The last time we talked, I started to walk
you through the nervous system a little bit and we started with the monkey business illusion,
and one of the things that's really remarkable about the monkey business illusion is that--and
change blindness illusions in general--is that demonstrate to you just to what degree
you could either describe yourself as blind or focused. And I think focused is actually better than
blind. You know, a laser beam doesn't cover much
area, but it really illuminates what it strikes. And people are sort of like that, we're really
beamed into a single point and there's something metaphysically spectacular about that, I think,
because that single point that we're narrowed down to is in some sense the thing that writes
the world, you know, because as we interact with the world we're able to turn it one way
or another in all sorts of complicated ways. And, I mean, I know our powers of doing so
are obviously constrained to a substantial degree, but by the same token, that focal
point of concentration enables us to interact with the world and then, at least seemingly,
to change it according to our will. It's like we take a future that's potential,
we interact with it at a focal point, and then it transforms itself into a past that's
in some sense fixed and real. So that's pretty strange. So I guess you don't want to underestimate
the utility of a point. I want to talk to you a little bit first more
about what you're blind to and then what the consequences of that are. So, this here is a little diagram of a computer,
believe it or not--a conceptual diagram of a computer--and it's predicated on... I'll tell you a quick story. If I've told you this story please stop me,
but I don't think I've told you guys this story. So one day back in about 1987 I was working
on my computer and I was typing some long essay in DOS and, you really had to back up
in those days because the programs didn't do any back up for you and so if the program
shut off and you hadn't been super careful you were just going to lose all of it. And so that's what happened--I was typing
when the computer went off and so, I had an emotional reaction to that. Right, now an emotional reaction to that is
kind of an interesting event because, I would say that you're not even working with the
computer until it quits. And the reason I would say that is because,
if you think about it, when the computer is functioning the fact that it's an extraordinarily
complicated device is basically irrelevant to you. What you're working with, roughly speaking,
is the screen, but not really, not even the screen. You're working with maybe a phrase or even
the word that's presented on the screen. You know, you're typing the word/phrase/sentence/paragraph/essay,
and only out past that domain of consideration do you start thinking about the hardware technology
that underlies what you're doing. You don't want to think about that at all. When something's working, you don't have to
see it. And so that gives you a clue as to consciousness. Consciousness is an error detecting and correcting
phenomena, and you're not conscious of things that are going well. You know, which might explain to some degree
why a lot of our life seems to be made up of suffering. If things are going well, it isn't exactly
like you're happy if things are going well, you just don't notice when they're going well. Sometimes if they unexpectedly go well, then
that makes you happy. But otherwise it's just the same old thing,
even if it's amazing. I was--yesterday--I was eating breakfast with
my son and I was complaining about the fact that I had to eat canned-smoked tuna because
I don't really like fish, but I have to eat fish for a variety of different reasons. And I thought, Jesus, what're you complaining
about? I mean, really, do you know what a tuna is
like? Those things are like small whales, right;
they weigh like 600 pounds, they're impossible to catch. So there's some poor characters out there
hauling in tuna, which is impossible--and then they have to clean them and freeze them
and smoke them and can them--and all I have to do is go to the store and pick up this
can of tuna and then I can complain about it for breakfast. It's really quite staggering, the fact that
I can ever eat tuna is a complete bloody miracle. But it's not the sort of thing that makes
me happy because I just expect that. Which is very pathetic, but that's how it
goes. So anyways, back to the computer. So, it stops working--well, and that's what
I would say I notice the computer. And there's nothing more annoying then noticing
a computer when you're in the middle of writing an essay because, what the hell do you know
about computers? Nothing. What're you going to do? Turn it on and off? Well that's like problem solving process number
1. It usually works--thank god--but if it doesn't
work you're into either the software or the hardware. So anyways, I turned it on and off and that
didn't work, and so then I turned on a light to see if I could see if something had happened
at the back of it. But the light didn't go on so I thought, aha,
the power probably went out or I blew a fuse, so I went out to see if the fuse was burnt
out, but it wasn't. And then I noticed that all the power in the
house was off, and then I noticed that--I went outside to go to the corner store to
get something, I don't remember what, and when I went outside I noticed that all the
streetlights were off. And then the entire power grid in Montreal
was out. And then the entire power grid for like half
of Quebec was out. And a big chunk of Eastern North America. And do you know why? Have I told you this story? Good. Because there was a solar flare. And so the sun is a big hydrogen bomb, right. So I don't know if you guys know this--a cheerful
piece of information for you if you need to be cheered up--but if you happened to have
a hydrogen bomb and you exploded it--you know a hydrogen bomb has an atom bomb for its trigger,
did you guys know that? You need to know that because it's important. Because an atom bomb is a big thing, but it's
just a trigger for a hydrogen bomb, so a hydrogen bomb is unimaginably bigger than an atom bomb. Anyways, if you blew a hydrogen bomb in the
atmosphere over Central North America, you could probably wipe out maybe all of the electronic
equipment in the entire continent permanently. Because what happens is when a hydrogen bomb
goes off, there's an electromagnetic burst, and as the propagates it'll hit your electronic
equipment and propagate across the wires and produce a big spike in current, voltage I
think, and it'll just blow it. So your cars won't work, your tractors won't
work, your subways won't work, your cars won't work, your computers won't work, your satellites
won't work. It's like, done. And also, just to cheer you up even more,
back in the late 1800s, I think it was the 1860s, there was this--oh let's go back to
the sun. So the sun's a big hydrogen bomb and now and
then it freaks out and emits a big solar flare, which is something that's gone wrong on the
sun. And maybe it blows out this solar flare almost
to the orbit of mercury, and then that burst of radiation comes zooming towards earth and
then 9 minutes later it hits and, if it's a decent electromagnetic pulse it'll wipe
out the power grid in Quebec. And that's what happened. So the reason my computer didn't work is because
the sun was misbehaving. And so, I like that. It was very illuminating to me because it
just shows you how many things need to be stacked on top of each other, working perfectly
for some thing that you're doing to actually function. So anyways, back in the late 1800s in the
1860s, there was a massive solar flare and it produced a bust of power on telegraph lines
and it lit some telegraph operators on fire. And so this does happen--it happens about
once a century, and we just missed one last year. So while you're worrying about global warming
you can be considering the much higher probability that a solar flare will knock out all of our
electronics and send us back to like 1860. So the point is that, first of all, there's
a lot of things going on to make up an object that you don't detect with your vision. You never think that the reason the computer
works is because the sun is acting properly. But it is of course the case that endless
number of things have to be stabilized that you don't see. And you might say, well the sun isn't part
of the computer but well, that's wrong. It's not part of the computer in some sense
when it's behaving, but as soon as it stops behaving it's instantly part of the computer. So here we've got--you might say, well let's
say the power hadn't gone out and the computer stopped working. Well then you might think, well I'll never
buy that brand again. And maybe the brand is associated with operation
in some country where corruption is rife and things are made improperly and the parts don't
work very well. So you might think, well I made a stupid purchase
decision. And of course that's connected to the political
system of that place and the economy. And then weird little things can happen down
at the micro level as well as the macro level. So computer chips have now got so small--you
know they have little wires in them right, the chips--the wires are now so small that
because of quantum uncertainty. So quantum uncertainty basically tells you
that you can't really tell where an electron is if you want to know how fast it's going. And you can't tell how fast it's going if
you want to know where it is. But more than that it says you can't really
know where the thing is, and so what that means is that once you get your wire short
enough, some of the electrons might not be in the wires where they're supposed to be,
and they actually cause short circuits. So that's another issue. There's other levels of reality that are micro
levels that you can't detect at all. So there's macro levels that are way beyond
you, you know, political systems, economic systems, biological systems, physical systems
outside of that. And then there are these Microsystems layered
all the way down, and things can go wrong at any one of those levels and a lot of that
is invisible to us. The same thing happens when something goes
wrong with you. It's like, what's wrong with you? Maybe you're malfunctioning at the molecular
level. Your DNA isn't working properly so you get
cancer. Or maybe some virus which is even smaller
than the DNA comes in and takes up residence and that's really not so good. Or maybe you're eating something wrong and
you have an organ malfunction. Or maybe your family's screwed up and you're
stressed half to death and the reason they're screwed up is because you live in, let's say
a society that's not friendly to your particular immigrant type, and so the real reason that
you're sick is because of people's inability to get along with one another. And so on and so forth and so on. And so god only knows where you're supposed
to focus. But, focus we do. And one of the things that motivation allows
you to do is to figure out what you're going to focus on. Now you think, god, there's all these things
to focus on. There's an infinite number of things to focus
on. How in the world do you ever figure out how
to focus on anything? Well the answer to that is evolution, fundamentally. You can view evolution in the following way. You can kind of think about the background
of reality--I think the best way to think about it is as this interplay of patterns,
complex patterns sort of like music. And those patterns are always changing in
a sort of dynamic way, and they exist at multiple levels, just like complex music does. So then imagine that what you're trying to
do is to dance to the music, to align yourself to the music. And it keeps changing on you so, well, what
do you do? Well if you can change then you can change
the music. But if you can't change then that's it. You're not dancing anymore. Okay, so let's assume that there's two ways
of solving that problem. One way is just sheer number. You're a single celled organism or a mosquito
and you don't have that much neurocapacity for transformation and so you don't know what
the melody is going to be when you lay your eggs if you're a mosquito and so you produce
like a million eggs and some of them can dance to the current beat and the others can't,
and so they all die. And so that's what happens over the course
of evolution for a very very long time. The melody keeps changing and then what creatures
do is propagate a whole variety of variants of themselves, and in the case of small animals
or fish even or crayfish or that sort of thing, they just overproduce offspring like mad in
hope that one of them can dance to the current tune. And then you know, we get three and a half
billion years later, roughly speaking, here we all are and what we've got is this dynamic
nervous system. And it enables us to take an external pattern
and map it to a neurological pattern, or multiple neurological patterns--because we can interpret
things, right--and then to output that to multiple behavioural patterns. And so in some sense, what we've done is we're
internalised the process of evolutionary variation into ourselves. And the more complex, roughly speaking, the
more layers your nervous system has--imagine there's a pattern on your skin, and then that's
interpreted by a pattern of nerves, and then those nerves have an output, they're sensory
nerves we'll say, and then those have an output to motor nerves, and then those have an output
to muscles. That's you, roughly. You're maybe a four-layer thing in that regard. But then you grow all these extra layers of
neural tissue, so that the layers are hundreds of cells thick. Hundreds of layers thick. And then you can map a whole bunch of patterns
in the external world onto a whole bunch of patterns in the neural world and then onto
a whole bunch of patterns in the motor world, and so that makes you dynamically adaptable. But you learned all that through this incredibly
painful process of evolution which basically consisted of the death of like 99.999 percent
of everything that ever lived. Species and individuals alike. Now, why is that relevant? Well, how do you figure out how to focus in
on something? Well, a big part of that is actually--let's
see how we do it. Well first of all, what are you focusing in
on here? Well not poisonous snakes, and rampaging lions
and chimpanzees. Because they're not in here. And the reason they're not in here, roughly
speaking, is because you live in a culture that's very very highly advanced and it's
got walls like mad. This is a--Carcassonne I think, a French city,
medieval city. It still exists. Beautiful city. You see how the medieval people solved this
problem. It's like, well you can't deal with much. Well what do you do? Build some walls, keep a bunch of stuff out. You don't have to worry about the rampaging
barbarians then because they just can't get in. And so a lot of the reason that you can handle
the insane complexity of the world is because it's not even neurological. It has virtually nothing to do with your physiology. It's just that you're in a university. And the university is protected by the city
and the city is protected by the province and the province is protected by the country
and the country is protected by all of its multiple entanglements. You're inside walls inside walls inside walls
inside walls and so on. Your world's pretty simple. You can just sit there in relative warmth
and comfort and not have to worry about anything. And so there's one solution: there's a cultural
solution. Then inside the cultural solution obviously
there's architectural solutions of various sorts. And then there's political and economic institutions
that are pretty stable, and they keep you from having to deal with chaos. I mean you can see that chaos breaking out
a little bit in the previous weeks, in the American election. Because the trump people and the left wingers
are going at it at the Trump rallies. And you can see that's just tinder, that could
just blow up at any point and all of that protection that's there because all of these
very complex games that we've agreed to play--like the democracy game--that just all flies by
the wayside. And all of a sudden you have to contend with
what people are like, and that is not something you want to do. There's people, man--they're capable of anything. Which is good, but also really bad. Well then the next thing is, you've got a
body. Now that's where the evolutionary process
really kicks in. And so the reason your body is the way it
is, roughly speaking, is because it's mimicked the external environment. Just like Piaget talks about children using
their bodies to mimic the external environment voluntarily, you know, your body is set up
through this evolutionary process so that you can focus on precisely that subset of
things that seems to keep something like you going for long enough for you to make another
one of something that's more or less like you. And it only really works for about a hundred
years. That's pretty much where it tops out. And so you don't solve the problem very well. You don't solve the problem of radical complexity
very well. But you solve it well enough so that you live
long enough to reproduce, speaking strictly biologically. And that appears to be good enough. And part of the reason why you seem to expire,
because you might think, well if I--why don't people just live for like 500 years instead
of 100 years? Because you'd think that someone who could
continue to reproduce for 200 years instead of 100 years would have it all over for someone
who could only manage it for 50 years, say. Turns out that your genes have a better time
of it if you just put them into a new body and shuffle off this mortal coil so you're
not using up too many resources while your children and grandchildren are trying to survive. And so that's an evolutionary solution. Death is not technically inevitable. There are creatures that are roughly immortal. Goldfish, for example, which is really annoying. It's like, really? Goldfish? Because they're a carp and carp basically
just keep growing. It isn't obvious that they senesce or age--they
get killed because they get diseases and these sort of thing, but there are 300 or 400 year
old carp. And some turtles seem to not age really. And then of course your DNA has been there
ever since life started, so it doesn't really age either. And it corrects itself. So things can last a very very long time. But not us. Anyways, we're put inside this body that frames
things for us and starts narrowing things down. And our psychophysiological selves have a
limited range of interests and desires and needs--however you want to construe that--and
then that gets instantiated more into the nervous system. It's a mistake to think--people always think
your brain is in your head, and that's really not a very bright way of thinking about it. I don't know exactly why we think that way
because, well there's the nervous system--you can see it right there. There's a lot of your nervous system that's
not in your head. The motor and sensory systems are distributed
throughout your body. Your spine is smart enough so that if it gets
severed and we put you over top of a treadmill--suspend you--you can walk. You don't know you're walking and you can't
control it, but your legs will do a perfectly good job of walking without you being involved
at all. So your spine is brain tissue for all intents
and purposes. Your brain is distributed through your body. And so, it's evolved so that it's pretty good
at going around specifying what it needs. And so we talked about the hypothalamus the
other day and how it accounts for what I called sub-personalities that are motivated towards
particular ends. And those ends are obviously the things that
we would identify as fundamental biological necessities. But then they transform themselves as we interact
socially into more and more complex fundamental biological necessities. It's a tricky thing because people talk about
needs as if they're biologically instantiated, like they're the fundamental building elements
of motivation. But it's not really that obvious, because
you might say, well being hungry is a biological need but being a doctor isn't. Well, not really because if you do end up
being a physician you pretty much solve the food acquisition problem permanently, right. So it's just a higher order manifestation
of the same thing. And it's higher order because instead of just
eating once you eat every day for the next 40 years. And instead of just feeding you, you feed
you and your family and maybe some other people too. So, thinking of that as something that isn't
rooted in biologically is not accurate. It's kind of a continuous complexification. From the simple local time-bound immature
subpersonalities that can only fulfill themselves in this moment and with help, to the development
of those circuits--which I would say is your personality--that are capable of providing
you with what you need in order to live and to be attracted to other people across very
large spans of time. It's like a tree, you know. It's a like a tree expanding upward. It's a good metaphor. Alright, so that's fine. Motivation sets up your perceptual frame. And so people often talk about motivation
as if it's a drive or a need--not as if those terms are particularly well-defined. A drive I suppose is a deterministic sequence
of motor outputs, something like that. But it's not accurate because the motivation
actually specifies what you look at. It specifies right what you see. And then it specifies as well what you're
going to respond to emotionally. So just imagine this, say I'd offered a 10,000
dollar prize to the person who counts the number of basketballs correctly. And then you're doing your best to count the
number of basketballs in the monkey illusion and then somebody stands up in front of you
like this, and blocks your view. Well what emotion are you going to feel? It's a negative emotion, right? In all likelihood. And so that might be anxiety, because you're
not going to win. It might be fear--it's like anxiety because
you're not going to win, but also like--fear because what the hell is this crazy person
doing. Anger. Right, that's another negative emotion, although
there's a positive attack element to it. Frustration, disappointment, maybe some grief--a
whole undifferentiated mess of negative emotions. Well why? Well, in some sense the motivational system
specifies the map and the goal. It's a little more complicated than that because
it also specifies where you are. But you can think about it as a map with a
destination. That's why stories are like that, because
we inhabit them. A map's like that all the time. And then what emotions do, roughly speaking,
is tell you whether or not things are going the way you want them to as you're on that
path. And so the emotions in some sense have to
have a motivational specification before they're properly functional. Like, what should you get angry at. Well generally you get angry at things that
either interfere with your progression towards a valued goal or upset the entire sub-personality
that contains the goal itself. That's a more--what could you call it--that's
a more serious failure. It's one to fail when you're trying to do
something, it's another thing to fail so hard you have to give up the whole project. We would rather just fail at some sub-element
than have to give up the whole project, right. It's one thing to fail an exam, it's another
thing to fail at university. And I think the reason for that--I thought
about that for a long time--why is it worse to fail out of university, assuming you want
to be in university, than it is to fail an exam? How does your brain compute that? Because you can't tell all the consequences,
right, so it's not self evident. But it seems to me that it's something like,
you think about these functional sub-personalities as having a temporal and spatial range of
application. So if you're a university student you're sort
of stabilized for four years. Wherever you go, people say "what do you do?" and you can say "I’m a university student." And everybody's happy about that. From an economic perspective it's probably
worse than being unemployed, in some sense, but you can't just go tell people that you're
unemployed and then you have a nice little high-status slot in society. It doesn't work that way. But you can do that as a university student,
you know, so it fulfills your social obligations and it makes you feel like you're doing something
at least vaguely useful--I mean apart from the learning and all the other things that
are positive about it. So what happens is that that map basically
covers that space and time--the time is four years and the space is everywhere you go during
those four years. Then if that map burns up it's like you're
exposed on all fronts for that entire four year period. And that might even be the two years previously. For example--strange to think that, but if
you bail out of university half way through your third year, you've also destructured
the map that you used to organize your memories, in some sense, of the previous two and a half
years. Because first of all they were the memories
of somewone who was doing just fine and going through university, and now all of a sudden
they're the memories of someone who failed. Those aren't the same memories. And so it's weird that an error can alter
the past, but it can and often does. I mean any relationship breakup that's of
any significance will do exactly the same thing, especially if you were betrayed, right. It's like, it's not just the present and the
future that dissolve into chaos and take you on a little trip to the underworld. It's also your revision--the necessity of
revising your past. So anyways, so then I would say well--failing
a class--well the class restructures you in some sense and focuses you for a certain subset
of the general going-to-university map. So it's going to be less traumatizing to do
poorly on a class than it is to fail out of university because the amount of space and
time that those respective maps covers differs. So what you're trying to do always is to lay
out a functional game--that's a good way of thinking about it--on the space-time territory
that you inhabit. And if you understand that then you can start
to understand a little bit about emotions. Now, okay, I have to put a little coda in
there and that's: motivations and emotions are not technical terms. They're sort of like id and ego. They're terms that you can use to structure
a debate. I showed you the hypothalamus and you see
it's made out of all those little nuclei--they're not the same, so you can't say that every
part of the hypothalamus is doing something that you can fit into a class: motivation. And motivations and emotions overlap, so,
I would say hunger--some of them oversee more purely motivation. If you have an unsettling altercation with
someone, it tends not to make you hungry. Whereas it might make you angry, it might
make you happy, it might make you sad. So hunger is something that seems to pop up
one of these maps and then emotions guide your way through it or tell you where you
are on it. But then you have complex motivation-emotions
like pain, and also anger. Because pain has a goal in it, right--get
away. Or stop, or get away--it's usually get away--but
it also has an emotional feeling, right. It feels bad. So it feels like an emotion, pain. Grief is like pain. Disappointment is like pain. Loneliness is like pain. And I mean this technically--all of those
things can be addressed rather successfully with opiates, by the way. So technically they're the same. But pain--is being hurt an emotion? Well people will say that, "well I feel hurt." Whatever. And anger is another one of those that's sort
of ambivalent because anger has a goal, right: remove obstacle. Remove or destroy obstacle. In a sense, that's the goal of anger. But people talk about it as an emotion. So we're oversimplifying. But it doesn't matter because it's a useful
oversimplification and that's sort of what a theory is: a useful oversimplification. Alright, so 
I kind of laid out what I think are the basic motivations there. Hunger, thirst, pain, anger, thermoregulation--you
don't want to be too hot or too cold--panic or escape, affiliation or care, sexual desire,
exploration, play. And you can kind of divide those into self-maintenance
motivations and self-propagation motivations, roughly speaking. Sort of just a way to keep track of them. And then emotions--so the hypothalamus is
involved in a lot of that. It's not the only thing but it's involved
in a lot of that. And so here's sort of how I've conceptualized
one of these maps. And we've seen this thing before. You're at point A because if you're using
a map, or if you're in a game, there's a starting point or you're a player--either way there's
you there--and then you're going somewhere and you have to do something to get there. Okay, so that's the little map, and maybe
you have to go make a peanut butter sandwich or you have to go turn the thermostat down
or you need to call your friend or whatever. But it's the same kind of structure that you're
using in all those different situations. And they switch, you know. Now you're finished being hungry. Now you're thirsty. Then you're lonesome. It's like Sisyphus. It's one damn thing after another, roughly
speaking. And so that's what keeps you alive. And you have to be chasing things all the
time because your natural tendency is to run out of fuel and decay. That's entropy--you have to fight that. And so that's a continual battle because you're
pretty organized and it's really hard for something that organized to just stay organized. It's a lot easier--there's a million ways
to mess up your room. There's like one way to clean it. Or maybe 10, you get the point. And it's the same with anything that's extraordinarily
complex. There's not that many ways it can stay in
order and there's a lot of ways it can fall apart. That's why you're running all the time on
a treadmill. You're fighting the second--is it the second
law of thermodynamics. Is entropy the second law of thermodynamics? I think so. That's a major one, so good luck in your scrap. Because you're going to need it. So these little underlying biological systems
pop up the primary maps and then those are elaborated upwards into maps that are more
and more complicated. And the more and more complicated maps maybe
solve two problems at the same time for a week. Or they solve 10 problems at the same time
for 20 years. That's why you want a job or a career: a whole
bunch of problems are solved immediately as soon as you're employed. I mean, you have some other problems, but
that's inescapable anyways. Okay so you're inside one of these so you're
always motivated. You're always running around after something. And that's another thing to know too because
the basic state of human beings is not quiescence, you know. You're not napping in front of a fireplace. If you're not pursuing something that you're
motivated to pursue, then generally what you're doing if figuring out how to pursue other
things that you're motivated to pursue. And that's exploration. And so if you're not actively motivated by
biological necessity, we'll say for the sake of simplicity, then the next motivation kicks
in, which is well, prepare for the next time that you are so motivated. And that really accounts for our capacity
to explore. We're always zooming around the world trying
to figure out what to do with it next, you know. Acquiring more information or--even when we're
entertaining ourselves because we're almost always looking at stories when we entertain
ourselves. We're still acquiring information that has
functional significance and so attractive to us that we find it innately rewarding just
to observe that sort of thing. It's even in strange situations, like people
will go to horror movies. What's wrong with them? Why do you want to go and get scared? Or disgusted? Because that's horror, right--fear and disgust. Plain uncertainty horror movies like The Blair
Witch Project, that's pretty much all fear. And then the slasher movies and that sort
of thing, that's pretty much all disgust. And you might say, well why bother exposing
yourself to that. And part of it is: to get over it. You know, it's exposure. Because life has terrifying elements and it
has disgusting elements, and you're going to have to learn to maintain yourself in the
face of that. Certainly illness is going to challenge your
capacity to deal with disgust. There's any number of reasons to be terrified
so, you go to movies and you practice facing it. And you observe that you can. I mean there's other motivations too, but
those are sort of the healthy ones that go along with people wanting to expose themselves
to dangerous situations. So even in that you see exploration and preparation
for what's going to happen next. And the exploratory circuit is a very very
fundamental circuit. It's also hypothalamically mediated. So, the way the hypothalamus works--it's quite
cool--is that, on one hand it pops up all these little maps that you can occupy that
have their core in, we'll say, biological necessity--so roughly Freud's id--but when
those things all shut down because they're satiated, that's a technical term by the way--satiated,
it means satisfied--it's a form of reward. So it's sort of how you feel after you've
eaten a good meal and you're in a warm room and your friends are around you and maybe
you go to sleep if it's your family. Because--I'm thinking of thanksgiving or something
like that--everything is just taken care of and so you fall asleep. That's satiation. You can see that in animals all the time because
they spend a lot of time satiated. Dogs: they sleep a lot. Cats: they sleep a lot. Because they've already attacked their cat
food and so that's pretty much it for the day. Human beings, we tend not so much to enter
into states of satiation. Now what happens when you're in one of those
little units--one of those little motivated things--there's a couple of things that can
happen. [Muttering]. Okay so we talked about motivations as sort
of setting up this little frame. And then we can talk about emotions. So, there you are going somewhere. And there's this little straight line that'll
take you there, this nice efficient way to get there. Now why do you want to do it efficiently? Well, because you use up the least amount
of resources like that so you can maintain some resources for doing the next thing you
need to do. So you care about efficiency and simplicity. So you want to go like the crow flies to the
destination. So then, what happens along the way? Well, let's say you just get to go straight. Well basically what happens is that you're
motivated by your perception of the goal or intermediary goals because the goal can be
linked together, and then as long as things are going according to plan, as you move towards
the goal in an untrammelled way you're going to feel mild positive emotion. And the reason for that is that you're turning
the environment--the environment almost never has... most of it (the environment) is irrelevant. The rest of it has a positive or negative
valence. And if things are going according to plan
it has a mild positive valence, right. You think things are okay, and really what
you're doing is you're observing two things. You're observing that the things that should
be happening, if you know what you're doing while you're acting, are happening. And so each step forward is an indication
that you're getting closer to your goal. That's incentive reward. And that's the sort of reward that you actually
think of as fun. An incentive reward is produced by activation
of the exploratory system that's in the hypothalamus--it has its roots in the hypothalamus--and that's
the dopaminergic system. And that's the system that cocaine and amphetamines
and all those drugs that people really like to take hyperactivates, making them feel like
they're doing something important and useful. Even though, in all likelihood, they're not. So the dopaminergic drugs in some sense hijack
your incentive reward systems. And it's incentive reward because you're incentivized
to continue moving forward. Anything that you look at that makes you want
to touch it or move forward to it basically activates the dopaminergic system. Now, so you say, well what happens when you're
on your way to somewhere. Well, roughly what happens is neutral things,
which is okay. You can ignore them. Positive things or negative things. Positive things happen when things are going
according to plan or even better than according to plan. You're walking to school, it's raining, somebody
you know stops and offers you a life. It's like, well you're doing okay getting
to school and that was fine, but all of a sudden you're getting there a little faster
and you're not getting wet. So that cheers you up. It's an indication that you're able to save
resources while you're moving towards a goal--dopaminergically mediated. You know, and then we can imagine a different
scenario where you're walking to school in the rain and someone drives by you, maybe
it's even the same friend, and they don't see you and there's a puddle right beside
you and not only do they not stop but they completely cover you with oily and frigid
water, and so that's not so good. You're angry about that and upset. Why? Well, you might say, "my day is ruined." What does that mean exactly? Well it means that you had a little map on
top of your day and you were hoping that the day and the map would correspond, and then
all of a sudden the map burned up and god only knows what's going to happen to the day. And so it's like the bottom has dropped out
of your map. And so then you have to worry about your clothes
and catching cold and all those things. And turning around and going home and what
it'll mean if you miss class and so on and so forth. So basically that's the domain of chaos that
we talked about. So that's a negative thing, but it's also--the
thing about negative things is they're sort of hard to disentangle from unexpected things. You know, because most of the things that
happen to you that are negative are also unexpected because you don't go around trying to make
negative things happen. So well, what happens when something negative
happens? Well, you get a negative emotion. Pain, anxiety, disgust. Those seem to be the big three. And they're mediated by different systems. We don't understand the disgust system very
well. It doesn't load with neuroticism because all
the other negative emotions load with trait neuroticism. Pain--pain seems to be what you experience
if your receptive surfaces are--you know if your physiological self is subject to stimulation
of an intensity that's sufficient either to damage it or to damage the receptors. You know, but pain is complicated. It's not just physical pain from physical
damage. It depends on how you define physical damage. If someone dies, that's pain. If you're alone and isolated, that's pain. If you're depressed, that's pain. If you're frustrated or disappointed, that's
pain. Frustrated might mean something gets in the
way of you moving towards a goal, and disappointment might mean the whole damn structure just collapsed
on you. Either way, that's pain. Now the behaviourists would have called that
an unconditioned--like a painful stimulus--they would've called that an unconditioned stimulus. You don't have to learn for it to be bad. It's sort of built in bad. And they would think about anxiety in response
to the unexpected as learned. The behaviourists would think that you need
to learn what predicts something painful. And if you learn that something predicts something
painful then you get anxious to it or afraid of it. But it turns out that it's more complicated
than that. So what the behaviourists would think is that
pain in some sense is the fundamental negative emotion. And then maybe you're a kid and you stand
up underneath a table and you whack your head on it when you're learning to walk. And then when you go under the table now you
get anxious because you've learned that if you stand up under the table, you bang your
head and that hurts. So anxiety under those circumstances is a
learned behaviour. It's a conditioned response. Got it? Okay, but it's more complicated than that
because anxiety can also be an unlearned response. So if you just encounter something you've
never seen before, it's going to make you anxious. There's actually a circuit that mediates anxiety. It's not just a secondary derivation of the
pain circuitry. It's its own little unit. And it's sort of like you've figured out over
time--evolutionary time--not to get hurt because you don't want to be damaged. But then, you've learned how to detect the
probability that you will get hurt for so long that you've also evolved a system just
to respond to that. And so some of that responds to things that
you have learned are dangerous. Some of it responds to things that are generally
just dangerous. Blood, spiders, insects of various sorts,
facial expressions that indicate fear or disgust or anger, broken limbs, bodies--especially
mutilated ones. You know what's in horror movies, that's all
sort of primary fear stimuli, right. And it's built right into you. Now psychologists debate about whether it's
built in or whether you can just learn it really easily. But I would say that there's sort of a continuum. Some of it seems pretty damn built-in. Snake-fear, for example. Chimps who've never seen snakes, you bring
one into their cage--if it's a rubber snake--poof, they hit the roof. And then they look at it. And snakes in the wild, a chimp will go up
to a big snake in the wild and hoot at it. They have a special snake--they call it a
snake [rah?]--and they'll look at the thing, and some of them will just look at the snake
for like 24 hours. So, partly they're afraid of it. Partly they want to explore it. So what they do, they get close to it and
the fear increases, and then they back up and the fear decreases and the curiosity increases. And so what happens is that they move back
and forth until they're right on the line where they're afraid, but they're curious. So then they're stuck, and they're looking
at it. And you experience that all the time actually,
because when you are engaged in something that's meaningful, that's where you are. And that's like the line between order and
chaos. You know, because you want to solve it--it's
important. Maybe you're reading papers about some illness
that you hope to work on or study. It's like, well you're worried about the damn
illness, you know. All you're doing is confronting it through
the papers so, you know, you're fairly well sheltered from it. But you don't want it to exist and you'd rather
it wasn't around, but you're curious so you're going to get engrossed in it. And most of you, to the degree that you're
immersed in anything, are partly immersed because you perceive it as a problem. So that's like existential anxiety in a sense. It's just part of being. There's problems that have to be solved. They produce anxiety, they're complicated. You find this--you find a way of approaching
them so that the anxiety doesn't overwhelm you and so the curiosity is optimized--that's
an incentive reward activation--and then you're awake. Because the anxiety keeps you awake and so
does the curiosity. And you think, yeah, this is a good place
to be. And it is a good place to be because you're
optimally protected right there and you're optimally learning. So yes, that's a good place to be. You can think about that as an answer to the
Nietzschean problem of how you create value. You don't exactly create it--you find it. There's problems that need to be solved, they
automatically engage your emotions--both positively and negatively--you've got to find the right
balance. And it's something like contending, you know. It seems to me like humans beings have to
have something to contend with, or they can't tolerate themselves. Because life seems like a stupid joke if you
don't have something worthwhile to do. But you can have something worthwhile to do. And so then maybe it's not so stupid and absurd
and tragic. And that's at least a good way to think about
it. (00:48:00)
So you've got satiation on the one hand, on the positive side, and the behaviourists would've
considered that an unconditioned response too. They really thought about that as a reward
initially. You know, so you take a rat--he's hungry--and
you feed him something: reward. Now Skinner, he used to train rats, right,
and he was a very--what would you call it--very well renowned behavioural psychologists. And he could train rats to do damn near anything. And what he would do is starve them to three
quarters of their body weight--they were basically hungry rats. They were hungry lonesome rats because they
lived an isolated existence, which rats don't like, and then they were starved down to three
quarters of their body weight. When the behaviourists used rats as a model
for people, they actually used hungry lonesome rats as a model for rats as a model for people. And you might think, well what kind of model
is that? But it turns out it's a pretty good model,
because you're a lot more like a scared hungry rat than you'd like to admit. Which is partly why you can empathize with
one, right. Everybody's sitting there thinking "oh the
poor rats". By the way, the more you thought that, the
more agreeable you are. So how many people were feeling pretty sorry
for those rats? Yeah. How about men? How many men were feeling sorry for those
rats? Oh yeah, about three. There's a big gender difference in agreeableness
between men and women, by the way. Just so you know--we'll talk about that more. So now the behaviourists also thought that
you have this primary set of rewards, call them unconditioned, and then you had to learn
that some things predicted them. Like, classically maybe, a rat would push
a lever and get a pellet. Soon he's pushing that lever like mad. He's pretty happy about pushing that lever. And he learned the conditioned association
between lever pushing and getting a reward. But it turns out that because that's been
around for so long, you also have a system for it. So it's not just a learned association to
what satiates you--it's a whole system. And that's the dopaminergic system. The serotonin system seems to be the thing
that satiates. So you know, if you have a big turkey dinner,
up goes the serotonin levels--you don't have to do anything. And serotonin is a calming and regulating
neurochemical. Which is why antidepressants stop your neurons
from taking up serotonin before you've had a real chance to use it to regulate your nervous
system. But dopamine tells you, hey, good things are
on their way. And that's pretty much what people run on. And you can think about that as hope. So incentive reward is sort of like hope,
or promise. I think promise is a better term. So there's pain and satiation, and those are
really ancient systems. And then there are newer systems that are
anxiety and promise. And those are related to those more fundamental
negative and positive emotions. And those things regulate you while you're
on your path. Now, there's one more level of complication,
because you think, well what can happen on the way to your goal. Nothing? Irrelevant. Okay, so that's the irrelevance that enables
you to not see the gorilla. And almost everything around you is irrelevant. And I think that's partly why I think people
don't like to have their little maps of the world destroyed. Because if your map of the world is thoroughly
demolished everything becomes relevant. And you do not want everything to become relevant. It's just too much for you. So you wake up and you're naked and it's dark
in the middle of a jungle. It's like, everything's relevant! You're not going to like that. It's going to burn you out quick. And so most of the time you have to be protected
so that almost everything's irrelevant. And then you can focus on the few things that
you're capable of handling, and you do that. So you're in your little map, and then as
you move towards it your emotions play. And the negative emotions appear when things
are not going well and the positive emotions appear when things are going well. That's basically how your emotions work. Now, you've got your satiation and your pain. Then you've got your threat and your promise. Then on top of that you've got a more complicated
thing which is novelty, because that's the other thing that can happen when you're on
the way from point A to point B. Something you didn't expect--and you don't understand. So you're walking down the street and there's
someone laying there face-down on the sidewalk. And you know, they're dishevelled, and so
well, what's your emotional response? Well you didn't expect it, so you're going
to be taken aback a bit: that's anxiety. It's like, you're moving towards your goal
and anxiety stops you. Now you can think of the space-time area around
that person as unexplored territory. Now you don't want any unexplored territory
in your map because god only knows what's going to happen there. So what're you supposed to do? Well maybe you cross the street--you think
well that person's drunk or maybe you think, well they're a homeless person. Maybe they're lying on a sleeping back--you
think they're just asleep. You're going to stop and then you're going
to observe, and then you're going to use little cues to try to put your map back together. And your map is, what’s going on here and
what should I do about it? And so, it's partly this interplay between
anxiety and curiosity. Now you can just step around it and continue,
but maybe that'll upset your moral map--what kind of person am I? Maybe I should have done something about it. Or maybe you think, there's no damn way I'm
going to get involved in this because, who knows what'll happen if I step in there. And you know, fair enough, because, who knows
what'll happen if you step in there. The point is that, it's like your map which
has made everything irrelevant has got a hole in it and now some of what's complicated is
shining through. And that thing that's shining through--so
that's like what the phenomenologists talked about as shining forth--that thing that's
shining through, it's like you don't know what to do about it. What should you do? Well, you should do what you do do, and what
you do is, you prepare to do everything. And that's an emotional response to novelty. Well, if you don't know what to do you should
prepare yourself for anything. And that's stress. You could prepare that something good will
happen. Let’s say you're in an ambivalent.