Transcript:

For me the biggest issue facing the world – at least in the human realm, sociopolitical realm – is how to get the ideas that I think have worked for us. Basically the ideas of enlightenment, of democracy, of science, of skepticism, of reason, of rationality, of humanitarianism, how to get the rest of the world to capitalize on that trend that we enjoyed for so long. It didn’t come easy to us. It doesn’t mean that we’re superior in any cosmic sense, but we have hit on a way of living that is better to the alternatives; that is classic, liberal democracy informed by science and reason. There are large chunks of the world that haven’t got there yet. They could do a lot of damage until they have their secular enlightenment. I have no solution as to how to make . . . how to speed that up. Clearly sending armies in and imposing it by force hasn’t worked too well. It’s unclear to me what will work well, but I wish we knew.

It’s hard to know what the obstacles are. There are certain features in human nature. People, I think, are left to their own devices, tribal. People left to their own devices are dogmatic. They’d rather their truth be imposed than challenged. They are, I think, by nature self-deceived. It’s painful to work your way out of those alter human traits, and it’s a constant battle. To live in a modern society is to be criticized; to be refuted; to be hemmed in by rules that you wish wouldn’t apply to you; to have to state your case; to constantly justify what you do. You take a historian of ideas that is wiser than he to diagnose how the west managed to do it in a way that could apply to other cultures. How modernization took place. Part of it might be technological. The spread originally of the printing press and affordable books. But we live in an age today where we have even better media like the Internet, and that isn’t the magic wand that brings the entire world into the enlightenment. How those attitudes change is, I think, an important and unsolved puzzle.

Probably knowing that each of us is a fallible and partly self-deluded agent. If I had to put my finger on anything, that is the beginning of wisdom and enlightenment; that as right as I think I am – and like most humans I think I’m right all of the time – I have to step outside myself and realize, “Well no. Probably some percentage of the time I’m wrong and that other people are right.” Both me as an individual, and my family, and my society, and this point in history that there’s always something to learn, ideas that have to be discarded in the light of the appearance of better ideas that we have to absorb from other people. That, I think, is the hardest nugget of knowledge that’s necessary for everything else to fall into place. It’s the opposite of faith. It’s the opposite of dogmatism. It’s the opposite of certainty.

I’d like to think that in addition to making some empirical discoveries – how little things work, for me in the case of language – I hope to have helped put things together. There’s so much of science and scholarship that consists of hyper specialized efforts. Necessarily have to pick one topic now because it’s retractable. It’s something that a single person can hope to make headway on in a lifetime. But when you do that, you also lose sight of the big picture. If you study _____ about irregular verbs, or experiments on word recognition, you lose sight of a question like, “What’s language for? How does it work?” A question that let’s say a lay person quite reasonably might ask, but which most specialists are completely ill-equipped to answer because they necessarily have to focus on a particular phenomenon.

I’d like to think that I have also helped draw the big picture in the case of language, the idea that language works by an interplay between memorized units that we call words and rules for combining them; and that the reason that we have language is that we are a species that lives off social cooperation and know-how; and that language is an evolutionary adaptation that multiples the power of technological know-how by allowing us to share it; and that allows us to negotiate relationships. So that is a kind of nutshell description of how language works and why we have it. And I think it’s not so obvious that it’s helpful for someone to draw the picture in such broad brushstrokes. And I’d like to think that I’ve done the same . . . or helped to do something like that for the human mind. How does the mind work? What is a human mind for? The idea that the mind is a system of organs of computation – that is, information processing sub systems that evolved by natural selection to allow us to figure out how the world works and figure out how other people work as a survival strategy for homo sapiens. It is a general idea, but it does help to make sense of the whole shebang. I think it offers me some potential of a satisfying answer as to why we have a mind and what it does. So both at the microscopic end of how irregular verbs work and why kids make errors on them, and a macroscopic view of what is language, what is the mind? I hope that I’ve advanced the discussion a bit.

I think the only way to make sense of nature and nurture is _______ obviously to point out that these are not alternatives; that you couldn’t have nurture – that is the creation and transmission of culture – without a rich system of emotion and learning to make sense of it; to create the culture; to acquire the culture if you’re faced with learning it as a child. And in the other direction, it would be a pretty useless kind of innate human nature if it couldn’t take in information from the environment; if it couldn’t figure out the kind of physical and social world that it had been placed in; and soaked up information as to how to prosper in it. In order to . . . So you need both. How do they interact? Well you have to specify, I think, the innate motivational systems, the innate learning mechanisms that make learning and transmission of culture possible. So something is innate. What is innate is not concrete behaviors or chunks of knowledge. What is innate is an ability to analyze the world and to learn in certain ways. Language makes it concrete where we certainly could not possibly be born with English. On the other hand, just an ability to learn generically isn’t enough because you could take a baby, or you could take a cat or a parrot, give them the same environment – the baby will learn to speak, the cat won’t. So something innate must be there as well. In the case of language, it would be a motive and an ability to analyze the signals coming out of someone else’s mouth as being formed out of units that have fixed meanings within a community and combinatorial rules that allow new ideas to be expressed by arranging these fixed signals in different orders and combinations. The brain mechanism that is equipped to do that – to find the words, the nouns, the verbs, the phrases – to analyze speech as having that logic . . . that’s what’s innate, not just a generic ability to learn at one extreme, not knowledge of English at the other extreme.

I don’t believe there’s such a thing as free will in the sense of a ghost and a machine, a spirit or a soul that somehow reads the TV screen of the senses and pushes buttons and pulls the levers of behavior. There’s no sense that we can make of that. I think we are . . . Our behavior is the product of physical processes in the brain. On the other hand, when you have a brain that consists of one hundred billion neurons connected by one hundred trillion synopses, there is a vast amount of complexity. That means that human choices will not be predictable in any simple way from the stimuli that I’ve hinged on beforehand. We also know that that brain is set up so that there are at least two kinds of behavior. There’s what happens when I shine a light in your eye and your iris contracts, or I hit your knee with a hammer and your leg jerks upward. We also know that there’s a part of the brain that does things like choose what to have for dinner; whether to order chocolate or vanilla ice cream; how to move the next chess people; whether to pick up the paper or put it down. That is very different from your iris closing when I shine a light in your eye. It’s that second kind of behavior – one that engages vast amounts of the brain, particularly the frontal lobes, that incorporates an enormous amount of information in the causation of the behavior that has some mental model of the world that can predict the consequences of possible behavior and select them on the basis of those consequences. All of those things carve out the realm of behavior that we call free will, which is useful to distinguish from brute involuntary reflexes, but which doesn’t necessarily have to involve some mysterious soul.

Recorded On: 6/13/07

Transcript:

I think any kind of creative discovery depends on having first been immersed in a huge sea of motifs, and elements, and ideas and then recombining them in some way. I think the idea of a lighting bolt of inspiration hitting you out of the blue, and a fully formed idea emerging is very rare or non-existent. I’ve been impressed by how much people in all kinds of fields have to do an apprentice of exposure to a huge number of ideas before they can accomplish anything original. If you talk to a novelist, they’ve read thousands of novels. If you talk to a good rock musician, they’ll have an enormous record collection. If you talk to a scientist, they’ll know a huge amount of information in their own field. For me, synthesizing ideas really depends on having a universe of ideas to recombine in the first place. One of the things that means is not staying within your own discipline. Not only for me have I not . . . have I done cognitive psychology outside the boundaries of cognitive psychology by looking at linguistics, and philosophy, and literature; but even beyond that in understanding the mind. You can’t just do it with the straight jacket of psychology. As much as I love the field of psychology, it’s a small subset of ideas, and that ideas of how our emotions work are as likely to come from an economist, or from a game theorist as from a psychologist. Ideas about our sexual lives is likely to come from an evolutionary biologist studying insects as from someone studying human being in a psychology lab. So for me it’s very important that traditional academic disciplines don’t get in the way of finding ideas wherever they may be found . . . wherever they may live.

As someone who works in the science of human beings, the boundary for me between science and other fields is kind of porous. What is essential in my finding an idea useful is that it comes from someone who thinks systematically, and rigorously and rationally; someone who cares about whether an idea is true or false; someone who’s interested in an explanation about why something is the way it is as opposed to another way that it could be. For me that’s the essence of science. That’s what’s valuable about science, but it’s not restrictive to science. And some things that used to be not science becomes science over the course of history, like in my own field of psychology as an example. And so I don’t try to think laterally or just get inspired by some strange image from fiction or music. But I do take seriously ideas that might have originated from a novelist commenting on human nature either directly in an interview or obliquely by a novel. I would care about what a historian might say as long as they are doing so in the general mindset that I think of as scientific, that is trying to explain things and caring about whether the things you say are true or false.

Well one example of how I’ve used ideas from other fields in my own thinking is a chapter I wrote on the emotions and how the mind works, which was heavily inspired by the political theorist and game theorist Thomas Schelling who wrote a remarkable book in 1960 called “The Strategy of Conflict”. Schelling was kind of a Doctor Strangelove among other things – a nuclear strategist of how you think through survival in a case in which you have to figure out what the other guy is thinking, about what you’re thinking, about what he’s thinking, about what you’re thinking and so on. One of the things that Schelling pointed out that there are certain realms in which a measure of irrationality and lack of control can actually work to your advantage. So for example if you’re negotiating with someone . . . Let’s say you’re negotiating over the purchase of a car, and you’d be willing to pay anything between $20,000 and $30,000 – of course the lower the better. And the car dealer would make a profit if he sold it at any price between . . . over $20,000. So you’d both be better off settling for a price in that range rather than walking away from the deal. On the other hand within that range the closer it is to $20,000 the better it is for you. The closer it is to $30,000 the better it is for him. How do you arrive at a figure? Well it turns out the advantage goes to the person who’s more irrational, stubborn, hotheaded – the person who would walk away from the deal unless he got the maximum. So a salesman who says, “I’d like to sell it to you for $20,000, but I’m not allowed. My supervisor isn’t here. He won’t authorize me to go under $30,000” will get the better deal. On the other hand the customer who says, “Well I’d love to but my hands are tied. The bank won’t loan me more than $20,000 so I can’t pay more than $20,000”, that lack of control worked to his advantage. What’s the analogy to human emotions? Well often humans do things that seem to be irrationally stubborn. They vow undying devotion to their friends. They fight a duel or retaliate if they’re insulted. They’re hotheads in other words. This is an example showing that it may not be irrational in some spheres of human life to be a hothead. The hothead is the winner. This is also true with threats, for example. The problem with issuing a threat is someone calling your bluff. If they insult you, or invade your space, or chat up your girlfriend and you say, “If you do something like that I’ll beat you up,” well you could get hurt beating someone up. You might be better off just letting them have your lunch money or your girlfriend than getting killed in the process. Get a person that can anticipate that, and therefore they can act with impunity. How do you defend yourself against that dynamic? Well if you’re such a hothead that it would be intolerable insult if someone took advantage of you, and you had to retaliate even if it did you harm in the long run, paradoxically that might be the most effective deterrent. They can’t call your bluff if it isn’t a bluff. There’s often game theory. No psychologist ever thought that up; but it might offer an explanation as to why so many of our emotions seem to be passionate and irrational. There may be a method behind the madness, and it took someone – not a psychologist, I think – to unlock the mystery of human irrationality and passion.

Recorded On: 6/13/07

Transcript:

I’d like to think that I’ve made a few empirical discoveries that will . . . that people will continue to find interesting and important. I did what I think is, and for a long time to will be the most exhaustive study of one aspect of child language development. The fact that kids make errors like, “We holded the baby rabbits,” and “The alligator go kerplunk.” Or they add a regular suffix like “-ed” to an irregular verb like “hold” or “hear” or “stick”, producing errors like “sticked” and “teared” and “holded”. I analyzed 20,000 of those forms from computer transcripts of children developing language, and developed a theory of why kids make that error, how they outgrow it, what it shows about language. The reason to obsess over a tiny little topic like that is that it’s a nice illustration of children’s creativity in acquiring language. The essence of language is that you aren’t restricted to a fixed list of messages that you’ve memorized and then you regurgitate like a parrot; but rather you recreate . . . recombine elements to create new messages. Every sentence that we utter is a brand new sentence, but it’s rather hard to study the process of kids making up new sentences. When a kid says something like “sticked”, or “teared”, or “heared”, or “holded”, that’s a tiny example of recombination that I think is the engine that powers language as a whole. The act of children making an error like that I think is a way of catching them in the act of doing something that makes language powerful, mainly combining things by rules. And in trying to understand that one phenomenon, I hope that we – my students and I – shed light on the process of linguistic generativity or creativity in general.

I also try very hard to crack the code of what verbs means and how that influences how we use them in sentences. The verb is, in a way, the chassis of the sentence. Once you pick the verb, it’s got slots that the rest of the sentence is built around – the subject, the object, the indirect object, prepositional objects and so on. So knowing how the verb works tells you a lot about how the sentence works. And how the verb works depends on what the verb means. You might think how could you ever get a handle on something as nebulous as what a verb means. But I’d like to think that I cracked a lot of that code. What’s the difference between a verb like “to fill”, and a verb like “to pour”, and a verb like “to load”? They’re not just video images in the head of someone pouring, and filling, and loading, but rather they have an anatomy. They’re built out of parts – parts like to cause, to move, means versus end, let versus cause. I tried to lay out the alphabet of ideas out of which complex ideas like those behind a verb meaning are composed.

I’d like to think that I have also helped draw the big picture in the case of language, the idea that language works by an interplay between memorized units that we call words and rules for combining them; and that the reason that we have language is that we are a species that lives off social cooperation and know-how; and that language is an evolutionary adaptation that multiples the power of technological know-how by allowing us to share it; and that allows us to negotiate relationships. So that is a kind of nutshell description of how language works and why we have it. And I think it’s not so obvious that it’s helpful for someone to draw the picture in such broad brushstrokes. And I’d like to think that I’ve done the same . . . or helped to do something like that for the human mind. How does the mind work? What is a human mind for? The idea that the mind is a system of organs of computation – that is, information processing sub systems that evolved by natural selection to allow us to figure out how the world works and figure out how other people work as a survival strategy for homo sapiens. It is a general idea, but it does help to make sense of the whole shebang. I think it offers me some potential of a satisfying answer as to why we have a mind and what it does. So both at the microscopic end of how irregular verbs work and why kids make errors on them, and a macroscopic view of what is language, what is the mind? I hope that I’ve advanced the discussion a bit.

I think in science it’s not reasonable to have an ambition of becoming immortal or of making a mark that’s associated with you. It’s more like you’re really contributing something to this enormous stream of knowledge. And realistically you hope to affect it downstream in significant ways, but your own contribution may not be associated with your name. It will be a combination of things that you actually created, experiments with discoveries, books and papers, the graduate students that you trained, the undergraduates that you influenced indirectly, the ideas that people may have taken from your work with out crediting you. Realistically I think the most one can hope for is this diffuse, but one hopes positive influence rather than some statue in the park with your name on it. We know what people do with statues. We ignore them. They’re meant to immortalize people, but no one really cares . . . no one actually reads who the person is or reads about them. I think it’s good to have that model in mind in terms of scientific contributions.

Recorded On: 6/13/07

Transcrpt:

What I basically try to do is understand human nature, how the mind works, what makes us tick. What are the patterns of thought, and emotion and motivation that characterize our species? I focus on language partly because you can’t make a living out of studying human nature. It’s just too big a topic. You’ve got to pick something tractable to study. For me it has been language, and indeed for much of my career one little corner of language, namely regular and irregular verbs. And I have my reasons for focusing on that particular corner. I think it sheds light on larger questions about what makes the mind work. But language as a general topic is, I think, a good entrée into human nature for a number of reasons. It’s distinctively human. If you’re interested in general in what makes humans unlike mice and birds, language is a pretty good place to start not only because of language itself – the fact that we make noise with our mouths in order to get ideas across, but because language has to be fine tuned for the kinds of thoughts and the kinds of social relationships that humans want to share and negotiate with one another. So it’s a window into human nature. It’s also figured into debates on human nature, perhaps most famously with Chomsky in the late 1950s using language as a way to rehabilitate the idea of innate mental structure, something that was virtually taboo in the 1950s. He said language was a very good candidate for something that is innately and uniquely human. So it’s an opening wedge for the idea that important parts of the mind are innately structured. It’s also a prime case of mental computation. It’s very hard to make sense of language, of our ability to string words into new combinations, sentences that other people have never heard before but can very quickly understand for the first time without appealing to the idea that we have a mental algorithm, a set of rules, or a recipe or a formula that picks words out of a memory store and strings them together in combinations where the order, as well as the choice of words is meaningful. So language sheds light on the idea that the mind is a computational system.

My main preoccupation today is using language as a window into human nature. I’ve studied language in the past as an example of human computation. What are the kinds of simple operations of look up in combination that the mind is capable of? How is language structured? What I’m turning to now is the interface between language and the rest of the mind – how language can illuminate our social relationships. For example, why is so much of language use veiled, or indirect, or done via innuendo rather than people blurting out exactly what they mean? Why do I say, “If you could pass the salt that would be great?” instead of “Give me the salt.” Why does someone make a sexual overture in terms of, “Would you like to come up and see my etchings?” rather than, “Do you want to have sex?” Why are threats so often veiled you know, “Nice store you got there. Would be a real shame if something happened to it.” Given that the listener knows exactly what the speaker had in mind, it’s not that anyone is fooled by this charade; but nonetheless some aspect of the social relationship seems to be preserved if the request is slipped in between the lines. I’m interested in what that says about human relationships, about hypocrisy and taboo. Also what it says about the kinds of relationships we have like dominance versus intimacy, and communality versus exchange and reciprocity. Just to be concrete, why do you say, “If you could pass the salt that would be great.” Well in issuing an imperative, you’re kind of changing the relationship. You’re turning it into one of dominance. You’re saying to a friend or to a stranger, “I’m going to act as if I can boss you around and presuppose your compliance.” You may not want to move the relationship in that direction. At the same time you want the damn salt. So if you say, “If you could pass the salt that would be great,” it’s such a non sequitor the intelligence of the listener can figure out that it really is a request. But both of you know that you haven’t actually turned the relationship into a superior-inferior. I think that’s the key to understanding all of these. That the sexual overture, the veiled threat, the veiled bribe and so on are ways of preserving one of several kinds of relationships at the same time as we transact the business of life such as requests, such as sexual overtures that might be inconsistent with the relationship that we have with the person. So it’s in a way of using language as a way of doing social psychology.

I did what I think is, and for a long time to will be the most exhaustive study of one aspect of child language development. The fact that kids make errors like, “We holded the baby rabbits,” and “The alligator go kerplunk.” Or they add a regular suffix like “-ed” to an irregular verb like “hold” or “hear” or “stick”, producing errors like “sticked” and “teared” and “holded”. I analyzed 20,000 of those forms from computer transcripts of children developing language, and developed a theory of why kids make that error, how they outgrow it, what it shows about language. The reason to obsess over a tiny little topic like that is that it’s a nice illustration of children’s creativity in acquiring language. The essence of language is that you aren’t restricted to a fixed list of messages that you’ve memorized and then you regurgitate like a parrot; but rather you recreate . . . recombine elements to create new messages. Every sentence that we utter is a brand new sentence, but it’s rather hard to study the process of kids making up new sentences. When a kid says something like “sticked”, or “teared”, or “heared”, or “holded”, that’s a tiny example of recombination that I think is the engine that powers language as a whole. The act of children making an error like that I think is a way of catching them in the act of doing something that makes language powerful, mainly combining things by rules. And in trying to understand that one phenomenon, I hope that we – my students and I – shed light on the process of linguistic generativity or creativity in general. I also try very hard to crack the code of what verbs means and how that influences how we use them in sentences. The verb is, in a way, the chassis of the sentence. Once you pick the verb, it’s got slots that the rest of the sentence is built around – the subject, the object, the indirect object, prepositional objects and so on. So knowing how the verb works tells you a lot about how the sentence works. And how the verb works depends on what the verb means. You might think how could you ever get a handle on something as nebulous as what a verb means. But I’d like to think that I cracked a lot of that code. What’s the difference between a verb like “to fill”, and a verb like “to pour”, and a verb like “to load”? They’re not just video images in the head of someone pouring, and filling, and loading, but rather they have an anatomy. They’re built out of parts – parts like to cause, to move, means versus end, let versus cause.

Transcript:

Well one example of how I’ve used ideas from other fields in my own thinking is a chapter I wrote on the emotions and how the mind works, which was heavily inspired by the political theorist and game theorist Thomas Schelling who wrote a remarkable book in 1960 called “The Strategy of Conflict”. Schelling was kind of a Doctor Strangelove among other things – a nuclear strategist of how you think through survival in a case in which you have to figure out what the other guy is thinking, about what you’re thinking, about what he’s thinking, about what you’re thinking and so on. One of the things that Schelling pointed out that there are certain realms in which a measure of irrationality and lack of control can actually work to your advantage. So for example if you’re negotiating with someone . . . Let’s say you’re negotiating over the purchase of a car, and you’d be willing to pay anything between $20,000 and $30,000 – of course the lower the better. And the car dealer would make a profit if he sold it at any price between . . . over $20,000. So you’d both be better off settling for a price in that range rather than walking away from the deal. On the other hand within that range the closer it is to $20,000 the better it is for you. The closer it is to $30,000 the better it is for him. How do you arrive at a figure? Well it turns out the advantage goes to the person who’s more irrational, stubborn, hotheaded – the person who would walk away from the deal unless he got the maximum. So a salesman who says, “I’d like to sell it to you for $20,000, but I’m not allowed. My supervisor isn’t here. He won’t authorize me to go under $30,000” will get the better deal. On the other hand the customer who says, “Well I’d love to but my hands are tied. The bank won’t loan me more than $20,000 so I can’t pay more than $20,000”, that lack of control worked to his advantage. What’s the analogy to human emotions? Well often humans do things that seem to be irrationally stubborn. They vow undying devotion to their friends. They fight a duel or retaliate if they’re insulted. They’re hotheads in other words. This is an example showing that it may not be irrational in some spheres of human life to be a hothead. The hothead is the winner. This is also true with threats, for example. The problem with issuing a threat is someone calling your bluff. If they insult you, or invade your space, or chat up your girlfriend and you say, “If you do something like that I’ll beat you up,” well you could get hurt beating someone up. You might be better off just letting them have your lunch money or your girlfriend than getting killed in the process. Get a person that can anticipate that, and therefore they can act with impunity. How do you defend yourself against that dynamic? Well if you’re such a hothead that it would be intolerable insult if someone took advantage of you, and you had to retaliate even if it did you harm in the long run, paradoxically that might be the most effective deterrent. They can’t call your bluff if it isn’t a bluff. There’s often game theory. No psychologist ever thought that up; but it might offer an explanation as to why so many of our emotions seem to be passionate and irrational. There may be a method behind the madness, and it took someone – not a psychologist, I think – to unlock the mystery of human irrationality and passion.

People left to their own devices are dogmatic. They’d rather their truth be imposed than challenged. They are, I think, by nature self-deceived. It’s painful to work your way out of those alter human traits, and it’s a constant battle.

each of us is a fallible and partly self-deluded agent. If I had to put my finger on anything, that is the beginning of wisdom and enlightenment; that as right as I think I am – and like most humans I think I’m right all of the time – I have to step outside myself and realize, “Well no. Probably some percentage of the time I’m wrong and that other people are right.” Both me as an individual, and my family, and my society, and this point in history that there’s always something to learn, ideas that have to be discarded in the light of the appearance of better ideas that we have to absorb from other people. That, I think, is the hardest nugget of knowledge that’s necessary for everything else to fall into place. It’s the opposite of faith. It’s the opposite of dogmatism. It’s the opposite of certainty.

I don’t believe there’s such a thing as free will in the sense of a ghost and a machine, a spirit or a soul that somehow reads the TV screen of the senses and pushes buttons and pulls the levers of behavior. There’s no sense that we can make of that. I think we are . . . Our behavior is the product of physical processes in the brain. On the other hand, when you have a brain that consists of one hundred billion neurons connected by one hundred trillion synopses, there is a vast amount of complexity. That means that human choices will not be predictable in any simple way from the stimuli that I’ve hinged on beforehand. We also know that that brain is set up so that there are at least two kinds of behavior. There’s what happens when I shine a light in your eye and your iris contracts, or I hit your knee with a hammer and your leg jerks upward. We also know that there’s a part of the brain that does things like choose what to have for dinner; whether to order chocolate or vanilla ice cream; how to move the next chess people; whether to pick up the paper or put it down. That is very different from your iris closing when I shine a light in your eye. It’s that second kind of behavior – one that engages vast amounts of the brain, particularly the frontal lobes, that incorporates an enormous amount of information in the causation of the behavior that has some mental model of the world that can predict the consequences of possible behavior and select them on the basis of those consequences. All of those things carve out the realm of behavior that we call free will, which is useful to distinguish from brute involuntary reflexes, but which doesn’t necessarily have to involve some mysterious soul.

Transcript:

I think that one general attitude towards solving our problems is to keep in mind that not all problems have to have a moralistic solution; that often, things that improve the value of life and that, in that sense, are highly moral outcomes may not have come about through moral saber rattling, posturing, persuasion. So to be concrete, let’s say you’ve got a problem that needs to be solved. A doctor makes an error, sends the wrong drug into a patient and the patient dies. There are two ways of solving that problem. One is you could punish the doctor and have a policy that any doctor that is careless in the future will face severe penalties. That would be a kind of moralistic solution. Or you could design the IV valves so that you can’t snap together the wrong drug with the wrong patient; that no matter how careless you are, you just can’t have that bad outcome. Probably the second one is . . . will save more lives than the first. It won’t give us that bittersweet glow of having punished the careless. On the other hand, more people might be alive. I think that probably a lot of improvement in the human condition – more than we acknowledge – has come about through non-moralistic improvements than we commonly acknowledge. If you ask who saved the most lives in the past generation, one answer might be Norman Borlaug, winner of a 1970 Nobel Peace Prize – someone that no one has heard of. He’s the father of the green revolution. He devised streams of crops and methods of agriculture that are more disease resistant, more energy efficient. He probably deserves credit for savings tens, maybe hundreds of millions of lives. No one’s heard of him. Why? Because he wasn’t a moral crusader. He was a technologist; but he accomplished wonderful things. Many of the problems that we face might be solved . . . I don’t want to say all of them. There is a role for Martin Luther King and abolitionists of slavery and so on. But there is also a role, I think, for the engineer, for the scientist, for the planner, for the policy maker who figures out how people can get more of what they want given the resources that they have.

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I think a political leadership that blows off science is going to lead to nothing but disaster. But I think though for their part, people in universities and newspapers have to open their minds to have the same kind of critical self-reflection that everyone must have; realize that universities can also spiral into kind of a self-contained, ideological, almost religious cult; and that it’s important for universities to open up and welcome ideas from smart people who aren’t in that particular orbit. I think that think tanks and policy institutes have been invaluable in that regard; that there are certain ideas that don’t come out of university departments because a university becomes a tribe or a culture, has an ideology, and they have to realize that they’re not an infallible and welcome ideas. I don’t think universities have been completely successful in doing that either.

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I don’t believe there’s such a thing as free will in the sense of a ghost and a machine, a spirit or a soul that somehow reads the TV screen of the senses and pushes buttons and pulls the levers of behavior. There’s no sense that we can make of that. I think we are . . . Our behavior is the product of physical processes in the brain. On the other hand, when you have a brain that consists of one hundred billion neurons connected by one hundred trillion synopses, there is a vast amount of complexity. That means that human choices will not be predictable in any simple way from the stimuli that I’ve hinged on beforehand. We also know that that brain is set up so that there are at least two kinds of behavior. There’s what happens when I shine a light in your eye and your iris contracts, or I hit your knee with a hammer and your leg jerks upward. We also know that there’s a part of the brain that does things like choose what to have for dinner; whether to order chocolate or vanilla ice cream; how to move the next chess people; whether to pick up the paper or put it down. That is very different from your iris closing when I shine a light in your eye. It’s that second kind of behavior – one that engages vast amounts of the brain, particularly the frontal lobes, that incorporates an enormous amount of information in the causation of the behavior that has some mental model of the world that can predict the consequences of possible behavior and select them on the basis of those consequences. All of those things carve out the realm of behavior that we call free will, which is useful to distinguish from brute involuntary reflexes, but which doesn’t necessarily have to involve some mysterious soul.

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I think that using the word God or the attitude of faith toward that which you don’t know is a copout. It’s a way of slapping a label on something rather than trying to understand it. Or since we may not understand everything, just say there are some things we don’t understand. To invent stories that sound as if they were true or could be true, to pretend that they’re true just so that we can have a story I think is unsatisfying, and it could even be immoral because it could lead you to mistaken policies to getting in the way of your best understanding of how the world works, to doing things that lead to more harm than good. A concrete example would be treating a cancer with some cockamamie herbal or homeopathic formula instead of the best medicine that we have. Or justifying invasions, and murders, and sacrifices on the grounds of appeasing some god or carrying out some divine mandate. There’s nothing but mischief that can come from inventing stories for that which we don’t understand. There’s nothing wrong with saying there are some things we don’t understand.

There are some questions that may not have answers because they are bad questions. A question like, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” It may just be a stupid question. The question of why am I here, why was I put here, what is my greater purpose, might be like that. Given that I am here, I do think that I have an ethical imperative to be good to other people, to put my life to some purpose that I can define like understanding the world better, helping other people, taking the best advantage of the gifts that I find myself with; but some cosmic reason as to “why me” seems to me a kind of arrogance or egotism. Why should the cosmos care about me? That’s seems to be the height of grandiosity to think that it would.

One of the things that I think science show us is that the idea that there’s some purpose to the universe is one that we should outgrow. There’s a purpose to each one of our lives, and we can articulate what that purpose is and why we have it; but why humans emerged on earth, why there is a planet earth, why the universe does what it does, we’ve got to outgrow these questions. It is very clear that there is no purpose in that sense. The fact that the sun will expand and consume the entire earth; that the universe might blow apart; that 99 percent of species go extinct and it would be sort of arrogant to say that homosapiens would be the only one that doesn’t; the fact that the earth is one out of presumably thousands, and millions, and billions of planets that could support life – that there’s nothing distinguished about our solar system. All of those realizations say that the idea that we were put here for some purpose is a kind of medieval ignorance and arrogance. That doesn’t mean that we humans, with the brains that we have, with our understanding of what we value and don’t, don’t have a purpose. And in many ways there is a kind of fulfillment of human purposes that has gone on through history owing to the cumulative efforts of humans to make something of their lot to achieve something worth while. We know more. It’s astonishing how much we do know. There’s lots we don’t know, but the fact that we know the genetic code of life; that we know how old the universe is; that we know how the earth was formed; that we know the basic constituents of chemistry, this is mind boggling stuff. People in the 17th century would have given up anything for a glimpse of what we know today. That’s something to be . . . to celebrate. The fact that we’ve gotten less violent over time. We no longer have human sacrifices. We’ve outlawed slavery in most of the world. We no longer have capital punishment for trivial crimes and misdemeanors. We don’t have routine torture, burning at the stake, disemboweling, crucifixion. The number of wars has gone down in the last 50 years. By many measures we’ve become a less violent species; not because there is some force in the universe pushing us in that direction, but I think because we recognize the futility and the undesirability of violence. And we tinker in various ways to reduce them. And in some degree slowly, incrementally we’ve succeeded.

It’s hard to know what the obstacles are. There are certain features in human nature. People, I think, are left to their own devices, tribal. People left to their own devices are dogmatic. They’d rather their truth be imposed than challenged. They are, I think, by nature self-deceived. It’s painful to work your way out of those alter human traits, and it’s a constant battle. To live in a modern society is to be criticized; to be refuted; to be hemmed in by rules that you wish wouldn’t apply to you; to have to state your case; to constantly justify what you do. You take a historian of ideas that is wiser than he to diagnose how the west managed to do it in a way that could apply to other cultures. How modernization took place. Part of it might be technological. The spread originally of the printing press and affordable books. But we live in an age today where we have even better media like the Internet, and that isn’t the magic wand that brings the entire world into the enlightenment. How those attitudes change is, I think, an important and unsolved puzzle.

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I think my own personal philosophy – one that I think offers a sounder basis for knowledge and wisdom than religion – is based on unreason. Now as soon as soon as we’re having this conversation, as long as we are trying to persuade one another of why you should do something or should believe something, you are already committed to reason. We are not engaged in a fistfight. We’re not bribing each other to believe something. We’re trying to provide reasons. We’re trying to persuade, to convince. As long as you’re doing that in the place first place, you’re not hitting someone with a chair, or putting a gun to their head, or bribing them to believe something. You’ve lost any argument you have against reason. You’ve already signed on to reason whether you like it or not. So the fact that we’re having this conversation shows that we are committed to reason. That is the starting point. And from reason many other things follow. I think science is just the application of reason to the natural world. There’s no such thing as the scientific method in the sense of a recipe or a formula, because techniques in science are always changing to handle the problems in front of us. Science is really an attempt to explain things, to answer the question of why it’s the way it is as opposed to some other way it could have been. And it’s an attempt to do your darndest to figure out the things that you believe are true. It’s the application of reason in the most purified and concentrated form, in a way that I think is continuous with philosophy, with law, with political organization if it’s done right. And I think it also provides much of the grounding for ethics and morality. At heart, morality is treating other people the way one would want to be treated oneself; and some version of that, of interchangeability of perspectives. It’s the fact that I’m not the only entity in the universe, and I have no grounds for privileging my interests over yours. That’s really what most or all moral systems ultimately boil down to. And again, as long as I’m talking to someone, as long as I am providing reasons, I can’t say that I am a unique, privileged person and hope for you to take me seriously. Why should you? You’re you, I’m me. Anything that I come up with as a code of behavior . . . any reason that I give you for how you should behave has to apply to me in order for me not to be a hypocrite or to contradict myself. And once you do that, then I think much or all of morality follows. And I think that the alternative that many people appeal to, mainly faith, is . . . immediately refutes itself. Faith means believing something with no good reason to do it. Once you’re talking to someone about what they . . . what is good to do, what they ought to do, or what they have reasons to do, you cannot appeal to faith. You’re committed to reason.

For me the biggest issue facing the world – at least in the human realm, sociopolitical realm – is how to get the ideas that I think have worked for us. Basically the ideas of enlightenment, of democracy, of science, of skepticism, of reason, of rationality, of humanitarianism, how to get the rest of the world to capitalize on that trend that we enjoyed for so long. It didn’t come easy to us. It doesn’t mean that we’re superior in any cosmic sense, but we have hit on a way of living that is better to the alternatives; that is classic, liberal democracy informed by science and reason. There are large chunks of the world that haven’t got there yet. They could do a lot of damage until they have their secular enlightenment. I have no solution as to how to make . . . how to speed that up. Clearly sending armies in and imposing it by force hasn’t worked too well. It’s unclear to me what will work well, but I wish we knew.

If the United States has some role in spreading the values that we associate with the enlightenment – like tolerance, and reason, and skepticism and so on – then it clearly can’t hold itself as a . . . as exceptional. It can’t say that there’s something uniquely special about the United States because it’s the United States and _________ anyone else to take that seriously. In doing so, that would be immediately contradicting the very idea that it would be nice to spread – namely that no entity is special by virtue of being that entity. It’s got to make its case to other entities that ________ are considered to be equal partners in the conversation. So while I think it’s okay to say for the United States and other liberal democracies to say, “We found a system that works. Here’s why it works. Here’s what’s good about it,” they can’t do it by virtue . . . by saying, “We’re going to impose it because we’re us and we can do that.” Those two ideas are in contradiction. The whole advantage of liberal democracy is that you make your case not because of who you are, but because you’ve got a good case and you can persuade others. And you don’t privilege your own vantage point over theirs.

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I remember my mentor Roger Brown once saying . . . He was one of the founders of the study of child language acquisition which is what a lot of my own research has been focused on. And he said, “You know, you never really understand what children are doing.” This was a bit of an ironic comment because, of course, that is what he spent his life doing and what I’ve dedicated most of my life to doing. But it does offer a little bit of humility and a feeling that if you don’t quite understand everything that’s in your data you shouldn’t feel too bad about it. It’s extraordinarily complex. We’re fortunate to understand what we do understand. I’ve gotten advice on writing from an early editor of mine who said, “When you try to present science to a wide audience, don’t feel that you’re writing for truck drivers or chicken pluckers. They probably realistically won’t buy your book. And if you try to aim at everyone, you’ll end up talking down or condescending. Write for your college roommate, someone who you respect as being as smart as you. They went into a different line of work. They’re joining the conversation late. They need to be brought up to speed; but assume that your audience is as intellectually engaged and as smart as you are.” That was terrific advice both for teaching, and for writing and speaking for a wide audience.

Certainly since adolescence I was always interested in what makes people tick, and what the implications are for larger questions. If we know something about human emotion and human motivation, does that provide implications for politics how we ought to run society? An ancient question, and one that I was eager to be involved in in the light of modern scientific understanding of human nature; taking into account cognition, and evolution, and genetics, and brain science, and social science. I majored in cognitive psychology, which at the time was a relatively new field, and I thought a tremendously exciting field. It combined experimental psychology with linguistics, and philosophy of mind, and artificial intelligence. And I thought that was an exciting growth area in the 1970s when I picked a major. And I’m still excited by it. I went to Harvard, I think, because it was the site of the cognitive revolution 10 to 15 years earlier. Even though it had pretty much died out by the time that I got there, it still had something of an aura in mind. It probably wasn’t the best choice if the current me could had given advice to the younger me, but it worked out pretty well. And since then I’ve been kind of ricocheting between Harvard and MIT most of my career with a foray to Stanford and a couple of sabbaticals at Santa Barbara. But what I’ve always valued was ideas, conversation, being introduced to some new way of thinking about something; some new explanatory principal; some idea that I would never have thought of in a million years, but which makes everything click. And so I’ve always wanted to be in a place where there was a constant bombardment of these ideas. I did strategically take a sabbatical at University of California – Santa Barbara which isn’t as much of a brand name university as Harvard, MIT and Stanford; but even brand name universities can get locked into a certain way of thinking. They can be kind of a culture or a religion that becomes entrenched in a particular place, and I think you can’t just be in one place and hope that all ideas will come to you. You have to occasionally venture out into places where they think very differently. For me Santa Barbara, which was the home to evolutionary psychology to influences like John ________, _________, Donald Simons, Napoleon Chagnon. Voices from anthropology, and evolutionary biology and economics were important sources of new ideas in my intellectual development. So I’m glad that I’ve left Cambridge for the wiles of California a few times.

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Well one example of how I’ve used ideas from other fields in my own thinking is a chapter I wrote on the emotions and how the mind works, which was heavily inspired by the political theorist and game theorist Thomas Schelling who wrote a remarkable book in 1960 called “The Strategy of Conflict”. Schelling was kind of a Doctor Strangelove among other things – a nuclear strategist of how you think through survival in a case in which you have to figure out what the other guy is thinking, about what you’re thinking, about what he’s thinking, about what you’re thinking and so on. One of the things that Schelling pointed out that there are certain realms in which a measure of irrationality and lack of control can actually work to your advantage. So for example if you’re negotiating with someone . . . Let’s say you’re negotiating over the purchase of a car, and you’d be willing to pay anything between $20,000 and $30,000 – of course the lower the better. And the car dealer would make a profit if he sold it at any price between . . . over $20,000. So you’d both be better off settling for a price in that range rather than walking away from the deal. On the other hand within that range the closer it is to $20,000 the better it is for you. The closer it is to $30,000 the better it is for him. How do you arrive at a figure? Well it turns out the advantage goes to the person who’s more irrational, stubborn, hotheaded – the person who would walk away from the deal unless he got the maximum. So a salesman who says, “I’d like to sell it to you for $20,000, but I’m not allowed. My supervisor isn’t here. He won’t authorize me to go under $30,000” will get the better deal. On the other hand the customer who says, “Well I’d love to but my hands are tied. The bank won’t loan me more than $20,000 so I can’t pay more than $20,000”, that lack of control worked to his advantage. What’s the analogy to human emotions? Well often humans do things that seem to be irrationally stubborn. They vow undying devotion to their friends. They fight a duel or retaliate if they’re insulted. They’re hotheads in other words. This is an example showing that it may not be irrational in some spheres of human life to be a hothead. The hothead is the winner. This is also true with threats, for example. The problem with issuing a threat is someone calling your bluff. If they insult you, or invade your space, or chat up your girlfriend and you say, “If you do something like that I’ll beat you up,” well you could get hurt beating someone up. You might be better off just letting them have your lunch money or your girlfriend than getting killed in the process. Get a person that can anticipate that, and therefore they can act with impunity. How do you defend yourself against that dynamic? Well if you’re such a hothead that it would be intolerable insult if someone took advantage of you, and you had to retaliate even if it did you harm in the long run, paradoxically that might be the most effective deterrent. They can’t call your bluff if it isn’t a bluff. There’s often game theory. No psychologist ever thought that up; but it might offer an explanation as to why so many of our emotions seem to be passionate and irrational. There may be a method behind the madness, and it took someone – not a psychologist, I think – to unlock the mystery of human irrationality and passion.

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People often asked me how my parents influenced me, and I can’t give a neutral answer to that because I very much influence by the saying by Hans Isaac that the biggest influence that parents have on their children is at the moment of conception. I think that people often attribute far too much to parental upbringing. There’s a fair amount of data from my field not widely know that suggests that the effect of parents in shaping intellect and personality might even be overrated. You see this in children of immigrants. Even if their parents never acquired the language and culture of the adopted country, as long as the kids who were immersed in a peer group, they end up as fully competent citizens – something indeed that happened to my own father, the children of immigrants who are culturally, utterly inept; never managed to speak the language. In the case of my grandmother, they were constantly at sea in figuring out the culture, and my father grew up highly successful. So if you would ask the question of him, “How did your parents shape you?” he would have laughed. He shaped himself. I don’t want to deny credit to my parents who brought me up in a rich and stimulating household, but I think I’d be kind of inventing a novelistic autobiography, which is what I think what most people do when asked, “How did your parents influence you?” That having been said, it was a house with books, with discussion, with arguments, with people coming in and challenging us with interesting ideas. So I wouldn’t have traded it for anything, but the scientist in me says that . . . warns against my tendency to tell a story, and how to explain who I am today.

It’s natural to credit who you are with your parents. It seems like an act of decency or gratitude. In fact I often have to apologize to my parents saying I really do appreciate everything you did to me. It’s just that the scientific data leads me to think that parents don’t shape children as much as most people think. And that attitude is . . . I should give them credit for their attitude, which is, “We wouldn’t want you to say anything but what you believe based on the best scientific evidence that you take seriously. So don’t try to fashion your answer to flatter us.” I think that is a sign of the kind of people that they are. They are, I think, as interested in ideas and in providing good reasons for your ideas as I am. I don’t know whether I inherited that, whether they fostered it in me, but they deserve full credit for that even if perhaps by the standards of their friends I seem to be denying them credit in talking about theories of the shaping of personality.

I think the only way to make sense of nature and nurture is _______ obviously to point out that these are not alternatives; that you couldn’t have nurture – that is the creation and transmission of culture – without a rich system of emotion and learning to make sense of it; to create the culture; to acquire the culture if you’re faced with learning it as a child. And in the other direction, it would be a pretty useless kind of innate human nature if it couldn’t take in information from the environment; if it couldn’t figure out the kind of physical and social world that it had been placed in; and soaked up information as to how to prosper in it. In order to . . . So you need both. How do they interact? Well you have to specify, I think, the innate motivational systems, the innate learning mechanisms that make learning and transmission of culture possible. So something is innate. What is innate is not concrete behaviors or chunks of knowledge. What is innate is an ability to analyze the world and to learn in certain ways. Language makes it concrete where we certainly could not possibly be born with English. On the other hand, just an ability to learn generically isn’t enough because you could take a baby, or you could take a cat or a parrot, give them the same environment – the baby will learn to speak, the cat won’t. So something innate must be there as well. In the case of language, it would be a motive and an ability to analyze the signals coming out of someone else’s mouth as being formed out of units that have fixed meanings within a community and combinatorial rules that allow new ideas to be expressed by arranging these fixed signals in different orders and combinations. The brain mechanism that is equipped to do that – to find the words, the nouns, the verbs, the phrases – to analyze speech as having that logic . . . that’s what’s innate, not just a generic ability to learn at one extreme, not knowledge of English at the other extreme.