Can Psychology Explain How Your Mind Works? (Paul Bloom)

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right we're trying to be completely neutral here like People magazine you've used it up I don't know what's next what's next well the next one comes out a couple weeks it's on Money Matters uh income inequality and and crypto and you know all that good stuff and then um after that let's see we have education matters Health matters and there's one other in there so we're in the big oh sex matters we got to do sex there we go of course that's got sex because you have you talk about it in your new book but let me give you a proper introduction here my guest today is Paul Bloom professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and the Brooks and Suzanne Reagan professor emeritus of psychology at Yale University his research explores the psychology of morality identity and pleasure Bloom is the recipient of multiple Awards and honors including most recently the million dollar Klaus J Jacobs research prize sweet nice he has written for scientific journals such as science and nature and for the New York Times the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly he's the author or editor of eight books including against empathy just babies how pleasure Works Descartes baby The Sweet Spot and the new book here it is Psych the story of the human mind this book began as I understand it Paul with your uh one of the most popular courses in the history of Yale right the intro Psych it did it was built up for my classroom course um it's a million person course on Coursera online and I figured I want to turn it into a book right I saw some of that uh I saw some lectures on that but there was other lectures on morality was that a different course was that part of that course yeah it was a different course I first taught a course in Morality moralities of everyday life I found it very exciting and then decided to go for a course on intro psych and it was tremendously rewarding I think I get emails virtually every day from people who've taken the course um and and it's it's I'm very glad to do it how do you balance uh being a research scientist and a intellectual public intellectual popular writer um by doing everything badly come on I like I'd like to hope that that's not the case it is not the case um I think like a lot of us I think certainly like you I wear many hats I'm a professor I teach classes I run a research lab I um I write books I edit a journal I co-edit a journal behavioral brain Sciences um you know and I have a family and you know you do all these things uh this book was sort of a special case it's a covet book so there's a special opportunity to do it when I spend a lot of time inside I actually thought this book would be quick I thought I had my lecture notes for intro psych just kind of transcribed them they were actually already transcribed as part of the internet make some changes boom boom boom six months send it off and then and then I did my first chapter which was Freud and all of a sudden at the end of it it was three to four times larger than I had expected and the book got very big right well I love the book it was uh you know I have a graduate degree in experimental psych and I taught intro psych for 12 years at a community college it was the evening class when I had a regular day job uh intros like I used Hilgard Atkinson and Atkinson was my intro Tech so that's how far back but I love that course because uh you get to cover so many different fields so you're not locked into any one particular thing so you open the book I just like this opening because I have a big question I want to ask you about how you read this book by John Barrow the theoretical physicist and cosmologist called the origin of the universe it began by describing Edwin Hubble's discovery that the Universe was expanding and then went and went over evidence for the Big Bang Theory of how everything started your heart began to race faster it was so exciting to know all this that I could be reading about events that happened 14 billion years ago actually I think it's now 13.8 billion years ago perhaps it's what people of Faith feel like when reading scripture the experience of great truths being revealed learning about the Universe I felt insignificant tiny in space and time but I also felt proud of our species that we could know so much about the incredibly long ago and Incredibly far away and that we could make real progress on the most fundamental of all questions and the birthday party was over I got my picked up the sun world was full of light uh driving back I talked to Zachary about this is your son about what I learned as we spoke I played with the fantasy of quitting my job as a professor of psychology getting a new degree in becoming a cosmologist uh but uh but I was where I belonged as you then quote great Emmanuel content from his critique of pure reason I love this quote two things filled the mind with ever more and increasing admiration and awe the more often more steadily we reflect upon them the story happens above me in the moral law Within Me so you so content the cosmologists and borrow and the rest have tackled the first one the starry heavens above the moral law within seems to be a much harder problem so here's where I want to uh start with kind of a philosophy of science question you know how come psychology is so far behind the physical sciences is it a measurement problem that the problem is just so much harder than physics they you know they talk about the three body problem and we have the you know the three billion body problem or whatever uh and could we get there at some point in sentries hence or is it just an intractable problem because of human volition or some other factors we can't measure it's a very good question to start with um and nobody knows someone uncharitable might say well the Geniuses went into physics and the rest of us went into psychology and that's why there's so much more progress in physics but I don't think that that's the truth really I think for whatever reason and it's not clear what it makes sense to talk about some fuels being objectively simpler than others or easier than others it kind of depends on what kind of creature we are um what would be easier for one creature it might be difficult for another but for some reason physics turned out not to be as difficult as psychology I think I think in part it's because the physical warlock Works according to laws which we have to figure out but the brain is just an incredibly complicated machine or set of machines which just require endless tinkering and a lot of it of course you can't takes it took a long time before we all to get into it and to decompose our our um our mental processes and different ways to study it so I think the problem is just much harder but then there's something else which you alluded to which is um I think the deepest psychological problems blend in in an interesting way to the deepest philosophical problems questions like the nature of Consciousness Free Will and a topic you've written a lot about morality so so in the end I think the hard psychological problems are often also the hard philosophical ones yeah I think that's right but I guess what I'm asking is just like Kepler discovered that planets travel in elliptical orbits according to certain fixed laws uh could we discover something like that about moral psychology about conscious thinking and and and information processing and something and it's just a harder problem it takes a longer equation or something like that or is it a different animal altogether I guess just different way of asking the same question we could discover laws about the mind and and there's been many various candidates for laws about Divine mathematical principles roughly akin to what physicists find but I think as a rule that's not going to be what our complete science is it's like suppose you're a biologist and you're not studying the mind you're starting to kneecap and kneecaps very complicated a lot to learn about the kneecap but I don't think in any way let's find the laws of the kneecap this is not it's not kind of what what your ultimate best science is going to look like rather what it's going to look like is here's how it works here's how it all goes together it's under these very general laws like you know f equals m a rather it's going to be this part connects to this part or take evolutionary theory uh connected to Gene genetics that whole program again you have the structure of DNA which is beautiful incredibly Rich well worth the Nobel Prize that came with it but it's not a series of laws it's more it looks like this and I think success in Psychology and Neuroscience for that matter would be more like here's how the machine works right and maybe the models are just more complicated or maybe you need more theories here I'm thinking of like in moral psychology in your course you talk about utilitarianism uh kind of a consequential ethics and then deontological ethics which is Rule bound and rights and and principles and so on and then virtual ethics why do we have three you know why why don't we have one so that's a that's another fact which is to some extent our minds are hodgepodges it's not as if some philosopher thought it from scratch let's build a moral psychology into people and no yeah we're not going to have all three of them or four or five we're just gonna get one maybe the consequences maybe on top identologists the the philosophy of Khan the philosophy abandoned them but the way the mind really worked is it's a hodgepodge there's I don't think we have any sort of moral principles in that simple sense baked into our heads we have systems that have evolved to deal with our our kin those we love um dealing with friends and there we get into sort of different evolutionary story reciprocal altruism um deal with strangers and that's entirely different story altogether um and part of this is hardwired but part of it is of course cultural so your views on slavery your views on what you owe to strangers be very different to your uh ancestors 200 years ago because just of how you were raised and so it's not going to be a complete coherent story some of it will be innate some of it will be learned some of our morality will be due to principles that are morality specific I think the sort of thing you get into moral philosophy others are more General involving intuitions of causality or intuitions about number or consequence and so on so it's kind of a mess a good psychology would explain how it all works but and it's not going to be our moral psychology as and I put up three equations on the board rather it's going to be this cognitive system that cognitive system this story that story all interacting together yeah another idea I've been playing with is different kinds of truths so you have like objective empirical truths you know the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago the Big Bang started 13.9 billion years ago so on and and we can say with reasonable confidence provisionally true with a small t uh you know that that's it and and and it's not likely to change dramatically just refined but then you have something like pure I don't know subjective truths like meditation works for me or I like Stairway to Heaven or whatever and then somewhere in between you know you have something like political truths you know what's the right number of immigrants we should allow each year I'm not sure that's even the right question maybe there isn't a right answer maybe it depends on the kind of system you set up and then science can say well objectively speaking if this is your goal this is the number of immigrants you should have but if that's your goal that's a different science that's right I mean I could add to your list there are sort of social truths so in baseball three strikes and you're out it's not a scientist wouldn't Discover it it's a human invention but then if you were to say well then it's all arbitrary you're wrong if you think it's two strikes or Force you're just mistaken you don't know how to play chess if you think the pawns move forward five spaces so sometimes arbitrary facts into minds of people who could communicate informing develop a a truth to it there's a truth to how long uh how many times a president could be re-elected there there's a there's a truth to the sales tax in Toronto and these are as true as true things can be even though they can change but they're the sort of thing you'd be right and wrong about and I think that's there's you know we could talk for hours about ways in which we're similar to animals non-human animals in ways which were different but this this world of social facts that we navigate in is certainly uniquely human mm-hmm yeah for sure one last point on that with uh talking about one of our mutual favorite subjects Jordan Peterson or if you if you're tired talking about him we talk about Joseph Campbell or any of the mythologists but you know Mythic truths you know that say um some story is completely made up of course but the story itself contains some truths about human nature take Shakespeare Jane Austen or any of the great novelist Dostoevsky and so on you know we wouldn't ask is it true in some kind of literal sense where they're really brothers karamazov in Russia in 19th century well that's missing the point uh and and so you know it's hard to pin Jordan down on this like you know do you actually believe Jesus lived and was crucified and then after three days was raised from the dead or is that a Mythic truth it just it stands for something else and I sometimes I think some of psychology is in that kind of that gray Mythic realm there maybe I hope not I I I have not much sympathy for Mythic Realms um I don't know whether Jesus walked the Earth but it seems either did or he didn't it's not very complicated maybe you need to perform Miracles or he didn't and you can believe one you can believe the other now whether or not it seems totally compatible say no no it's just a story but the story captures some important morals we should pick up I think that's fine I think that's totally fine you know I could tell you um I I tell I tell a young kid a fable about I don't know a girl who cried wolf and is it true no it's not true I just picked up that story does It capture a good a good moral sure but I worry sometimes that too many people aren't too many people we both know during the mystify thing oh you can't talk about the truth it's true is there a god it's true it's true it's not true and everything um I'd like to reserve Truth for things that are true yeah not not just are true of a star next to it believe in things that uh don't have to be believed in to be true you've very nicely put yeah yeah um yes okay another big question uh big big picture question much of your book is informed by evolutionary psychology evolutionary biology and Theory why did it take till the 1990s like over a century after Darwin wrote On the Origin or um on The Descent of Man uh I mean what happened how come psychologists didn't glom onto that obvious but seems like in retrospect now obviously that has to inform psychology it's a good question when you dated to the 1990s I think you're thinking of the work by people like Lita cosmetes and John Toby yeah back to the 70s with Wilson and trivers and so on yeah that's right so the center man was like 1873 I think or 71. so a century yeah yeah um it's a really interesting sociological question there there has always been ever since Darwin um people using the tools of evolutionary theory to explain ass and explore aspects of our human nature of course including Darwin himself but but there's no shortage of great scientists like uh Robert trivers or Paul Ekman who before those dates did some really extraordinary work but you're right that there's been a lot of resistance to it and I think the resistance has two sources one is for whatever reason psychologists love empiricism they love the idea that the head is empty that other animals have instincts you know William James William James who was very much of a sophisticated thinker I believe they said that animals have tons of instincts and humans have even more but psychologists hate that I think you know Darwin or God bequeath every other animal a set of innate capacities but humans are very unusual our heads are perfectly empty to be accumulative culture so Skinner came along a Skinner had a version of you everybody loved Skinner the modern day connectionist neural network there is just empty just learning you got to train it properly and people love that for some reason and I don't exactly know why my colleagues hate the idea of innate ideas they hate the idea of evolved capacities so that's one thing and then the second thing is there's always been a sort of political concern about evolutionary theory um Stephen J Gould I know you have thoughts about um very much championed the idea that data sort of idea the human capacities are biological adaptations is somewhat unwholesome not politically correct not consistent say with Marxism or consistent with whatever view you have and since psychologists by and large are progressive the idea there's something unhealthy about this uh has persisted I don't think it's entirely gone away but I think largely if somebody says um I here's the theory of say incest avoidance and it's very grounded in evolutionary theory like the one I presented in my book I think the response to my most psychologist is sure that makes total sense we could argue about this and that my friend Brian Scholl points out that in the field of visual perception which is the field he works in nobody has ever doubted the idea that the visual system evolved for perceiving objects it makes no sense without it try studying the architecture of the ear and hearing without assuming that it evolved or is built for perceiving sounds and you know you've got nowhere so but when it gets to sort of politically sensitive issues it gets more complicated yeah um yeah I think some of that has been teased out by our mutual friend Steve Pinker in the blank slate one of the great books um that there's a fear of determinism so you mean it's all wired in and I can't do anything about it and then a fear of eugenics so post World War II that became a boogeyman even though in the 20s and 30s Eugenics was promoted by progressives you know if we're going to engineer Society from the top down through laws and legislation we should also engineer it through genetics right so and then um it then and then you talk about this a lot dualism you know the the fear that there's no ghost in the machine there's no soul there's no mind it's just it's just a you know mechanical protein and that doesn't feel good and it doesn't and intuitively it doesn't feel like that right it feels well you call it Natural Born duelism I always quote you on that uh uh it just feels like I have thoughts floating around up there yeah so much of modern psychology For Better or Worse doesn't fit our intuitions modern psychology says our brains have evolved through natural selection and so much of our thought patterns and how we deal the world is a result of where evolutionary history shared with other animals and that seems that doesn't feel right it doesn't feel right that our thoughts are due to our physical brains we are I think Natural Born Duelists um in fact to believe your thoughts and results of your brain implies that when your brain goes so do your thoughts and that's bad news for anybody who wants life after death and um and a determinism to sort of say well you know I I lectured in my class on introsite a very smart bunch of students and I said well so why are people different we're a personality different intelligence differences and I I wrote down on the board you know well it's overheads you know all those genetic factors determining the nurse environmental factors environmental factors can be within the family or outside of family and a student came up to me afterwards very sharp students said well what about choice where's Choice above and beyond that and I believe in Choice I'm a compatible list to produce things but I think the idea of choice is a magical thing that floats free of everything else really is Magic I'll also add something else to the sort of political talk which is um Chomsky who's of course the most Progressive of progressives and still around in his 90s making all sorts of trouble um argued that uh that basically people think that innate ideas is somehow politically bad news but he turned it around he said the idea that humans are infinitely malleable is in some way if it's true it's true you gotta face that but you probably wouldn't want it to be true because he puts it a blank slate as a dictator's dream authoritarians all around love the idea that people are infinitely plastic because want to make people hate their children you can do it want to make people give up food to worship their leader you can make people do it and once you acknowledge that people have appetites and desires and complicated structure in some way it gives you more respect for the individual and less of a sort of idea that you could mold people any way you want them to be okay let's hit this let's just kind of go through the biggest questions that you cover in your book let's start with the mind how the mind works or the brain If you prefer since the mind really is just a word to describe what the brain is doing right it's a process that operates uh so how does it work and how does you know how does neurons swapping chemicals across synaptic gaps give rise to what we're doing in the sense the experience of life itself and because from there everything else follows right I mean how does the perceptual system work if we assume there's a reality how accurate is our perceptual that's all tied in with the brain yeah that's an easy one nobody knows nobody knows um yeah so so this distinguish what we do know what we don't know I think we know I know there are people who disagree with this but I think this is kind of gospel from psychology and and well-founded gospel that like you say the mind is just the workings of the brain that that everything happens everything all of our thoughts and everything is because this this disgusting lump of cells between our ears and that's just the way it is and we know this in a Million Ways you know it's with philosophical arguments we also know because you know we could monitor the functioning of the brain and predict what you're thinking about if damage to the brain can affect the most intimate aspects of your thoughts there's every reason to believe it's the brain that does it and not some sort of immaterial so how does the brain do it how does um the transmission of neurotransmitters across synapses between different neurons the firing of neurons either themselves or in assemblies all at atoms should us how does that give rise to the feeling that you're talking to a friend on a podcast and you know there's some sun shining through the window and you're you're tasting some tea over there and how does that all happen uh we don't know that's a real toughie but we have made we have made through not so much through psychologists but for people like Alan Turing we have made a discovery which is made to discover that physical things can do intelligent activities so this was discovered a while ago through the invention of the computer and now we deal with something like chat GPT which we could talk about that whatever it does in some ways it's pretty pretty damn smart and so we have an existence proof if somebody says if something like Rene Descartes a duelist came back and said it is impossible as he as he said to have a physical machine act in complicated ways therefore you aren't a physical machine say ah let me show your computer my computer can play chess with you and win bet you didn't think a physical machine could do that and then Descartes would have to concede well okay I guess physical machines can be intelligent but now there's the next step and this is what David Chalmers caused a hard problem of Consciousness which is how does this physical gun not just solve problems and play chess and navigate but feel the the pleasure of an orgasm the pain of having your car your hand slammed in the car door all of that stuff and again we know it does how it does it it's a matter of a lot of debate right because the question I always like to ask when Watson beat Ken Jennings the greatest Jeopardy player of all time does Watson know that he won that he beat the great Ken gen that he's you know the world champion no he doesn't even know he's playing Jeopardy and that's not even the right way to phrase the sentence it does he know there's no he and knowing or whatever feeling like you know data on Star Trek was he excited when Captain Kirk walks on the bridge you know you talk about Star Trek in there you know and so that's the other mind's problem yeah maybe this is what Thomas Nagel calls one thought too many like if you ask the physicist if he has to borrow or any of these Foods you know why is why why does gravity act the way it does or why do objects in space like planets have gravity and they may say something like it's just in the laws of nature that's the nature of the universe that that's the full that's the answer Consciousness it's just a property of material stuff dogs have lessons than humans cockroaches have less than dogs whatever it's just built into the system that's all that's the answer but it's a question we can't duck you may be right so for instance one Theory Of Consciousness is a product of certain physical systems so John Cyril famously said only brains can be conscious a computer can't be conscious it's just computation doesn't make other people say no no accomplished Consciousness arises from computation and you might think well philosophers could just go away and argue this back and forth for another 5 000 years see what they do but I think this problem is going to become real some guy um Blake lemon lost his job at Google because he insisted that oh yes that the AI program he was dealing with it becomes was unconscious and sentient and and then he insisted well so it's not being paid it should speak to a labor lawyer it's actually a slave what it's like to be trapped and unpaid and everything like that right study Buddhism out of Google are suspended him maybe um and a lot of people like me said well that was he was silly the machine was not conscious the machine talks a good game but not conscious but sooner or later it's going to talk a better and better and better game and then one day you're going to be talking to a podcast guest and it's going to be it's kind of a phase it's going to move around but it'll in fact be an AI and you will and it will say like I'm saying to you I'm fully conscious and it matters whether I'm right or not whether I am conscious because if I'm not conscious do whatever you shut me off you could do experiments on me if I am conscious I have rights I I you can't harm me you can't kill me and I don't know do you think this is just science fiction or do you think that within our lifetime we're going to be facing this question in reality yeah it's a good it's a good point you know it's the other mind's problem how do I know you're conscious you know the philosophical zombies maybe I'm the only one on the planet and everybody else is a is just a machine but you know the I play to solve this I apply the copernican principle I'm not I'm not special and your brain is structured like mine so it's very likely if I feel things so do you now in principle it should be substrate independent it doesn't have to be neurons why can't it be silicon chips and therefore at some point if data data is an actor uh you know plays the role pretty well but you you could in principle have a data-like character who has everything that seems like he's sentient the same as us so it would be reasonable to offer our provisional Ascent yes that is a sentient being seems to me you think we're going to come across such beings in our lifetime I hope so that would be fun that would be fun wouldn't it it's one of my best Arguments for being chronically Frozen and brought back 500 years from now so I could see how it all worked out yeah oh the hard problem Oh that turned out to be easy in the 23rd Century here's what we did I am I am very curious and there's a question which beers a lot as a professional psychologist which is that you know if a machine like chat DBT which works on relatively simple principles just a whole lot of them um can become conscious that that tells us some potential things about human consciousness and human intelligence but mostly it's just going to be freaky if it turns out that within 20 years along with us there are say a billion other conscious entities AI programs living with us whose rights matter just as much as ours and perhaps are smarter than us then she wrote about Star Trek and you also write about emotions it's a good time to bring in I had Leonard Malad now on the podcast he's a physicist and Stephen Hawking's co-author but he also wrote a book on emotion so we were talking about emotions you know what's the purpose of emotions why did they evolve and so on is proxies to drive Behavior to get organisms to do things and so but he also wrote for Star Trek the Next Generation right a couple Seasons yeah so he he and the script writers would go okay we have to have data do this and data do that and and but in fact if data really was just a computer he would just be sitting there on the bridge computating whatever and you know you'd have to program in you know when Captain Picard walks on the bridge you are to stand up a greed him and act like you're excited to see him or whatever you'd have to program it in otherwise they wouldn't do anything yeah yeah it's the point it's a point Stephen Pinker makes a long time ago which is they say Smock and date everything have no emotions but plainly have some motivations but also just sit there perfectly still they you know you know so so they one of them they're responsible they uh they they are often heroic they often have flashes of humor companion ability and so on and to say that they don't have emotions in the end just means that they aren't very expressive about it you know they don't cry they don't they don't laugh they don't do contractions they say he is and not he's and oh look it kind of looks cold but but if you think there's no emotions in these in these entities then you have the wrong theory of emotions because you're right emotions are what's needed to push us around if if a creature comes running at me and I run away it's hard to explain that without fear right so maybe it's a mistake a category error perhaps to distinguish reason from emotions or rationality from emotions or you know something like that they're not too completely separate as if data just needs a chip we got to put the chip in the motion ship yeah right the emotion chip right and so um let's just think about this for example attractiveness what do I find attractive well you know I like a hourglass figure in a female because I'm a straight guy and that .67 ways to hip ratio turns out you know evolutionary psychologists have a theory about this okay but I I would never walk around with calipers going okay let me see what the measurement is you know I just look and go yep that looks good and so that feeling like I'm attracted uh or lust or whatever it is is a proxy for natural selection did the calculation for me already over millions of years of what's a proxy for health or something like that I think that's a deep and safe way to think about the mind really sort of step one for thinking seriously about these issues to appreciate the difference between why something evolved and how it currently works so William James is good on this William James says well why are we hungry it's a no-brainer for evolutionary point of animals that don't get food into the system die they don't reproduce so we we seek out food but if you ask somebody why they're hungry instead of he has his line instead of revering you as a philosopher he will laugh at you as a fool he's hungry because he wants to eat he's hungry because his mother-in-law made something good he wants to shout out how much he likes it it's hungry because it's seven o'clock that's when he eats um we or take another example uh people are typically not attracted sexually attracted or siblings why not even if your siblings are very hot objectively speak well because Evolution 101 I don't have don't have uh sexual intercourse your siblings because the children will grow up very importantly not that often there's serious genetic costs so we've been wired up to avoid our siblings but at a gut level it's not like somebody says oh I don't want to sleep with my brother because I don't want to have bad children rather it just shows up in her gut feelings you know if if you if I smell some rotten hamburger I have a feeling of disgust and in it there's a logic of infection and microbiology but I don't know that I just feel the disgust so emotions are some very smart but we we don't see the smartness of it and when you you talk about um Danny Kahneman system one system two thinking system one being this kind of Rapid cognition heuristics biases instincts whatever intuitions system two being the more rational calculator is system one really more like emotions a description of emotions it's just kind of pushing you to make a snap decision because who has time to sit there and do all the calculations about what's the right toothpaste I should I should buy and you sit there for an hour you know kind of doing all the the computations you couldn't function with like that yeah it's a good it's a good question so so Danny wants to kind of break up the mind as he well knows this is a very traditional way of looking at things into sort of gut feelings and considered thoughts and talks about how they relate to each other in different parts work I think he would view the emotions as more into system one more in the gut and less reflective and um because they're fast they're often faster automatic and uh they're very useful for us in a fraction of a second the flash of fear or anger or grief you don't need to work it out and think about it and kind of work out a thing you just get it right immediately it feels like it comes to you you know somebody's talking to me and and they're being very rude and disrespectful I get feel and then anger Rising within me and it's like this Alien Force possesses me it didn't consciously decide to be angry but um but like you're saying there's an intelligence in the emotions right it's a kind of a form of rationality um you know the subtitle of my conspiracy book is why the rational believe the irrational it's not irrational to believe a lot of conspiracy theories are uh true that is they reflect real conspiracy conspiracies because there are real conspiracies right so it's a kind of it's a little bit like the all the famous social psych experiments like the you know smoke in the room and yeah you know the idiot sits there filling out his form while everybody else is ignoring the smoke pouring in and they're all shills but in fact you know our social group is a reasonable reasonably rational source of information like pull the audience in that game show that's they get it right most of the time so that's a that would be a heuristic I guess follow what the crowd does because most of the time they're doing the right thing so let me let me try it on you because I talk about conspiracy theories in my chapter and rationality and I'm making the argument that people are much more rational than we give them credit for we're really smart and so they say well the the common responses if we're so rational how can we believe in all these crazy conspiracy theories you know queuing on and and you know the moon landing was a fake and choose your conspiracy theory and so you're an expert here so here's the line I take is that one thing and this one I get from people like uh Pinker and Hugo Mercier and others is that sometimes our conspiracy theories are just playful they're like crazy celebrity guys they don't really connect with us other times they have more weight but they serve more of a social function than a truth function in that you know if everybody arounds me around me believes in Q Anon it might actually behoove me to believe in Q Anon not because it's true but because it's as a creature who wants to to survive in this world it's really important not to alienate my social group so how does that fit with your analysis yeah it fits perfect like all that proxy conspiracism that is the conspiracy theory is a proxy stand in for something else whether it's true or not is beside the point so Pizza gate you know it is the you know Hillary Clinton really running a secret satanic pedophile ring out of a pizzeria in Washington DC Comet Ping Pong one guy believed it Edgar Welch he went there with his gun made a long video to his daughters you know I'm going in this is going to break up the crime no one's doing anything about it it which is you know you have a Mercier points this out this is what you would do if you thought there really was a crime going on and no one would do anything about it yeah right but most people when they you know tell the poster yeah I think there's something you do you think there could be something to the yeah I guess it could be you know I'm a Republican and most Republicans believe yeah okay such that if I took you there and said look there's no pedophile ring there's not even a basement you wouldn't go oh in that case I guess I'll vote for Hillary right you were never going to vote for Hillary it's just kind of that's one of those things those crazy Democrats or the evil Clinton's or you know it's a stand-in for something like that my other type specimen is the OJ trial which you know OJ was acquitted on a conspiracy theory the LAPD planted the bloody glove and the rest of the evidence but for the um mostly black jury the history of the police engagement with the black community in La since the 1950s was pretty bad they used to do things like that maybe they still do I don't know but planting evidence you know this guy may get off we know he's a bad guy we know he has priors let's just plant the evidence and make sure he's you know put away for good whatever their argument is something like that so to a a black jury in 1994 that's not an unreasonable conspiracy theory even if that one wasn't particularly true yeah and and there's there's a d Point you're making here which is sometimes these things could be irrational if you assume that the point of rationalities to get you at the objective truth then you shouldn't believe in pizzagate the evidence is really weak it's kind of dumb but that's not a good definition of rationality rationality is basically trying to achieve your goals and people have many goals um in the O.J Simpson case maybe their goal isn't to find that the truth or innocence of a man the goal is to is to retaliate against you know years and years of vicious racism the goal is to show solidarity of their group the goal of the of the pizza gay person might be to say you know boo Hillary um there's there's all this stuff you know um a lot of Republicans said at different times said that Barack Obama was not an American citizen he was born in Kenya oh that's a stupid conspiracy theory then somebody did this poll where they asked Democrats do you think Donald Trump was born in the states and many of them said no he wasn't born in the States and what they were saying was Boo Trump right you asked me a question a question like that you know and as yes Noah I'm gonna give you an answer which is a boot trap answer and to to tag me as being irrational I think misses the point is is a very ungenerous way of our mind's work yeah yeah I think so yeah I mean I've spent most of my career debunking crazy ideas and weird things so it skewed my perception of human rationality as being mostly irrational but I've been rethinking this you know again you know your work umrca Steve Baker and so on others that in fact um most people let's just take cults why do people join Cults and you get Scientology and you know the uh Heaven's Gate and Jim Jones Jonestown all that stuff that you know you can come up with half a dozen examples and it's astonishing that people did this but in fact most people don't join Cults yeah you know what's the base rate how many people went to Jim Jones's church and never went back how many people you know engaged with the heavens gate people for a few days and thought well this is crazy we don't we have no idea you know how many people take that those little personality tests at the Scientology offices around the world and they just walk out they never sign up they never take a course you know we don't know right so my guess is that in fact it takes a great effort on the part of cult leaders to really recruit people I mean it's like 20 steps to get them to get in there and give their money and give their sex or whatever the cult leaders are after and in fact most people are reasonably rational most of the time that's what I'm now thinking so have your thoughts on conspiracy change how you think about religious belief yes in fact because I think religion is back to this kind of Mythic truth that it stands it's a stand-in for other things and I think for most people um who are not inclined to follow theological arguments you know the prime mover and the cosmological constant Mark argument and uh fine-tuning argument I think for them it's it just kind of this is what I believe this is my this is you know it's it's my social group it gives me meaning and purpose I think most people don't give it that much thought yeah they're not reading Aquinas and Dawkins and so on I like to tell the story I'll tell you the story that uh Dawkins and I were on uh on stage at a conference on science and religion with Ken Miller Ken Miller the microbiologist leading textbook author of microbiology leading debunker of intelligent design creationism right so we all turned to him in his book um on this whole subject but then the last chapter he says oh by the way I'm a Catholic you know and I accept all the doctrines of Catholicism and and so on so Richard is kind of pushing Ken on this point like okay Ken let's say we found a piece of the True Cross you know the holy relics that churches once had played they had and on the piece of the True Cross there there's a little bit of Flesh and we could extract the DNA from Jesus himself who was of course born a virgin so he can't have the same DNA as everybody else and Ken could see where this was going he's like Richard Richard I'm not claiming any of this is true in in the city of scientific sense yeah I'm a Catholic this is what we believe yeah and it's kind of a conversation stopper like okay well what do you say to that yeah it's interesting I think Dennett calls it belief and belief um where yeah people who tell you they believe in heaven and they're not lying to you they believe in heaven they want their kids to believe in heaven is important to them then if you ask them so what's heaven like since you're going to spend eternity there and they go ah stop I'm not that interested um are you do you fear death if you think I've been having you show of course in person yeah yeah I wouldn't want I'm very careful I don't want to step in front of a car I don't wanna but what about heaven and it tastes funny status where they don't treat it as if I'm going on a vacation in two weeks to a resort I'd be very curious about a resort and what they offer they take it as sort of this social Allegiance this thing which is good to have and um it has very interesting status and seeing it this way I think should make one more sympathetic to um to the religion I think one problem that that atheists run into is they see some religious claims as claims of literal truth do you think the world is such and so years old well that's dumb let me show you the evidence why but some people do are literalists but most are not most of these beliefs have a special of a different sort of status which means that they aren't to be thought of in the same way call them um mythical truths but they aren't to be thought of the same way as actual truth well maybe there's a good place to bring up Free Will and determinism because for some people I think free will or volition is a kind of mythical truth or useful fiction or I don't know I've read this argument I've read that argument I read Dennis book I read Sam Harris's book I don't know what to think I don't know I feel free uh you know I'm just gonna act like I'm free because it that's how it works yeah um it's it's there's obviously attention because on the one hand you're you have a scientific worldview which says that your behavior is entirely predictable from the current conditions of the universe right now maybe there's some Quantum silliness going on but put that aside for that random side you know where are you where are you on an hour is is exactly determined and you know a a God could figure it out or even a power enough computer perfectly and yet it also seems irrefutable that you choose what to do when this podcast ends where to go what to do and it also seems irrefutable that I view your behavior that way otherwise I can never thank you for anything good you do for me or any any or or condemn you for any bad thing you do for me so we seem to be in a perfect pickle where free Wilson is absolutely indispensive and a gut feeling deeply true but it violates our scientific worldview and I guess I tried my own my own take is kind of compatibles where I think there is a notion of freedom um you are there's a real difference between you having a free choice on where to go versus somebody locking you in your room that's a real it's a physical difference there's a reality between a machine that chooses by evaluating the pros and cons of different options chooses accordingly versus a machine that mentally flips a coin and so we talk about decisions and deliberation and so on and I think we should continue to do so all the time recognizing that is compatible with um with a physical determined world interesting there's one which I think I think Dennett makes which is a nice way to think about it which is think about Choice our free will on an analogy with time so we all have a conception of time and scientists tell us that because every time it's very it's very the truth is very different from how you see it but we don't normally say oh time doesn't exist then we say is there's a Time time's different from what we thought and I think we should say the same thing about choice is it so there's always this question could you have done differently is it that um as I move forward in my life I'm aware of the choices I've made in the past when confronted with certain variables from which to choose this time I'm going to do different I think the determinist would say well but the conditioning conditions or whatever are not the same and that if they were exactly the same you would do exactly the same right okay so let me give an analogy you know remember Steve Steve Gould's famous you know rewind the tape and play it again would we end up with Homo sapiens you know back to the dinosaurs or whatever and you know Dan Dana made the point well if it was a read-only memory tape yes it would be exactly the same because it's just a recording of what happened but he you know Steve meant something different like this run the whole thing over and let it just play a second uh you know a second time of course it we wouldn't end up with exactly what we have so it's not really a fair question so could you have done differently because if it's literally everything's exactly the same then it would be a recording of what happened and you would just do the same but you can never replicate it exactly so the conditions are always going to be slightly different and you have knowledge of what you did last time so for you with the agent or the volition come in there at that point go I remember what I did I'm going to do differently this time because I was punished or I was rewarded or if you want to go Skinner on that front or whatever yeah I don't know I think yeah I think there's two separate issues I think I agree if the determinist that every time you make a choice if we can perceive it as a choice we feel we could have done differently I'm choosing the chocolate and vanilla and I choose the child I miss it could you chosen it of course that's I was choosing them which meant that vanilla was very much on the table but the determinist comes in and says you were you were destined to choose to drop it you you're an illusion that you could have chosen about you were destined to choose chocolate and um and trying to reconcile those two things our deep feeling of choice and to determinist logic is like I said before really tough yeah it may be an insoluble problem it may be one of those mysterian Mysteries like you know free will God and the why is there something rather than nothing you know these kind of deep questions I like Dan danette's idea of degrees of freedom so if you take someone like who's an alcoholic or a drug addict and I'm not I don't have that problem I have more degrees of freedom than the alcoholic has because I I'm less deter well what what does that even mean I'm less determined than the alcoholic because of my physiology versus his physiology which is programmed you know no it's no willpower in my part I just got lucky that I don't have the physiology that processes alcohol in that way and he had bad luck so what is that you know there's something there are considered coercion um you know somebody asked me break into you do me a favor and break into that car and I do so and then the cops find me to probably put me in prison so you broke into that car I said well he asked me to and I said well that's that's not a good reason you chose to but suppose you pointed a gun towards my head and said breaking that car or I'll kill you then I could legitimately say I was forced to break into that card I probably wouldn't be held legally responsible now you can imagine a philosophical police officer came back and said well you weren't literally forced you could have chosen not to to break into the car you chose to break in the car as opposed to dying but there's some intuition that just says in your addiction case there's some cases where we're forced and Free Will is lessened in some way and the law the law understands that the law understands cases of coercion or blackmail or threat as in some way dampening Free Will and thereby dampening more responsibility yeah I was just thinking about this the other day I had Steve Hassett on the podcast he's a cult expert now he goes way further than I do he thinks pretty much practically everything is a cult it's all over the place I mean he brought a book called the Trump cult in which you know I I couldn't imagine he believed this but I said you know you don't mean 74 million Americans who voted for Trump are all on a cult you know that there is this undue influence and they're under his Sway and he said yeah it's like I don't think so most people just vote tribe you know I don't like Trump but he's a republican I'm a republican I'm going to pull the end right but so there's this question of undue influence like the Manson family you know bulliosi's uh genius here was to get uh the women convicted for murder because they actually committed the murder and Manson also even though he wasn't even there at the crime scenes yeah because he had so much influence over them you know so there I think that's an interesting problem it is interesting these cases illustrate that um maybe not that anybody needed to convince him but these philosophical problems have real world friends wait in that who do you convict who do you charge who goes to prison who doesn't um take Trump himself I think um I think uh uh that some of the charges against them basically amount or at least accusations of basically treason attempt to overthrow the government wrestling his facts about his intentions and wrestling his influence on other people and his perceived influence on other people yeah so the the January 6th Insurrection we know who most of those people are now and these were not tinfoil hat wackadoodle uh you know crazies living in their parents basement they're regular people some of them flew there on their private chats right in their careers and jobs and families and kids and and so on but they really believed that the countries being stolen from them the boss said so that morning right and then plus whatever tribal and mass hysteria whatever else is going on psychologically but there they were so you know that's the power of belief is Trump culpable on some level had he not so counterfactual causality had he not given the speech that morning would it have happened you know maybe well at first I said no uh but then now it looks like there was a lot of Planning by some of these right-wing groups to get there they brought their weapons and plastic ties to tie up Nancy Pelosi or whatever they're going to do and so on so that that had some floor planning separate from Trump although Trump led the whole thing since the day of the election day after the election when he declared it fraudulent so that probably fed into it that's a hard one I mean my you know first amendment attorneys I've talked to tell me it's a really high bar to go from speech to actual action or violence or whatever and it should be I mean yeah a lot of people including me I think including even um have no love for Trump but they're but there are broader points at Play and if you if you make that bar too low then all sorts of speech that we would want to encourage or permit at least becomes too risky because you know and it has some connection to violence and um and so it's a difficult Balancing Act you know to take it more generally I like this discussion because it's working on two levels so there's the there's the topic of my book which is the psychology psychological explanation and you know and explain how do we explain conspiracy theories how do we explain why some people grow up to be murderers and others don't and those are just sort of bread and butter psychological questions but this deals a lot of a sort of meta question which is how do we take these premises of psychology of evolution and causality and uh uh materialism it's due to the brain and and struggle to reconcile them with Notions that we find for everyday life and for Law and that that that high level question is a really important one as well oh yeah for sure well that's why I like your work so much because you do both of those in all your books um here I was thinking about Adrian rain's book I can't remember if you we've discussed this before uh the anatomy of violence so I reviewed it for oh you reviewed it so you know the arguments right so he has those two case studies he's got the um Mr off the the the middle age school teacher uh who became somewhat pedophilic with his wife's with his stepdaughter his wife's daughter and she catches them he's in big trouble and so on and uh and then he gets a brain scan for various reasons and look there's a tumor in his orbital frontal cortex they extract the tumor his pedophilic feelings go away he's back to school and so on then the wife finds some kitty porn on his computer and back to the brain scan the tumor's grown back as well okay then he has that whole section on Adrian um on Dante page the African-American Man convicted for murder rape and murder of a of a woman and Adrian was on the defense team saying he shouldn't get the death penalty because and then he's spends like two and a half pages on this poor guy's background which is like the most horrible upbringing you could ever have such that you almost feel you do feel sympathetic for him you know he's a single mom she's drug addicted you know boyfriend's going in and out of the house all who beat up on him hospitalized for brain uh you know head to injuries and on and on and on and running with gangs and just just horrible and then by the time he gets to the point where he commits this murder you know but so Adrian's point was that with Mr off you can see the tumor in the brain scan there it is yeah but you can't really see you know 20 years of a horrible background in a brain scan but he you know I think his argument is that it's tumors all the way down whatever you want to call it it's just it's in there and that's a kind of deterministic argument so by the same logic he would take somebody lived a perfectly normal life and uh nothing bad happened and particularly no abuse no tumor he went off to kill somebody for some reason and say same for that person I mean if if it's if if one thing is caused by the physical brain and caused by the past in a sense to others too and what I think that kind of leads you to a a conclusion which you don't really want to make so so you wouldn't let you know if if you end up letting people off because well what they did was not freely chosen but rather caused by their genes and their brains and their past you gotta let everybody off right you know we're only going to put people we're only going to people people in prison who chose their evil act through Transcendent free will that escape their brain had nothing to do with their history well that's a very small the prisons will be largely uh empty yeah so that's a good point okay another big question what's the nature of reality and how do we know it so you know you're probably familiar with Donald Hoffman's um uh theory of of perception I think his analogy is the uh you know laptop screen where you have the little trash icon and this icon and that our perception is like a a computer laptop screen where what we think we see is real or just these icons that represent something else and I'm kind of oversimplifying his theory but you're familiar with it and that Evolution did not design perceptual systems to give us vertical perception that is an accurate model of the world but just good enough to get your genes the Next Generation so let's just use that as a starting off point how did our senses evolve along with our brains and to what extent does it give us some reasonable picture of reality yeah I I'm not fully I've heard Hoffman's argument in various forms um and I think there's a real insight to it which is our perception of the world isn't veritical you see this in optical illusions but you also see this in our limitations just a tiny proportion of the light spectrum is visible to us um you know dogs and and other creatures and octopuses and everything have radically different perceptions of the world and it's not like ours is right and theirs are wrong everything is filtered through tremendous computational processes where I departed from him is the idea that in some way we're not perceiving the actual physical world and I never feel I understand argument correctly because from evolutionary point of view it really behooves you to know where the snakes are and where the cliff drops off and where the apples are so it does seem as if we have evolved to perceive snakes and cliffs and spaces and apples um not veritically not perfectly but and I'd also put it another way which is the enormous success of our science the fact we have spacecrafts that can go to you know other planets um suggests that we really do have kind of a world at a tail we do seem to we do have have we do have a sense of reality because if you don't have a sense of reality why are we so successful dealing with it does that make any sense yeah totally yeah I think so that's right but I I use like animal camouflage the reason it works is because it looks like something else that most organisms uh perceive as being real perfect example a perfect example camouflage only makes sense if it turns out that the the prey looking for you sorry the Predator looking for you seize the world in such a way that that that is gradient so that looking looking like like the ground makes it pass you by because it thinks you are the ground but it's hard to tell the story unless you just there's something like looking like the ground yeah yeah I'm sure a shark looks different to a dolphin than to me because the Dolphins using echolocation and so forth but there really is a shark and there's really one end you want to avoid because there's teeth on the end of it and you know so that you know whatever it is there's some approximation to the way it really is that's right that's right there's always been a tradition of skepticism an external World sometimes it's religiously based uh Bishop Barkley said well we have all these Sensations why would God need to create an external world with it why doesn't he just give us the sensations and I guess occasionally post-modernists would say well everything is based on what we believe and so on but the best reason to believe in reality is that um is that it really works if you if if I believe there's a rock in our way um and you don't and we keep walking towards one of us is going to stumble or stumble over and look foolish who did you quote in there that's the person that kicked the rock I kicked the rocket everything was a Samuel Johnson hearing about the claim there's no external where where Kick the rock and said I refuted thus and that's kind of a a cheap shot but but I think it's basically right I think it's amazing right if you if I think some things don't exist and we pretend it to exist but if if believing in their existence allows you to navigate through the world physical or whatever um it's a good piece of argument of evidence that it exists um I also quote uh Philip K dick who defines reality as something like reality is what exists even if you don't believe in it right yeah that which exists uh yeah it doesn't go away it doesn't go away that's right that's right yeah but at the same time this one we're piling up quotes um and this is in in Hoffman's favor there's also a quote um by a nice name which is that um that we don't see the world as it is we see the World As We Are and there's a yeah too yeah yeah I look at my dinner which has been you know carefully prepared and it's all delicious and it makes my mouth water and it's the yummiest thing in the world but but the yummiest the yumminess of it and a wonderful warm smell of it and everything that's acid of me not it you know for a dung beetle I'm sure dung just smells and tastes fantastic but but that's just because the way dung beetles work not because of the fact of what the dung is right yeah and also kind of autobiographically what whatever actually really happened years ago or decades ago changes as I get older and and I just had Marty Klein on the podcast we just released it today and he's a sex therapist anyway we were talking about divorce because he got divorced and and he said the first 10 years after that it was entirely her fault and then the next 10 years I was kind of 50 50 and now I realize it was almost entirely my fault yes so it's like okay so there's a reality and then there's the kind of not just perception of it but evaluation of it in a different context it's an interesting case um I'm thinking in terms of actually marital arguments that are friendly enough but but you know one person goes and I'm sure many people have experienced you know here's why I'm mad you said this to me you said this to me and you did this and the other person says you have it entirely wrong you started by saying this I did not say that and most likely both sides are incredibly wrong one of the great findings of psychology is that our memories are not to be trusted right I have my own anecdote about this actually I gave a talk once long time ago and I was just beginning assistant professor and I gave a talk on some work and attacked them to work and somebody asked me really a mean question a very pointed critical question and I I got a bit upset and I I gave an answer but I kind of lost a bit of control and then we went back and forth and was quite heated until something stopped so I'm leaving and I get an email from the University later I'm saying the students and I agree to this tape my talk because they're giving during a study and how people give talks so they got my permission tape and they said do I want to see what the talk looks like okay they sent me the video I masochistically watched the video and I see somebody asking a perfectly polite question to me me answering in a polite humorous calm way that's going back it was all in my head and this wasn't six years later it's like like a week later and it was humbling yeah yeah Carol Taffer says a funny story in her book mistakes are made but not by me about um this one of her favorite childhood books that she still has she has these memories of sitting on her father's lap while he read the story to her and and all the stories they told each other about the book and so on and so on and then she recently looked up the pub date of the book and it was published after her father was dead yes yes and that's like where did that come from and that's the rule not the exception I want some I once was at a party and I was telling some sort of funny story about something that happened and then as we were leaving my wife says she was very nice she didn't say that the party says you know what story happened to me and I said no it didn't I remember it perfectly but then I was oh yeah it did happen to you and then but I heard it and then it gradually kind of sucked into my head that's right and again before people think that this is crazy talk it always works this way there's a million studies showing that our memories are hugely unreliable they're highly reconstructive I said I think that's one of our big findings of psychology yeah yeah I love Elizabeth loftus's work on that the Lost in the mall yeah it's poor guy's telling us in Crazy incredible story about being lost in a mall as a child which never happened yeah where is he coming up with it imagine her working on planting false memories is really it really matters and and has such relevance for the legal system where there's these terrible real world cases where people go through extended police interrogations often I think done in good faith I think this person has done a crime we're going to get them to acknowledge they want to give them the data anyway but sometimes in some odd cases the person comes to it's persuaded that he did a crime he never did and confesses they don't confess because they're coerced in any simple sense they confess because they have had a false memory of the crime and planted right right yeah that's astonishing I remember in the 90s Elizabeth was facing this kind of dilemma where um this guy named John damonyak who was identified as Ivan the Terrible at was a triplink I guess and uh now he's just some retired Auto worker in Ohio is it really him or not and people look rather differently you know 50 years after the fact and so on so his defense was like these are false memories and we're using the work of Elizabeth Loftus so they call her up you know will you uh you know appear on the defensive Ivan uh this guy and you know she's Jewish and like oh my God I'm defending this possible Holocaust criminal you know but it could be he's innocent right that's a tough one it could be he's guilty I mean yeah yeah right right right okay but memories uh we do have memories some of them can be accurate how what do we know about how memory actually works how how does an event causing neurons to fire get stored and as it permanently start is it always in there somewhere that you could in principle retrieve it with the right cues or is it always evolving it's a good question um there's uh my one of my favorite writers crime writers is Michael Connolly and I quote a passage from his book where somebody sees a crime or sees something and then a long time later is brought through hypnotic regression and it's very much as you can imagine what is it okay now imagine it now you're looking at the car now can you see the license plate yes okay now what numbers on a license plate and that's totally bogus um so so the story of memory is first thing a lot of stuff just doesn't get in the first place if you don't attend to it it disappears through a striking degree um if all of a sudden our screen flickered and went off and then went back on and you were wearing a different shirt I might well not notice we tend to sort of even order background picture change to a different picture it's called change blindness exactly so if you don't attend it goes away if you do attend it could get into the system but then it is easily malleable through the sort of questions we're talking about before so um it might be malleable because you have a question maybe Mallory because you have stories um there was a study done right after 9 11 Intrepid memory psychologists went over and asked people right away saying where were you when you heard when the planes crashed and then later on much later on to ask where were you and surprisingly many of the stories were so different um because what happens is for something like that people would tell oh where were you when it happened so tell a story of it but of course the standard remembering the story and the stories change they simplify and so on and then the original memory is gone it's not like it's just been modified and finally brains are physical things they're meat and just through random Decay you'll lose memories so no it's definitely not a vertical recording hypnotic regression is bogus um uh a lot of memories recovered through sort of psychiatric intervention is bogus you know all the good intentions in the world so many of these cases end up in planting memories rather than recovering them yeah right I've always had a memory of the day JFK was shot on that Friday November 22nd 1963 I was in third grade and that the teacher took us out of class and we went out and saluted the flaggers whatever we did and actually have no idea if any of that happened yeah I really have no way of checking and you know it was a memory I had you know I don't know like 15 years after the fact and yeah I do remember that and I actually now I think I have no idea the humility the humility is good we have to be humble I remember um Hillary Clinton uh when she was Secretary of State described Landing in a country at a war-torn country a few years ago and a few years before and said oh we were under heavy fire and everything and then people took back yeah and it wasn't true at all and everybody's saying oh she would a psychopath maybe she's she's got Alzheimer's maybe that's how memory works it's only when you have The Misfortune to be an extremely famous person that somebody goes and actually runs the tape right but on the other hand if I go under general anesthesia and they wake me back up my memories are still there uh I'm the memory of my mother's face I can picture that and I know it's reasonably accurate where is that how is that stored somewhere in the brain um for different different campus or different memories we say frontal lobe hippocampus or some evidence of different sorts of memories are stored in different parts of the brain there's um there's some fascinating evidence that um for differences in memory which always fascinated me so the classic stuff is you have these people who have Visa this terrible problem due to a stroke or accident or sometimes surgery run amok where they lose the capacity to form new memories so there's a wonderful case the very famous case of hm but there's many others Korsakoff syndrome with extreme alcoholism gives you this Tuesday you lose the capacity to form new memories and and there's stories of scientists who work with them like Suzanne quarkin every day she goes over and says hi introducer for years the same guy and he just hello very very play very nice to me no memory so you think he can't form new memories but um he um what's interesting is that he uh he can um form new motor memories so you get him to trace something and in a mirror and it's very difficult to trace any while looking in the mirror but he gets better and better and better suggesting that the part of the memory that that stores that is um is intact right one of the arguments um for uploading the Mind into the cloud so you can live forever I wrote about this in Heavens on Earth it depends on this theory that memories are the physical things that are stored in there and if you had a brain scan of the connect Dome if you created the connect to all the synaptic points you do this kind of electron scanning electron microscope of a neuron and you can see the little dots those are the synaptic connections and that input this is what they argue in principle if you had a snapshot of that that that would be the memory self uh you know kind of permanently store it's in there somewhere so they sent me these articles when I was writing about this look here's this experiment you know the person's brought down for open chest surgery their temperatures are you know super below freezing for a couple hours so they can do this surgery so the brain is essentially frozen shut literally Frozen but it stopped molecularly stopped and then they wake him back up and their memories come back online so they have to be in their relatively permanently some physical way yeah yeah not permanently not permanently yeah but right but it does have a physical substrate yeah and that's what happens when you go from short term to long-term memory uh it somehow gets you know the wire together fire together wire together it's just yeah the term of artist consolidation consolidation right and that's what you get so we talked about interior grade memory I feel very much in my intro psych mode but um if you're in a car an accident you smash your head often you'll lose your memory of everything that that has passed for like 15 minutes and the argument is that it's that this that memory was in there you you disrupted it it never got put into the system and so it's gone right the guy has a hole in your memory forever right okay so let's talk about the nature of the self so related to this there's this remembering self right the the memory self and this is what the uploading people argue that that's your true self but my counter that is a point of view self that that you know from one moment to the next I'm looking at my eyes I see you and then and then I see you and then and then this and then this and we're still talking and that that's the me the experiencing me is just the point of yourself it just that you can't copy such that if I copied my connectome and uploaded it to the cloud while I'm still alive that I I didn't go up to the cloud I'm not up there looking through the camera hole here I'm right here right that's just a duplicate I am with I am with you man I am with you man I am I am married to a person I love very much but C seems to believe that she goes into transporter and it destroyed it original and she can't oh somebody comes that's her uh-huh I don't yeah and a lot of people believe that but but I'm with you I think that that our individual physical selves Define the boundaries of our consciousness right but why do some philosophers and even some psychologists call the self an illusion um for different reasons um some of them say because the brain is always changing to some extent and because there's no single part of the head that's the self what bandana called the Cartesian theater then there's no self now I take it a different way I think all that shows is there could be a self there's a you there's a me we're different um and but it's just not localized in the brain in a single joke but it definitely isn't here it's in the head others have a more philosophical bent uh Sam Harris for instance would argue that the principles of Buddhism and proper Enlightenment sort of to demolish itself and you realize you have no self I never fully understood the argument besides despite having it patiently explained to me many times I guess I'm still stuck with the sort of Cartesian notion that there is a selfish to brain but it's nonetheless it's a self this I have a self right over here I care very much what happens to it I care what happens to you but not as much because you're not myself maybe if we think of it as like a fuzzy set of characteristics that can that can Bounce Around within a bounded uh category uh so you know some days I'm more extroverted than I than other days or I'm more open to experience if you want to just go through the big five but but it's kind of bounded based on temperament personality is just kind of inherited 50 of the variances is accounted for by my genes my parents with this whatever and so that's my sense of self kind of continues throughout the lifetime the lifespan and while it can change and some people can say okay I'm too introverted I'm going to force myself to go to parties I'm going to nudge myself to go over there and talk to somebody but they're not that comfortable doing it because it's it's sort of still stuck within the boundaries and maybe that's the self that's kind of fuzzy set yeah and and it will change gradually over time I think there's an interesting sense in which you're the same person you were when you were one years old um they have the same name you track through time if you were given a bequest at your birth to be um to be given to you much later in life you could claim it because you're that person then of course there's a real sense in which you're not which you have transformed and there's a very interesting question both sort of a philosophical point of view and also how we naturally think about it how much changes would you have to undergo in your own head before you're no longer you and so so Nina strowman strominger and Sean Nichols and her colleagues have done some nice experiments where if if I got a sort of severe Alzheimer's severe form of dementia where I not only wiped all my memory but my personality changed in my intelligence faded so there's an interesting sense where where Bloom is Dead the Original guy is dead there's someone else in here and can you imagine that could you imagine that there'd be a case of change that's so radical you would say that you cease to exist yeah I guess it'd just be if it was Alzheimer's or something the spouses of Alzheimer's patients say she's no longer the woman I yeah I've known yeah and there I guess it's a quantitative difference but at some point it becomes a qualitative difference that's right the number gets so much that's right and that would just be what neuron death and I sometimes wonder about non-alzheimer's cases so I could imagine myself losing all my episodic memory but still being me um who am I I wonder and a split second when you wake up in the morning sometimes you don't quite know where you are at least at least for me and imagine I'm more extreme still be me though but what if my personality changed in all sorts of ways too there's a certain point where I would think the person who occupies his head isn't me anymore like what if instead what if he had old what if I had now we're entering philosophical thought experiments but what if I ended up waking up with all of your memories but also your personality wouldn't in a sense that be you inside my head yeah that's right well right what's it like to be a bat we well you can't know that and if I did then I would just be a bat that's right that's right you never know what it's like to be back you know what you know I wouldn't like to be Michael Schumer inside a bat's body right right but to be a bat you would then be a bat you'd be unable to sort of you having Bad Brains you wouldn't ask the question and if you recovered back into your own body you wouldn't have no memory of it because it's that Cartesian dualism again like the uh kafka's metamorphosis you know the the guy is now whatever he was a cockroach I forget what the uh the insect was um but but that that that implies that something else goes into the animal that you're becoming that's right like Freaky Friday when uh Jamie Lee Curtis and and Lindsay Lohan swap body yeah wait a minute what what swap there is nothing to swap but it is so intuitive that there's a u an orb a sort of that could jump to another body that could Ascend to Heaven that could leave your body and look look down upon it you know right and and you know I gave a talk about the book to to somebody I was talking about a week ago and his very first question was what do you think of um of past lives I said well I don't really believe it I don't really believe and I said but what about the soul and he then immediately said what about the idea your soul could leave your body and look down on it and my response is we certainly believed that's possible so many people report it but that's very different from saying it actually happens and I do not think it actually happens yeah yeah but back to the self question and and the current controversy over trans you know what does it mean when somebody says I I feel like I'm in the wrong body well that implies there's a u and then there's your body like they're separate things but that the embodied cognition there's no such thing as just you you know so it but again you have these kind of fuzzy sets male female you have all the secondary sex characteristics and so on there's you know there's different threads along this line but you know one of them is that well if I'm a guy and you know if I get the surgery and I have breast implants and grow my hair the makeup and so on I feel more feminine but they're not really biological female this is gender this is a more of a cultural social thing or something um I don't know what so what what are your thoughts on that controversy without getting ourselves canceled so so our whole range of experiences that people talk about under the rubric of this but I think of a specific experience because I know I know two people in my life who uh have had children who had some version of this and take a case where somebody is a um a natal boy penis testicles indistinguishable boy biologically a boy but believes and I'll say herself to be a girl feels that they're a girl in the wrong body and it's an absolutely fascinating question how that could happen and it makes me think in some of the nativist part of me thinks that there may be a switch in the head for gender male gender female gender but regardless are these cases that are very early emerging so it's not part of some social epidemic or it's part of a bypro or all these stories about later on which I don't know much about but it's very early emerging and it's really real and urgent and it's it's both you know troubling because these people unless there's some sort of intervention on maybe by giving a body they Wonder condemned to lives of misery but it's also fascinating it happens and it's not so unimaginable you don't need to be a dualist to imagine it here's here's a case which is definitely is clinical and but it but it's nicely analogous there are people who think they have one arm or one leg too many they they they they might think I want my left leg amputated and doctors say there's nothing wrong with it I I cannot have this left leg it is not part of me and you know it it is possible that our mental map of our body in this case for Limbs and other cases for for for the sex um is misaligned with how we see ourselves but couldn't you imagine um imagine you you woke up at some point and you were you were were encased in a female body you would feel in this match this is not this is not what you're prepared this is not how you see yourself how you feel yourself and I think that crazy science fiction cases matches what we find for some trans individuals and this is why I think in in some cases intervention to make the body match more the person's gender is actually a just and kind and and think give them what they want the early onset gender dysphoria is I think different from the social contagion model of it happening in in teenagers where young teenagers bodies are changing and they have some body dysphoria because of that which is probably different from the early onset as it's called there was that movie Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin all of me right where they switch bodies and so you know Steve Martin like oh this is what it's like to be a woman and vice versa yeah but but again would that happen or would you just be a woman now yeah I mean if you literally did that I think I mean you put us nicely which is we do want to retain any good theory has to be complicated enough to retain the difference between um well three things actually biological sex there's fuzzy cases but but uh Lily tomlin's body is the female body Steve Martin's in male body gender identity what you see yourself as which typically matches biological sex but not always and then sexual orientation which is a whole different thing like who you're attracted to yes right and of course these three things they typically align in a certain way typically people with male biologies have male gender identities and are attracted to women female bodies female gender attracted to men that's the norm throughout most people in most of human history but then there's an enormous amount of variety and I think um I'm sympathetic to the trans activists who have really made us appreciate that these things can vary certainly like let's just say this talk think about this out loud so within boys or within girls there's a spectrum you know there's masculine boys and feminine boys and Tom girl Tom boys and girls and so on um and so maybe at some point you're back to the sense of self you have this kind of fuzzy set this is who I am and I have one set of characteristics and I'm a say middle of the bell curve mascular male uh and but if I was shifted way to the left or right or whichever direction at some point my brain may go well you know I'm kind of feminine and or I'm both or Matt Ultra maximum mail list sorry I'm speaking here uh but that maybe that then becomes the self actually I'm just kind of rambling here I'm not sure what I'm trying to say um again back to that kind of fuzzy set of characteristics like what is a woman all right so I wrote this essay about this it gets to that kind of problem of Concepts like wittgenstein's what is a game yep right and if you demand the philosopher to give you a definition that fits everything it's impossible you know what is a chair it's a it's it's a little bit like that and you end up with well I kind of know when I see one or I am one when I feel that way something like that you can't perfectly Define it but it usually works for most cases yeah the edge cases being the exception so I talk about the evolution of sex and evolution of sexual desire and male female differences I I find that issues like what is a woman to be it's often used as sort of a political club by people on the right yeah you liberal okay you can't answer that simple question right apparently that question to answer the question is supposed to be adult female which seems like a terrible answer because why what's a female and right and then you know you say and whoa It's so obvious what is the answer have to do with the genitals or does it have to do the chromosomal structure because they go in different directions sometimes and all of a sudden things don't look so obvious after all and you're where you are now which is pointing out that categories can get complicated and people who observe the complexity of the categories are not are not you know necessarily crazy liberals docking serious questions they're just people thinking through things I guess it's the edge cases that push us to think rethink the concepts so let's talk about mental illness in that sense because you know this is uh defined by a set of characteristics you know what's a schizophrenic well or paranoid schizophrenic or a bipolar disorder and you know psychiatrists have this kind of list long list all right if you tick 20 of the 27 boxes then you're likely to be in this bin of paranoid schizophrenia something like that that's that's Again part of that kind of conceptual category yeah and and those categories are really contested so I review in my book this is the second last chapter right before I get to happiness because you got to end on a nice note but but I go through all of the the major mental disorders I talk about what their characteristics are and I talk about their treatments and and what causes them and so on and this sort of try to do the state of the art and Clinical Psychology I'm not a clinician so I got a sort of shout out not want to give their names but more than any other chapter I had experts in Clinical Psychology go over it you know if there's a mistake it's my fault but they but they they really really help me correct things um but but there's all your category questions now come in and here's two ways to put it one is when does normal end and mental illness begin and that's a very very important judgment you know a long quite a while ago but not so long ago um the American Psychological Association viewed being homosexual as a mental illness and and so normally that is an internal is worthy of treatment nobody sees it nobody seriously sees it that way anymore but things change um in the Soviet Union dissidents who are often viewed as mentally ill and how crazy would you be to to want to escape from this wonderful communist Paradise you know so the land is socially molded and then you get cases where debates about autism you know where where some people say at least some forms of autism someone call it high functioning aren't a disorder at all which is a different way of being cognitive diversity cognitive diversity neurodiversity right to be respected and my feeling on this is sort of mix I think I think back to most people who think about our have mixed feelings which is there are some cases where too quick to diagnose something as obsessive-compulsive disorder uh uh an uncomfortable personality type as mentally ill as opposed to a different way of being that in some circumstances leads to a better more productive life than people who don't have that um but then you get cases where so here's where I'm not radical here's where I'm sort of middle of the road and very much medical model which we are plainly disorders you know an autistic person who can't speak or cannot Maybe Can't toilet themselves um a schizophrenic who has bizarre hallucinations and and can't be trusted around other people an obsessive compulsive or or a phobic who can't leave their house these terrible cases the entirely on misery and that you got a treat would you treat um social addictions or whatever you call them like gambling social media addiction shopping addiction porn addiction in a medical model way because you in in a way it you know there's no problem with porn if no one cares that I do it but if I or drinking or whatever but if my spouse leaves me and takes the kids and I get fired from my job well I do have a problem yeah but that that we're using as a definition consequences in your life rather than something in my head yep and when they people Define mental disorder consequences are are a heavy part it has to cause some problems you know if you're a narcissist but you you rise to success and become president or something then then it's not clear what we fixed it's a purely hypothetical example purely hypothetical no no no president could ever be a narcissist um you know I don't know in those cases in some way let me try this out I'm not sure it matters where suppose you have a gambling addiction that's messing up your life well you're going to want to take steps to make that go away if you if you want you want you say this is terrible I can make it go away whether we call this fixing an illness or coaching you through a problem I'm not sure it makes much of a difference it may make a difference whether insurance companies pay for it but for these in-between cases maybe we just grant that they're fuzzy cases and um and then go ahead with there but but that doesn't something could be not an illness but um but could still benefit from treatment if I'm shy and find it difficult to give talk and my job requires I give talks um maybe I'd benefit from some coaching and some help and whether or not we call we say I suffer from an illness which is now being treated I don't think matters that much yeah I see our mutual friend John height just posted an essay this yesterday on you know kids these days uh is it really different than the rest of us older people saying kids these days back in previous generations and he yeah his answer is it is statistically so that would be a consequential thing that you know there's a spike in teenage anxiety and depression suicidal ideation cutting and so on morning girls and boys so there's a measurable difference but we're still using some kind of consequential criteria for deciding if social media is a problem or not I'm I'm not sure that that's a problem so there's a range of psychological phenomena and I'm not sure if it's a problem to say we're gonna Market we're gonna block these things off as illnesses if they cause distress in limits of functioning now it gets complicated because you might say what if it causes a stress and limits of functioning because of how the world is arranged um one issue which often comes up is that uh that kids get diagnosed of ADHD um because they're really bad at the age of like seven of sitting perfectly still in a chair for eight hours in glass you can say well what an insane thing to demand that they do so we treat them as if they have a mental illness well really it is society that is setting up these bizarre strictures so I I see that point but if there was no way to change society which isn't true but if there's no way to do it then you'd want to treat illness and then there's a second question by the way checking is very very theoretically interesting and I get to the end of the chapter and here's where sort of experts weigh in different ways which is there's two ways to construe these problems like schizophrenia or or major depression obsess muscle or uh um uh dissociative identity disorder one is a sort of punctate problems akin to getting coveted so it's not just a whole range from you've got a little bit of covet to know covet and so on or breaking a bone just you broke a bone you didn't break a bone there's some variation at bone break but it's not a continuum but arguably some of these things like major depression might just be there's really really happy there's happy there's him but there's okay and then there's sad you keep on going down the line and at some point society says why don't we call from here on in major depression um maybe addictions they're saying we have to draw the line somewhere like what's the drinking age that's right well you know it's a fuzzy continue that's right the law says it's that day right there yeah the day you turn 18. and in some way it's sort of arbitrary and there's no way around that you know if we're going to have a society where people you would decide who to get treatment or not so so psychiatrists in the diagnostic standard manual the big the Bible of mental disorders say I forget the exact number but in order to have depression major depression you have to be sad for you have to show symptoms for such and so number of days let's pretend it's 14. um then it makes sense like one one day wouldn't count you know by the time we get you an appointment it's already gone but there's nothing religious about 14 it could have been 15 it could have been 13. and so sometimes even for mental disorders that are pretty clear there's no um there's no objective cutoff it's a societal choice all right so let's shift into your final chapter happiness meaningfulness purposefulness and so on in the context of this and maybe throw in a little Behavior genetics to what extent can I control these sorts of things that happen to me let's just not use you know paranoid schizophrenia where there's obvious brain chemistry just neuroses or sadness or anxiety or whatever and I'm going to choose you know just to act differently I'm going to act happy I'm going to be an optimistic person can I do that and you know can I read the self-help books uh and go to Tony Robbins seminars and get myself all worked up and and change my life you know to what extent does that stuff actually work yes and no it's it's there's a couple of questions buried in there which have different answers so one question is can I through sheer force of will become an extrovert become happier become more conscientious probably not I don't think the system works that way can I make choices that then intervene and change my life that can affect me uh and improve my life the answer is probably yes in all sorts of ways sometimes the choices may be if I'm depressed I could go outside more get some sunshine force myself to socialize with friends that'll probably help me um if I'm extremely anxious there's pills I could choose to take and it's a choice you go you go to the interview bills and so in all sorts of ways we can fiddle with our happiness and our personality even our intelligence you want to raise your intelligence slightly take an extra year of school that gently bumps up the intelligence a few points so we have you know those numbers on the scale corresponding to personality intelligence how happy you are are to a large extent influenced by our genes to the largest and influenced by environmental factors we don't know anything about but I do think that there are ways which we can change them and I think that that's that's obviously one of the ways in which the science of psychology can have real human benefits but you can and cannot do yeah what's the name oh like Catherine page Harden right I I love that you used her work I had her on the podcast I read her book uh which I really loved but she she was talking something about the genes for divorce and I thought come on there can't be a jeans for divorce well no it's how temperament leads people to have a lot of conflict in a marriage and that more likely to leads to divorce and then she sort of confessed that she's in that category I said are you trying to tell me you're hard to live with she goes yeah it's really funny yeah um one of the one of the points that um her advisor actually Eric turkheimer May is that for any behavioral outcome any behavioral outcome there is a genetic influence on it and you see that's kind of crazy how could it be genes for divorce well learn jeans four specifically divorce divorce wasn't around when we evolved but um but there are genes for you know your your how much you'll how easily dissatisfied you are how open you are to new experiences how difficult you are to live with there's there's um I'm sure there's a genetic influence in high school basketball not because there's some genes with rewards high school basketball written on them because there's genes for height and strength and diligence and so on and so um so part of her Point she makes several good points part of the point is this point that genes affect every behavioral outcome sometimes to a small Liberty sometimes to a pretty big degree but another Point she makes which is really important is that the extent to which the genes affect the outcome often depends on society there's a simple example this isn't hers but she cites it um suppose people with red hair uh were shunned and weren't allowed to go to school and were treated poor gingers yeah they were tremendous discrimination against gingers now under this world certain genes that encoded for red here would also encode for unfortunate outcomes in life the minute Society changed and we say oh no more discrimination it all gone poof those genes were no longer in code for it right now that's a fancy folks now here's a real sound here's an English example um intelligence as measured by IQ tests has a tremendous influence on people's fate in life it is it is one of the best predictors of longevity wealth better you choose it and so the genes then code for intelligence encode for all of these things I think some of that's always going to happen I think no matter what world you're in being able to reason problem solve and so on is going to be beneficial to you if I was a hunter gathering at the theme of another hunter-gatherer I'd rather do one with a high intelligence and low intelligence but in modern day United States so much of society works by filtering people through a very small number of universities Elite universities that basically require very high scores on intelligence sets to get in they call them SATs whatever and from that filter those people go on to great stuff if you took away that system you will then change the heredity uh you changed the force of of of intelligence it was so suddenly no longer matter quite as much yeah you do cite the research um that on the Flint effect IQ scores are going up three points every 10 years for the last century or so well first of all that can't continue forever can it I think it stopped I think it stopped about 10 years ago yeah yeah yeah unless the society changed in some dramatic way I mean isn't the explanation that because we shifted from agriculture to Industry to information processing that the kind of tasks that the IQ test measures like rotating figures in space and abstract reasoning this is to that is this is to and then you got to pick the one those things are bet they are expressed more successfully in a society like an Information Age if it changed then that those wouldn't be important I don't know exactly know why the Flint effect happened there's a lot of debate about it some people say similar to what you're saying it's schooling that we've become we're in a world where abstraction becomes far more important than if you're like a farmer um but uh the point of the Flint effect is really powerful because it speaks to your original question which is the Philippine flag said very quickly our intelligence went up and up and up and this since this is way too quick for any genes to have changed it must be Environmental right um and this would counter then the Bell curve-like arguments that it's largely heritable and if there are group race group differences in particular then that's mostly accounted for by genetics this is showing that is not the case right it's very important to distinguish what we know for sure which is within a group certain traits are very heritable to jump to the conclusion that between group differences are very heritable so so take one example I used in my book is uh take height so you get a bunch of North Koreans within North Korea Heights pretty heritable taller parents will have taller kids within South Korea Height's pretty heritable taller parents have taller kids the difference between North Korea and South Korea a big difference in how tall people are because it is is has nothing to do with genes at all it's because people in North Korea are starving and have less food that are shorter and so so you have this perfect case where where the same genetic population goes up into two very different ways the between group difference is entirely Environmental um while a within group difference the word green group effects is is heritable and this is really important because I think the heritability of stuff is I think as as grounded science as will ever have it's very clear and in some way it's common sense it's true for physical traits nobody really doubts that tall parents tend to have tall kids and it's true for mental traits as well too many people say oh my God that can't be true but it's horrible if it were true or boy I hope it's true because they believe that this entails that differences between Asians and blacks and whites and Jews that has to be genetic too but they're totally different explanations yeah that makes sense that's perfect okay what if psychologists discovered about what I can do I can choose to do to lead a better life and and and what does that even mean a good life happiness fulfillment meaningfulness purposefulness how are you operationally define those and what are the factors that nudge them up or down so that's so in some way that's that's the question of them all what's a good life and as a psychologist I have no expertise I just you know studied the mind and I've run experiments I've made the case um drawing upon a lot of different work and and in my last book The Sweet Spot for sort of pluralist view on the good life where a good life is one involving pleasure but also involving meaning involving social connections involving morality um and if you starve that assumption now we can then ask what correlates with these things and um certainly for for pleasure and for a lot of these other things um here's I'll tell you the least the least surprising finding at all of Happiness research people with more money are happier there was a period where people were denying that and I know where you give lessons my God you might think money makes you happy but it doesn't but no money makes you happy and of course it makes you happy it buys stuff you know it buys food it buys it buys Freedom it buys time with your friends it buys Health Care by safety it buys you know it buys a lot of things happier there's diminishing returns you know at a certain point if you're got a 150 000 it's not a ten thousand dollars won't make much of a difference well if you got twenty thousand dollars it could make the world of difference and rich countries are happier than than poor countries for the same reasons um social connections matter a lot it was a science paper that said the the health effects of being um lonely are about the same as obesity and smoking you know you gotta have people around there are some surprises um surprisingly there are not any sort of systematic sex differences in happiness it's kind of surprising because in some way men die younger men are much more likely to get addicted to things much more likely to be both the perpetrators and victims of violence women are more likely to suffer from depression anxiety but maybe it all kind of washes out because it's about the same um religion has a complicated relationship to happiness and here's an area which I think you know a lot a lot about in in religious countries like the United States there's a positive correlation more religious people are happier but um religious countries on a whole are less happy than more atheistic countries and they do less well and they do less well than it is but every every measure you could look at um some of that religious effect I think is due to probably factors into the social networking part they just have more if you're just going with your spouse every Sunday to the group and it doesn't matter what they're talking about you know they have uh you know music and singing and free checking afterwards and you know and so it's a social thing you get some of the benefits I think that's exactly right in the studies support that so the studies find out they do these studies where it says what exactly determines how happy you are and the answer isn't how much you read the Bible how much you believe in the Divinity of Jesus Christ how much you go to sin how much how much you read to Torah whatever it's how often do you participate you know the way somebody put it I forget it was a researcher put it you know a stone cold atheist who goes to church services a lot to please his wife say who's religious we'll get as much of a happiness boost as the truest believer it is very social yeah yeah yeah one of the one of the yeah the other thing about that on the money issue I always when that first came out that research I thought oh boy conservatives are going to use this to to combat the idea of higher income tax don't you worry you're pretty in about that money stuff it's not going to make you any happier just ignore the yacht that I just bought that's right because I'm not any happier than you yeah you don't want hey buddy I'll take the yacht and deal with my depression you'll deal with the consequences of it yeah one of the cool findings which was gonna which just becomes increasingly relevant to all of us when we um when we age is that is a sort of surprising u-shaped pattern in happiness where you're pretty happy when you're when you're young 18 whatever and it drops and you get like 50 50 52 you're at the bottom of Happiness on average and then it goes back up why is that do you think I'm not sure I it could be um a sort of Shifting of priorities it could be um it could be that once you pass a certain point you're you're in some way your mileage may vary different different people out of a certain rat race and you're focusing sort of um David Brooks has a nice nice line you're focusing Less on a sort of resume virtues and more on eulogy virtues you know less trying to make a lot of money less trying to get that top position less competing for mates and more trying to focus on relationships and and being a good person maybe maybe being more moral but as your priorities shift they drive you to sort of more social connectedness and so on but but I don't really know why that's that's kind of a guess but weirdly enough people in their 80s pretty happy sort of up until bad Health really catches up to them maybe it's like in your 40s and 50s you're still in the rat race and you're grinding along feeling like you're not doing enough you know the fear of missing left being left out or whatever uh that sort of hedonic treadmill you're never going to catch up and then maybe at some point in your 60s or 70s you oh it whatever I'm I am where I am I'm just gonna live the rest of it uh yeah I think I think the point may be in auxiliary then exhilarating jump and happiness was that I'm out of the game yeah yeah exactly I think the point about just on the money issue a little bit I think the you mentioned the kind of the buying of your freedom or autonomy time mostly you don't have to think about money if you have enough that's a good point yeah I forget which Economist said this but you know the poor have to think about money all the time you know every day how am I going to make my payments at the end of the month and you know at some point in in my life when I didn't have to worry about that anymore I I just sort of realize I'm not worried about money anymore this is great now I I don't have expensive Hobbies I just buy a new bicycle every three years or so that's about it if I was buying race cars I'd probably be constantly worried about money because I don't make enough to do that but if you figure out whatever it is that you do that is fine and you're fulfilled with it and you don't have to worry about money then that that to me is the value of it like my wife and I were on a vacation recently we were in Cambria and she wanted to stay another day you know hey can we afford stay at this hotel this really nice hotel an extra night I'm like I don't know I guess so whatever I don't care just just do it whereas before you know 20 years ago I've been oh I don't know and let me check my budget and you know and it's that you know it doesn't really matter what it is it's just not having to worry about that yeah and that ends up with some interesting life advice which is because I think you're right I think a reasonable goal is not to care about money so there's two ways to get to that point one is get a lot a lot of money another one is so to orchestrate your life so that you don't need as much money in order to get to that state so if all of a sudden you built your race car habit and it became absolutely Central to you now you're setting yourself up to be very unhappy because you have to generate a lot more yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's like I always say if I won the lottery you know what would you do different if you won the lottery and the answer is pretty much nothing I'd be doing almost everything I'm doing except I would want to fly private I'd want my own jet because I've had friends that do this where you drive right up out of the tarmac you pull up next to the when you get out you walk Under the Stairs like oh man but the few times that that I uh well I never pay for flying first class but but when I have done it when somebody else is paying or whatever and I look to see what it would have cost you know like ten thousand dollars to fly to Europe first class or whatever you get to the other end it's like I could have just bought a brand new carbon fiber Tour de France level racing bike for what I just did and I'm off the plane it's over yeah I got nothing to show for yeah I agree I'm less I just want enough money to always fly window seat I could pay the extra money to move never gets stuck in the middle again [Laughter] yeah okay so just kind of wrapping up um so the point I guess is that maybe happiness is not the right word I've always didn't like that word because it kind of suggests that you're walking around with a beatific smile on your face but that isn't the point right it's just that just have meaning and purpose and joy and I don't know what the all the adjectives would be there's a lot of versions of this but the philosopher Robert nozick um talks about the experience machine where you plug into a machine and you live the life of your dreams and you don't know you're plugged in machine the system you're in it's some version of Matrix and and but you're just lying there the rest of your life a lump they feed you with a tube or something and you imagine this wonderful life full of the greatest pleasure and so on and some people say just strap me in plug me in but I think a lot of people say no I don't want to just think I did great things I want to do great things I don't want to think I'm in fulfilling relationship I wouldn't be in fulfilling relationships I don't want to leave the world and to the extent one has that intuition to suggest that pleasure isn't enough right yeah remember when uh Cass sunstein was hired by Obama to be a czar of whatever it was behavioral choice or something like that if if if President Biden called you and said we'd like you to design some government programs to increase the happiness and purposefulness of Americans you know what would you recommend I mean do I don't know just taking some examples maybe more income redistribution to you know because the poor really do have to worry about this so we should raise everybody up or Universal basic income or I don't know Universal Health Care so people don't have to worry about health care payments something like that all of those things would make people happier but they all involve consequences right so Universal Health Care you know involves a lot of people changing their jobs and a lot of people being unhappy and so on income redistribution has you know could have people leaving the country there's there's I don't have any easy answers to that um I'd very carefully read what John height has said about social media because social media has had a profound role on on on our happiness for better or worse and so I'd be interested in that but my first impulse is um not to immediately change laws and tell people to do stuff to make them happier but maybe to set up situations where people had more opportunity and more choices yeah maybe the sunstein example is good you nudge people that's right you know just give tax breaks for not smoking or you know whatever that's right I'm I'm a big believer in the logic of of the nudge particularly as as an alternative to some sort of coercion yeah yeah I mean governments do this all the time right I get a tax break for being married I get a tax break for having a kid I get a tax break for owning a home so apparently the government does want me to do certain things to charity that's right yeah yeah yeah so we're already doing this anyway this is sunstein's point why not do it intelligently yeah and I think I use people like you that know what you're talking about at least based on the latest findings all right Paul love the book psych thank you very much the story of the human mind you're always working on uh new projects what's next on your either research or writing agenda I'm planning to write a book on perverse actions why we do things why we do things we know are wrong it's a very fun topic and it's been in my head for years and I just decided when I get started on that I started thinking about this oh my God what would that be what would an example of a perverse the very classic example comes from Saint Augustine so Saint Augustine's it writes the confessions like 1600 years ago and um and he begins a chapter saying I want to talk to you about my most insane carnal desires and he doesn't talk about sex he talks about about this one case where he and his friend go into an orchard and they steal some pairs and what freaked Augustine out was they didn't eat the Paris they threw him to pigs they and they said Well why'd I do this he said I wanted to do something bad I just want to say and it goes tries to so I I set up this um this uh thing online called a perversity project where I got people to send me stories about their perverse actions and those stories will form the basis for this book oh my God you must have get something oh I got some I got some incredible ones some of them not safe for work but but really really interesting things this is like when bus did that survey on you know have you ever thought about killing somebody you didn't like and then write out your answers oh my God what people were thinking like holy crap yes yes asking people to transcend you their deepest thoughts is always a risky risky thing yeah that sounds great all right Paul thank you for your work and your friendship and for coming my pleasure thank you for having me again as always that was a great conversation really one of the best that was really good

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 14,324

Keywords: Michael Shermer, Skeptic, cognitive neuroscience, consciousness, depression, emotions, human nature, intelligence, language, memory, mental illness, mind, neuroscience, psychology, Science Salon, sex, Sigmund Freud, The Michael Shermer Show, Paul Bloom

Id: gG_KhpDH744

Length: 120min 42sec (7242 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 28 2023