it looks to me like—well, it looks to me like those things all sort of fit together. So adaptation basically means—in its most optimal sense—adaptation means that you have transformed something you do not understand into something that you can not only predict but can use. Because you just don't want to transform everything into something irrelevant, right? That would be useless.

You want to transform things you don't understand into things that you can do something with that you want to do. So, so every individual has a different balance through which they approach, like the use—like the balance between the left and right hemisphere or the approach to the known and the unknown?

Well, there's some evidence for variation in temperament, you know. Some people are more inhibited and some people are less inhibited. Now, the problem with that is that I believe that, I mean, it does look like there's pretty solid evidence for these temperamental variations. So you might say that you have a lower threshold, for example, for experiencing anxiety in the presence of something unknown than the next person does. And that's constant across situations.

The problem with that is that it doesn't take into account the fact that what's unexpected is always construed in relationship to history. My guess is that if people looked into this, they'd find that inhibited people have different stories about the way the world is constructed. And part of their biological predisposition towards timidity manifests itself in the structure of the stories they tell themselves about the world.

It makes sense because if you're more frightened by people, the stories you tell about them are going to be twisted more towards the domain of threat. So do those balances also vary situationally? Like you said if someone is refusing to accept information that does have relevance for their story and they're ignoring it until it gets to a certain point where it sort of forces their—

Yeah, I think the whole last half of the course is about that. Like because one of the things that you can do to yourself to make yourself more pathological is just not adapt to anomalous information, and that makes you functionally pathological, I think.

So would that actually make the right hemisphere less reactive or would it make it a compensating function or is it—? I think it—I think what happens under those circumstances is the right hemisphere starts to make a lot of noise. So your dreams start to—one of the students I had in this class last year has just written a paper for me on the potential function of dreams.

He points out that in neural net modeling of pattern recognition, there's a phenomenon called catastrophic failure, where if you have a neural net, and it’s a bird category and fish category, and you throw it a penguin, well, what happens is that the bird category and the fish category collapse, and all you get is the animal category. So there's kinds of anomalous information that will blow whole categorization systems.

So what he posited was that there's one system that does categorization and another that slowly feeds it anomalous information, so it doesn't collapse. So it has time to adjust its structure to the new anomalous information without blowing its whole categorization scheme. Now, you have—have to have a categorization scheme because if you don't, you don't know how to act.

And if it's really global, like if I tell you—you say, well, how do I write an essay—and I say you act like a human being, so this information is so vague as to be completely useless for the task at hand. You want a categorization—you want information that's of sufficiently high resolution so that it'll aid you in your task. If I blow all your categorization sets and you're just left with this really amorphous categorization, you don't know how to act.

So you want to maintain your categories. What he suggested was that dreams slowly move anomalous information up into the categorization schemes. So in terms of your question, well, if you constantly ignore anomalous information pouring in from the right hemisphere, basically what you've done is categorize more and more information into the category of things that are so terrible they can't be faced.

And I think what you do under those circumstances is you activate a monster, so to speak, that lives in your right hemisphere, and it gets more and more and more powerful until one day, when at a weak moment, say, it just swallows you whole. And that's when you fall catastrophically into depression or into terrible anxiety or maybe even, depending on your physiological predisposition, into something resembling schizophrenia.

So you keep—because all that information that you've encountered that's anomalous, it's categorized. You categorize it by avoiding it, and the category is so terrible I can't face it. So you think that if you integrate it, you don't end up with nightmares?

Yes, that's right. That's right. Although if you haven't been integrating, and then you start, the nightmares might increase in intensity.

Yeah, because it's also the case that when you are dreaming, you know, your spinal cord, your reticular activating system part is activating the hippocampus and the amygdala, and that's the part of the brain that deals with anomalous information. It reverts to brainstem control.

So it looks to me like this is a good—that this is a reasonable hypothesis. You have a system that deals with what you know, and another one that deals with what you don't know. You need both. If you ignore one, well, there's a whole social psychological literature that says if you ignore anomalous information, you're happier. You know, which is—the—that's a really appalling literature because they don't take temporal duration into consideration.

It's real good in the short term. What lit—oh, there's a whole—yeah, that's right, that's right. The positive literature, Taylor? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's being trashed with empirical data showing that, yeah, in the short term, it's a good solution, but the long term, you know, you get hostile and anxious and depressed, and people don't like you very much, which is, you know, hardly all that surprising.

But they actually wrote self-help books, you know, the self-help books telling people that positive self-illusions were good for mental health. Man, despite like 5,000 years of philosophical evidence to the contrary.

Both of these hemispheres, hemisphere, working at the same time when you come across experience—what would happen to a split brain patient? Has there been any—?

Well, we do know, for example, that—I don't know the literature on emotional responsivity of split-brain patients, but I do know that if you sustain right frontal cortical damage, it makes you inappropriately non-depressed and anxious. And what that—what happens under those circumstances is that you acquire functional psychopathy, which basically means that psychopaths don't regulate their behavior as a consequence of information that indicates that their behavioral output is doing something that, in the long run, is a bad idea.

Well, there's a famous paper by Eslinger and Damasio about a guy who, uh, can't remember his initials. He had an IQ of 143, right-frontal damage, no measurable decrements in IQ, so he's still 143. He's three standard deviations above the mean; we're talking a very bright person here. But he makes a series of catastrophic decisions that look—that are of the sort that you'd associate with stupid criminality. He gets divorced, he marries a, uh, well, someone who's very bad for him—basically gets involved in a whole series of terrible business decisions, etc., etc.

So if you're missing the information from your right frontal cortex, you're happy. No kidding. It's because you've knocked out the whole system that deals with all those things that make you unhappy. But you have to be unhappy to live properly when you encounter those things that don't go out according to plan. Because if you don't attend to those things that don't occur according to plan, then you don't learn, and if you don't learn, you keep your model of adaptation stable in the face of shifting environmental contingencies.

And what that basically means is that over time, the thing that's you gets old and stale. And that's how it's represented in mythology, by the way. That's the—that's the image of the wasteland. You know, that's the land where all the trees have dried up and everything's old, and nothing grows. And you can read that as the absence of the positive aspect of the great mother, which means that there's no beneficial novelty around.

Or you can read that as the tyranny of stupid ideology. So either way, you’re suggesting that. Are you suggesting that in the absence of connection, the left brain will dominate?

Probably. Well, one of the things—yes, I think that's true. Like this is speculative, but there's some physiological evidence like the left brain—the left hemisphere is dominant in most circumstances in schizophrenia. For example, if you're schizophrenic and you start hearing voices, it appears as though there's a possibility that the reason for that is because the areas that are isomorphic with the language centers but are in the right hemisphere have been released from tonic inhibition by the language centers in the left hemisphere and are starting to become active.

And the way you interpret that is, "I hear voices; they aren't me." So which suggests to me that who you are, as far as you're concerned, is mostly the sum total of linguistically mediated processes that localize usually to the left hemisphere. But mostly they're linguistically mediated. Which is only to say that mostly what you are, as far as your own self-regard, is a culturally constructed entity, most of which has been constructed using the mediation of language.

So do you think consciousness resides in the left?

No, no, no. Because first of all, there isn't consciousness; there's a bunch of processes that are consciousness now. Like, one consciousness that's clearly conscious is what happens to you when something anomalous occurs because you'll orient towards that. And I think orienting is most central to what we define as consciousness because, like, even in this room—look, there's only a few things that you're really conscious of.

You're very much not conscious, as a general rule, of the floor, the ceiling, the walls, most things around you. The only thing you're conscious of is that part of your experiential field where there's some novelty emerging, right? That's because your orienting systems are activated. And this is very interesting because, in mythology, one of the things that brings about the world is the capacity to discriminate between things, the capacity to attend to novelty.

Um, well, I want to get into that in the course of today's discussion, actually. Look, when you're orienting towards things, you're attending to the world that's defined by chaos and transforming it with the intermediation of exploration into defined territory. From the mythological perspective, that's equivalent to the construction of the world.

Now that's why, in Christian theology, for example, there's the doctrine of the Logos. The Logos is being assimilated to consciousness. It's a solar-like entity mediated by language; that's why it's the Word. It's also assimilated to Christ, and this is not a notion that's unique to Christianity, as we'll see. That's the thing that creates the world.

It creates the world by dividing. Look, here's an example. In the earliest Sumerian myth, there's a dragon who lives in the primordial waters, and he gives to two wedded deities, one's the sky and the other is the earth. They're separate but not really. And the way the myth represents that is that they're locked in something technically called a hieros gamos, which is a mystical marriage. So they're in sexual union; they're united.

They're not really two things. Their union gives rise to a third force; that's their sun, the god of the atmosphere, as it turns out. The Sumerian—it’s the god of the atmosphere who separates, pushing the sky up to the sky and the Earth down to the Earth and thereby creates the world. What the hell does that mean? Well, it means that in any creation myth, there's four elements: chaos. And what's chaos?

That's the union of everything that will at one point be distinct, and it's sometimes represented in mythology by the union between the mother and the infant, because that's sort of symbiotic, right? One's absolutely dependent on the other, but yet in a sense they're two distinct entities or they will be two distinct entities. But anyway, chaos—that's the dragon that lives at the bottom of the water.

It gives rise to two deities, the earth and the sky. They're locked in sexual union; they give rise to a son, the god of the atmosphere—it's the sun god—he separates them; that's the world. Now you could say that the world is born as a consequence of the interaction of the sky god and the earth god, or you could say that the world is born as a consequence of the fact that the sun god separates the two. Both stories are accurate.

All this story is saying, you have to look at the mythological representations of the story and say, well, the earth—this is chaos. The earth—that's maternal, that's the mother, that's novelty; it's the source of all things, territory. The sun god separates these two things by discriminating between them, which is basically by taking the thing that's novel and transforming it into the thing that's explored.

That means the origin of the cosmos, from the mythological perspective. So there's three seminal elements in your standard creation myth: the mother, the father, and the son. The mother is the unknown, unexplored territory. The father is the known explored territory, and the—the son is the process that mediates between them.

And I've assimilated that to the orienting reflex because it's the thing that focuses in on novelty, initiates the process of exploration, which is the process by which the determinant world is formed. Think, well, what is the determinant world under those circumstances? Well, it's all those places that you can go where you know how to behave, and those places consist of the territory, but also the behaviors of everyone else that you interact with.

So known territories are social territories because all of our actions in the habitual domain are defined by the actions of others. So part of what it is that we know when we say we know is how to map the actions and interactions of others. So that's why the known is also assimilated to culture and to the patriarchy and to the king. Because, of course, the king is the behavioral model that defines the state, who everyone in the state imitates so that everyone in the state can predict everyone else.

That's part of it. Anyways, so for me, you're exploring territory because I can define what you're going to do in this situation. And the reason I can define is because we share the same story, which is that we're pursuing goals that are at least concordant. They don't conflict. If they conflicted, we'd have trouble because you'd be mapping things with one motivational significance, and I'd be mapping them with the other, which basically means we'd either have to negotiate, which means you to arrange your story and I to arrange mine, or we fight. That's it; those are the two options.

Or I can pretend that the conflict doesn't exist, in which case sooner or later it will get me. Okay. Now I want to because this is a course about social identity and social conflict, I want to tell—read you some or get you—in one sec, I want to read you some things from Mercia Eliade because it'll help you understand how it is that we naturally categorize things.

So you want to remember chaos, because that's the thing that we're going to discuss now. Chaos is what exists before there's a separation of subject and object, and the thing that chaos is is then both spirit and matter—terrible mythological way of speaking. But I'll give you an example of what that means. Eliade said that the subject constructs himself as well as the object in the course of exploration, which basically means that what you are formed out of is all those things that you discovered as you were approaching all those things you didn't know.

Now you form the world as a consequence of the process of exploration, but you also form yourself because it's in the process of encounter with novelty that you generate information, and it's information that you build yourself out of. So from the mythological world, the thing that's chaos that existed before the world existed is composed of spirit, which is what you will be, and matter simultaneously, which is very— that's a very interesting concept.

Said, okay, question? Uh, I don't want to go off in a different—no, the symmetry between the present goal process and then the state—one chaos state and then the known. Now, the known versus the unknown.

Yeah, so that the knower is in the place of the process. The knower is the process; the self becomes the mechanism which embodies the process. Yes, or something.

Yes, that's right. That's right. That's what religious stories basically push you towards. That's why I wanted to show you this story of Marduk. Marduk is the person who encounters the unknown, the god who attains the highest position in the hierarchy of gods who then goes out to fight Tiamat, who's the dragon of both—she's both the dragon of chaos and the mother of all things. Those two categories get overlapped substantially.

And in the fight with Tiamat, Marduk generates the cosmos. Now the Mesopotamian king imitates Marduk. That's what gives him power; that's what gives his position validity, is the fact that he's the embodiment of the sun god. What does that mean? Well, the sun god is the thing that makes the world. But what does that mean? Well, the sun god is an image of the process of consciousness, which turns the unknown—which is undefined territory—into explored territory, which is the world.

And as long as the king—so then the archaic people say the state—if the king doesn't do his job, the state becomes sterile. Crops don't grow, for example. Anything—what the hell kind of attitude is that? If the king doesn't do his job, then crops won't grow? Well, what it means is the king is a pattern of adaptation.

If he doesn't constantly update his behavioral attributes in the face of shifting environmental contingencies, the beneficial aspect of the environment will disappear. So when the archaic people say if the king doesn't do his job, then the state becomes sterile, crops won't grow—they're dead right!

What do they do? Kill the king, sacrifice the king? Or he has to undergo a ritual that indicates a sacrifice, which actually the king of Mesopotamia did every New Year's when he renewed the cosmos. He had to do that because if he didn't renew the cosmos, which basically meant update his pattern of behavioral adaptation and representation, then the environment would drift farther and farther away from the state, and everything would collapse precipitously.

So the king had to voluntarily encounter novelty, or in the long term, he would catastrophically encounter it, along with all his people. Anyway, okay, last, you relate that somehow to why money has value or the use of coins?

Oh yeah, that's a funny one. All right, well a gold coin has the head of a state on it. Why? Well, the gold is a symbol of the sun, and the sun is the sun god. And the emperor is put on the coin to indicate value because this is the thing that is most valuable. And it's symbolic representations of that that we've used to signify promise, basically.

So yeah, gold has always been assimilated to the sun, at least in the west. So, okay, now I want to read you some things from Eliade. I think these things are, well, from the perspective of social psychology and the notion of understanding conflict and the hopes for its resolution, these sorts of things I think are revolutionary if you understand their significance.

Because Eliade basically describes how it is that people naturally perceive those who are not like them. Now I would say, well, if I'm like you—if I'm like you, I share your story. Okay, this is a castle we're both inside; I can construe your relationship to me with regards to our end goal. That's—I also—and we'll get to this later—this is also a dominance hierarchy, like this, okay?

The king's at the top of it, and every organization is set up that way. It's like if you and I are both—in fact, if you and I and a hundred other people are pursuing the same goal, we organize ourselves into a dominance hierarchy. We each have a position that basically constitutes a sub-goal of that greater goal, and the utility of the goals are rank-ordered in terms of their importance, and the person who's at the top is simultaneously the most important person in the dominance hierarchy and an embodiment of the goal—chief executive officer in the corporation, for example.

How you could also relate that—thinking about that this week to the more complex story—remember that looks like this and so on. Now the thing that's neat about this is this is also—does everybody remember how this works? Is that the story actually consists of sub-stories basically all the way down.

Now the higher you are up on the dominance hierarchy, the closer you are to the broadest expanse of this story. So if you're just a functionary in an organization, you have one of these stories, and anything that comes along to disrupt you, like if you get fired, is only going to bother people who are working on that particular sub-goal.

Now if you're the king or the chief executive officer, you occupy this territory, so like in the case of a hostile takeover of a corporation, that means the whole structure is potentially disrupted, and everyone inside that structure feels anxiety and depression because their stories are being disrupted.

Okay, now you can also see how groups form in relationship to this because you're most tightly identified with those who share the most—uh, the most, the broadest subset of your embedded stories. So does that make sense? Would you say that the response to cination—right? Perfect. Exactly more accurately, the knower.

When the North Korean emperor died, people said the sun had set. The sun had set permanently. People were out on the street wailing and crying, you know, carrying around pictures of the sun god who disappeared because the whole state was placed into chaos, right? The same thing happens when Stalin died, for example, when any tyrant dies because the tyrant is well, embodies—they embody the story of the state.

Kill the tyrant; everything collapses. People come out in the streets and cry. Yeah, yeah. Eliade points out that people like Queen Elizabeth still draw a crowd because lots of people still think in a medieval fashion, so to speak. But more accurately, Queen Elizabeth embodies our stories—she's the focal point, you could say, or she's the person who incarnates the abstracted stories.

Now, so you could say that over top of her objective reality is laid a—I don’t know how you describe it—a glamorous facade that people see because of their subjective interpretations, and she acts out that role. That's right; that's projection. You say that's a good example of projection. They think that what they're so excited about is the queen; it's her attributes.

Well, you can say in a sense that's true; it's what she signifies for behavior. But that's not exactly a property of the object, now, is it? Now if you can understand that, you get very close to understanding what it is that archaic people were referring to when they were referring to a god. Because Queen Elizabeth, in a sense, is an incarnated god. And the more potent gods occupy broader domains of the story.

And what the Mesopotamians said—and this is the core for religious stories in general—is that the thing that should be at the top of the hierarchy is Marduk, right? Marduk was elected by all the other gods to be the king god. He's the process by which anomaly is transformed into explored territory. And what that basically means is that if, in your hierarchy of value, what's placed above all else is the necessity of responding to anomaly every time it manifests itself, then all your other biological systems that determine value will operate properly.

And if you put something else in the place of that god, so to speak, then sooner or later everything will fall into chaos. That's what those mythological stories are trying to tell people. That's your attitude towards anomaly that determines everything. And you have two choices: either face it voluntarily or not. And if you don't, well, that's why we're reading Milton's Paradise Lost.

Because Milton's Paradise Lost is a story about the consequences of the voluntary failure to admit to the existence of anomaly. Okay, now, so you see, you read the story of Marduk—the Sumerian myth—it's very, very interesting. Say all those gods, they organize themselves into a dominance hierarchy, so they're threatened by Tiamat.

She's the dragon of chaos. She constitutes unexplored territory. She's going to destroy all the gods. Creator gods always do that. And that's because the unknown generates everything and takes everything back. So it has this ambivalent motivational status. It's the source of everything and the place that everything returns to. It's a constant threat; it never goes away. There's always something you don't expect to deal with.

The gods organized themselves into a hierarchy, and they put Marduk at the top. Then he's the king. Okay, it seems to me that what that story is telling you with regards to the construction of the dominance hierarchy is two things. First of all, the Mesopotamian society was the consequence of the intermingling of a whole set of cultural groups, each of whom had their own god, which is basically their own representation of the highest ideal projected, more likely, into the external world.

Now, there was a lot of differences between these representations, but in the process of becoming one culture, all these gods had to fight it out, so to speak, for dominance in the territory defined by interpersonal communication.

And the myth of Marduk climbing the dominance hierarchy is the story, the cumulative story of the combat between these gods and the rise of one god to preeminent status. Now you can see at the end here, um, yeah, on page 96—I don't know how many of you have your book, but Marduk still has a whole bunch of sort of other names that were likely the names of gods who sooner or later became assimilated to Marduk.

He sort of took over their domain, and the Mesopotamians said that Marduk had—I don't remember how many names—50. And here are some of them. And so what the Mesopotamians basically concluded unconsciously, so to speak, was that whatever Marduk represented was also vital to what all these other names represented.

And here are some of the names: he's Namaku, who's the god who restores to life, okay? That is describing his role in the process that we have talked about this.

Okay, chaos equals death. Now when these Mesopotamians say Marduk is the god who restores to life, this is what they mean. He's this process. This being read as death, stale state, death, rejuvenation—the process—that's Marduk. That's name number one. Who can restore all ruined gods as though they were his own creation?

The god, lord, who by holy incantation restores the dead gods to life. Same thing. This is the dead god. And you could say, why is that? All your behavioral patterns of adaptation are the consequence, in the final analysis, of your mimicry of all those people who came before you and established modes, exploration-driven modes of adaptation.

Which is to say that what you consist of in terms of your behaviors is the cumulative behaviors of your whole culture in so far as those are being adaptively relevant. And most of those were established by people who are now dead. Ancestral figures in many religions—the ancestral figures are assimilated to gods, and that's because they determine your behavior. But anyways, the known is the domain of the dead gods; that's basically—there's an interesting little side piece of knowledge I know about that: if you're completely identified with your culture, your ideology say, means you're the product of people who lived before you, not your own original thought because you've ident—you've adapted a dogma which defines you.

It's not you; it's the construction of people who were dead ideologically. The catchword of an ideology is a slogan; slogan is derived from the Welsh sluag. Sluag means "battle cry of the dead," which is a nice commentary on ideology.

Okay, um, yes. So it seems, okay, so the right hemisphere seems to be what the process is doing, what the king is doing; they're the ones that are going out to the unknown, and the other ones that are using what they find from the unknown for adaptive behavior?

Okay, hang on. What? No, that's not exactly right. Okay, look: chaos, that's the dragon. So to speak, that's the possibility— that's the unknown before it's being contacted. It's the unknown, hypothetically. It's the fact that behind everything that you know there’s this reality that you can't say anything about. Something that you actually encounter that's unexpected—that's the manifestation of the unknown in your experience; that's an anomaly.

Okay, the right hemisphere is responsible for pointing out the fact of anomalies. Just to say that if you're pursuing your goal-directed linguistically mediated plans and something you didn't expect occurs, then your septal, hippocampal, and limbic systems grab your motor behavior and your attention and force it towards the anomaly.

Then you have—then you make a decision process or ignore it. And the thing that makes the decision, I think, is the left hemisphere. It's the thing that decides whether it will voluntarily make the descent or will reject it. So then what is it that uses—because I think we experience chaos from the affective perspective when we're completely dominated by the processes of the right hemisphere.

Which is to say the affective aspects of chaos are basically anxiety, depression, and well, I think the third category is sort of schizophrenic-like symptomatology. This is right hemi-mediated. We do not like that when your brain has flipped dominance from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere. You feel like dying. In fact, you might commit suicide.

But the—it’s—that's—I mean, that's part of the reason why people are very motivated not to pay attention to anomalies. It's in its first manifestation; it's anxiety-provoking and painful. But you have to balance that against knowledge that if you don't pay attention to it, all that will happen is that it will grow until instead of you facing it, it will attack you likely when you're weak.

Okay, so you have this anomalous piece of information. The right hemisphere focuses on it; the left hemisphere says go after it or not or ignore it. And then—does it then call again to the right hemisphere to use patterns to identify it, etc.?

Well, okay, that's—that's a good question because the thing about an anomalous experience is it doesn't present itself purely in its objective manifestation. Let me give you an example. So you're sitting in your apartment at night. It's quiet, and you hear a— a noise that shouldn't be in another room, okay? So you're reading. That disrupts your reading, but say you hear something fall over—something big.

That disrupts your reading. It's like your goal-directed activity has been eliminated. It's like you're alert. You wake—you might even wake up if you're asleep, but you're alert. So you walk cautiously. Well, you might run out of the house; that’s one way of dealing with it. Or you might phone the police.

But let's say you decide to explore while you're conflicted because you're driven towards it, but you're also anxious. So you walk towards the room. Let's say the door is slightly ajar like this, and it's dark in there. And you reach your hand in to turn on the light, you watch what your mind does when you do that.

See if you watch the pictures that it generates because it's trying to figure out what the hell’s in there. You'll get all sorts of fantasies about the potential thing that might be in the next room.

Now if you actually watch yourself do this, you generate—well, some of the visions will be more or less realistic—like, cat, go in, maybe it's—but you also get images that are monstrous, like that's—what’s— well that's both a hypothesis that your brain is generating about what might have done it, a warning that something terrible might be in that room because you don't like—you really do not want to put your hand in there.

And the anomaly all at once because it emerges—the anomaly emerges in a sense in already categorized form. That's the thing—you never really encounter chaos per se. As soon as something unexpected happens, it's already presenting itself in the form of a potential hypothesis.

So I think your right hemisphere is doing the pattern recognition instantly. So then it seems like the left hemisphere is the decision maker, basically.

It just uses the right hemisphere for, "Okay, what is what is anomalous? What—give me the patterns, and then let's see how to use this for adaptive behavior to get to the—I think that—that's how it works. I think the—the information, if there's a continuum between entirely explored and not explored at all, as information moves from the category of not explored at all to entirely explored, it moves across the hemisphere, so to speak.

So the local of specialization shifts, and there's evidence for this. I mean, the right hemisphere does seem to be the place where activity takes place most particularly when you don't know what the hell you're doing. Also, the other thing that happens is, like, if you're practicing a new activity, when you first start practicing, huge areas of the cortex light up, and as you get good at it, the area that's involved gets smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until there's just a tiny center somewhere that's really specialized for that activity, and then it's not conscious anymore.

You do it automatically, like typing or something.

Well, I don't know that... I don't know enough about the literature on specialization to tell you, like—I don't know where motor patterns end up localizing, for example. I don't think anybody knows. We know that the prefrontal cortex is involved in construction and monitoring of motor plans when they're first being formulated, but once they're perfected, where they go seems still somewhat mysterious.

Um, what's that? Yeah, it seems involved in in, like, regulating the smoothness of their application, but in the basal ganglia are involved in motor output too. But where those patterns are localized, I don't think anybody knows yet. It seems a bit rash to generalize the two hemispheres as these sort of absolute patterns of activity. Yes, it is rash, and the thing is that broadly speaking, and I don't think it's so much a matter of hemispheric specialization, maybe as whether the information is linguistically mediated or still in image form.

Or whether it's an image form or still at the level of behavior. So I know it's—you risk simplification to think of it in terms of hemispheric specialization, but there's still enough useful information to be deduced that way to make it worthwhile.

So if you were to look at language, then could you say that the organization of thoughts and all that is left hemisphere, but style and the actual thoughts come from the right hemisphere? It doesn't seem right to say—well, broadly speaking again, I would say that there's some evidence for that. Things like style—that is pattern recognition capacity—I mean, that's all like the font on a given typeface, for example, has nothing to do with the information per se; it's sort of an emergent property.

Or styles in architecture, literature, and so on, they’re patterns that are difficult to—and I think they are related to story and image. So I know you, you know, the right hemisphere is specialized for the comprehension of stories. It is specialized for the comprehension of patterns; it's the hemisphere that's responsible for your understanding of music and most non-verbal cues.

It's broadly specialized for negative affect, so—and it's also architectonically constructed so that it has a left—less differentiated structure than the left hemisphere, which seems to indicate that it's better for quick and dirty analysis.

And I think what it does is use metaphor. It says this unknown thing has the same attributes as all these other unexpected things that you've already encountered, so watch out! So which is useful information if you don’t know anything else about the unknown. It's good to know that it's like all those other things that you already encountered that you didn't understand.

I think what's happened with—in religious systems in large part is that people have constructed images of the unknown, like Kelly, and then use those as ritual models against which to practice patterns of adaptation that are specialized not for anything particular but for adaptation to the unknown in general, because that's really what you have to know. Not how to do something, but how to do something when you don't know how to do anything.

That's really what you need to know. So you get things like the great goddess who's responsible for death. The only thing to her that's acceptable is a human sacrifice. What does that mean? Well, they're ritually acting out this—that to get from here to here to make an adjustment to the fact of chaos requires constant sacrifice. What—a sacrifice of the king, for example.

But the king is a pattern of adaptive behavior before you can understand that in the image or semantically you acted out, and that's where those rituals come from. So that plague of the god is endless sacrifice. Well, that's right. What is it? Well, it's endless sacrifice of that thing that you value most, which is, in fact, in the abstracted form, your current set of beliefs and your configuration, your view of the world. The thing you want to give up the least because it's the thing that protects you from emotional chaos. That's what you have to sacrifice all the time in order to adapt to the fact of the unknown.

Okay, back to social psychology. I want to read you these things from Eliade. This is very interesting. For religious man, space is not homogeneous. He experiences interruptions and breaks in it. Some parts of space are qualitatively different from others. "Draw not nigh hither," says the Lord to Moses. "Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground" Exodus 3:5.

There is then a sacred space and hence a strong significant space. There are other spaces that are not sacred and so are without consistency or structure. They're amorphous, have no definition, nor is this—all. For religious men, this spatial non-homogeneity finds expression in the experience of an opposition between space that is sacred—the only real and really existing space—and all other space, the formless expanse that surrounds it.

Okay, it must be said at once that the religious experience of the non-homogeneous space is a primordial experience. He means by that an archetypal experience. It doesn't have to be learned. It's a structural element of experience homologous—homologous to the founding of the world. It is not a matter of theoretical speculation, but of a primary religious experience that precedes all reflection on the world.

For it is the break effected in space that allows the world to be constituted, because it reveals a fixed point, the central axis for all future orientation. When the sacred manifests itself, there is not only a break in the homogeneous space; there's also revelation of an absolute reality to the non-reality of the vast surrounding expanse. The manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world.

Okay, now what Eliade is trying to say there is that your cognitive systems are founded upon certain presuppositions. And what Eliade is trying to do—and this is what Jung was trying to do too with his identification of the archetypes—is to point out what are the most fundamental levels of presuppositions upon which all the things that you think, in fact, are based.

As Kurt Gödel pointed out that any internally—any internal and consistent logical system is necessarily predicated on presumptions that can't be proved from within the system. They have to be accepted; they're axioms. Like the axioms of geometry: this is an axiom. There's defined territory and undefined territory. This is what you protect; this is where you live.

It's the establishment of this that is the precondition for everything else you do. So establishing that initial sacred space—that's a religious act, the primary religious act. So what is clear? So, it is clear to what a degree the discovery—that is, the revelation of sacred space possesses existential value for religious man. For nothing can begin; nothing can be done without a previous orientation, and any orientation implies acquiring a fixed point.

It is for this reason that religious man has always sought to fix his abode at the center of the world—that's where the medieval notion that man existed, or that the Earth was the center of the cosmos—that's where that idea came from. It wasn't an empirical notion. It was the notion that wherever we live, that's the center.

That's defined space, surrounded necessarily by an expansive territory that we haven't explored. Now we already know too what to make of that in terms of implications because we know what unexplored territory signifies. First, it signifies fear, then it signifies promise. So defined territory is security established in an expanse of anxiety and curiosity. But— but a priori anxiety.

So your village is surrounded by the places you don't go because it's frightening out there. Why is it frightening? No behavioral structures have been erected to make that space habitable, so it's the domain of monsters; it's the domain of wolves; it's the domain of foreigners; it's the domain of barbarians; it's the place that you can't explore.

It's like the old maps—the old medieval maps of the world define territory—amorphous edges surrounded by ocean with monsters. That's what that means. There are monsters out there in unknown territory. That's—it's interesting too because the monsters always take the form of whales. But whales aren't whales for medieval people because they didn't know what whales were; they're serpents, sea serpents that live in the sea.

And if you go out there, out beyond explored territory, the sea serpent comes out of the sea and swallows you. That's the hero's mission, right, down into the belly of the beast. You might come back and you might not, but what that is is the projection of mythology onto the world.

So for the Europeans, the age of exploration was an extraordinarily radical event. Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. Yes, yeah. Well, here I'm going to tell you exactly how radical it was. This is something Eliade is at pains to describe: one of the outstanding characteristics of traditional societies is the opposition that they assume between their inhabited territory and the indeterminate space that surrounds it.

The former is the world—more precisely, our world, the cosmos. So when Marduk constructs the cosmos, that's what that means. It means he's constructing habitable territory, the definable world, out of the amorphous reality that surrounds it. Everything outside the cosmos is no longer cosmos, but a sort of other world, a foreign chaotic place peopled by ghosts, demons, foreigners who are assimilated to demons and to the souls of the dead.

Now this is some other research that I did, so this is a like an insert more specifically to the dragon of chaos. Okay, so this is the point here: your natural category of foreigner is the dragon of chaos. They're in the same category not because you've assimilated them together, but because you have not yet distinguished them. They're still the same thing.

So your natural response to the foreigner is he's the thing that isn't human that occupies the space defined by chaos, whose a priori motivational significance is the generation of terror and disorder. So you say you don't need an explanation, then, about why people are hostile to foreigners. What you need is an explanation for those few instances where that does not in fact occur.

Among the Hyksos, barbarians were assimilated to Apis, who devours the sun. No, sorry, yeah, that's right. The Hyksos were barbarians from the Egyptian point of view; they kept coming into Egypt and disrupting everything. They were assimilated—Hyksos, mean barbarian; and they were assimilated to Apis, who devours the sun.

Okay, so that's the Egyptians. Among the Indo-Europeans, the ancestors of the modern Indians, the assimilation of enemies in battle to the slang of Vritra. In fact, enemies were called Vritra, and Vritra was the gigantic dragon who held back the waters in the hollow of the mountain. Indra slayed him and constructed the world. So for the Indo-Europeans, the slaying of enemies was precisely equivalent to the act that constructed the world.

And that is because when you slay your enemies, you expand your territory, and the expansion of territory is equivalent to the construction of the world. It's a heroic enterprise; you're battling the enemies of the state. Among the Zoroastrians in Iran, he who triumphs in battle truly kills—um, sorry, the fight of the hero Prana against the dragon Ahriman is recounted as the struggle of King Fadan against the foreign usurper, the dragon Ahriman.

Again, it's the same story; foreigners are the dragon of chaos. They bring disorder into the state. So to overthrow the foreigner, to establish new territories, is to do the same thing that the deity did when he established the world. Now, okay, at first this cleavage—at first sight, this cleavage in space appears to be due