308. The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason About Human Nature (6)
1 (57m 17s):
And then, you know, Paul Eckman picked that up and ran with that, and it seemed like that was a done deal. And then Lisa Feldman, you quote in your book it says, oh, no, no, no, and, and offers what seemed like some reasonable criticisms of that research comment on, on that.
2 (57m 34s):
So this literature goes back and forth and there are those who come back at Lisa Feldman and say, you know, no, there are some core facial emotions that are in it after I, I, I am not following this literature closely enough to determine who is right. It also depends a lot on what task you're doing and how you measure it and what you think is the right task and not the right task. I think for, from my perspective as an external viewer, the question is why are you asking this question? Why you invested? Is this problem in this problem of can you detect emotions in the face? Why do you assume that's the proper way to evaluate innate emotions? I don't think that makes sense.
1 (58m 13s):
Oh, interesting. Right, because at some point the facial expression is just a proxy for something going on in the mind for the
2 (58m 21s):
Brain. Right, exactly. So a set of computation, so you adjust, so there is this case of shame you, the extended of shame that you feel depends on who else is seeing you at your shameful event. So, and your sense of shame is adjusted based on, on those assessments. So really I think it makes much more sense to think about emotions as computations and think about the computations as something that is innate. But of course, if you think that computations and cognition in general is ethereal and distinct from the body and you think that only what's in the body can be innate, then of course you can think about innate computations.
2 (59m 4s):
That's an oxymoron to you. So I dunno if that might explain why there has been so much effort to try to, you know, either rescue or refute the notion of facial innate facial emotions. And I think that just barking at the wrong tree here.
1 (59m 20s):
Yeah, it could be, I was thinking of Robert Trevor's theory on self deception. You know, maybe if you give off too many cues to your fellow drug mates that you're not trustworthy, you're a liar, you're deceptive and so on, you may be out of the group or you know, less successful. But if you believe the lie, then the cognitive computation of keeping track of both the lie and the truth goes away If the, the lie becomes true in your mind and therefore you're less likely to give off those body language cues that your fellow group mates may pick up on.
2 (59m 57s):
That's interesting.
1 (59m 59s):
Yeah. Yeah. So I, I'm convinced that a lot of cult leaders or you know, just con or whatever, probably come to believe their lie at some point because it helps, it makes, it makes 'em better sales for their product that they're selling if they believe it.
2 (1h 0m 14s):
Yeah, yeah.
1 (1h 0m 19s):
Internal state. Yeah. Right. Okay, so let's talk about the afterlife. And so would that be an example of kind of a universal innate sense since pretty much everybody in the world has some kind of belief in an afterlife that would suggest that that sense of dualistic self that continues on beyond the body is Yeah. Part of our nature.
2 (1h 0m 42s):
So methodologically, I don't think that everything that you find across cultures need to be innate. You need to be careful in what you identify as the innate cause of the behavior. So everybody can have a coke these days in the universe on earth, right? Right. But this is obviously not innate. Beliefs in the afterlife are very common across cultures. That is exactly what you would expect by dualism. But as we have discussed, I don't think it's necessary to assume that dualism itself is innate, but rather that what's innate are the, the components that the engines of dualism.
2 (1h 1m 27s):
But that is indeed what, what would make you believe that you continue to persist without your body,
1 (1h 1m 34s):
Right? Again, you can't conceive of yourself not existing because to conceive of anything you have to be existing. Right? So almost literally impossible now. So you could see how everybody would construct some kind of a continuation after the death. We can all see that bodies, people die. A hundred billion people lived and died before us and they're all gone. We can all see that they haven't come back. So that seems real, you know, this is the, the, you know, death awareness, what's it, what's it called? The theory of death awareness. That's not the title, but you know, that, that it leads to this kind of existential angst. And so we do things in our, our culture and our personal lives to kind of deal with that terror management theory and, you know, that that is a derivative of that, that cognition.
2 (1h 2m 23s):
Yeah, possibly.
1 (1h 2m 25s):
Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about, you have a long chapter on free will. How do people reason about their own free will versus that of others?
2 (1h 2m 39s):
This is something that at primarily summarized works of other, I don't think that this is really the most original contribution of, of my book, but the point is, again, to show how we ourselves by making assumption and trying to interpret our, especially the role of, you know, beliefs about morality and, and its association with the mind rather than the body and, and the tools that this is creating.
1 (1h 3m 20s):
Right. Okay. That's kind of a short version. Let's kind of drill down on that a little bit cuz it's an interesting comment on the free will determinism problem. I don't think it's resolvable in any sense, cuz the, I think it's a conceptual problem that is, it's a problem with our concepts. Well, what do you mean by free? What do you mean by determined? You know, and can a, can an agent in a determined universe make volitional choices? What do you mean by choices? Right? So maybe here, your meta analysis, how people reason and think about Yeah, free will is as good as we can get.
2 (1h 3m 54s):
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I I think that it's, it's important to recognize the biases that go into that. And in particular how a dual list bias can lead you to misinterpret, say, evidence from the brain. So yeah, I, I can send you back to the book to, to look at that father.
1 (1h 4m 19s):
Hmm. So, and then talk about theory of mind a little bit and how that affects your, your, your analysis and your research here. What, what part of our psychology does that come into play in
2 (1h 4m 35s):
In general? How it feeds into my book or, or
1 (1h 4m 38s):
Just anything. Yeah, just comment on that. I mean, it's one of the more interesting aspects of psychology, I think touches on a lot of the different topics you're covering here.
2 (1h 4m 46s):
Well, I think the theory of mind is, is one of the engines of dualism. So this, this book is really an attempt to say so. So I started this whole thing trying to understand empiricism where we think knowledge comes from. And the answer that I said is, here are these two crayons that you use to paint your picture of your mental life. One is dualism and the other is essentialism. And what I tried in this book is say, once you understand that you have these two crayons in, in at hand, what other pictures might these two crayons be responsible for? And then I'm going through several other cases and show that you paint those pictures by the interaction of those two colors, so to speak.
2 (1h 5m 34s):
And the way I see the contribution of this book is, there's a lot of previous research that looked at dualism. There's a lot of previous research that looked at essentialism. What has not been previously noticed is there two principles are actually intention with each other because you think that dualism claims that some abilities are only in the mine and essentialism claims that human nature must reside in the body. And that predicts a tension that ought to manifest in many other phenomena. And what I try to do in this book is demonstrate all the cases where we paint these pictures using those crowns.
2 (1h 6m 15s):
And theory of mind is, you know, so if, if one think about one of my cryon dualism and is being like a green crayon, well this is really the blue and yellow meaning this notion of dualism, which looks to us as atomic is really not, it's really construed by the tension between intuitive physics and theory of mind. So that's how theory of mind fits into my argument. So in this book, there isn't much discussion about theory of mind se, but only to the extent that it informs dualism.
1 (1h 6m 53s):
Hmm. Right. Well, you, but you kind of have to assume something like that to interact with another language speaking concept forming primate, you know that? Yeah, course. Yeah,
2 (1h 7m 6s):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
1 (1h 7m 8s):
Otherwise, we don't really have the same kind of social life that we have. All right. One of your more original sections was on health and disease and, and insanity and mental disorders, dyslexia and so on. So just talk about that for, for a little bit.
2 (1h 7m 21s):
So again, so, so again, another thing that, that you see a lot in the press is people are claiming we can see dyslexia in the brain. Well, where else is this going to be? Right? Person learns how to read it, it actually changes their brain. Well, where else would you find it? So again, it's this, this dualist notions that colors how we think about health and how we think about disease. And so in my lab we've, we decided to look at that. So we ask people, you know, suppose you have a person that shows symptoms of depression, and you're going to diagnose them in one of two tests.
2 (1h 8m 12s):
One and the two tests say present people with happy versus versus sad faces. And you observe their responses. And you detect the responses either by looking at the brain responses, say by EEG or, so you're looking just at electric activity. It's not even going to tell you specific localization on the brain, basically on or off. Are you responding more to the happy faces or not, or looking at response time? Are you responding faster to the, the happy faces? And in both cases, the, the, the diagnosis comes, the person is responding in a way that's consistent with depression. And then you ask people, so how likely is it that the person has this depression?
2 (1h 8m 54s):
And how likely it is that the depression is inborn? So if you know you had a twin that was raising isolation, would this show the same symptoms? And the answer is, if the diagnosis comes from the brain, people interpreted differently to, if it comes from behavior, even those, the results are completely identical. So if the results come from the brain, people think that the disorder is more, the depression is more likely to be innate. It will not change a way, it will not, it will not respond to, to treatment. It's unlikely, it's likely to be in their twin.
