Ep109 "Are you one mind or many drives?" with Jordan Peterson - podcast episode cover

Ep109 "Are you one mind or many drives?" with Jordan Peterson

Jun 16, 202543 minEp. 109
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Episode description

Is your brain a one-person show or an ensemble cast of rivaling neural networks? How do we manage the conflict between different drives, and what does this have to do with literature, deities, maturation, and what Nietzsche meant when he said “every drive wants to be master, and it attempts to philosophize in that spirit”? Join Eagleman this week with Jordan Peterson as we examine the way lives are built on conflicting wants.

Transcript

Speaker 1

You consider yourself an individual, but are you in fact built of rivaling neural networks? Can we see ourselves as a collection of personalities? How do we manage the conflict between different drives in our brains? And what does this

have to do with deities or literature or maturation? And what did Friedrich Nietzsche mean when he said that every drive we have wants to quote represent just itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of all the other drives, Or as he also put it, quote every drive wants to be master and it attempts to philosophize in that spirit. What exactly does that mean?

Welcome to inner Cosmos with me David Eagle. I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe to uncover some of the most surprising aspects of our lives. Today's episode is about how we are built of complex circuitry. Each of us is not like a simple computer program, but

instead a machine built on conflict. This is a topic I have loved and written about for many years, and in today's podcast, I talk with a colleague who equally loves this topic from the point of view of clinical psychology. Today we talk with Jordan Peterson. He's one of our most well known psychologists. He was formerly at Harvard University and the University of Toronto and has now started his

own educational platform called the Peterson Academy. You likely know Jordan from his books which have found wide audiences, like Twelve Rules for Life and his newest book, We Who Wrestle with God. Jordan and I are going to visit some key points in our conversation. The first is that as we age, we find ways to make these networks in our brain work together better, and this is in

a sense, the definition of maturation. We'll also talk about the spectrum from a basic drive like reproduction to something richer that we might call a personality.

Speaker 2

Will come to the.

Speaker 1

Role of setting contracts with yourself to wrangle the behavior of the networks. And finally, we're going to discuss the role of literature and religion in setting up a way to direct the conflicting networks by giving them an external exemplar to look to with no out further ado. Here is my conversation with Jordan Peterson. So, Jordan, I'm very interested in how we are a collection of different things going on on the inside.

Speaker 2

We use the term individual when we talk about.

Speaker 1

Ourselves, but in fact we're made up of many different drives or personalities or neural networks.

Speaker 2

This is what we'll get into. So in my.

Speaker 1

Book in Cognito, I talked about as a team of rivals. I know you think about things as a collection of personalities. I'd like us to get into that. So how do you think about what we're made of?

Speaker 2

Who we are? I like the metaphor of personality might be deeper than a metaphor. It might just be a description because it works on a variety of different levels. It adds sophistication to the idea of drive because a drive has an algorithmic and mechanical connotation to it. But a personality has perceptions, emotions, and it has ideas, and it has opinions, and our internal motivational states are like that. So, like sexual the desire for sexual gratification brings with it

a perceptual framework. Obviously, the same with anger, the same with hunger.

Speaker 1

And perceptual framework means what we notice exactly, how we prioritize our attention, and how we sequence our actions.

Speaker 2

Yeah, yeah, But then there's a there's a deeper level too, which which I think you'll you'll find interesting. So I stimpend a lot of time studying the work of a historian of religions named Merche Eliada, and Eliada described a pattern he saw across cultures which was probably the psychological record of integration of tribes across time. So imagine every tribe has a value structure. It's usually represented by a superordinate deity or a set of deities. Okay, now, and

one tribe meets another and they start to interact. Well, that often involves war and certainly involves discussion. It involves cooperation and competition. But there's a cognitive element to that too. So as the cultures integrate, the ideas integrate. Well, that's represented in the mythological literature as a battle between gods in heaven, right, And one of Aliata's points was that the battle between these gods, so these are personalities, tends

towards a monotheism. Across time, as multiple cultures integrate, they integrate towards a monotheism. You might say, well, what's the evidence for that. It's like, well, mono implies unity, integration, applies unity. If culture is into penetrate and there's no unity, they're not integrated. They might be occupied the same territory,

but they're not integrated. Interesting, and I think there's a parallel between that war of personalities that's represented, let's say, in the mythological literature, and the integration of fundamental motivational states in the process of maturation within a culture. I think those are the same thing. And if that's the case, then while you see a unification of phenomena across a very wide range of inquiries.

Speaker 1

Let's talk about what we mean by integration, because in fact, what we have is a battling of these networks all the time. Is certainly when you're a child, but even as you grow older and you set the path for your life and so on, you're always battling with yourself, as in, oh, I should need the case, I should need the cake, I should go do this thing.

Speaker 2

I shouldn't do the thing.

Speaker 1

And so you can cuss it yourself, you can conjole yourself, you can contract with yourself. You can get angry at yourself. And the question is who is getting angry at whom? That's for sure, right, So in a sense, we're still like the polytheism on the infinite.

Speaker 2

We never quite made it to a monotheism. Okay, okay, So I'd like to address that well simultaneously addressing something that you said at the beginning of this discussion. So you talked about us as individuals who are at war with our internal states. Let's say, or we're a battleground of warring internal states, and so we're made out of parts and we coalesce at the individual level. But I

would say that's not exactly, that's not sufficient. That's a necessary description, but it's not sufficient because the idea of integration levels doesn't stop at the level of the individual. Because I could say, for example, well you're married, so now you're a part of that. That's another superordinate structure. It's a real structure. It's not a structure that's embodied in a single body, but it's a structure that's embodied in two very closely interacting bodies. So that makes another

it's a metabody. But then that's integrated in a family, and that's integrated in a community, and then a town, and then a state, and then a nation, and that and even the level of the nation isn't necessarily the highest level of integration. And to identify the individual as arbitrarily as the pinnacle of the integration process is an error, I think. And this actually that addresses the problem of

self regulation. So you're not integrated properly when your wife hates you, right, So a huge, a huge source of information that we use to determine whether we've integrated our internal states properly isn't whether they're functioning for us as individuals. It's whether they allow us to integrate ourselves harmoniously into a marriage, into a family, into a community, into a town.

And then the measure of integration becomes not the existence of the individual, but the existence of harmony across every single one of those levels simultaneously. And so that harmony is what we're striving for. I think that harmony is exemplified by music, by the way, I think so well. Music does the same thing. It takes diverse elements and it organizes them into hire and higher order integrated hierarchies.

And you can see people acting this out when they dance, like to an orchestra, of all the diverse players who are doing the same thing, they're integrated. And then you see people moving themselves in couples and then in a community in relationship to the music. It's a it's a model for this, it's a heavenly hierarchy. That that's the way you express it in terms of ideas that are derived, let's say, from the history of religion. And so I

think we've made a big mistake as psychologists. Assuming it's because we're basically liberal Protestants in our orientation. We assume that the individual is the pinnacle of the integration process. But that's not it's not accurate.

Speaker 1

I would say, there's there's other reasons why we why concert on the individual there, because that that's you know, bound off, it's got borders around it.

Speaker 2

It lives and dies. So this three pound.

Speaker 1

Brain will at some point go away, but the other brains in the community will stick around.

Speaker 2

That sort of so it's a natural place. But of course, every reason to assume that it exists, right, whether it exists as the pinnacle, that's the other question.

Speaker 1

Okay, fair enough, But what it's trying to do within its three pound universe is figure out all these tasks. Okay, how do I work within a community? How do I work within my larger nation state.

Speaker 2

And so on.

Speaker 1

But I think we can corner it to that three pound organ and then talk about what are the neural networks in here?

Speaker 2

Okay, but what Okay, that's possible, but I'm not thoroughly convinced of it, because I think it's reasonable, Like, why not assume that the neural network that's made out of a communication a communicating group is like it's it is part of the work, and it's certainly moving information back and forth, and it like it has an existence, like it's not as obvious to our perceptions as the embodied form of an individual, right, and so it's more abstracted

in that sense. But I don't see that it's of a lower order of reality.

Speaker 1

I totally agree. Okay, it is a network inside large network. That's absolutely right. But as a neuroscientist, that's the that's the level that I choose.

Speaker 2

As a fair sociologist, yeah, fair enough.

Speaker 1

So within that you've got these different networks. One of the things that you and I have talked about this previously, but this question about Okay, So, as Frederick Nictzschi said, each drive philosophizes in its own spirit, meaning when I'm hungry, when I'm angry, when I'm happy, when I'm addicted, when I'm addicted, these things don't just drive me, but they actually have their whole story.

Speaker 2

They tell me, oh, this is true, this is the right.

Speaker 1

And Nietzsche had a what do you call this perspectivism, I think, which is this idea that this is why it's hard to say what a single truth is because you've got all these different drives, which we might call personalities and whatever, but you've got these different things that tell you different.

Speaker 2

Truths also have different criteria for truth exactly right. And this is something that pragmatists under William James were wrestling with at the end of the eighteen hundreds. So the pragmatists, who saw analogies very directly between their philosophical work and Darwinian theories, really derived a new theory of truth. And the new theory of truth was something like truth good enough, like something is truth, it's good enough as a tool

to obtain a certain end right. And it's an interesting definition because it takes into account the fact that none of our truths are ultimate right, all our truths are proximate. And then you might say, because we're ignorant. We're bounded by our ignorance. Nothing we know is absolute. So then you say, well, how do you know that something's true? And the answer is something like it functions in relationship

to its intended purpose, in relationship to a goal. Now that lays open to the question of what our true goals. But that's okay for now. And when a drive philosophizes, it's looking for the truth that enable it to obtain its end. Yes, right, right, that's its criteria for truth. Yes, right, this is a good enough argument to win the battle with my wife. Right, it's true enough for what so I can dominate her? Let's say, right, right, right, yes, exactly.

Speaker 1

And so the thing that you and I have discussed before is the possibility that instead of each of these drives actually owning its own personality, it might be sort of reaching out to other places and saying, you know, when I think about what I want to get out of the pre filled cortex, or you know, what I want to get in terms of words to use in this argument or something, it's drawing on these other mechanisms, these subsystems that are there.

Speaker 2

But here's the thing. The question is.

Speaker 1

About the conflict in these things and the way that these things battle with each other. So how do you think about the way these battle and the way as we mature we are working these battles out, We're working out how to get these things.

Speaker 2

Well, I think that is the job of the cortex. But the cortex is highly socialized, right, so you can think about it neurologically, it's the job of the cortex.

But then the cortex is programmed by these larger networks, right, definitely. Okay, So what happens to you if you're well socialized is that these underlying motivational systems arrange themselves in the game so that each of them gets what they want at often enough, in a manner that doesn't interfere with the future or makes the future better even and in a manner that allows for the benefits of social community. Right.

So there's a very tight set of constraints, and I think that I think the developmental psychologist PHA probably modeled this better than anyone else I know of, and he put it in terms of it's not game theory exactly, because game theory is a technical endeavor of its own. But PSA spent an awful lot of time analyzing the structure of games as the prototype of both maturity and of socialization. And a game for PSA, a game is a voluntarily shared aime with agreed upon procedures, the voluntary

part being very very important. And I would say, you know, if you're trying to integrate rage and lust, let's say you can use pain as a suppressive or fear as a suppressive mechanism, even neurologically, like as a parent, you could punish your child viciously every time they were aggressive, and that aggression would come under the inhibitory control of fear, and you could call that socialization. But a much more effective way to do that is to entice and invite

the child to integrate. That integration into something like higher order competition towards a distal goal. And that's what you do. For example, if you trained a competitive child, sot aggressive child to be an athletic victor, so the aggression is now directed towards a social aim, right, because that would be the game, and the aggression actually becomes something that's good rather than bad. Because if you have a sports team, you want your players to want to win, you want

them to be competitive. But then if they're well socialized. It's like aggression within rules towards an aim name would be the victory of the game, but not just that, the well being of the team, the growth of the team across time, the ability of the team to get along with other teams, and the generalization of that to a broader range of games. That's what it would be

to be a good sport, for example. So's that's a game like model of motivational integration towards a higher order ethos, right, future oriented, community oriented, right exactly.

Speaker 1

So we're putting we learn as we grow from a child who has these different drives, we're learning how to make these cooperate for communal reasons.

Speaker 2

Yeah, yeah, and for the future, yeah exactly.

Speaker 1

The thing that's interesting the most is how these things stay rivaling our whole lives and how we work.

Speaker 2

Out strategies for this.

Speaker 1

So one thing you and I've talked about before is the Ulysses contract, where you say, you know, I know I want to do this kind of thing in the future, and so I'm gonna contract.

Speaker 2

I'm going to make some.

Speaker 1

Unbreakable pact where I can't break it, and I have to do this thing in the future.

Speaker 2

But I'm Also, I want to.

Speaker 1

Talk to you about story and religion and how those can be ways that steer us when we are thinking about these internal conflicts.

Speaker 2

Well, I was interested in your Eleas's contract model, but the model that sprung to mind for me when you walk through that was the Old Testament model of covenant, because covenant is actually contract. So unpack that. Well, the relationship with the divine in the Old Testament is characterized as a covenant. That's a contract. Okay, it's a sacrificial contract, which is very specific kind of contract. And I think the sacrificial contract is the basis of maturity and community.

I think it is by definition. Well, and what does that official mean? Like means I'll give up something now to get something later, got it? Oh? Okay, that's the sacrifice. There's no difference between that and work, right, because when I work, I sacrifice the present to the future. Yeah, right, that work is sacrificial. Okay. Now, once this is a matter of definition. Once you know that, a very interesting question enters the stage. You might say, which is what's

the most effective form of sacrifice? Right? And the biblical stories examine that from every conceivable angle. So, for example, one of the very early stories in the biblical Corpus is the story of canaan Abel, and it's the story of two patterns of sacrifice, one of which succeeds at least in the divine sense, and the other which fails cataclysmically. And that's the sacrifice, the false sacrifice of kan. It

sets up a pattern of sacrifice. One is immature, prideful, usurping, and self serving, and it degenerates into murder and genocide, right, and then the flood comes. That's how those stories are arranged. The other is the sacrifice of able and able sacrifices of the are those that are pleasing to God. Well, that opens the next question, which is well, exactly as we pointed out earlier. Once you know that the foundation of community and the future is sacrifice, the only question

that remains is what's the appropriate sacrifice? And that as a very complex question. There's other ordering possibilities, like the postmodernist notion essentially is that power is the uniting meta narrative. What's an example of that. Well, the Marxist presupposition that society is as a zero sum competition between the oppressor and the oppressed. On the economic plan, that's been generalized by the neo Marxist let's say to be what a

multi dimensional battle of power? And you know, you can see some truth in that when you think about, for example, if you're thinking about the solution to the problem of rivalry only as competition, as unbridled competition, but as soon as you understand that there's bridled forms of competition, maybe that's why you're interested in the Ulysses contract because that puts structure around rivalry. Right, how do you structure rivalry?

So maybe that's why it captured your attention so intensely, because that's a crucial question, right, how do you delimit the demands of power? M'd say, that's another way of looking at it. Yeah, that's right, And I'm interested. I mean, what's your take on the role of story in sayings?

Speaker 1

So I've always got all these possible paths that i could take, and I'm always facing temptation.

Speaker 2

Everyone is.

Speaker 1

And the question is, you know, do story in general, biblical stories or otherwise give us a sense of Oh, here's a model that I hadn't thought of before, and I can look up to this character and I can or that's right, and navigate myself accordingly.

Speaker 2

Well, okay, so a story is a description of a hierarchy of value. That's an embodied hierarchy of value. Okay. So when God assigns a role to add him, he says, your role is to name, identify, and subdu, and subdu means to put everything in its proper place. Okay. So someone's character is the manner in which they put things into place, right, their priority. When you go watch a movie, what you see is the embodiment of a structure of prioritization.

This person has an aim, they have a strategy, They have some things for them come first. That's the things they attend to. That's what you're watching. When you watch the character, you reflect the perceptions and the emotions, and you observe the success of the strategy. Right. So what a story presents to you is a hierarchy of intentional and action priority, and it's extremely valuable. And then you can test them out. And I say, that's the technical

definition of a story. And so we're always looking for a better story, and the story would be the structure that integrates the conflicts. That's another way to say that.

Speaker 1

That's really lovely, right, because I always think about the story as what always has grabbed me is the way that we slip so easily into characters, into.

Speaker 2

Story in other ways. Yeah, right.

Speaker 1

Neuroscientists we study the brain. We say, look, here's how the visual system works. You have photons that the retina. You know, you figure out what you're looking at, what you're hearing from. But in fact, what brains do most of the time is they don't care at all about what's in front of them.

Speaker 2

They're thinking about other things. They're simulating possible future.

Speaker 1

Is that reminiscing about the past, or they're slipping into literature and absolutely the character. So I love what you said about the reason you become the characters. You get to experience the world from a.

Speaker 2

Different attentional exactly exactly, it's a different structure. Well look, look, so a typical story element, let's say, in an action romantic action adventure movie, is do you save the woman you love or do you serve your country? Right, that's very so you can see there's both of those are very well developed hierarchies of value. There's real reasons to prioritize the person you love, and there's real reasons to prioritize your nation. Okay, so now what do you do

when those are head to hit? Well, the character of the protagonist determines the answer to that question, right right, right, right.

Speaker 1

So see gets to live in those shoes and see what he does, and see what that resonates with you.

Speaker 2

Yeah, and you can see whether that's an uphill that's an uphill journey or a downhill journey, yes, right, and so or or a variant of that. And this is the most standard variant is the comedic variant, which is obstacle crisis resolution, but resolution at a higher order, right, right, that's the divine comedy. Tragedy is just the dissent, right, that's the emergence of entropy. That's a way of thinking about it. Give entropy would be while your your belief

system collapses because it encounters an obstacle that's insurmountable. Now you're bereft, and that's the end of you. Right, that's tragic dissolution of the would be hero, that's right.

Speaker 1

And just symone's following the entropy is this idea of you know, instead of having a clear path, you've got multiple possibilities. That's this idea of an increase of entropy. Your brain is anxious and it has does things.

Speaker 2

Fall apart, or which you don't know which way is up, or when you don't know where you're going, or when you're lost in the desert right right, or you're just in despair. Right. All of those those are high entropy.

Speaker 1

States exactly, And what the brain is always trying to do is save energy. That's essentially its mainful life. Yeah, that's right, right, Oh, that's.

Speaker 2

Yeah, yeah, that was Schrodinger's definition of life. Essentially, it's an anti entropic function, right, So the association of anxiety with entropies is very, very fundamental, very fund Stories are ways of constraining entropy. That that isn't all they do, because they provide an aim and they provide hope. But even that's an entropy constraining function to some degree.

Speaker 3

Oh, fascinating, Yeah, it's it's it's it's really a key realization. As soon as you understand that a story describes a hierarchy of attentional prioritization, you think, oh, well, of course, because that means that the story, the story is literally how we make sense of the world. It's a description of a structure of making sense in the world.

Speaker 2

Navigation. It's a navigational.

Speaker 1

Structure, right, And all these lessons are as we plow through novels with these lessons give us is ways to manage the own conflict within our heads with all these different drives going on.

Speaker 2

And to do that in relationship to other people in.

Speaker 1

The future that's exactly right, and ourselves in the future, right, and.

Speaker 2

Ourselves of course, of course, of course, because we're actually a community across time, right. So that's partly why there's an analogy between the self and the community. It's like, well, why should you take care of the old, Well, you're going to be old. So if your society doesn't take care of the old, that's you, buddy. Why should you take care of the sick? Well, you may be naive and think you're going to be healthy your whole life, but you're not, you know, so over the course of

your life you're going to it. While you could say you're going to inhabit the entire sociological cosmos. So you see reflections of this. For example, this is a very canonical example of this in the insistence that the savior is born in the lowly place. You see that with Moses, and you see it with Christ is born with the animals, among the animals in a stable. Why well, because at some point, at some point in his life, even the

greatest hero occupies the lowest position. And so then if that's the case, then you want to set things up psychologically and socially so even those who occupy the most lowly of positions are protected as if they're of infinite value.

Speaker 4

That's the ethos, oh I see, that makes them very appealing to the whole demographic to watch the story, because if the hero is someone who already is born in privilege and rich and so on, maybe you lose a lot of the audience that way.

Speaker 2

As this course, the audience doesn't have the opportunity to move. It means that it also means that the story that's being told doesn't span the entire range of possibilities. It's like, well, here's a hero story if you're rich, well fair enough, and it's not like that isn't the guide, But a better guide is here's the story that guides you when you're coming up from the abyss, or from the depths,

or from the lowest possible place. Because the the total story would take you from the lowest possible place to the highest possible place.

Speaker 1

Right, I've always thought about that just as the size of the delta.

Speaker 2

Being the important thing.

Speaker 1

But your point is that opens it up to you know, everybody getting to see that where that spans.

Speaker 2

It's univers so well, and you can imagine that as a solution increases in quality, it becomes more generalizable. Right it is that's almost by definition. That's that's that's that's a good indication of its utility. This applies to everyone. So then the question is partly of course this is the case. If you think it through, it's like, what

story are human beings attempting to work out across the generations? Well, the story that applies to everyone, well obviously, while like what else, what other story could they possibly be trying to work out? Right, the story that applies to the privileged few, well, that would work if the privileged few were stable, But they're not, right. I mean, look, one percent of the population almost always controls fifty percent of

the wealth. But the people who occupy that one percent aren't the same people even within the span of their life. So like the water that's running from a faucet makes a stable column, but the molecules are different from second to second. Well, it's the same with these distributions in social status. And so you know, a rich person who goes to school is still the youngest kid in the school, is still going to be subject to bullying, is still

going to be low on the social totem pole. And so you need an ethos that applies to everyone across all possible social positions, right, and a universal That's why Harry Potter's an orphan, right, because he's lost, he's parentless, he occupies a low he lives under the stairs with like tyrannical parents, right, But it doesn't matter because he's

the hero that redeems everything right. Right, So that's a universalizing story, and that's why it's sold, like, you know, hundreds of millions of copies.

Speaker 1

Okay, So coming back to the issue of rivalry between I think about them and networks.

Speaker 2

You think about them as personalities. Other people think about them as drives. It'sarily some of the things are drives.

Speaker 1

Some of the hypothalamic issues are you know, thirst, fear, hunger.

Speaker 2

The more the more automated they are, the more they're drive Like yeah, that's because right, So, and the more the more phylogenetically asient they are because they can just run as programs. That's a really good point.

Speaker 1

Actually, so we should we shouldn't call them all drives or all personalities. I totally agree with what you're saying. These really automated hypothalamic things. Those are really like I think about the most personalities with.

Speaker 2

Very few degrees of freedom. Yeah that's right. Right, So like sexual behavior, once it's instigated, collapses into a relatively there's a few degrees of freedom, that's right, but it's a more dry but it.

Speaker 1

Still has a personality in terms of the things that notices, the things it says to try to seduce and so on.

Speaker 2

Yeah that's right. Okay, Then we can think the more phylogenetically ancient the motivational state, the more drive like it becomes. Yeah that's right. Okay, it's mostly automated. Good personality is on a spectrum. Okay, so complexity of personality at least, right.

Speaker 1

So how do you think about maturation and all these personalities that you have.

Speaker 2

What's your take on what it means? Okay, Okay, here's a way of thinking. I think this is very cool. So imagine that you have a drive to admire, Okay, because you do. Okay, okay, what other people sure? Just the fact that that exists, it's like you'll admire someone, It's like, okay, I would say, the drive to admire is the manifestation of the instinct to mature. Okay, let

me understand that the impact. Yeah, okay, Well, so look, a four year old is going to admire a six year old, all things considered, they'll usually pick someone that's in their zone of proximal development, so someone they could be. Right, And so now this instinct that compels them to admire, right, to copy and to attend to picks a potential future self that's obtainable and then grips them. Okay, that's the instinct to mature. Right. So then you could say we've

got all these hypothalamic functions. There are sub personalities, but there's a metafunction as well that's also biologically instantiated, that drives us towards maturation and integration and integrates all those sub personalities, and that manifests itself in the experience of admiration. And then we admire heroes in books, and we admire religious figures, and those are all here's how you make

a religious figure. It's simple. You take ten admirable people and they're the same because they're admirable, so they exist in a category. You extract out everything that's admirable, you sink it into a single personality and posit that as an ideal. And you do that a thousand times, you have a savior. A savior will emerge out of that.

Speaker 1

Oh terrific, right, okay, and then we okay, And so the to summarize this, what we then do is we use that savior as a way when we.

Speaker 2

Have an internal battle.

Speaker 1

We say, it gives us some you know, I don't know what would Jesus do exactly?

Speaker 2

What would what would dny X do?

Speaker 1

Yeah, that's right, because right, so, both literature and let's say religion, even at a higher level of this gives us a way to deal with this conflict because, as you what I've talked about before. You know, what we're always trying to do is reduce entropy and not have every possibility open.

Speaker 2

And often we know.

Speaker 1

That there's a conflict between instant gratification and long term thinking who we want to be, and so that gives us a way to grip onto it, to say what would this deity do well?

Speaker 2

And the fact that that, the fact that that example is exemplified in the story also makes it generalizable. And here here's why. So think if you watch children play house, Let's say a little boy is playing the father. You might say, well, he's imitating his father, but that's not right. What he does is he watches his father, and then he watches instantiations of the father in say movies, Disney movies, and the books he's reading, and he abstracts out the

character of the father. Now, the character of the father is a far more generalizable understanding than pure imitation. It's less drive like, it's more personality like. So, if you have a savior instantiated in a story, you can generalize from the story to the novel situation, which you couldn't do if you were just imitating. Yes, right, so that's how you encapsulate the spirit of the story. The spirit's the pattern that can be generalized.

Speaker 1

What's interesting is this is not to my knowledge, it's not really studied in neuroscience, so we don't know where do you store the savior? I mean presuming this all prefrontal, long term thinking stuff, some of that shapes your circuits, the fact that I know of a savior, or we study it in some ways, but we don't know we're studying it.

Speaker 2

Okay, if you study vervet monkeys, for example, vervet monkeys will look longer at photographs of high status vervet monkeys that have low status in their tribe, right in their group. Right, So there's an association between social status and movement towards that admirable figure. And the alpha chimp is the highest status chip. Okay, so you might say, well, he's the most powerful chimp, he's the most brutal chip. It's like friends to all blue that theory to bits, that isn't

the case. Stable alphas are reciprocal and they have very dense friendship networks. Right. So now you could say you take alpha you're a chimp. You take Alpha one in one generation and Alpha two in the second generation in three and four and five, and then you amalgamate them. Well, that's eliot a tract that development in religious stories. That's exactly what happens, is that that's how memory actually works.

Is imagine there's a historical figure who's memorable and stories are told about them, but then it's three generations later and everyone who knew him died. Well, all the stories get amalgamated into a central hero figure, and that's what's remembered, right, that's what's remembered, right, Yeah, And that's what stories are told about. That's what's remembered, and that is what is taught.

Speaker 1

And when it's taught to somebody, then they can use that hero figure as a way to navigate or they.

Speaker 2

Even acted out, they dramatize its. Right, Yeah, yeah, that's that's right, that's exactly right. So the the historical memory aggregates into singular figures and then those are elevated, exactly right.

Speaker 1

And my point is, I think this we don't understand entirely how that we know about mirror neurons and the fact that we in person and others. But but this is a big part of why we have hero stories in religion and so on, is so that we can say, oh, that's somebody worth mirroring, that's definitely.

Speaker 2

Definitely and admiration is the key to that. And that's so that's where you can say the instinctual basis of it, and you know that admiration is probably the drive as well that compels a child to listen to his father if he admires it, right, because and you need that because otherwise, why would the child make the father a

figure of intentional prioritization. There has to be an instinct there which is an instinct to respond, let's say, to the paternal and then if the father matches the paternal template genetically, then he's going to catalyze that instinct for admiration and learning is going to take place. Excellence, Yeah, excellent, Thank you so much. Hey, my pleasure. I loved this conversation. There were so many things that came out. Yeah, yeah, correct, it was my pleasure.

Speaker 1

That was my conversation with Jordan Peterson, and I just want to summarize a few of the parts that I found particularly important. First, nobody, you know, is one thing like a computer system with a single operating system. But instead each person you look at can be somewhat different under different circumstances. And the part that sometimes it's harder

to see is that this applies equally to ourselves. We are each build of different networks with different goals, and your behavior falls under the grip of different drives, like when you're trying to obtain something or you're hungry, or you're sexually driven, or you're angry, or you're calm and thinking about your long term goals. Whatever state you're in modifies not just how you act and what you decide, but what you even notice and how you perceive it.

I'll give you an example. One study showed that when people are thirsty, they're more likely to perceive an ambiguous surface as transparent, like water. This is like a parts traveler seeing mirages of water in a desert. Versions of this sort of thing happen all the time. What we see and what we notice depends on our drives. A person with an addiction to drugs, sex, food, anything else

will notice threats and opportunities differently than someone else. They know notice what they need to notice to obtain what they seek. But because we're always trapped inside ourselves, it can be difficult to see that we're different people at different times. This only becomes clear in those moments when we look back and we think, wow, I really can't believe I did that, or said that, or thought that

was a good idea. A century ago, Albert Einstein commented on how when a scientist looks at raw data, they can only see what their frameworks allow them to see he said quote. It is the theory which decides what can be observed. In other words, there's raw data out there, but if you don't have a framework for something, you won't even see it. And the heart of today's episode is the same sort of idea, not about a theory,

but a personality. The personality, the drive that grips you at the moment, the neural network that is winning for the moment, that decides what can be observed. If you're a regular listener to this podcast, you know that I'm obsessed with the differences between people in terms of what they perceive from the world. But today's episode is fundamentally about the differences between you and you and you at

different moments in time. Sometimes the role of religion or literature is to set up ideals that we admire, and that way, instead of just looking to other people, we can look to an envisioned future self. We can say, Okay, I have a vision that I kind of like for the sort of person that I want to be, even if you don't feel like that person. Now you can build a model of that future you and ideal self that satisfies the greatest number of constraints, both individual and communal,

and then you can navigate your decisions in deference to that. So, as we wrap up, here's the takeaway. You are not one singular, unchanging entity, but instead a shifting constellation of drives, states, neural networks, each vying for control in different moments, and recognizing this fluidity can be a powerful tool not only for understanding your past actions and moments of regret.

Speaker 2

But also for shaping your future.

Speaker 1

Self By consciously constructing ideal versions of yourself, whether through thinking about it or writing on religious or literary exemplars, we can use these to help guide our choices because if.

Speaker 2

We are in our core a team of rivals.

Speaker 1

Then the challenge and the opportunity is learning how to captain that argumentative team towards the optimal outcome. Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading. Send me an email at podcast at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments Until next time.

Speaker 2

I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.

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