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The Michael Shermer Show, 308. The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason About Human Nature (5)

308. The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason About Human Nature (5)

2 (45m 45s):

I don't know. I, and I don't care. I, I what I care to know is what I think exists. I, I, I don't know. I mean, if you're a, you know, a social psychologist, of course you're going to define the self and, and, and build theories about what you think the self is. So yes, that can be answered, but this is not what I can tell you about.

1 (46m 7s):

Hmm. I wonder if you, you might agree with somebody like Jordan Peterson's theory of truth as being pragmatic. It's what worked truth is what works for a person. So if you say, well I think the self is an illusion that works for me, or I believe in free will, even if I know the universe is determined, that story you tell yourself, I'm free and I make free moral choices and I I hold myself accountable and I'm gonna do the same with you. And I think that's how civilization should be structured, that we hold people morally accountable. And and you would say, well that's one way to think about it. Yeah, but it, but it's a kind of truth, right? Cuz it works. I don't know how far you'd, you'd like to go

2 (46m 46s):

With it. I dunno that I would feel comfortable in saying this is the truth. But I certainly think to say, you know, what we want to identify is, is pragmatic principles that guide our society and that we hold each other responsible for them. Whether these are the truth or not, I'm not prepared to answer.

1 (47m 6s):

Hmm. And also reading your book, I was thinking about Richard Dawkins idea of the middle land that we evolved on the plains of Africa, in which everything was kind of a midline size, say between ants and and mountains. So perception, conceptions of atoms and molecules or galaxies and expanding universes and multiverses. I mean there it's so counterintuitive or speed, you know, it's kind of midline speed perception or perceptual apparatus is designed to pick up things that move some somewhere between the speed of say a tortoise and maybe a cheetah, something like that. Or maybe a lightning bolt at the most. But we don't even really understand the speed of a lightning bolt. So when you talk about like einsteinian relativity or expanding, you know, universe, 13.7 billion years old, I mean none of this doesn't even make sense intuitively.

1 (47m 55s):

Science has to work hard to get people to grasp what you're talking about. The speed of light. I can't even conceive of what that must be cuz I'm used to these kind of middling things. So I wonder if, and cuz part of the point, I think some scientists that that's actually good enough for survival. That's all you really need, right? Is kind of a folk physics about how the world works. Things drop, things fall, things run away, whatever, you know, this the billion balls hitting each other. You know, maybe technically in physics you could run the film backwards and you can't tell, you know, which time, time is direct, which motion time is moving. But really in, in the real world, it's good enough, it works

2 (48m 33s):

Well, it is only adaptive. But I think we want to go the last two years have show us why we want to go beyond that, right? Why we want to go beyond essentialism and understand real genetics and understand the, you know, covid and how it works. So we certainly, we want it good enough depending on what's your good enough right? Definition is,

1 (48m 56s):

Well then I was gonna take that to the next step and say, well whether it's itself as an illusion or free will is an illusion. It works pretty well for me to assume that I am me and you are you and we're two different essences and that you're making free choices and I am too. And it feels like I am. And you probably feel like you're making free choices. So whatever the world is really like, that's good enough, that works pretty well for, you know, social primate species to interact with each other and anticipate each other's behaviors, theory of mind, all that. Trying to figure out what other people are thinking and then respond accordingly. Even if technically these are incorrect doesn't really matter. You know, it works in a, in a pragmatic way.

2 (49m 39s):

I think the pragmatic choices we can study certain things and other things we can't and let's focus on the things that we can understand and can study.

1 (49m 50s):

Right? One of my favorite examples of essentialism comes from Bruce Hood's research where he asked people to, what one of 'em was, would you wear Hitler's sweater? I think it was, or jacket or something like that, or Mr. Or Jeffrey Dahmer's sweater, the serial killer, even though he'd had a dry clean or whatever and people didn't wanna put it on why the, the essence of evilness is in the sweater. Something like that. And it could ooze into my, through my skin and into me.

2 (50m 20s):

Yeah. And, and that, I dunno if it's, I, I forget, I dunno that it's whoever did study the, the fact that we think about this essence and something that is contagious and usually our notion of contagious is about matter. It's only matter that is contagious shows that we think about essence in embodied terms as part of the body,

1 (50m 42s):

Right? So the, the little volleyball on the Tom Hanks movie Castaway, you know, it's, it's, it's a Wilson volleyball, so he calls it Wilson and pretty soon Wilson is a thing. It's an essence a being a person that he cares about. And you know, I thought I I like that example. Cause I think it's true. I think that we do do that we embody objects with essentialism or whatever you want to call it. It's like another agent, maybe it's agency.

2 (51m 11s):

But, but furthermore we think that the essence is something that lies within the body because contagious contagion is usually something that we associate with bodily fluids, for instance. The fact that the sweater for that person can exert the same contagions mean that we think about con contagious process as part of the body. And so the essence is part of the body and therefore it can create disgust like any other bodily fluids.

1 (51m 42s):

Do you think this could just speculating, do you think this could be behind vaccine hesitancy or even the anti-vaxxers? Cause you know, the idea of injecting yourself with a contagion doesn't feel intuitively good.

2 (51m 58s):

Yeah, no, I I think it's more serious than that. I mean, it might, might, might contribute to that, but i i it is probably more serious than, than

1 (52m 8s):

You mean more political or what do you mean? Yeah. Hmm. Yeah, I think so. But I was thinking about that just maybe it's multi causal, anti vac, the vaccine hesitancy. But like if I said, you know, just the motion of disgust triggered by bodily af livia, like vomit or feces or whatever, I said, well, we have this cure for this particular disease, we're gonna inject your body with a tiny, tiny, tiny little bit of your feces. It would be like, oh no, no, you're not. That's just disgusting. I I do not want that. Yeah. Right. And it maybe it's something like that. Like, you wanna inject some disease in me, the virus, you know, partial half dead virus or whatever you wanna say it is.

1 (52m 50s):

I don't know. That doesn't feel right.

2 (52m 53s):

Well, yeah, that, that's only doesn't help. I mean, if you think about some other species or organisms essence that gets into your essence, then yeah. That it feels like you're being invaded in some way. But again, I don't, i I doubt that that's really the, the main part of, main explanation for that.

1 (53m 11s):

All right, so talk about how people reason about personality as part of our selfhood or whatever.

2 (53m 20s):

I haven't looked at how there isn't about personality. I've looked at how there isn't about emotions. We can talk about that. Yeah.

1 (53m 25s):

Emotion. Yeah. Okay. Do, do talk about emotions. Yeah.

2 (53m 29s):

So the, the idea, so maybe to connect it to the rest of the books, this is, so one big idea in the book is people think that what you know cannot possibly be innate because what you know is not part of the body and what's innate must be part of the body. So if this logic is correct, then emotions should present the opposite or should generate the opposite prediction. Because in the case of emotions, people intuitive believe that emotions are in the face, right? Or in the body. They think that, you know, fear is in your stomach and that happiness you can see on the face.

2 (54m 12s):

And if you think that what's innate is in the body, then therefore you would be prone to think that emotions are innate. So we've done the studies and that's exactly what we found, that people believe that facial emotions are innate, that they're universal, that they would be recognized by anybody. That if you go to some hunter gather who never seen a westerner and ask people, they would be able to, those people would be able to identify a westerner emotion. In fact, if you tell them, scientists believe that emotions are really learned, people still insist that emotions are innate. And the more they link emotions to the body, the more likely they are to think about emotions as innate.

2 (54m 56s):

So I found it curious also in relation to how professional scientists look at emotions, right? Because a lot of the discussion of whether emotions are or aren't innate is based on the question of can you detect universal emotion expression? And the question is why you should assume this. Why you should assume that emotion ought to show in the body, right? Well, one possibility is that people, scientists assume it just because this, you know, it's, it's just easy. So if emotions were in the face, if emotions were in the face and they were universal, then it's something that easy to see and demonstrate. But if there aren't, should you assume that emotions therefore cannot be universal evolution or a psychologist at claim to my mind sensibly that there you have no reason to make this assumptions why you should broadcast all your emotions.

2 (55m 50s):

And in fact you have good reasons to try to hide them. And you can think of emotions in fact as computations rather than as facial expressions. So why is it the case that in this field, a lot of the literature and emotions is the literature that ask, can we identify emotions in the face When you look at how lay people think about emotions and you look at how scientists look at that, you see some correspondence. It's not to for me to say the causality, but I think it's, it's an interesting coincidence at least,

1 (56m 24s):

Right? So I followed some of that literature over the years before, let's say in Darwin's time, you know, he wrote the expression of the emotions of man and animals and that kind of put it on the map that maybe we can study emotions from an evolutionary biological perspective. And that went out of fashion for the longest time until like, I, I, I was felt, you know, took that camera crew to different places in the world like Papa New Guinea famously where, you know, the camera, the lens is pointing this way toward, you say, but the actual filming is done that way through a prison mirror inside the lens. Cause they don't want people acting differently cuz you're pointing a camera at them, right? So this is his idea of being a little more objective, I guess. So he claimed that, you know, there's certain expressions come up everywhere in the world, you know, like raised eyebrow if you're surprised the smile, if you're, if you're friendly, the frown or the, the fright frightening or anger and so forth.


308. The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason About Human Nature (5)

2 (45m 45s):

I don't know. I, and I don't care. I, I what I care to know is what I think exists. I, I, I don't know. I mean, if you're a, you know, a social psychologist, of course you're going to define the self and, and, and build theories about what you think the self is. So yes, that can be answered, but this is not what I can tell you about.

1 (46m 7s):

Hmm. I wonder if you, you might agree with somebody like Jordan Peterson's theory of truth as being pragmatic. It's what worked truth is what works for a person. So if you say, well I think the self is an illusion that works for me, or I believe in free will, even if I know the universe is determined, that story you tell yourself, I'm free and I make free moral choices and I I hold myself accountable and I'm gonna do the same with you. And I think that's how civilization should be structured, that we hold people morally accountable. And and you would say, well that's one way to think about it. Yeah, but it, but it's a kind of truth, right? Cuz it works. I don't know how far you'd, you'd like to go

2 (46m 46s):

With it. I dunno that I would feel comfortable in saying this is the truth. But I certainly think to say, you know, what we want to identify is, is pragmatic principles that guide our society and that we hold each other responsible for them. Whether these are the truth or not, I'm not prepared to answer.

1 (47m 6s):

Hmm. And also reading your book, I was thinking about Richard Dawkins idea of the middle land that we evolved on the plains of Africa, in which everything was kind of a midline size, say between ants and and mountains. So perception, conceptions of atoms and molecules or galaxies and expanding universes and multiverses. I mean there it's so counterintuitive or speed, you know, it's kind of midline speed perception or perceptual apparatus is designed to pick up things that move some somewhere between the speed of say a tortoise and maybe a cheetah, something like that. Or maybe a lightning bolt at the most. But we don't even really understand the speed of a lightning bolt. So when you talk about like einsteinian relativity or expanding, you know, universe, 13.7 billion years old, I mean none of this doesn't even make sense intuitively.

1 (47m 55s):

Science has to work hard to get people to grasp what you're talking about. The speed of light. I can't even conceive of what that must be cuz I'm used to these kind of middling things. So I wonder if, and cuz part of the point, I think some scientists that that's actually good enough for survival. That's all you really need, right? Is kind of a folk physics about how the world works. Things drop, things fall, things run away, whatever, you know, this the billion balls hitting each other. You know, maybe technically in physics you could run the film backwards and you can't tell, you know, which time, time is direct, which motion time is moving. But really in, in the real world, it's good enough, it works

2 (48m 33s):

Well, it is only adaptive. But I think we want to go the last two years have show us why we want to go beyond that, right? Why we want to go beyond essentialism and understand real genetics and understand the, you know, covid and how it works. So we certainly, we want it good enough depending on what's your good enough right? Definition is,

1 (48m 56s):

Well then I was gonna take that to the next step and say, well whether it's itself as an illusion or free will is an illusion. It works pretty well for me to assume that I am me and you are you and we're two different essences and that you're making free choices and I am too. And it feels like I am. And you probably feel like you're making free choices. So whatever the world is really like, that's good enough, that works pretty well for, you know, social primate species to interact with each other and anticipate each other's behaviors, theory of mind, all that. Trying to figure out what other people are thinking and then respond accordingly. Even if technically these are incorrect doesn't really matter. You know, it works in a, in a pragmatic way.

2 (49m 39s):

I think the pragmatic choices we can study certain things and other things we can't and let's focus on the things that we can understand and can study.

1 (49m 50s):

Right? One of my favorite examples of essentialism comes from Bruce Hood's research where he asked people to, what one of 'em was, would you wear Hitler's sweater? I think it was, or jacket or something like that, or Mr. Or Jeffrey Dahmer's sweater, the serial killer, even though he'd had a dry clean or whatever and people didn't wanna put it on why the, the essence of evilness is in the sweater. Something like that. And it could ooze into my, through my skin and into me.

2 (50m 20s):

Yeah. And, and that, I dunno if it's, I, I forget, I dunno that it's whoever did study the, the fact that we think about this essence and something that is contagious and usually our notion of contagious is about matter. It's only matter that is contagious shows that we think about essence in embodied terms as part of the body,

1 (50m 42s):

Right? So the, the little volleyball on the Tom Hanks movie Castaway, you know, it's, it's, it's a Wilson volleyball, so he calls it Wilson and pretty soon Wilson is a thing. It's an essence a being a person that he cares about. And you know, I thought I I like that example. Cause I think it's true. I think that we do do that we embody objects with essentialism or whatever you want to call it. It's like another agent, maybe it's agency.

2 (51m 11s):

But, but furthermore we think that the essence is something that lies within the body because contagious contagion is usually something that we associate with bodily fluids, for instance. The fact that the sweater for that person can exert the same contagions mean that we think about con contagious process as part of the body. And so the essence is part of the body and therefore it can create disgust like any other bodily fluids.

1 (51m 42s):

Do you think this could just speculating, do you think this could be behind vaccine hesitancy or even the anti-vaxxers? Cause you know, the idea of injecting yourself with a contagion doesn't feel intuitively good.

2 (51m 58s):

Yeah, no, I I think it's more serious than that. I mean, it might, might, might contribute to that, but i i it is probably more serious than, than

1 (52m 8s):

You mean more political or what do you mean? Yeah. Hmm. Yeah, I think so. But I was thinking about that just maybe it's multi causal, anti vac, the vaccine hesitancy. But like if I said, you know, just the motion of disgust triggered by bodily af livia, like vomit or feces or whatever, I said, well, we have this cure for this particular disease, we're gonna inject your body with a tiny, tiny, tiny little bit of your feces. It would be like, oh no, no, you're not. That's just disgusting. I I do not want that. Yeah. Right. And it maybe it's something like that. Like, you wanna inject some disease in me, the virus, you know, partial half dead virus or whatever you wanna say it is.

1 (52m 50s):

I don't know. That doesn't feel right.

2 (52m 53s):

Well, yeah, that, that's only doesn't help. I mean, if you think about some other species or organisms essence that gets into your essence, then yeah. That it feels like you're being invaded in some way. But again, I don't, i I doubt that that's really the, the main part of, main explanation for that.

1 (53m 11s):

All right, so talk about how people reason about personality as part of our selfhood or whatever.

2 (53m 20s):

I haven't looked at how there isn't about personality. I've looked at how there isn't about emotions. We can talk about that. Yeah.

1 (53m 25s):

Emotion. Yeah. Okay. Do, do talk about emotions. Yeah.

2 (53m 29s):

So the, the idea, so maybe to connect it to the rest of the books, this is, so one big idea in the book is people think that what you know cannot possibly be innate because what you know is not part of the body and what's innate must be part of the body. So if this logic is correct, then emotions should present the opposite or should generate the opposite prediction. Because in the case of emotions, people intuitive believe that emotions are in the face, right? Or in the body. They think that, you know, fear is in your stomach and that happiness you can see on the face.

2 (54m 12s):

And if you think that what's innate is in the body, then therefore you would be prone to think that emotions are innate. So we've done the studies and that's exactly what we found, that people believe that facial emotions are innate, that they're universal, that they would be recognized by anybody. That if you go to some hunter gather who never seen a westerner and ask people, they would be able to, those people would be able to identify a westerner emotion. In fact, if you tell them, scientists believe that emotions are really learned, people still insist that emotions are innate. And the more they link emotions to the body, the more likely they are to think about emotions as innate.

2 (54m 56s):

So I found it curious also in relation to how professional scientists look at emotions, right? Because a lot of the discussion of whether emotions are or aren't innate is based on the question of can you detect universal emotion expression? And the question is why you should assume this. Why you should assume that emotion ought to show in the body, right? Well, one possibility is that people, scientists assume it just because this, you know, it's, it's just easy. So if emotions were in the face, if emotions were in the face and they were universal, then it's something that easy to see and demonstrate. But if there aren't, should you assume that emotions therefore cannot be universal evolution or a psychologist at claim to my mind sensibly that there you have no reason to make this assumptions why you should broadcast all your emotions.

2 (55m 50s):

And in fact you have good reasons to try to hide them. And you can think of emotions in fact as computations rather than as facial expressions. So why is it the case that in this field, a lot of the literature and emotions is the literature that ask, can we identify emotions in the face When you look at how lay people think about emotions and you look at how scientists look at that, you see some correspondence. It's not to for me to say the causality, but I think it's, it's an interesting coincidence at least,

1 (56m 24s):

Right? So I followed some of that literature over the years before, let's say in Darwin's time, you know, he wrote the expression of the emotions of man and animals and that kind of put it on the map that maybe we can study emotions from an evolutionary biological perspective. And that went out of fashion for the longest time until like, I, I, I was felt, you know, took that camera crew to different places in the world like Papa New Guinea famously where, you know, the camera, the lens is pointing this way toward, you say, but the actual filming is done that way through a prison mirror inside the lens. Cause they don't want people acting differently cuz you're pointing a camera at them, right? So this is his idea of being a little more objective, I guess. So he claimed that, you know, there's certain expressions come up everywhere in the world, you know, like raised eyebrow if you're surprised the smile, if you're, if you're friendly, the frown or the, the fright frightening or anger and so forth.