502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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Episode: 502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi

Author: Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Duration: 01:38:10

Episode Shownotes

Jordan Peterson sits down with theorist and researcher Mark Changizi. They discuss the biological reasons for mass hysteria on the societal level, why we evolved to have color vision, and how we understand and interpret the patterns of the natural world. Mark Changizi is a theorist aiming to grasp the

ultimate foundations underlying why we think, feel, and see as we do. He attended the University of Virginia for a degree in physics and mathematics, and to the University of Maryland for a PhD in math. In 2002, he won a prestigious Sloan-Swartz Fellowship in Theoretical Neurobiology at Caltech, and in 2007, he became an assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In 2010, he took the post of Director of Human Cognition at a new research institute called 2ai Labs and also co-founded VINO Optics, which builds proprietary vein-enhancing glasses for medical personnel. He consults out of his Human Factory Lab. He curated an exhibition and co-authored a (fourth) book — “On the Origin of Art” (2016) by Steven Pinker, Geoffrey Miller, Brian Boyd, and Mark Changizi — at MONA museum in Tasmania in 2016, illustrating his “nature-harnessing” theory on the origins of art and language. This episode was filmed on November 22, 2024 | Links | For Mark Changizi: On X https://x.com/MarkChangizi/highlights On YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/markchangizi Website https://www.changizi.com/?_sm_nck=1

Summary

In this episode of 'The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast,' Dr. Jordan B. Peterson converses with Mark Changizi on the evolutionary significance of color vision in understanding emotional signals, emphasizing the connection between perception and emotion. They critique social constructionism and explore how perceptions of emotional displays influence social behavior. Changizi also posits that emotions are foundational to language evolution and social interactions, paralleling negotiations with poker tactics. The conversation extends to modern issues like online anonymity and political polarization, shedding light on how these dynamics alter human communication and reputation in social networks.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_00
¶

00:00:14 Speaker_02
Hello, everybody. I'm going to start today with a couple of announcements. The first is that I published this book, We Who Wrestle With God, Perceptions of the Divine. It came out November 19th.

00:00:25 Speaker_02
It's number one on Amazon right now, which I'm pretty happy about. And it's also the basis for a tour, which I started in November, continues through December, then January through April as well.

00:00:37 Speaker_02
You can find information about the tour at jordanbpeterson.com.

00:00:42 Speaker_02
It's about this new book, which is about biblical stories, but you should also understand that I'm doing the same thing with these stories that I did with the other tours that I had conducted before, and the other books for that matter, which is to take high-level abstract ideas, in this case foundational narratives, to explain what they mean, but also to explain why knowing what they mean can make a real practical difference in your life.

00:01:07 Speaker_02
You know, I want to bridge the gap between the abstraction and the reality so that you can put into operation the principles that I'm discussing so that it does produce a tangible improvement in how you attend to things and how you act.

00:01:18 Speaker_02
So come out to the lectures if you're interested in continuing with that. Today, I had the opportunity to talk to Mark Cianghisi, who as an author of this book, Expressly Human, and a number of other books. And I wanted to talk to Mark for two reasons.

00:01:34 Speaker_02
One was because we share an interest in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, especially with regards to perception, emotion, language, and mass group behavior. And so I've been trying to wade through the literature on perception.

00:01:53 Speaker_02
Mark is very interested as an evolutionary biologist slash psychologist in the function of evolved traits like perception.

00:02:02 Speaker_02
And one of the hypotheses that we discussed, which is a very interesting one, was his explanation, rather unique explanation for the evolution of color vision.

00:02:10 Speaker_02
He believes, for example, that we have additional color vision, not so much so that we can detect ripe fruit, for example, which was one hypothesis, but so that we can better attend to the emotional signals that people display as a consequence of alterations in their circulation, especially displayed facially.

00:02:30 Speaker_02
So we have color vision so that we're better at detecting signs of health or ill health as a consequence of skin tone, but also detecting and reacting to emotional displays.

00:02:41 Speaker_02
And so join us if you're interested in evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, emotion, language, communication, and the behavior of mass groups. So I think we'll start our discussion by talking about perception.

00:02:57 Speaker_02
And you've studied visual perception for a long time. And so I'd like you to outline, if you would, what you understand about visual perception. And then we can contrast our viewpoints and see where we can go with that.

00:03:11 Speaker_02
And I think we'll segue into emotion and language from perception.

00:03:15 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, so, you know, my background is sort of mathematics, and I went into cognitive science, and I was really more of an evolutionary biologist. And so, one of the areas that I've worked and have a bunch of discoveries happens to be vision.

00:03:28 Speaker_01
So, I have other things in other areas of sort of evolutionary biology, why we have as many fingers and why animals have as many limbs as they do, why you get pruny fingers when you're wet. They're actually optimized to be range-red, so that when you

00:03:40 Speaker_01
when you don't want to hydroplane. So they suddenly have the optimal pattern so that you can channel the water out as quickly as possible. So these are the sorts of things that I was always dealing with.

00:03:48 Speaker_02
We're very sneaky, us people.

00:03:49 Speaker_01
That's right. So always I was interested not in the specific mechanisms by which our brains work, but on the ultimate sort of design questions for why it would have evolved that way. So functional. It's all about function.

00:04:02 Speaker_01
And strangely, I mean, this is more on the political side, strangely, even though the biological world claims to believe in Darwin, when you're actually there in the evolutionary biology world, almost nobody believes in natural selection.

00:04:16 Speaker_01
They nod to it, but if you actually do a paper that argues, here's why it evolved to be this way, here's the functional reason for why it's this way, they'll say, you're doing a just-so story. You're not allowed to make hypotheses about Design.

00:04:29 Speaker_01
That's a just-so story. That's teleology. I was like, you're missing the entire point of natural selection. Darwin's discovery is that, yes, there's design. That's not an issue.

00:04:39 Speaker_02
Well, sexual selection also amplifies that.

00:04:42 Speaker_01
Well, I mean, sexual selection has things that are not leading to perfect natural selection design, but let's set that aside for the moment. The whole point is not that there's not design. The whole point is that there need not be a master designer.

00:04:54 Speaker_01
That is, you can explain all this design, all the seeming teleology without a designer. That's the whole point, right? But what they want to reject is not just a designer, but they want to reject design itself. And so there's an immense,

00:05:06 Speaker_02
Reject teleology.

00:05:08 Speaker_01
Reject teleology. No, like my eyes.

00:05:10 Speaker_02
Yeah, yeah, that's weird.

00:05:11 Speaker_01
It's bizarre, sorry. And so it's a very small community and it becomes across as, you know, they attack sociobiology, we also have the same kind of basis.

00:05:20 Speaker_01
You sort of want to be, it happens not just when you enter into human behavior and human psychology, it happens even generally when you're talking about even rain treads, you know, rain tread, you know, pruning fingers like I did or any of the stuff that I do.

00:05:31 Speaker_01
That is a just so story and it is not allowed, right? Now, it's true that you can't study design the way that you study mechanisms. You can't do a lab experiment in quite the same way. You have to ask it in different kinds of ways.

00:05:42 Speaker_01
You have to say, if this is really designed for what I'm claiming it's designed for, let's say, you know, if the pruney fingers are designed to be rain treads, well, then here's, let's derive what the optimal morphology would be.

00:05:53 Speaker_01
What should the wrinkles actually look like? So, that's one kind of prediction, looking at the morphology of the shape.

00:05:58 Speaker_01
Another might be, if it's really the case that it's for design, well, it should only occur in animals that, you know, have wet, dewy conditions, whereas certain kinds of animals that are never in wet, dewy conditions shouldn't have this, you know, this morphological feature shouldn't appear.

00:06:10 Speaker_01
There's different kinds of predictions you can make, but they're often phylogenetic predictions, morphological predictions, sometimes you can do behavioral, do they actually behave, perform better in wet conditions when they're wrinkly versus when they're not wrinkly, and all the kind of combinations of these things.

00:06:22 Speaker_01
What you don't, you can't typically do the mechanism kinds of experiments. It's just a whole different kind of thing. So you have to do it differently.

00:06:28 Speaker_01
But the strange, weird thing in an incredibly far left communities as they are, is that they somehow have thrown Darwin out entirely and you can't talk about natural selection, which was an incredibly bizarre thing.

00:06:44 Speaker_02
I can think of a variety of possible reasons for that, and I'd like your opinions about those reasons. I mean, you tangled together a couple of things.

00:06:52 Speaker_02
You said that even as an evolutionary biologist, if you start to tread in the water of teleology or purpose, you receive pushback from your colleagues. And then you mentioned that that was also a far-left phenomenon.

00:07:05 Speaker_02
And so I'm curious about... It seems to me that the relationship with the far-left is likely the fact that the far-left

00:07:15 Speaker_02
Far-left political philosophy is predicated on a radical social constructionism, essentially, that every single thing that everyone does, especially human beings, but to the degree that the same thinking paralyzes speculation about animal evolution.

00:07:34 Speaker_02
There's an insistence among those on the far left that there's no essential human nature. Everything's infinitely malleable. And I see that as a reflection of an incredible intellectual arrogance because the reason

00:07:49 Speaker_02
for the insistence that everything is socially constructed is because that allows for the possibility for everything to be 100% modifiable by those, for example, who would like to modify human behavior and what the image of their own philosophy.

00:08:04 Speaker_02
Do you think there's, is there anything else? Do you think that's going on with regards to the rejection of purpose or so-called design?

00:08:13 Speaker_01
My pet assumption has been that their hair stands on end or they feel backed up against the wall when you get to human behavior. Steven Pinker and Blank Slate are arguing this as well.

00:08:28 Speaker_01
The idea that there's any notion of instinct or a human nature is against something. They really want to push back on that because they want to think of us as infinitely malleable and subject to socialism and whatever policies that they have.

00:08:41 Speaker_01
They can shape us however they wish. And so even when we're in things like pruning fingers, it's as if they've taken

00:08:50 Speaker_01
that kind of prohibition of human psychology and push it into any realm at all and have a general admonition not to do any kind of design or research that concerns the design of animals themselves.

00:09:03 Speaker_01
So I'm not sure what else it could be, but at any rate, it's a bizarre thing because the only way that- Well, there's something else too there.

00:09:09 Speaker_02
Maybe it's something like, there's a lot of reasons for rejecting the idea of purpose. One is to reject the idea of an ultimate designer. So there's a religious argument, say, lurking at the bottom of that.

00:09:23 Speaker_02
But it's also very convenient to reject the notion of purpose or meaning because it also allows you to reject the idea of any kind of implicit responsibility. If nothing has any meaning, the disadvantage to

00:09:37 Speaker_02
everything being meaningless is that things are meaningless, but the advantage to everything being meaningless and purposeless is that you can do whatever the hell you want.

00:09:47 Speaker_02
And so it's a very good rationalization for like short-term hedonistic power-mad behavior. And if you combine that with the problem of like infinite social constructionism, then you have a real problem.

00:09:58 Speaker_02
It's a weird thing that you would encounter that among at least among hypothetically evolutionary biologists and thinkers, because why would they be concerned with evolutionary biology if they are going to toss out Darwin, for example?

00:10:11 Speaker_01
Most of them don't really have to think about Darwin because they're doing mechanistic experiments. They're not doing hypotheses about its design. I'm one of the rare people back, you know, in the 1920s.

00:10:21 Speaker_01
You had the ethologists who did a lot more thinking in terms of the design and the function, really thinking about their evolutionary connection. But that's gone way away. Everybody's dealing with really complicated experiments with mechanisms.

00:10:30 Speaker_01
They don't have to think about it. So, they've somehow developed this knee-jerk reaction that you don't have to understand design and purpose. But you cannot understand any machine without understanding what it's designed for.

00:10:40 Speaker_01
So, if I often use an example, if you were to find a stapler out of the middle of nowhere, natives find a stapler for the first time. and they want to try to understand it. There's not much to a stapler.

00:10:49 Speaker_01
You know, there's like four parts or whatever, six parts. But you can't, you might work out all the mechanisms. This opens, this, there's these, there's like seven things, let's say, and they do these sorts of kinds of actions.

00:11:00 Speaker_01
Well, that's not an understanding of it. You might start saying, well, maybe it's a weapon, and you start shaking it around like nunchucks, you open it up. Well, now you can work out how does it break when you hit someone in the face? Does it bend?

00:11:10 Speaker_01
And maybe that's part of its, there's tons and tons of mechanistic behaviors that it have that have nothing to do with what it's in fact for. how it deforms when this happens.

00:11:18 Speaker_01
There's lots of infinite numbers of kinds of mechanisms that are involved with it that are completely irrelevant, right?

00:11:24 Speaker_01
Only by understanding the mechanisms in the context of what the function is for, this is where the computational hardware, you've got function, you've got the algorithm level, you've got the mechanistic implementation level.

00:11:33 Speaker_01
You have to understand all these systems by understanding it by all of these parts all cohering together in one. In relationship to function. In relationship to function at the top.

00:11:43 Speaker_01
And so they're throwing out the very thing that allows you to understand, even if they are only interested in mechanisms, which my eyes glaze over with mechanisms, you can't understand mechanisms without inherently understanding the functions.

00:11:55 Speaker_02
Okay, so that's a very interesting place to segue into perception itself. Because I got very interested, I don't know, probably 20 years ago, in pragmatic philosophy, the pragmatic philosophy of William James and Peirce.

00:12:11 Speaker_02
And they were all part of the metaphysical club in Cambridge at the turn of the 19th century. And they were also extremely influenced by Darwin. And the pragmatists have been deemed the only genuine American stream of philosophy.

00:12:31 Speaker_02
And the pragmatists were very concerned with function. In fact, their definition of truth was essentially functional. determine what's true by examining the concordance of a proposition even in relationship to its effectiveness with regard to purpose.

00:12:51 Speaker_02
And they've made a case for that on the scientific side of things, that things that we regard as true, we regard as true because they provide an effective means for us to move towards a desired end.

00:13:02 Speaker_02
So for the pragmatist, there was really no separation of truth itself, even at the level of perception of fact, There was no separation between that and functional purpose.

00:13:12 Speaker_02
And I'm curious about your opinion in that regard, in relationship to perception itself.

00:13:20 Speaker_02
Because the best models of perception that I've encountered, the ones that seem to make the most sense in keeping with everything else I know about psychology, are pragmatic models.

00:13:29 Speaker_02
And that they're predicated on the idea that what we perceive, and this is part of the thing that I argued about, for example, with Sam Harris, is that

00:13:39 Speaker_02
The radical empiricists who believe that we can orient ourselves in the world merely in consequence of the facts don't take into account the fact that when we perceive a fact, we're actually perceiving something much more akin to a function.

00:13:55 Speaker_02
So for example, I was very influenced by a visual approach to ecological perception.

00:14:01 Speaker_00
Gibson.

00:14:01 Speaker_02
Gibson, yeah, yeah. not in all regards, but I found much of Gibson's work extremely useful, that his sense is that when we're looking at the world, we're seeing something like, I've broadened it a bit, but pathways to a desired destination

00:14:17 Speaker_02
tools that can facilitate our movement forward, obstacles that might come up in our path, and a vast domain of irrelevance around that. And that's true for every perceptual act. It seems to be particularly evident in the case of vision.

00:14:33 Speaker_02
A vision is something like a navigation aid. That's one way of thinking about it. So I'm curious what you think about that. And well, if any of those ideas, how those ideas might be related or not related to the manner in which you're conceptualizing

00:14:47 Speaker_02
object perception, let's say.

00:14:49 Speaker_01
Well, I mean, ecological, capital E, ecological perception, ecological vision with Gibson ended up biting onto a whole lot of philosophical baggage that I never bought into.

00:15:00 Speaker_01
I consider myself a lowercase e ecological vision person, in which case you can't understand what vision or any

00:15:07 Speaker_01
horny mechanisms are doing, unless you understand what it was functioning for in the natural environment for all of those millions of years. And so, let me just give you some specific examples.

00:15:17 Speaker_01
So, one of the things that I had noticed was that people had talked about color for 100 years and color vision. First of all, to back up, we primates, we and some other primates, have a third dimension. Your dog just has gray scale.

00:15:30 Speaker_01
and yellow-blue, two dimensions. All the bunny rabbits, horses, just have two dimensions. But some of us primates have a third dimension, red-green.

00:15:38 Speaker_01
And so for 100 years, they thought, well, maybe it has something to do with finding fruits in the forest. And there was never any good evidence for this at all.

00:15:45 Speaker_01
There's incredible varieties and variability in terms of the kinds of diets that they would have.

00:15:49 Speaker_01
not to mention just even generation to generation is going to experience radically different kinds of diets of fruits, but they all have the same, pegged, the exact same kind of color vision. And it's a weird kind of color vision.

00:16:00 Speaker_02
This is across primate groups? Across all. Across trichromate primate groups?

00:16:04 Speaker_01
All the old world trichromats have, so dogs and bunny rabbits have one low wavelength sensitive cone, down in the 550s. And then the other one, sorry, in the 400s, 450s or so, and that's sort of

00:16:18 Speaker_01
blue cone and then the other ones we have one in the 550s or so for the dogs that's around here. So you've got two and then what you'd expect if you're going to have a third one would be that suddenly it may be over here.

00:16:29 Speaker_01
You'd have the uniformly distributed like RGB. For your cameras, they're uniformly distributed across the spectrum, which is sort of a poor man's spectrometer. You've got three across the spectrum, you put them uniformly. But in fact, ours is this.

00:16:42 Speaker_01
we ended up with another cone sensitivity right next to the other one. They're exactly side by side in a really weird, peculiar way. Why would you want to have a third cone sensitivity, the same part of the spectrum? It's just like 15 nanometers away.

00:16:53 Speaker_02
Right, because in principle, it wouldn't be detecting anything radically different. No. Okay, so that's the problem you're trying to address.

00:16:59 Speaker_01
All right, so I realized later that when you look, I'd noticed that one of the things that matters is blood under the skin, blushes, blanches, health modulations, all of these kinds of emotions, signals that humans and other primates are doing on bare skin is shown by virtue of the blood under the skin.

00:17:16 Speaker_01
And it's by virtue in particular of the oxygenation, deoxygenation of hemoglobin under the skin. And it turns out that when you're looking at

00:17:25 Speaker_01
a completely arbitrary and weird spectrum of hemoglobin, which is a bunch of, it has a little W in one, this one part. So it goes like this and there's a little W. And when it's, that's when it's oxygenated.

00:17:35 Speaker_01
And when it deoxygenates, that W in that little region turns into U. And so these little peaks right there in the W part, If you wanted to be sensitive to this oxygenation, deoxygenation, you actually have to have two cones right there.

00:17:48 Speaker_01
So the little W peak in the middle, as it goes down in terms of U and the other parts that go up, you have to sense it. You have to have a peculiar spots of two cones in this exact spot.

00:17:58 Speaker_01
So I was like, oh my God, exactly where you'd have to put cones to be sensitive to the only spot where you could tell that it's getting oxygenated versus deoxygenated is exactly in the spots where we have our cones.

00:18:08 Speaker_02
Okay, so let me sum up that just so that I make sure I'm following you. So the first, the objection you have to standard theories of trichromat perception is that

00:18:21 Speaker_02
the two of the color spectra that we see are so close together on the electromagnetic spectrum that there's no advantage to distinguishing them that's clear in the natural world as such.

00:18:33 Speaker_02
And you're associating that with the enhanced ability to detect difference in oxygenation in the skin. And you're going to associate that, I presume, with emotional display. Is that right?

00:18:43 Speaker_01
So, this is an empath sense. In short, our color vision, our primate color vision is an empath sense. It's only by virtue of that that we can see these blushes and blanches. And it's only by virtue of that that you can actually see veins at all.

00:18:55 Speaker_01
The veins, of course, are the deoxygenated parts. And the more fleshy red parts are the more oxygenated parts. This stuff is completely invisible if you're colorblind. If you're a colorblind doctor, even going back to Dalton.

00:19:05 Speaker_01
He had complained about his complete inability to see if someone had infected in one eye versus the other. No idea. If they've got blood or stool on their pants, they can't tell the difference between whether it's blood or stool.

00:19:17 Speaker_01
These things go back for a long ways. As soon as you're color deficient, you're missing one of those. Now it's just, you can't distinguish these things at all.

00:19:25 Speaker_02
Do we know if people who are colorblind are deficient in facial emotional processing?

00:19:30 Speaker_01
We, that has been very hard to test because, but what we do know is that there's a long history of medical doctors who have known problems in just detecting blood state related diagnosis, symptoms that are recognizable by blood state.

00:19:44 Speaker_00
Okay, so that's analogous to that.

00:19:45 Speaker_01
But actually doing controlled experiments where you're able to do this with, it has been very hard. So no one has quite that data. There's a lot of, you know, my dad's colorblind and he's emotional.

00:19:56 Speaker_02
What would happen if you did rapid, rapid presentation of angry faces like almost at a subliminal level.

00:20:05 Speaker_02
Do you think that people who are colorblind would be less able to detect the difference between angry and non-angry faces if at least to the degree that that's signaled by by facial flushing?

00:20:15 Speaker_01
Well yeah I mean you can certainly mimic on screen, you could try to mimic the spectral difference in some sense. First of all, just to back up, one of the interesting side effects of this is that your camera doesn't show you color vision.

00:20:32 Speaker_01
Your TV doesn't show you color vision. All the cameras that we use are still in some sense to color vision because their third receptivity is way out, you know, it's distributed way out there.

00:20:45 Speaker_01
So none of those cameras that we take these pictures of are able to sense these oxygenation modulations.

00:20:49 Speaker_02
Okay, so that's an experimental problem.

00:20:51 Speaker_01
Yeah, so this is what makes it deeply difficult. It also means that literally we're not seeing all of the states that we experience in real life.

00:20:59 Speaker_01
The glow of youth, when you see glow of youth, you're talking about the glowing of oxygenated blood on the skin. None of that's available.

00:21:06 Speaker_02
Okay, so you mentioned the glow of youth. Hypothetically, one of the markers that could drive transformation of color vision in the direction of emotion detection that was blood related would be for picking up signs of fecundity.

00:21:26 Speaker_02
And that would be a direct association. And there is evidence that I think is quite compelling that One of the things that makes women attractive to men are signals of health that are associated with enhanced fertility.

00:21:40 Speaker_02
All of those signals seem to be associated with what people conceive of as feminine beauty, and you picked one that was cardinal there, which is that You call it the flush of youth.

00:21:50 Speaker_01
Right, and it's not just on or off. I mean, different motions will lead to different kinds of gradients on the face. And of course, it's not just the face, the whole body can flush.

00:21:58 Speaker_01
And the other primates, the rump becomes so exaggerated that they literally, the UK would take some of these, the females when they were having estrus out because it was almost embarrassing for the kids to come and watch.

00:22:09 Speaker_01
So it's, you know, there's, it's multidimensional. It's certainly, it's color related, but it's not just red, red green, but there's actually, you know, where you have more, Like if I squeeze my hand and let go, you get yellow-blue differences.

00:22:23 Speaker_01
Because when it's squeezed out, it's more yellow. When there's more blood, all things equal more blue. But if it's oxygenated blood, then it's blue and red, so it's more purple. If it's deoxygenated blood, it's green and blue, and so bluish-green.

00:22:36 Speaker_01
So in fact, you end up, by virtue of concentration variations, blue-yellow, and oxygenation modulations, red-green, you can get any possible hue at all.

00:22:44 Speaker_01
Which is why if you're a painter and you're trying to actually paint human faces, when we go back and look at their paintings, which I could never do, you're like, oh my God, they're using all the hues. Yeah, right.

00:22:54 Speaker_01
You know, because we don't typically consciously notice it. We just look at the skin and we think of it as sort of this matte, you know, like a doll. But in fact- Pink. Yeah, some pink, but of course it's not. And you're really seeing the blood.

00:23:05 Speaker_01
You are not looking, skin is not, if you've ever, you know, if you get a bruise, the first thing you notice is that it's, of course, total discoloration.

00:23:12 Speaker_01
And so we, you're really seeing a dynamic view into the very state and function and health of the individual. It's completely a highly transparent surface. And we're not consciously aware of it, although we're certainly reading it all the time.

00:23:31 Speaker_02
And so how has that, so that's a theory of color vision as health detection.

00:23:36 Speaker_01
Is it a theory that- Well, mostly, I don't know whether it's mostly health or mostly emotion. It's certainly emotion, state- Right, it wouldn't only have to be one of those things anyways.

00:23:45 Speaker_02
Okay, well, could you make a separate case for emotion? Okay.

00:23:48 Speaker_02
So one of the things that I've read, I don't know if you believe that this is true, because everything turns out to be debatable among scientists just like everyone else, but I've read that one of the things that shaped the evolution of our eyes is

00:24:06 Speaker_02
they're shaping to be maximally visually evident to perceivers, right? We're unbelievably good at determining exactly where someone's eyes are pointed.

00:24:16 Speaker_02
So even if someone is sitting across the room from you, you can tell if they're looking at your eyes or at the tip of your nose, which is such a tiny fraction of movement at the eye level or a fraction of angle that it's almost amazing.

00:24:30 Speaker_02
It's amazing that you can detect it at all and that we have

00:24:33 Speaker_02
the white background and the colored iris and the black pupil, partly because that maximizes the degree to which our eyes are salient, the hypothesis being that anyone in our evolutionary history whose eyes weren't salient was salient with someone whose intentions were very difficult to determine and was much more likely to be misunderstood, say, and killed in consequence, or much less likely to

00:24:57 Speaker_02
to find a mate. And so our faces have evolved, at least at the level of our perception of the eyes of others, to ensure that we can understand intent. And we do that by inferring attention by looking at eye gaze.

00:25:13 Speaker_02
And you're making a strong case in your work for the relationship between perception, color vision, and emotion perception.

00:25:23 Speaker_02
We talked a little bit about cues of health that might be associated with skin coloration and cues of fecundity, but tell me about the emotional cues that are associated with differences in color.

00:25:35 Speaker_01
So, you know, the first thing I think people think about with spectral skin signaling is blushes, right? And blanches and flushes, but that's really just the beginning. you know, this barely touches the surface.

00:25:48 Speaker_01
So, you can imagine someone's angry and they can get a red face, which is very different from when somebody blushes and they get, with embarrassment.

00:25:55 Speaker_01
And people actually, if I'm in front of a stage and something happens that's slightly embarrassing, and the audience is over there and I'm looking this way, you actually blush more on the side that's facing the audience.

00:26:07 Speaker_01
Your body is- Oh, is that right? Yeah, this is known, this is a Drummond- Wow, wow, that's a very specific response.

00:26:14 Speaker_01
These are strong arguments that these are signals, not just automatic side effects of some kind of implicit side effect with no purpose.

00:26:22 Speaker_02
Well, that's so complex too, eh? Because it opens up the question, like, first of all, not everybody blushes. And the issue is, well, what does the blush signify? And it signifies something like self-conscious shame.

00:26:35 Speaker_02
And then the question is, well, why would you want to signal self-conscious shame to people?

00:26:40 Speaker_02
I mean, because it's a shameful signal, but it does indicate that you're the sort of, one of the things that might indicate is that you're the sort of person who can't get away with What exactly? Violating the social norm? Something like that, right?

00:26:53 Speaker_01
And it's an honest signal because it's out of your control. So honest signal just in this context is a sort of a technical term of ours. So we mean by honest signal that you have no control over it and it wears its meaning on its sleeve in some sense.

00:27:09 Speaker_02
Right, right. So yeah, that's right. It's a signal of your intent beneath your conscious awareness. Laughter, genuine laughter seems to be a signal like that too. And there's some evidence that Genuine smiles are like that too, right?

00:27:22 Speaker_02
Because if you smile falsely, your eyes don't smile. Although I think you can train yourself to do that. But generally speaking, it's hard. Yeah, it's hard.

00:27:31 Speaker_02
If someone is manipulating with a smile, they don't do it the same way they do when they smile spontaneously.

00:27:40 Speaker_02
rapid onset implicit emotional displays are a signal about our genuine motivations and if those signals are obvious it's in principle easier for people to read us and therefore in principle easier for them to engage in trusting negotiations with us.

00:27:58 Speaker_01
Right.

00:27:58 Speaker_02
Because we wear our heart on our sleeve.

00:28:00 Speaker_01
That's right.

00:28:00 Speaker_01
And so, I mean, other predictions that come out of this, by the way, it should be the case that if this is true, then the primates with color vision, as opposed to the primates that didn't have three color vision, the primates with color vision should have more naked spots.

00:28:16 Speaker_01
They should have bare faces. And in fact, when you look, the primates with color vision are the ones with naked faces.

00:28:22 Speaker_01
They often have naked rumps, you know, naked genitalia, which, because all of these things are signaling, the ones without color vision are furry-faced like your typical bunny rabbit, typical dog.

00:28:32 Speaker_01
Nakedness and color vision, three-color vision, are opposite sides of the same coin.

00:28:38 Speaker_02
Okay, okay, okay. Does the theory that trichromate vision evolved at least partly or perhaps in the main as a aid to emotion detection, contradict the frugivore theory?

00:28:55 Speaker_02
Is it possible that color vision also gave us an edge, at least in some environments, with regards to the detection of higher quality food sources?

00:29:03 Speaker_01
It's certainly possible, but it wouldn't have driven, there's no reason to think that fruit would have driven those particular wavelength sensitivities of the middle and long wavelength-sensitive cones.

00:29:15 Speaker_02
Particularly given that they're so close together.

00:29:17 Speaker_01
Right.

00:29:17 Speaker_02
That's the crucial issue.

00:29:19 Speaker_01
Yeah, and there's all kinds of things where we leverage our color vision, which is peculiarly for empath kind of health senses, but we obviously use it for lots of things probably in nature beyond that, and in culture, it's all over the place.

00:29:34 Speaker_01
But that doesn't amount to an explanation for what drove it.

00:29:38 Speaker_02
Part of the problem, I guess, that people have with functional evolutionary explanations for the purpose of any given human attribute is that There's no reason ever to assume that any given attribute is singular in its function.

00:29:56 Speaker_02
It's sort of like asking what the hand can do. What's the hand for? Well, you know, the hand is for a lot of things. Is there a cardinal purpose to the hand?

00:30:06 Speaker_02
That's a hard question to ask, but there's no reason to assume that evolution wouldn't operate so that a given biological phenomenon would be other than multipurpose.

00:30:21 Speaker_01
Right. Well, so everything might be multipurpose, but the odds of there being two competing or multiple competing desiderata that are determining the design, that they're close to one another, are going to be typically fairly rare.

00:30:37 Speaker_01
Typically, one of them might be 10 times more important than the other.

00:30:40 Speaker_00
Right, right.

00:30:41 Speaker_01
Or a thousand times more important. Usually, in my experience, it turns out that one of these is the principal drivers. It can explain first-order, even second-order properties of the thing.

00:30:49 Speaker_01
And yeah, there can be other third or fourth order stuff, but that's mostly irrelevant. So you can get away with explaining. So for example, another one, why we have forward-facing eyes. Standard story.

00:30:58 Speaker_01
And the fun thing of all of these explanations, whether it's pruning fingers, it's still probably in the Wikipedia page. It says it's a side effect of osmosis or some bullcrap, right? It's still there to this day, these old narratives.

00:31:08 Speaker_01
And then for forward-facing eyes, it's always something about predators want forward-facing eyes. Well, except that every fish is a predator eating a smaller fish. All the birds are predators. They all have sideways-facing eyes by our standards.

00:31:22 Speaker_01
They're all sideways-facing eyes. Even all the carnivores, the paradigmatic mammalian meat-eaters, predators, have sideways-facing eyes relative to us. I mean, they still have forward-facing eyes in terms of the big picture of things.

00:31:35 Speaker_01
So there's a lot of variability and forward-facing-eye-ness across the mammals. And the question is, why is there this variability? And so there's been multiple kinds of, one is stereoscopy, better stereoscopy.

00:31:50 Speaker_01
You even get stereoscopy in a bunny rabbit. Bunny rabbit has a very thin binocular field, and it can see stereoscopy within a thin binocular field. But it also gets the benefit of seeing everything. It can see directly behind it, below it, above it.

00:32:00 Speaker_01
So you've got this full panoramic vision, whereas we've chosen to lose Right, a lot. Half of our visual field or, you know, a lot of our visual field just to have better stereoscopy up in front.

00:32:12 Speaker_01
Now, so one of the bad sorts of, you have these two currencies, like, you know, the standard argument is, oh, I've got this great wide stereoscopy field of better 3D vision up front at the expense of losing everything. How do you balance those things?

00:32:24 Speaker_01
How is that an argument that I would want more of? of apples while getting less adverbs in the back. They're not even obviously comparable things that I can trade off. So my argument is like, first of all, stereoscopy is the least important 3D sense.

00:32:40 Speaker_01
We have all of these. There's many, many three-dimensional senses. One is just what kinds of objects they are, how far down towards the horizon Are they- How they overlap? Things, yeah, occlusions in front of other things.

00:32:53 Speaker_01
If I just do this with one eye, even with one eye, I'm getting amazing, much better than stereoscopy.

00:32:58 Speaker_01
All of these things, when you do, if you're a perception psychologist who creates stimuli that have competing cues of two different kinds, and they say, which one's Trump? Stereoscopy loses always. All of these other ones are Trump.

00:33:09 Speaker_01
They win if there's competing- Right, oh yeah.

00:33:11 Speaker_02
Oh, I see. So that's a good way of testing what's the most cardinal element of the- Right. Oh yeah.

00:33:15 Speaker_01
And so, stereoscopy always looks, and if you've played first-person shooter video games, yeah, you have both eyes open, but you're being fed one image on screen. And these things are so immersive.

00:33:27 Speaker_01
You never are confused as to where the guys are that you're shooting, right? They're always really unambiguously in one particular spot, yet you're a cyclops, right? So, it had occurred to me back then.

00:33:37 Speaker_01
I said, I don't think it has anything to do with stereoscopy whatsoever. And it turns out it's all about one currency. This is, again, to this idea of why,

00:33:44 Speaker_01
Why aren't there three, two or three or more equivalent kinds of functions that are all competing and then it's just some ugly mess and it's not a good, you know, design hypothesis at all.

00:33:54 Speaker_01
It's going to be sort of ugly kludge that happens to, it's almost never a kludge. And so in this case, the reason that we have forward-facing eyes and the more forward-facing they are is to see better in clutter.

00:34:07 Speaker_01
And so, what I mean by that, animals that evolved with leaves all over the place. When there's leaves, if your eyes are more widely separated than the clutter leaves, let's say.

00:34:15 Speaker_01
So, for example, if you've played this game, if you just, if I hold my finger up in front of you, it's very thin, and I look at you, but not my finger, I see two, unless I've got a dominant eye, but for those of you who don't have a dominant eye, you'll see two copies of your finger and each will be semi-transparent.

00:34:28 Speaker_02
Right.

00:34:28 Speaker_01
Right. Now, you can see through it. Right. So, what one eye is being blocked with, the other eye is seeing the world beyond that. And so, your brain has evolved to just create two copies of it.

00:34:40 Speaker_01
And you're not confused, like, oh, my God, I've got two figures. No, you know what's going on. It's just you have this perception that combines them and creates semi-transparency so that you can see beyond it.

00:34:50 Speaker_01
Now, even my whole hand, I'm almost missing nothing, even with my whole hand in front of me. There's a little bit of a core in the middle, but I'm capturing most of it.

00:34:58 Speaker_01
So for objects that are less, objects that are not as big as this interpupillary distance, the separation between my eyes, then when you're an animal with those kinds of eyes in a forest with leaves that are typically smaller than that, you actually get, I call it x-ray.

00:35:15 Speaker_01
You actually can see, it's probabilistic summation. You actually can see much, much more of the environment beyond than when you're a cyclops.

00:35:22 Speaker_01
So, and in fact, I noticed this playing video games back 20-something years ago, when I would be, you know, because you're a cyclops and you're hiding in bushes and I'd be trying to snipe people.

00:35:29 Speaker_01
And then when you're in a bush, you can't see anything. Of course, these are fake bushes, I get it. You can't see anything because you're just looking at the, but where in real life, you're in a bush, you pretty much see the entire world outside of it.

00:35:38 Speaker_01
You can, you know, peek from outside of your bush. So you had to keep shaking to get different shots than someone shoots you because they see you wiggling in the bush.

00:35:44 Speaker_01
In real life, you're designed to be in these cluttery environments and to see perfectly well beyond that. without having to move, too. Without having to move.

00:35:52 Speaker_01
And yes, you're losing what's behind you, but then you can start calculating how much of the environment can I see if I'm a forward-facing animal with this X-ray ability, that is, my eyes are bigger than the leaves, versus a rabbit, let's say, effectively, who has a full panoramic view.

00:36:05 Speaker_01
Yeah, he can see entirely behind him, but you can actually then calculate how much of the world outwards can you see. If you think about it two-dimensionally,

00:36:17 Speaker_01
One, two, three, three and a half times better than him if you think about it as a two-dimensional grid. But in fact, it's more of a three-dimensional grid. Then you have to sort of think about spheres, sphere-packing problem.

00:36:26 Speaker_01
And so I can see only the front half of my little sphere, but if the world is sort of built out of these spheres of these little

00:36:34 Speaker_01
surrounded by lots of clutter, I can see the six spheres in front of me fully, and I can't see beyond that, and only half of mines, but I can see now six and a half times more of the, there's like simple models that you can build of simple models of forested kinds of environments where you can show that now you can see really almost an order of magnitude more.

00:36:53 Speaker_01
It's see the most. It's not a little bit more stereoscopy here, but a little bit less seeing. No, it's just see the most.

00:37:00 Speaker_01
And so animals have, depending on their environment, they have more forward-facing eyes, the greater the extent to which they're in cluttered, forested kinds of environments.

00:37:09 Speaker_01
And so one desideratum, see the most, suffices to explain all the variability that we find across mammals in terms of how forward-facing eyes are.

00:37:17 Speaker_02
So does that mean that our forward-facing eyes evolved when we were still in primarily arboreal environments? And are chimpanzees still primarily in arboreal environments? I guess they're... Yeah, I would say they are.

00:37:34 Speaker_02
So the fact that we were on the African plain for some millions of years wasn't sufficient to...

00:37:40 Speaker_01
Even there, even in the African plains. So even when you have animals in the same habitat, you have some animals that find micro niches, for example, cats. who like to hang out in the clutter and wait for their prey.

00:37:54 Speaker_01
And then let's say the gazelles who don't want to be anywhere near that clutter because they can't see crap when they're inside it.

00:37:59 Speaker_01
So they will find micro environments within even habitats that at first glance, we kind of don't think of them as very cluttery, but animals that are good at clutter will find those cluttery spots and leverage them.

00:38:11 Speaker_02
Okay, okay, okay. Well, that's an interesting account of binocular vision. Let's, if it's all right, let's turn our attention back to emotion perception and then segue from that into the development of language.

00:38:25 Speaker_02
In this book, Expressly Human, which was published in 2022, You talk about the evolution of language, which is a relatively new phenomenon. You date it back several hundred thousands of years, and we could talk a little bit about that.

00:38:42 Speaker_02
But you also make the case that our linguistic ability, although it's relatively newly evolved, is scaffolded on an understructure of emotional display and emotional language.

00:38:55 Speaker_02
And so this is in keeping with the notions of perception that you put forward that are

00:39:00 Speaker_02
faces, our skin surface, but primarily our faces, our emotional display mechanisms, and that we can read a tremendous amount about the intent of others, intent and desire of others, merely as a consequence of reading off emotions, and that language evolved with that as its underlying

00:39:27 Speaker_02
axiomatic set of axiomatic presumptions. I mean, one of the things that I can't remember even where I read about this, but it's the problem of infinite regress in language. You know, if I and how we solve it.

00:39:40 Speaker_02
If I tell you, I was angry this morning, your likely question is, what made you angry? Not, what do you mean angry? And the reason that you don't ask, what do you mean angry? Is because you know what it's like to be angry.

00:39:55 Speaker_02
And so we share the underlying psychophysiological platform and all of the experiences that are part and parcel of that platform. And then we can use words to refer to those.

00:40:05 Speaker_02
That's a situation where you can think of emotions, and I think object perceptions are the same, by the way. Emotions are the axioms of our linguistic capacity, and you seem to be making an argument that's analogous to that in your book.

00:40:21 Speaker_01
Way before there were social animals, every animal would have had emotions, right? So these are just rough and ready.

00:40:30 Speaker_01
One way to think about emotions is just states that you're in that feel like something that motivates you to engage in certain kinds of behaviors, right?

00:40:36 Speaker_01
And none of the, they would have all been dead-eyed shark-like creatures that have, they're filled with lots of emotions, filled on the inside with emotions, but they're not social animals, so they never had to signal to anybody anything.

00:40:48 Speaker_01
So what really what Darwin was concerned about was like, okay, that's great. There's all these animals with all these emotions, and it feels like something to be them. And there's like all this internal stuff.

00:40:56 Speaker_01
And there's no reason for them to tell anybody. So why are all these social animals signaling so much to one another? What's the point of it? What does this language mean?

00:41:04 Speaker_01
What we do here is just ask, if you're social animals and you don't have a language of any kind that we're so used to, what is the optimal language stimulus signaling system such that you can carry out negotiations and compromises?

00:41:22 Speaker_01
And you can negotiate and someone can back down or someone can raise and someone can do. So, let me give you an example where people can come to a decision and come to an agreement. without ever saying a word. We do this when we play poker.

00:41:37 Speaker_01
So, I know something, and you know something. I've got cards, a certain hand, you've got a card, a certain hand, and we don't know, and imagine that we can never talk about it.

00:41:44 Speaker_01
Like, it turns out I could say, actually, it's, but imagine I've got these things that I know in the world, and you've got these things that we're arguing over, zucchini bread keeps it, arguing over some particular thing that we want to split.

00:41:53 Speaker_01
And here we want to split the pot, whatever, the ante, there's the ante in there, and we want to get the ante out, and I can't talk. And we can even play online where we can't even talk, right? There's not even any emotional expression, sir.

00:42:05 Speaker_01
But what I do to make my case is I just slide in a certain amount of stake. I stake something, and then you stake something. And it could be that after a while, I go, okay, I think he's, Jordan's pretty confident I'm going to, I'm going to fold.

00:42:18 Speaker_01
As I'm agreeing, okay, your hand is stronger than mine. We've come to an agreement. I never signaled anything, I never spoke. But we nevertheless managed to solve a potential conflict, because it could call.

00:42:29 Speaker_01
Call would be to say, screw you, we're going to go all in. And that means, in the case of poker, just laying down to see whose cards are better.

00:42:35 Speaker_01
And so figuring out whose cards are better in real life might be, oh, yeah, I'm a better fighter than you, or whatever it might have come to, blows or whatever it might be. something that we don't want to have to get involved with all the time.

00:42:47 Speaker_01
We'd like to make our lives much smoother in terms of the utility area. The path to negotiation. Right. So, poker is how you do it.

00:42:54 Speaker_01
And so, what we're able to show is that you need to have the ability, you need to have a signal that says, I think I'm really confident or really, really confident. And you do this by shoving in social capital chips, shoving in reputation.

00:43:05 Speaker_01
So, when you signal, pride, or I also signal that I don't think you're confident at all. I have disdain for you. So either I'm signaling that I'm really confident or that your claims are not very – you've got a bad hand.

00:43:17 Speaker_01
Either of those things amounts to a certain amount of stake or betting social capital. But I can also show humility. And now I'm sort of pulling off chips. I say, okay, you know, I'm not so great. Or I show respect to you.

00:43:28 Speaker_01
I'm also pulling out chips off the table. So you can't do that in actual poker. But you can just start working out.

00:43:34 Speaker_01
You need to be able to both make claims strong and weak, or pride and sort of humility about my own confidence, and also respect or disdain concerning yours.

00:43:44 Speaker_01
And then you can start to work out, I also need to have the ability to acknowledge what you just claimed. Okay, you're saying that you're really confident that I'm, and I'm not confident. Well, given that,

00:43:53 Speaker_02
That also is a particular signal, and it has something to do with happy versus... That confidence too, you know, that confidence must be something like the end result of an internal Darwinian competition between different competing motivational states, right?

00:44:08 Speaker_02
Because you might ask yourself, why should I accept your confidence as a signal of your competence? And one answer to that would be, I know something about you and know that you can do things.

00:44:20 Speaker_02
And so that would be a consequence of me actually knowing you in a social circumstance. But another would be that if your evaluation of the situation is sufficient so that the

00:44:33 Speaker_02
emotion of moving forward and dominating isn't being challenged by a number of other potential emotional states, like anxiety, I'm going to be able to read that on your face.

00:44:43 Speaker_02
And so I'm going to know that you undertook the internal computations that were sufficient to at least convince you that you're correct.

00:44:52 Speaker_01
Well, I mean, I think you're overthinking it. Here, for this argument, we don't even have to – we don't have to think about it being honest signals like for color vision. Even if we were – I mean, and we're not consciously doing these.

00:45:04 Speaker_01
We have evolved to just do these signals often implicitly without really – and that's really when we're good is when we're not consciously thinking it through.

00:45:14 Speaker_01
The reason that you're willing to believe me when I show confidence that I'm the one who should get most of the cake that mom's laid out, let's say, and you're my brother, is because we're part of a social community and I'll get humiliated if it turns out that mom tells people that I'm wrong.

00:45:29 Speaker_01
The reason that it works is because I care about what I staked. I care about the reputation, they're at risk. And the social community is always watching and gossiping and I'll lose reputation. The reason that it's all about these reputations.

00:45:42 Speaker_02
Okay, so you're building in, I think you're building in something like appreciation for the fact that the reputational exchanges that we're making are cumulative across time in a social community that's actually continually interacting.

00:45:58 Speaker_02
So it's never a one-off game.

00:46:00 Speaker_01
And so that means that also- Somehow with humans, it seems to sometimes work even with one-off, right?

00:46:06 Speaker_01
Because we're so instinctively doing, but we've been instinctively designed thinking that we're part of a single community that we seem to get off, we get on pretty well and we're all nice to the baristas and everybody's nice to each other, even though we could be real jerks, right?

00:46:20 Speaker_01
So it seems to hold over pretty well, but yeah, it definitely brings up more troubles in bigger cities where there's fewer interactions with the same people.

00:46:27 Speaker_02
Yeah, well, I've also been, well, I'm curious about what you think about this as well, because I've been working out the idea, it's not only me, obviously, but many people work on this idea that, and I think it's associated with the, it's the same idea as the idea of natural law in more pure philosophy, is that there's a pattern of ethos that emerges as a consequence of the fact of iterated exchange.

00:46:55 Speaker_02
So I'll give you an example of this from the animal literature.

00:47:00 Speaker_02
So when animal behaviorists first started studying rat play, and were trying to understand it physiologically and functionally, one of the things they would do was match juvenile rats together so that they could wrestle. but they do one-offs.

00:47:20 Speaker_02
And what they found was invariably that if one of the rats had about a 10% weight advantage over the other rat, that he could win the vast majority of times. And so the idea of play was something like

00:47:36 Speaker_02
You put two animals into a ring, they compete with one another. The larger animal can dominate the smaller animal. And the purpose of the play bout is to establish dominance without damage, right?

00:47:51 Speaker_02
But the problem with that hypothesis was that rats don't play with each other once, they play repeatedly. And it turned out that if you put rats together, juveniles,

00:48:06 Speaker_02
Repeatedly, the big rat has to let the little rat win at least 30% of the time, or the little rat won't play anymore. And so this is a remarkable discovery. This is Jaak Panksepp's discovery.

00:48:19 Speaker_02
It's an absolutely brilliant discovery because it shows, first of all, that the purpose of play is not dominance.

00:48:26 Speaker_02
It also implies that the social hierarchy order isn't dominance related, but even more importantly, it shows that reciprocity is the basis for social organization, even among rats, and not the expression of power.

00:48:42 Speaker_02
And that's a radically different idea. Now, Franz De Waal has found something like that. As far as I'm concerned, found something very similar with his studies of chimpanzees, because it was thought for the longest time

00:48:53 Speaker_02
I think by Marxist-oriented evolutionary biologists, fundamentally, that the substructure for dominance with regard to the alpha chimps was the physical expression of power. But what de Waal showed was that that happens now and then.

00:49:10 Speaker_02
You get a chimp troop. where the major alpha is a bully and a successful one, but he tends to get torn to shreds as soon as he has a weak moment by like two subordinates who've had enough of being pushed around.

00:49:22 Speaker_02
The stable alphas are often smaller males, although that's irrelevant in a sense. What they are is extremely good at continuous reciprocity, and they tend to rule over much more harmonious social troops and have a much longer reign.

00:49:37 Speaker_02
So the reason I'm asking about this is because you talk about the importance of staking social capital when making a claim for confidence. And I'm curious, I'd like to have you elaborate on that more. You used the poker game analogy.

00:49:58 Speaker_02
You said, I'm staking something and you implied that, well, if I'm wrong in my confidence and word gets around, it's gonna damage my reputation, which means that the next time I act, confidently no one's going to believe me.

00:50:14 Speaker_02
The implication is, is that if you're reciprocating with people across a long span of time, then you're only going to make confidence claims where you're relatively certain that being wrong isn't going to damage your long-term reputation.

00:50:28 Speaker_02
That's basically the- Right.

00:50:30 Speaker_01
And I haven't, there's two different, this is a, and here we work out the, in some sense, argue it, here's the fundamental and minimal signaling system that is absolutely needed for two creatures to engage in these kinds of staking conversations.

00:50:47 Speaker_01
You have to have exactly 81 as a four-dimensional signals. Now, the optimal way to use it is like asking, what's the best way to play poker? Now, there's more than one way to play poker. It's deeply complicated. This is one of the most complicated.

00:50:58 Speaker_01
It's the most complicated game that exists, as long as there's no limits. Poker, super complicated. So there's certainly more than one way to play. One way is to say, no, you go first. No, you go first.

00:51:09 Speaker_01
And you're never more confident than your actual levels of confidence. You're not blustery.

00:51:15 Speaker_01
And that kind of way you can build up a reputation over time and you probably are helping your friends also build up their reputations, which is kind of what reciprocity is.

00:51:25 Speaker_01
As opposed to the blustery kind of who just bluffs his way to the top and is just mean to everybody around him. He's a chip bully, right? He's a chip bully. He's got a big stack of chips and poker and he's just pushing everybody out.

00:51:35 Speaker_01
They bet something, he shoves it in his fold. out of fear. There's other ways, and you can rise to the top that way as well, but it's probably fragile. But key here is what is the language that you need?

00:51:48 Speaker_01
And it turns out the language, once you work it out, it's exactly the space of emotional expressions that we have.

00:51:53 Speaker_01
The emotional expressions that we have are exactly what's needed to engage in exactly the kind of generalized poker game that social animals that don't have language need to actually communicate and stake things and carry out.

00:52:05 Speaker_02
So that would be the basis for establishing cooperative endeavors over the medium to long run, but also properly regulating competitive endeavors so that they don't end in catastrophe. Both of those. That would be the negotiation landscape.

00:52:22 Speaker_02
Okay, so why don't you tell us why you think that our emotional displays are optimized for solving the problem of cooperation and competition.

00:52:31 Speaker_01
Oh, they probably are. All I'm saying is that my ability to... I didn't try in this book to work out what are the... It would be nice to be able to say, and here's the optimal way to use this, or here's, let's say, several optimal strategies.

00:52:45 Speaker_02
That's the study of ethics in general, right? The optimization of strategy. I mean, the philosophy of ethics is exactly that study. And it does have something... I think it has something to do with

00:52:57 Speaker_02
It's something like optimization of reproductive strategy, but over the largest possible number of environments and timeframes. It's something like that, right?

00:53:08 Speaker_02
Because one of the things you pointed out with the poker example is the strategy that you use while you're playing poker is going to be dependent to some degree on how many times you're going to play poker with these people.

00:53:18 Speaker_01
No, that's true.

00:53:18 Speaker_02
Right, right, right.

00:53:19 Speaker_01
But less so, because in poker, when you earn currency money in poker, it's spendable anywhere, right? But social currency is inherently often spendable only within the particular community that you're involved.

00:53:32 Speaker_02
Right, so the rules there are even more constrained. Yeah. Yeah, well, so this is a very cool thing to understand, and I think it's one of the things that's very powerful about your book, is that I have thought for quite a while that

00:53:43 Speaker_02
the analysis of reciprocal interactions.

00:53:47 Speaker_02
This is something economists did very badly for a very long period of time because they thought of people as rational maximizers, but their notion of the time frame across which you maximized rationally was one interaction.

00:54:00 Speaker_02
And that's just absolutely 100% not true. And it's also not how people behave, right? There's that famous behavioral experiment where you can take two people and you can say to one of them,

00:54:10 Speaker_02
you can make one offer to your partner, you get $100, you can make them one offer, you have to give them some money. If they reject the offer, neither of you get anything. And across cultures, the standard offer is 50-50.

00:54:23 Speaker_02
And if you take poor people, they're even more likely to make a 50-50 offer rather than less, which is not what they should do if they're rational self-optimizers.

00:54:32 Speaker_02
But it doesn't take into account something you alluded to, which is we're very, very cognizant of the manner in which our decisions propagate. reputationally across our social space.

00:54:45 Speaker_02
Because I think there isn't anything that, it seems to me that for social animals, there actually isn't anything more important than reputation.

00:54:51 Speaker_02
I know, for example, among hunter-gatherer hunters, there are rules for how you conduct yourself if you're a successful hunter. The rules are very interesting, and they're quite stable across different cultures.

00:55:03 Speaker_02
So imagine that you're the best hunter in the group. You still fail most of the time, and you would fail almost all the time alone. So even if you're the best hunter, you need all the other hunters.

00:55:15 Speaker_02
And even if you're the best hunter, you're going to fail a lot. So you can't only rely on your own skill. Now, the problem with being the best hunter is that you can provoke jealousy and disruption in the group.

00:55:27 Speaker_02
And so people will be jealous of you and they won't cooperate with you properly. And so even if your skills are optimized, if you disturb the skill set of the group, you're all going to fail.

00:55:37 Speaker_02
And so one of the rules, for example, if you're a good hunter, in a hunting community is that you don't take the best cuts of meat for yourself, you distribute them. If you're the guy responsible for the kill, and you also downplay your contribution.

00:55:51 Speaker_01
Oh, this old thing.

00:55:53 Speaker_02
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, you know, you were very, very helpful. And the idea, it's quite straightforward, I think, once you understand it properly, is that you're storing

00:56:07 Speaker_02
the results of your current hunt, where you've actually brought down an animal that's larger than you can consume or that your family can consume, you're storing that in your reputation among the other hunters.

00:56:18 Speaker_02
And that's by far the best way to store it. And you could think about that as a, I think you can think about that as the basis for something like natural law. It's like, because I was thinking about that.

00:56:28 Speaker_02
There's an injunction in the gospel accounts about storing treasure up in heaven rather than on earth where it can rust or where moths can consume it.

00:56:37 Speaker_02
And I have thought recently that that's a reference to the utility of storing your treasure in reputation, because that's the best possible currency.

00:56:49 Speaker_02
If you have a stable social group and people think highly of you, they know that you've contributed generously in the past. If you hit a rough patch, the probability that you're going to

00:57:00 Speaker_02
invite reciprocity on the part of people you evaded in the past is extremely high. Okay, now your concept of the relationship between emotion and language is that we're using, we need to bridge that gap. We're using emotion to signal our

00:57:17 Speaker_02
to signal our strategies in reciprocal interaction so that they're structured optimally. How do you see language emerging out of that? We've got this emotional under structure.

00:57:27 Speaker_01
I mean, language is a whole other story. But one thing this does is, and I'll get to language in a second.

00:57:33 Speaker_01
The way that often we think of language is that you've got this really rigorous grammar, these propositions, and then emotions are these little colors that they've added. There's a little bit of flavor and color.

00:57:46 Speaker_02
Or something that's interfering with rational discourse, right?

00:57:50 Speaker_01
But really, I think it's the other way around. The real language that we speak, even on Twitter, even when it's just text, is ultimately, it's all of this stuff. It's all of these emotional expressions being done in very complicated ways.

00:58:01 Speaker_01
And nowadays with GIFs, if you look at the GIFs that we use, the animated GIFs, they're all deeply, they're ways and memes. These are all ways of getting across your emotions.

00:58:11 Speaker_02
They're archetypal emotional expressions, yeah.

00:58:13 Speaker_01
Really, it's all emotional expressions sprinkled with propositional-like content attached to it, rather than propositional content sprinkled with emotions. This is the wrong way to think about it.

00:58:23 Speaker_01
Most of what we're doing, all of these things are amounting to pushing in chips because I've said that I'm so right about something for these reasons, or I think you're so wrong for these reasons. I'm pushing in social capital chips when I tweet.

00:58:36 Speaker_01
Or I'm saying, I'm not really sure, but maybe it's this. So I've pushed in one tiny little chip.

00:58:40 Speaker_02
So it's a betting market on the validity of propositions using social capital.

00:58:44 Speaker_01
That's exactly what it is. It's a market. It's a marketplace. And that's why free speech is necessary. Free speech is really a marketplace of ideas. One of the interesting things about social capital is a decentralized currency, right?

00:59:02 Speaker_01
Now, most of us didn't know anything about decentralized currencies until Bitcoin came along, and now we've got all these cryptocurrencies, which are decentralized currencies.

00:59:11 Speaker_01
One of the interesting things about decentralized currency is because there's no bank with some boss looking at the ledgers of who sent money to somebody else.

00:59:20 Speaker_01
That's not going to work because the whole point of a decentralized currency is that it's not in any one person's hand. Instead, it's spread across many, many... It's an unfalsifiable ledger. That's right.

00:59:29 Speaker_01
So there's this notion of a blockchain and a blockchain is just like, OK, today Doug sent Susie 0.3 Bitcoin and it's just a list of all the Bitcoin transactions that occurred. And it's in everybody's computers everywhere.

00:59:39 Speaker_01
And when there's a new block added to the chain, there's some particular work that has to be done called proof of work or there's proof of stake.

00:59:46 Speaker_01
There's different kinds of ways of adding it such that it once you've built up, let's say, a year's worth of these sort of block Bitcoin, let's say, transfers, it's practically impossible to go back and mess with the history of it.

01:00:01 Speaker_01
And the reason it has to be like this is because it's decentralized and there's no other way to do it. So, well, reputation is another decentralized currency.

01:00:09 Speaker_01
How do you get it so that within a community, a social community, you can make sure that when I had an argument with you and you won, I don't go around later and say, oh, actually, I won that argument. I totally humiliated Jordan, right?

01:00:21 Speaker_01
I could just start lying about the past, about what happened. It's like me saying, no, actually, you gave me the Bitcoin. I didn't give you the Bitcoin. Or we call it double spending.

01:00:29 Speaker_01
Like, I give you Bitcoin, but I still have the Bitcoin, because the ledger's not keeping track of the fact that I gave it to you. This would undermine a currency. Nothing would work.

01:00:36 Speaker_01
So the same problems that decentralized currencies have that lead to blockchain is why we end up with social narratives. Social narratives are the answer that we already had up and running.

01:00:46 Speaker_01
Social narratives are the human social groups way of remembering, OK, this week, Mark lost social capital to Jordan and Susie lost it to Betty. We keep track of these little stories.

01:00:58 Speaker_01
The most stories that we remember are one, stories about the argument that we had, Mark was being a douchebag, but it's also really about the Mark lost social capital to Jordan because of those things.

01:01:08 Speaker_01
Those things are helping me remember how much social capital that I lost. And there's often people that are good at gossip. These are the people that are good at minors. These are like, or proof of, well, one is proof of stake.

01:01:21 Speaker_01
They own a lot of, they're already high reputation people in the community. These are people who own a lot of Bitcoin, say, or some other currencies. And then they can say, we have a higher vote as to whether a new block comes onto the chain.

01:01:32 Speaker_01
And they're worthy of listening to because they care about the validity, whether that currency stays good. So gossipers are typically high, ranked reputation people in the community, and they spin stories about what happens, sort of accumulating.

01:01:47 Speaker_01
They come up with simpler versions of whatever happened that helps it, remember, it gets added to the chain.

01:01:53 Speaker_01
And often, gossip is really easy to check that it's preserving what actually happened in the community, but it's really hard to come up with good gossip. Good gossip that elegantly explains the happenings of the week.

01:02:06 Speaker_02
It's like a condensed narrative.

01:02:08 Speaker_01
Like a really condensed narrative, easy to verify, hard to come up with, only certain kinds of individuals are good to come out with. So these are a lot similar to what's called proof of work.

01:02:14 Speaker_01
Proof of works are things that are really hard to do this work to glue one block to the next, but they're really easy to verify that it's a correct solution.

01:02:22 Speaker_01
So, you end up with these sort of analogies that we've already been using for hundreds of thousands, well, millions of years, well, at least hundreds of thousands of years, that we ended up with these social narratives that in order to have a reputation currency that is preserved over time and we can't muck with, builds these blockchain-like social narratives.

01:02:41 Speaker_01
And that's great. But the downside is that once a narrative gets up and running, just like once a blockchain gets up and running, you can't muck with it. And so, if it creates something false, You're stuck with it for generations, potentially.

01:02:54 Speaker_01
So this is one of the things that I talk about a bit here, and I'm trying to work into a next book.

01:02:59 Speaker_01
Taking seriously some of these kinds of emergent phenomena that you have to deal with when you have decentralized currencies, like these blockchain-like properties, which are what social narratives are.

01:03:09 Speaker_01
have these downsides of being almost unalterable. Right, right. And they just- Permanent mistakes. Permanent mistakes that go on and on forever. You know, the Jews deal with this.

01:03:17 Speaker_01
I think the Jews got added to, as being the evil, you know, goblin-type group that's controlling and puppeteering everyone two or 3,000 years ago, and it just never goes away.

01:03:27 Speaker_01
You know, it just keeps on, and it just keeps getting added to the same kind of narratives, keep moving on. So there's all these terrible things, but it's also all these great things, because you wouldn't have reputation systems that work.

01:03:38 Speaker_01
None of the public square would work. None of the social interactions would work at all without it.

01:03:42 Speaker_02
So let me ask you, one of the things that I've been concerned about, for whatever that's worth, is online anonymity.

01:03:52 Speaker_02
We know there's an endless number of, I think, valid social psychology studies, which is a very small proportion of social psychology studies, by the way, that show that when people are shielded from the reputational consequences of their actions, they're much more likely to misbehave.

01:04:10 Speaker_02
And that's why, for example, You know, if someone steps in front of you while you're walking down the street, you're very unlikely to curse. Whereas if they cut you off in your car, you're very likely to curse.

01:04:22 Speaker_02
So anonymity facilitates a more psychopathic and impulsive style of responding. And one of the problems we have on the net now is that Anonymity, I wouldn't say reigns, but it's very, very pervasive.

01:04:38 Speaker_02
And that means you can say whatever the hell you want with absolutely no reputational consequence. And so my view of the online world, this might be particularly relevant on X, is that anonymous signaling

01:05:00 Speaker_02
facilitates a psychopathic and sadistic form of social interaction.

01:05:05 Speaker_01
Yeah, I hear that a lot. I've argued against that often. And the reason I don't think that's right is every day you have countless encounters with folks in real life at the coffee place, or wherever it is, cars signaling to one another.

01:05:18 Speaker_01
We emotionally signal in our cars all the time. And you don't know one of these folks, and you're you know that you don't know these folks.

01:05:26 Speaker_01
And what's usually, though, there that's not there on the web is full, rich, socio-emotional interactions that are allowing you to go through your day. Yeah, you're embodied. Yeah, you're embodied.

01:05:36 Speaker_01
You're really able to get along well, I think, because all of your emotional expressions are there. I think that online... Well, and your habits, too.

01:05:45 Speaker_02
because it's an embodied environment, you're running on the habits that are a consequence of the fact that you are in something approximating an intact social environment.

01:05:54 Speaker_01
No doubt, no doubt. And let me give you an example online where things work terribly. or Twitter, where we typically don't know people in real life. In Facebook, you kind of know who they are, at least back in the day.

01:06:08 Speaker_01
You know that that's Doug's friend, whatever. You kind of have some idea who these people are in real life. And people are even meaner on Facebook. It's one or other than these little comment arguments. They're just vicious and vile.

01:06:19 Speaker_01
And they're so mean, even though they know each other. I think that what's

01:06:24 Speaker_01
I think that really what matters in both of these worlds is having some notion of identity that extends over time and you need to be able to socially, socio-emotionally express yourself as best you can.

01:06:38 Speaker_01
So on Twitter, I think really what matters is pseudonyms are fine. You know, I can't say it's pseudonymity.

01:06:46 Speaker_02
Because they're stable?

01:06:47 Speaker_01
They're stable. You know, some of the best accounts are these folks. Once you've built up 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000, it takes years to get to this point. You've got a voice. No one knows who they are, but they don't want to lose their account.

01:06:58 Speaker_02
Then you're making a distinction between

01:07:01 Speaker_01
They're an individual in that world.

01:07:02 Speaker_02
High-reputation anonymous is not the same as low-reputation anonymous.

01:07:05 Speaker_01
And that's true, right, yeah. They're real people as far as they're concerned. They really have something.

01:07:10 Speaker_02
Well, it might even be that their pseudonymous identity is actually trumping their genuine identity if they have like 500,000 followers online.

01:07:17 Speaker_01
Yeah, often these people are nobodies in real life and they could well have be jobless, living in their parents' base. Who knows?

01:07:24 Speaker_01
No one knows, but they've got something really good to say as far as their followers are concerned, and they care, and they have a lot to lose if they were to start saying things that ruin their reputation and they lose their followers.

01:07:36 Speaker_01
So I think that what's important is that continuity over time, and pseudonyms are fine. It's the anonymous folks. It's not anonymity. That's fine.

01:07:45 Speaker_02
Okay, well, that's a good objection. That's a good objection because you're basically pointing out that stable pseudonyms that extend across time and that accrue reputation, then become subject to the same regulating forces as a genuine identity.

01:08:01 Speaker_02
Okay, that seems perfectly reasonable to me. And there are anonymous accounts or pseudonymous accounts that I follow in X that I think are of high quality. So I don't think there's a necessary relationship between the use of a pseudonym and pathology.

01:08:15 Speaker_01
And frankly, 99% of the people who have their real names are, I don't really know if it's real names. I'm never going to meet them in real life. It's so abstract that it's academic. Really what matters is their identity there.

01:08:27 Speaker_01
Even their real name there amounts to a pseudonym, as far as I'm concerned, practically speaking.

01:08:33 Speaker_02
Yeah, well, there's always the lurking possibility that they'll be discovered. Possibility of cancellation, but yeah. Okay, fair enough. Okay, so let's leave out the more reputationally significant pseudonymous accounts and concentrate on the

01:08:50 Speaker_02
So a lot of the, I read a lot of comments, partly because I find that's a very useful way of, first of all, evaluating how people are actually responding to the material that I'm putting up.

01:09:02 Speaker_02
And that's very necessary if I'm going to be communicating with a very large number of people. But it also gives me a good sense of the tone of the social world at any given moment around any given topic. Now,

01:09:14 Speaker_02
There are a multitude of accounts that are anonymous, that are low reputation, no followers, no postings, right? And they're often exceptionally vitriolic. And I guess one of the concerns that I've had is that

01:09:29 Speaker_02
the lack of consequence that they experience because of their derisive and pathological utterances polarizes the social discussion in a manner that's genuinely counterproductive. So tell me what you think of this.

01:09:46 Speaker_02
So imagine that there's a distribution of attitudes around any given concept. right, or any given topic. And the more extreme attitudes are rarer.

01:09:56 Speaker_02
But if the extreme attitudes are emotionally amplified and there's no punishment that's consequential to that emotional amplification, in fact, perhaps the reverse, because if it's pithy and striking, even if it's derisive and denigrating, it's going to pick up more influence than it would under normal circumstances.

01:10:16 Speaker_02
I've wondered if the political polarization that characterizes our time is partly a consequence of the exaggeration of long tail distribution opinions in a manner that would never occur in face-to-face social interaction.

01:10:34 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, the folks that have, you know, let's just say a dozen followers, they certainly have very little to lose because they can just restart a new account if for some reason

01:10:45 Speaker_01
If those 12 followers stop following, then it's like, screw it, I'm going to start over again.

01:10:49 Speaker_02
Sure, or they might have two dozen accounts to begin with.

01:10:52 Speaker_01
But they're a lot like the town drunk, for example. They could cause a lot of havoc, and they can enter into conversations to sort of cause havoc, but no one really would be listening to them. I suppose you could argue that they're getting their

01:11:07 Speaker_01
they're getting to say something with the same status as somebody else with a lot of followers right there in the stream, whereas in real life- Yes, that's the issue. And that may not even be true.

01:11:16 Speaker_01
It could be that Musk has it so that often when they're just not even visible and say there's more and you got to click it and then it opens up some others that it is suspicious whether you even want to hear.

01:11:25 Speaker_01
So they may be doing some mechanisms that hide the very low reputation, low follower count folks, which is probably a good idea at some point because you need to have these people earn their, earn your way to being worth listening to, right?

01:11:38 Speaker_02
Of course. Of course. Otherwise, you'd have to have 7 billion people in your house all the time. Right, right. Yeah.

01:11:46 Speaker_01
So I think there's that and thousands of other issues in terms of how to optimize social networks and public squares. Given that it's no longer 100 people in your village, or maybe 500 people in your village, or high school-wise.

01:12:02 Speaker_02
Well, there's also not face-to-face emotional display, as we've been discussing.

01:12:07 Speaker_01
So there's been an evolution towards that. Now, in the last three or four or five years, you can do different kinds of emotional expressions on Facebook. You can choose to laugh or smile.

01:12:15 Speaker_01
There's a lot of these, you can just respond not just with a like or not like, and even a like is effectively an emotional expressive response.

01:12:22 Speaker_01
And we manage just in the prose that we use, of course, we're using constantly emotional responses that amount to an emotional response, even if you don't think of it as much. You're either showing confidence in yourself or disdain in the other.

01:12:33 Speaker_01
These are emotional expressions because you're staking or pulling off stake. Almost at all times, that's how you show confidence to real people, not p-values. We do it through staking stuff. That's how we do it.

01:12:46 Speaker_01
Hopefully, the designers don't need to fix it. In real life, the public square has local spots where people, let's say, in their local village argue.

01:12:58 Speaker_01
And then maybe the best couple of them go to the bigger city and they argue with other people from different villages in the big city. It ends up hierarchical, the public square, in the old days.

01:13:10 Speaker_01
And in principle, if you look at the hierarchy that happened organically through something like Twitter, I think you're going to see similar kinds of hierarchies. Well, I think you do. I think you do already.

01:13:21 Speaker_01
So it self-organizes so that it's not just a bunch of everybody talking to everybody, right? It ends up self-organizing into a kind of representative democracy kind of way so that you end up dealing with this.

01:13:33 Speaker_02
Yeah, well, Musk is gambling with X that that's what will happen organically as well. Right.

01:13:37 Speaker_02
You know, I guess part of the problem there is that we don't exactly know what the algorithms that operate behind the scenes, how they're weighting the discourse in manners that we might not understand.

01:13:46 Speaker_02
Well, you ran afoul of that, which is something that we're going to talk about more on the Daily Wire side of this. So, yeah, so you...

01:13:55 Speaker_02
So you don't seem to be as concerned as I am, potentially, with the pervasive polluting effect of the anonymous troll demon types amplifying viewpoints that, under normal circumstances, wouldn't rise to the top.

01:14:11 Speaker_01
I'm skeptical of their ability to do any amplification because they have no followers, so no one is seeing them. You may not, sometimes I see them just because even though I don't follow them, I do go through my comments as well.

01:14:22 Speaker_01
So I do end up seeing some of them to the extent that they're not themselves de-boosted. But they in principle should have very little effect, right? Unless the algorithms are somehow accidentally augmented.

01:14:33 Speaker_02
Could they make up for their effect in volume, what they lack in specific following? Like the anonymous troll types, there's a pattern to their communication and they're relatively interchangeable.

01:14:45 Speaker_02
There's a lot of resentment and derision that characterizes the landscape of that kind of communication.

01:14:51 Speaker_01
Well, you certainly have to be, I mean, someone like Musk, it has to be a beware of bot farms that create bots that can then leverage and hack, you know, some diagonalize against whatever their systems are so that they, it turns out when you have tens of thousands of comments in the right way, it ends up

01:15:08 Speaker_01
ends up doing something to the algorithm that ends up allowing them to boost things just on the basis of a whole bunch of no follower bots. You can imagine having the wrong kinds of algorithms.

01:15:17 Speaker_01
So those are the kinds of things they have to be aware of. And no matter what they do, it could be that I haven't thought about this kind of problem.

01:15:23 Speaker_01
It could be there's ways of sort of always finding some new crack and they've got to come up with measures.

01:15:27 Speaker_02
Well, it's going to be an evolutionary arms race. Obviously. And whether the rules can keep up with the most creative trolls, it's unlikely, I would suspect. Because they never do.

01:15:38 Speaker_02
I mean, we wouldn't have criminals in the real world if people couldn't game even well-established reputational systems. But, you know, it's weird. I guess we can think about this from an evolutionary perspective because

01:15:53 Speaker_02
A lot of online activity is criminal or quasi-criminal, probably half of it, right? It's about 25% pornographic and about 20% outright criminal. So that's 45% right there.

01:16:04 Speaker_02
Then there's a periphery of pathological troll types that's got to add at least another 5 or 10%. And so one of the things we might ask ourselves is like, is that a...

01:16:16 Speaker_02
devolution to the standard form of human interaction, because before there were well-established, free, rule-abiding, law-governed societies, it was probably something like a quasi-criminal Wild West.

01:16:29 Speaker_02
And it looks to me like we're duplicating that, at least to some degree, online.

01:16:36 Speaker_02
I wonder if the fact that we've removed so many of the cues that help us regulate social behavior by abstracting up our communication patterns so intensely, like narrow channeling them, these 144 character tweets, for example, whether we've lost a lot of the systems that allowed us to regulate social interaction, like we've stepped out of our evolutionary landscape.

01:17:00 Speaker_01
So that to me is more important than,

01:17:03 Speaker_01
Pseudonyms are fine, but to me, a lot of these small accounts that walk up with all this attitude out of the blue, if I saw them in real life, I guarantee you they would have a different behavior toward me in real life. Absolutely.

01:17:18 Speaker_01
And not to mention that I'm probably twice their age and I've got a little bit of gray. Younger men typically just behave a little differently to older guys. There's just something that happens in normal life when you see someone.

01:17:28 Speaker_02
Yeah, well, you never have an interaction like that in normal life, ever. I don't think anybody has ever spoken to me once in my life the way people speak in the troll comment sections, right?

01:17:39 Speaker_01
So I don't know whether there's some way to... I've thought a lot about how can you...

01:17:44 Speaker_01
allow much more full expressive, you know, I don't know what full expressive capabilities are, how can you add them so that you can actually, for example, not just like or not just happy, but you actually pull up a two-dimensional array and actually just pick from at least the two dimensions, a full four-dimensional space, but at least a two-dimensional quick space to give you a much more exact, you know, but still it's not going to be the same.

01:18:07 Speaker_01
It's going to be still some technical. So,

01:18:09 Speaker_02
Well, it's also not the same partly because, you know, you talked about the way that young men react to you or men in general.

01:18:15 Speaker_02
I mean, one of the things that regulates male communication, at least in the public space, is the probability if you say something sufficiently stupid, you're going to get smacked. And that's definitely not something that happens online.

01:18:27 Speaker_02
And you might think, well, that's good because we've abstracted ourselves away from the violence.

01:18:31 Speaker_01
It's the risk of a fight. Yes, definitely. Always, there's the call. And without the call, poker wouldn't exist, right? Poker wouldn't exist if I knew that you couldn't call. There was a risk of us turning our cards over.

01:18:44 Speaker_01
the entire game of emotional expressions is trying to avoid the call, but the fact that the call is there is an ever present, that we could fight about it, and lawyers are involved.

01:18:55 Speaker_01
The entire game of lawyers is each of them potentially willing to call and let's go to court, but they're all trying to bluff that they're totally willing to go to the court, but no one wants to go to court. They all want to pretend like they are.

01:19:05 Speaker_01
That's all emotional signaling to avoid the fight, to hopefully settle and come to an agreement without having to go to court.

01:19:12 Speaker_02
Yeah, well, that's another kind of stake. It's like there's hierarchies of stakes, right? So to begin with, you signal your willingness to potentially sacrifice your reputation. So it's sacrificial signaling.

01:19:26 Speaker_01
Well, it's not sacrificial because I'm saying that I'm really confident, or I have to show disdain for you.

01:19:30 Speaker_02
Right, but you'll take the risk. Well, yeah. That's the value of the signal is that you think that you're right enough so that you'll take the risk that you might have to sacrifice something.

01:19:39 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:19:39 Speaker_02
Right. Right, right.

01:19:41 Speaker_01
Which shows that I think I'm going to win.

01:19:43 Speaker_02
Right, right. Well, not only win the immediate argument, but win in a manner that sustains your reputation across time. Well, when you jump out of that domain, you're in another domain of stake.

01:19:55 Speaker_02
Because when I move from reputational fighting, let's say, to physical fighting, what I'm putting on the line is my psychophysiological integrity.

01:20:05 Speaker_02
I'm willing to say, no, I'm going to stake myself on this particular proposition, even if it's at risk to my physiological integrity. And so we try to avoid that, obviously. I mean, anxiety is one of the things that helps us avoid that.

01:20:20 Speaker_02
Pain signifies actual physical damage and anxiety just the threat of that. But it's interesting that just as language grounds out in emotion, negotiation grounds out in something like willingness to contend physically.

01:20:36 Speaker_01
Yeah, or signaled willingness. A lot of it's, of course, bluff.

01:20:41 Speaker_02
Of course, of course. With anyone with any sense, it's bluff until that's absolutely impossible, but it's a pointless bluff if the reality isn't there at some level.

01:20:54 Speaker_02
And people are always checking each other out to see whether or not that bluff is pointless as well. So, yeah. So what are you working on next?

01:21:04 Speaker_01
Well, I was going to quickly, we sort of skipped language. And this is not just language, it's writing language and music and all of the things that make us human 2.0.

01:21:15 Speaker_01
So in my second book, Vision Revolution, in addition to some of these color and four facing eyes and why we see illusions, which we didn't talk about. The reason that we can read at all, so if you think about it, reading, we didn't evolve to read.

01:21:29 Speaker_01
You know, it's just 2,000 years old at best. Often our great-grandparents didn't even read. Most of us have illiterate or great-great-grandparents. Reading is much too recent, and yet we seem to have visual word form areas.

01:21:40 Speaker_01
I mean, neuroscientists know that we didn't evolve, but they've named some of the areas of our brains even, you know, basically reading areas. And we know that they're not actually reading areas, so how did that happen?

01:21:47 Speaker_01
In fact, we read so well, it really is like an instinct. We read often more than we listen to all day long. Reading is, and we're so amazingly good at it. Even children are great at it by four years old, and they're barely being read to.

01:22:01 Speaker_01
They're not having much practice compared to being spoken to, right? So it's almost as if it's an instinct. So how is that possible? And so what I argued 20 years ago is that over time, cultural evolution itself shaped

01:22:14 Speaker_01
the look of writing to look like nature. So, we already have visual systems that are incredibly good at processing natural scenes, object recognition. And so, all that culture had to do was invent writing systems that looked like nature.

01:22:29 Speaker_01
In our case, so for example, you've got L junctions. just whenever there's some kind of contour in the world, meaning the tip of another contour. You've got T-junctions whenever something goes behind something.

01:22:38 Speaker_01
There's my contour here, goes up against this contour. Those are the two main ones. There's X-junctions, but X-junctions don't happen in a world of awake objects. It's very rare, in fact.

01:22:47 Speaker_01
And then you can look at all the different kinds of junctions that have three contours. Let's say Y junctions and K junctions. And it turns out there's 32 of these different kinds of topologically distinct junctions with three contours.

01:22:59 Speaker_01
And then you can ask, well, how commonly do these things happen in natural scenes of just opaque objects? Either you can look at like different kinds of varieties of scenes as well as just turns out it doesn't really matter where you look.

01:23:08 Speaker_01
It's all the same as just a world with opaque objects strewn about. It's basically drives the same relative probability of which of these junction types happen.

01:23:17 Speaker_01
And then you can just ask, well, if this idea is right, then you should find that across human writing systems, writing tends to have the junction types that are found in nature. And that's- In those proportions? In those proportions.

01:23:28 Speaker_02
And is that the case?

01:23:29 Speaker_01
And that's the case.

01:23:30 Speaker_02
In those proportions?

01:23:31 Speaker_01
Right, and this is a 2006 paper by an American naturalist. Oh, that's cool. So the idea is that we read, we can only read, which is part of what we take to be central to our human nature, even as the ability to be literate, right?

01:23:41 Speaker_01
I mean, of course, it's not a part of our human nature. This is culture which is harnessed- Especially silent reading.

01:23:47 Speaker_01
This is a cultural evolutionary process which has harnessed the visual object recognition brain for reading by tricking it, not because we've evolved for it, but instead evolving writing to fit us.

01:24:00 Speaker_01
Now, the same idea, I argued in the next book, in Harnessed, that spoken language is like this as well.

01:24:07 Speaker_01
So spoken language, instead of writing evolving to look like nature, it's spoken language evolved to sound like nature, in particular, sound like solid object physical events. When there's solid objects- That's a consonant? That's a consonant.

01:24:22 Speaker_01
Well, a plosive in particular. There's a plosive like puh, duh, kuh. And then you've got fricatives. Well, this doesn't- Sliding. This doesn't make any sound at all. Right. You got sliding sounds.

01:24:34 Speaker_01
And then you have, when either of those things happen, the things vibrate, they ring. And those are like the sonorants.

01:24:39 Speaker_01
Sonorants are things that ring, vowels, and any kind of like ya and wa, and also just a, e, i, o, u. The basic notion of a syllable is a hit and a ring. It's either, you know, sa is a slide, and those objects are vibrating.

01:24:53 Speaker_01
Or a ba is, there's a collision. Like a bell. Yeah, it's like a bell. Something hits and they're ringing thereafter. And then this is just what you can then start working out when I do the book.

01:25:02 Speaker_01
It's like, look, there's all these grammars of what solid object events do.

01:25:07 Speaker_01
So you can actually work out they typically are going to start with a consonant or a plosive or a fricative because those are just the more often with a plosive because that's what starts the event.

01:25:16 Speaker_01
And it'll typically end in certain kinds of ways because that's what physical events among solid objects do.

01:25:21 Speaker_01
And you can start working out all of these many dozens of kinds of regularities, and then ask whether across human languages, you find the same morphemic regularities at that level.

01:25:34 Speaker_02
the white ball hits the black ball, the black ball hits a yellow ball, that black ball, yellow ball hitting is something like kuk, right? Starts with a consonant, ends with a consonant.

01:25:45 Speaker_01
In that case, because the rolling maybe you can't hear, but if you're imagining sliding bricks, it could be buh, buh, shh.

01:25:53 Speaker_02
Right, right.

01:25:53 Speaker_01
Say bosh, like bash, like bash.

01:25:56 Speaker_02
Right, and if it ran into something else, there'd be another consonant at the end of it.

01:25:59 Speaker_01
And there'd be a consonant at the end, right?

01:26:00 Speaker_01
So when you work out, but you can work out many kind of mathematical regularities that happen in exactly in those systems and are peculiar, and then across humankind, you can show that, oh my gosh, over and over again, these same regularities of solid object physical events are found as universals across humankind.

01:26:14 Speaker_01
So the story in both these cases, and then music, let me, before I make that kind of summary thing, music, also sound like speech, but of course it's fundamentally different. It's utterly evocative.

01:26:26 Speaker_01
We could listen to music all day long in the car, in our houses. My music is on literally all day long. We just enjoy it so much.

01:26:33 Speaker_01
Why would I enjoy listening to these weird sounds that some people have thought, well, they're like mathematical things from Plato's realm. This is always bull crap. This doesn't make any sense. We didn't evolve to like mathematically beautiful things.

01:26:44 Speaker_01
We evolved to like things that are human. Those are the things that we want to touch and be with. And the humans are the most important stimuli in our lives, which is why colors are so important.

01:26:56 Speaker_01
Colors are ultimately emotional and evocative because they're about human skin and bodies and emotional health, so forth. And the sounds of music, I hypothesize, and this was, I guess, 15, 20 years ago, are the sounds of humans moving in your midst.

01:27:09 Speaker_01
In fact, this has been an old idea even since the Greeks and music has something to do with movement or, you know, some sounds of, but trying to make it rigorous. So working out, okay, what do humans sound like when they move?

01:27:18 Speaker_01
Well, one of the most basic things is there's a gate, there's the footsteps. Sure. And that's just the beat. And then, of course, there's loudness modulations, which is the fortissimo down to pianissimo.

01:27:30 Speaker_01
And there's the scales at which those things change. And you can work out what are the scales at which those things change.

01:27:35 Speaker_02
We wouldn't be able to dance to music if that wasn't the case.

01:27:38 Speaker_01
That's right. You wouldn't be able to dance. So it's not like some accidental side effect that you're able to dance to it. No, it's literally designed to be the sounds of a human mover moving evocatively in your midst.

01:27:46 Speaker_01
And another thing that happens when things move through the world is you actually hear their Doppler shifts. Now, Doppler shifts, you know, ee-ow, right? And the faster it is, it's ee-ow. Bigger Doppler shifts are faster moving things.

01:27:56 Speaker_01
Now, even the movements of humans, which are a little bit, they're much smaller kinds of Doppler shifts, but my claim in that book was that the kinds of patterns that you end up with the Doppler shifts, which are exaggerated Doppler shifts, as if it's moving faster, still have the fundamental signature of

01:28:11 Speaker_01
of human movement. And so, for example, if you're moving faster, there's a bigger difference between high pitch and low pitch because of the Doppler shift. But also, if you're moving faster, the tempo of the song is going to be faster.

01:28:25 Speaker_01
It's going to be a higher, faster tempo, right? So, the faster moving things will have a bigger difference between top and bottom. And in music, that's called the tessitura, the difference between the top and the bottom.

01:28:36 Speaker_01
But also, so the prediction here is that faster tempo things correlates with higher, bigger tessitura, sort of in real-world movement. Is that true in music?

01:28:44 Speaker_01
Do higher, bigger tessitura songs actually tend to be more bigger, faster in tempo, or vice versa? Which is not what you want when you're the piano player.

01:28:53 Speaker_01
When someone says, hey, here's a much faster song, you're like, great, hopefully it's a really small tessitura, because I can just go, no, no, no, no, in fact, The faster the song, the tessituras get wider and wider, for example.

01:29:03 Speaker_01
So these are these kinds of predicted regularities between these different kinds of patterns of modulations, of loudness.

01:29:14 Speaker_01
beat and rhythmic things that are connected to the time lock to the beat, as well as to so that there's like 80 something different kinds of regularities you can show. For example, how fast do humans turn?

01:29:25 Speaker_01
And so we got data from soccer players, how many steps do they take to turn 90 degrees? And so At the top of the high pitch is when it's coming directly toward you. Low pitch is when it's moving directly away from you in a tessitura.

01:29:38 Speaker_01
So typically, people, when they turn 90 degrees, take about two steps to do it on average. They can go obviously faster if they just go one way real quickly.

01:29:46 Speaker_01
And so it's 100, you know, to go from toward you to away from you quickly would still be about four steps. And so that would be about four beats. It typically takes a measure.

01:29:54 Speaker_01
So you can actually look across thousands of songs and ask, is it usually the case that you move a half a tessitura in about two beats.

01:30:01 Speaker_01
And in fact, you can show, yeah, these in fact determine the baseline time ranges of how quickly melodies move through the testors, things like that.

01:30:12 Speaker_02
So you're mapping the basic structure of music onto the kinetics of human movement. Like I said, if that wasn't the case, the dance wouldn't work. That's right, exactly. And music is very evocative of motion.

01:30:23 Speaker_02
It's very weird that we sit in concert halls, like in classic music concert halls, and sit still. No one wants to sit still. We want to move our body in time. And not only that, it's interesting too, because music unifies us socially as well.

01:30:36 Speaker_02
Because when we're moving in time to the music, we're all moving in the same way. So it's evocative of a pattern of movement that unites everyone. Right, right, right. Right. Well, there's also the emotional display element.

01:30:49 Speaker_02
I mean, you can see in musical compositions argument, there'll be a proposition and then a counter proposition. Yeah, that's right.

01:30:56 Speaker_01
It's not always just one guy or gal walking. It's often complicated, the duets and different things going on. And in some sense, what I work out in the book is sort of the baseline boring you know, here's the baseline kind of things that humans do.

01:31:12 Speaker_01
Any good composer is deviating from that baseline to create interesting stories, right?

01:31:18 Speaker_01
So I'm not the artist type, I'm trying to like, here's the typical baseline, that's what determines the average across all these songs, none of which would be potentially very good if they actually stuck to the average that I'm finding, right?

01:31:27 Speaker_01
So they're all deviating from that. But the bigger story about these kinds of cultural harnessing of us, I call this harnessing, by looking like nature, sounding like nature, is that we often think of ourselves as the speaking animal, right?

01:31:44 Speaker_01
Or as the music animal or the artistic animal. This is what often we define what it is to be human by a lot of these things, the arts and the ability to talk, the ability to be literate.

01:31:55 Speaker_01
But up until just a couple hundred thousand years ago, and it's exactly unclear, we didn't have language at all. We certainly didn't have writing. We didn't have music.

01:32:02 Speaker_01
We may have had some vocalization stuff that people did, but probably a million years, we may not have even had that. All of the things that we mistakenly think of ourselves as human aren't human 1.0 at all.

01:32:12 Speaker_01
All of the stuff that we take to be human today are really human 2.0s. These are things that are products of cultural engineering that now is harnessing us and giving us all these modern powers. So, you know, it always was remarkable.

01:32:26 Speaker_01
You've got chimpanzees with their encephalization quotient, you know, and it's a little bit bigger than these other great apes and so forth. And then you've got us. Again, it's a little bit bigger on a log scale, but it's not

01:32:37 Speaker_01
you're not looking at it, you're going, oh, this totally explains the difference between us and chimpanzees. No, chimpanzees are like super dumb compared to us, because look at all the stuff that we could do.

01:32:44 Speaker_01
We can ride, drive cars, and we can do math, and all the crazy stuff that we can do in our real lives makes us seem like we're literally off the page and miles away.

01:32:53 Speaker_01
So how can you make sense of the fact that we're only just a little bit higher, and yet it's because biologically our human 1.0 selves are just this little bit higher? In this world, just expressions, we're just a little bit smarter.

01:33:06 Speaker_02
But what we have is all this... Which is why we can understand other animals. We emote very, very directly.

01:33:12 Speaker_01
That's right. And dogs, we get along great. It's the cultural technology that's fundamentally changed who we are. The first big one, of course, was language, which has made us the language ape, but we're not the language ape per se at all.

01:33:24 Speaker_01
This is a cultural product of this cultural evolution co-evolving, not co-evolving, just evolving for us to plug into our brains and give us language when we never had one.

01:33:36 Speaker_01
harnessing object event systems to make it so that we can suddenly communicate with one another. And then music is evolving to the sounds of human movement recognition systems.

01:33:46 Speaker_01
And then much more recently, writing evolving, culturally evolving, just to look like natural objects allowing us to read. All of these things are exactly who we take to be human today, but none of this is our human 1.0 selves.

01:33:58 Speaker_02
Right, but you draw a continuum because you're pointing out that even these abstract capabilities are grounded at a perceptual level in our ability to perceive phenomena that were real-world phenomena.

01:34:11 Speaker_01
That's right.

01:34:12 Speaker_02
That's very cool. I never thought about consonants as collisions, but of course that makes perfect sense. I like the idea of vowels as the ringing element.

01:34:22 Speaker_01
That's right. So I feel like this is a – so, for example, typically for language, you've got two sides. You've got – and they're gorillas, like Steven Pinker and Chomsky. Chomsky's been on and off of this for years.

01:34:34 Speaker_01
But roughly, you've got the language instinct folks. That we've evolved over millions of years or hundreds of thousands of years to evolve to really have a language in sync. There's part of our brain that's designed for language.

01:34:44 Speaker_01
And I think that's wrong. And the other side, all these years, was like, no, we're infinitely classic, infinitely malleable. We do all these things we never evolved to do, like riding horses, whatever.

01:34:52 Speaker_01
Like, there's millions of things we do, we're just infinitely classic. Well, that's totally wrong as well. And in fact, Pinker's one of the best people that argues against that. Neither of these are right, right?

01:34:59 Speaker_01
So my view is like completely, it's like, no, this is a kind of zoocentrism in my opinion, because each of these are violating zoocentrism. Zoocentrism is the hypothesis that we're animals, for God's sakes. We're not special having a language.

01:35:13 Speaker_02
Right, you assume continuity.

01:35:14 Speaker_01
There's just continuity. We're not special and have a language instinct that makes us human like nobody else's language instinct, but we do. And we're not special

01:35:22 Speaker_01
in the in the blank slate like all these other animals they're filled with instincts but we we're blank slates we're like totally have all these general plastic mechanisms no that's just another violation of zoocentrism we are just animals this and to the extent that we now seem to be something fundamentally different is because of cultural evolution another blind designer blind watchmaker that has got up and running

01:35:45 Speaker_01
several hundred thousand years ago, mildly, that's been designing all this tech for us and giving all these new powers.

01:35:51 Speaker_01
And the fun, of course, language is a big one, writing is another huge one, but all around us right now, there's so much more we can't even put our finger, like the phones, all of these things are constantly evolving to raise us to be becoming more and more intelligent and farther from the other great apes.

01:36:06 Speaker_02
Well, that's probably a good place to stop, as it turns out. That wraps things up quite nicely.

01:36:11 Speaker_02
You are making, in a way, a modified language instinct argument, it seems to me, although what you're doing is pointing out that the instinctual elements of language have to do with the fundamental elements of language and their ability to

01:36:25 Speaker_02
what would you say, abstract out of a substrate that's associated with our evolved perceptions of the natural world. Right, so it's not language per se that is the instinct.

01:36:35 Speaker_01
But it preserves zoocentrism, would be the way I'd like to say it.

01:36:39 Speaker_01
So I'd like to think of this, if you really want to be the Galileo of biology and say, look, no, there's nothing special about the earth, the world doesn't move around the earth, the earth is just one part of the, same thing for us, we're not special, then this allows you to say it.

01:36:52 Speaker_01
There's no language instinct, it's really, We're just animals, and to the extent that we seem not to be, it's because of culture, but we're truly a zoocentric creature. Right, right, right.

01:37:02 Speaker_02
All right, so look, for everybody watching and listening, we're going to switch the topics up when we switch over to the Daily Wire side, because Mark is also somewhat famous, I would say, for running afoul of the internet censors in a very interesting way.

01:37:17 Speaker_02
I follow him on Twitter, that's where I've discovered him and his work. And I had two reasons for inviting him as a guest today.

01:37:25 Speaker_02
And one was because we share an interest in the evolution of perception and cognition and language for that matter, and art for that matter. And so I wanted to have that discussion, which I thought was very productive.

01:37:36 Speaker_02
But there's another element to Mark too, which is his...

01:37:40 Speaker_02
his conflict with the powers that be behind the scenes at the social media networks, and he was subject to relatively draconian censorship in the COVID era, and we're gonna talk about that on The Daily Wire side, so join us there.

01:37:53 Speaker_02
Thank you very much, sir, for coming in today. It's a pleasure. Yeah, very good talking to you. Thank you, everybody, for your time and attention.