The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi

Episode Date: November 28, 2024

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

Hello everybody. I'm going to start today with a couple of announcements. The first is that I published this book, We Who Wrestle with God, Perceptions of the Divine. It came out November 19th. It's number one on Amazon right now, which I'm pretty happy about. And it's also the basis for a tour, which I started in November, continues through December, then January through April as well. You can find information about the tour at JordanBPeterson.com. It's about this new book, which is about biblical stories, but you should also understand that I'm doing the same thing with these stories that I did with the other tours that I had conducted before,

and the other books for that matter, which is to take high-level abstract ideas, in this case, foundational narratives, to explain what they mean, but also to explain why knowing what they mean can make a real, practical difference in your life. I want to bridge the gap between the abstraction and the reality so that you can put into operation the principles that I'm discussing so that it does produce a tangible improvement in how you

attend to things and how you act. So come out to the lectures if you're interested in continuing with that. Today I had the opportunity to talk to Mark Ciengisi, who is an author of this book, Expressly Human, and a number of other books. I wanted to talk to Mark for two reasons. One was because we share an interest in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, especially with regards to perception, emotion, language, and mass group behavior. And so I've been trying to wade through the literature on perception. Mark is very interested as an evolutionary biologist slash psychologist in the function

of evolved traits like perception. And one of the hypothesis that we discussed which is a very interesting one was his explanation rather unique explanation for the evolution of color vision. He believes for example that we have additional color vision not so much so that we can detect ripe fruit for example which was one hypothesis but so that we can better attend to the emotional signals that people display as we can better attend to the emotional signals that people display as a consequence of alterations in their circulation, especially displayed facially. So we have color vision so that we're better at detecting

signs of health or ill health as a consequence of skin tone, but also detecting and reacting to emotional displays. And so join us if you're interested in evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, emotion, language, communication, and the behavior of mass groups. So I think we'll start our discussion by talking about perception. And you've studied visual perception for a long time. And so I'd like you to outline, if you would, what you understand about visual perception. And then we can contrast our viewpoints and see where we can go with that. And I think we'll segue into emotion and language from perception.

Yeah. I mean, so, you know, my background is sort of mathematics. And I went into cognitive science and I was really more of an evolutionary biologist. And so one of the areas that I worked and have a bunch of discoveries happens to be vision. So I have other things in other areas of sort of evolutionary biology, why we have as many fingers and why animals have as many limbs as they do, why you get pruney fingers when you're wet. They're actually optimized to be rain shreds so that when you don't want a hydroplane, so they suddenly have the optimal pattern so that you can channel the water out as quickly as possible.

So these are all the sorts of things that I was always dealing with. We're very sneaky, us people. That's right. So always I was interested not in the specific mechanisms by which our brains work, but on the ultimate sort of design questions for why it would have evolved that way.

So functional. It's all about function. And strangely, I mean, this is more of the political side, strangely, even though the biological world claims to believe in Darwin, when you're actually there in the evolutionary biology world, almost nobody believes in natural selection. They nod to it. But if you actually do a paper that argues, here's why it evolved to be this way, here's the functional reason for why it's this way, they'll say,'re doing a just-so story. You're not allowed to make hypotheses

about design. That's a just-so story. That's teleology. I was like you're missing the entire point of natural selection. Darwin's discovery is that yes there's design. That's not an issue. Well sexual selection also amplifies that. Well I mean sexual selection has things that are not leading to perfect natural selection design, but let's set that aside for the moment. The whole point is not that there's not design. The whole point is that there need not be a master designer.

That is, you can explain all this design, all the seeming teleology without a designer. That's the whole point, right? But what they wanna reject is not just a designer, but they wanna reject design itself. And so there's an immense... Reject teleology. Reject teleology. No, like my eyes.

Yeah, yeah, that's weird. It's bizarre, so it's a very small community and it becomes across this, you know, they attack sociobiology, you know, we're also on the same kind of basis. You start wanting to be... It happens not just when you enter into human behavior and human psychology, it happens even generally when you're talking about even rain treads, you know, rain tread, you know, pruney fingers like I did or anything, stuff that I do. That is a just-so story and it does not allow, right? Now, it's true that you can't study design the way that you study mechanisms. You can't do a lab experiment in quite the

same way. You have to ask it in different kinds of way. You have to say, if this is really designed for what I'm claiming it's designed for, let's say, you know, if the pruney fingers are designed to be rain treads, well, then here's, let's derive what the optimal morphology would be. What should the wrinkles actually look like? So that's one kind of prediction, looking at the morphology of the shape. Another might be, if it's really the case that it's for design, well, it should only occur in animals that, you know, have wet, dewy conditions, whereas certain kinds of animals that are never in wet, dewy conditions shouldn't have this, you know, this morphological feature shouldn't appear. Now, there's different kinds of predictions you can make, but they're often phylogenetic

predictions, morphological predictions, sometimes you can do behavioral, do they actually behave, perform better in wet conditions when they're wrinkly versus when they're not wrinkly, and all the kind of combinations of these things. What you don't, you can't typically do the mechanism kinds of experiments. It's just a whole different kind of thing. So you have to do it differently. But the strange weird thing in incredibly far left communities as they are is that they somehow have thrown Darwin out entirely

and you can't talk about natural selection, which was an incredibly bizarre thing. You know, so, okay, so I can think of a variety of possible reasons for that, and I'd like your opinions about those reasons. I mean, you tangled together a couple of things. You said that even as an evolutionary biologist, if you start to tread in the water of teleology or purpose,

you receive pushback from your colleagues, and then you mentioned that that was also a far- left phenomenon. And so I'm curious about, it seems to me that the relationship with the far left is likely the fact that the far left, far left political philosophy is predicated on a radical social constructionism,

essentially, that every single thing that everyone does, especially human beings, but to the degree radical social constructionism essentially, that every single thing that everyone does, especially human beings, but to the degree that the same thinking paralyzes speculation about animal evolution, there's an insistence among those on the far left that there's no essential human nature. Everything's infinitely malleable.

And I see that as a reflection of an incredible intellectual arrogance because the reason for the insistence that everything is socially constructed is because that allows for the possibility for everything to be 100% modifiable by those, for example, who would like to modify human behavior and the image of their own philosophy.

Do you think there's, is there anything else, do you think that's going on with regards to the rejection of purpose or so-called design? I mean, my pet assumption has been that their hair stands on end or they get, you know, if they feel backed up against the wall, when you get to human behavior, Steven Pinker and blank slate arguing this as well, the idea that there's any notion of instinct or a human nature is against something, they really wanna push back on that because they wanna think of us as infinitely malleable

and subject to socialism and whatever policies that they have, they can shape us however they wish. And so even when we're in things like pruning fingers, it's as if they've taken that kind of prohibition of human psychology and push it into any realm at all and have a general admonition not to do any kind of design or research that concerns the design of animals themselves.

So I'm not sure what else it could be, but at any rate, it's a bizarre thing because the only way that you have- Well, there's something else too there. Maybe it's something like, there's a lot of reasons for rejecting the idea of purpose. One is to reject the idea of an ultimate designer. So there's a religious argument, say,

lurking at the bottom of that, but it's also very convenient to reject the notion of purpose or meaning because it also allows you to reject the idea of any kind of implicit responsibility. If nothing has any meaning, the disadvantage to everything being meaningless is that things are meaningless. But the advantage to everything being meaningless and purposeless is that you can do whatever the hell you want. And so it's a very good rationalization for short-term hedonistic power-mad behavior.

And if you combine that with the problem of infinite social constructionism, then you have a real problem. But it's a weird thing that you would encounter that among, at least among hypothetically evolutionary biologists and thinkers, because why would they be concerned with evolutionary biology if they are going to toss out Darwin for example? But most of them don't really have to think about Darwin because they're doing mechanistic experiments. They're not doing hypotheses about its design. I'm one of the rare people back you know in the 1920s you had the ethologists who did a lot more

thinking in terms of the design and function function, really thinking about their evolutionary connection. But that's gone way away. Everybody's dealing with really complicated experiments with mechanisms. They don't have to think about it. So they've somehow developed this knee-jerk reaction that you don't have to understand design and purpose. But you cannot understand any machine without understanding what it's designed for. So I often use an example.

If you were to find a stapler out of the middle of nowhere, natives find a stapler for the first time, and they wanna try to understand it, there's not much to a stapler. You know, there's like four parts or whatever, six parts. But you can't, you might work out all the mechanisms, this opens, this, there's these, there's like seven things, let's say, and they do these sorts of kinds of actions.

Well, that's not an understanding of it. You might start saying, well, maybe it's a weapon, and you start shaking it around like numchucks. You open it up. Well, now you can work out how does it break when you hit someone in the face? Is it bent? And maybe that's part of it.

There's tons and tons of mechanistic behaviors that have nothing to do with what it's in fact for, how it deforms when this happens. There's lots of infinite numbers of kinds of mechanisms that are involved with it that are completely irrelevant, right? Only by understanding the mechanisms in the context of what the function is for. This is where the computational hardware, you've got function, you've got the algorithm

level, you've got the mechanistic implementation level. You have to understand all these systems by understanding it by all of these parts all cohering together in one. In relationship to function. In relationship to function at the top. And so they're throwing out the very thing that allows you to understand, even if they are only interested in mechanisms, which my eyes glaze over with mechanisms, you can't understand mechanisms without inherently understanding the functions.

Okay, so that's a very interesting place to segue into perception itself, because I got very interested, I don't know, probably 20 years ago in pragmatic philosophy, the pragmatic philosophy of William James and Peirce. And they were all part of the metaphysical club in Cambridge at the turn of the 19th century. And they were also extremely influenced by Darwin. And the pragmatists have been deemed the only genuine American stream of philosophy. And the pragmatists were very concerned with function.

In fact, their definition of truth was essentially function, that we determine what's true by examining the concordance of a proposition even in relationship to its effectiveness with regard to purpose. And they've made a case for that on the scientific side of things, that things that we regard as true, we regard as true because they provide an effective means for us to move towards a desired end. So for the pragmatists, there was really no separation of truth itself, even at the level of perception of fact, there was no separation between that and functional purpose.

And I'm curious about your opinion in that regard, in relationship to perception itself, because the best models of perception that I've encountered, the ones that seem to make the most sense in keeping with everything else I know about psychology, are pragmatic models. And that they're predicated on the idea that what we perceive, and this is part of the thing that I've argued about, for example, with Sam Harris, is that the radical empiricists who believe that we can orient ourselves in the world merely in consequence of the facts don't take into account the fact that when we perceive a fact, we're actually perceiving something much more akin

to a function. So for example, I was very influenced by visual approach to ecological perception. Gibson. Gibson, yeah, yeah. Not in all regards, but I found much of Gibson's work extremely useful, that his sense is that when we're looking at the world,

we're seeing something like, I've broadened it a bit, but pathways to a desired destination, tools that can facilitate our movement forward, obstacles that might come up in our path, and a vast domain of irrelevance around that and that's true for every perceptual act. Seems to be particularly evident in the case of vision. A vision is something like a navigation aid.

That's one way of thinking about it. So I'm curious what you think about that. And well if any of those ideas, how those ideas might be related or not related to the manner in which you're conceptualizing object perception, let's say. Well, I mean, ecological capital E, ecological perception, ecological vision with Gibson, ended up biting onto a whole lot of philosophical baggage

that I never bought into. I consider myself a lowercase E ecological vision person, in which case you can't understand what vision or any horny mechanisms are doing unless you understand what it was functioning for in the natural environment for all of those millions of years. And so let me just give you some specific examples. So one of the things that I had noticed was that people had talked about color for 100 years and color vision. First of all, to back up, we primates, we and some other primates have a third dimension.

Your dog just has gray scale and yellow blue, two dimensions. All the bunny rabbits, horses just have two dimensions. But some of us primates have a third dimension, red, green. And so for a hundred years they thought, well, maybe it has something to do with finding fruits in the forest. And there was never any good evidence for this at all.

There's incredible varieties and variability in terms of the kinds of diets that they would have, not to mention just even generation to generation is going to experience radically different kinds of diets of fruits, but they all have the same, pegged the exact same kind of color vision. And it's a weird kind of color vision. This is across primate groups? Across all the... Across trichromate primate groups?

All the old world trichromats have. So dogs and bunny rabbits have one low wavelength sensitive cone down in the 550s. And then the other one, sorry, in the 400s, 450s or so, and that's sort of blue cone. And then the other ones, we have one in the 550s or so for the dogs that's around here. So you've got two. And then what you'd expect if you're going to have a third one would be for the dogs that's around here. So you've got two and then what you'd expect if you're going to have a third one would be that suddenly it may be over here. You'd have the uniformly distributed like RGB. For your cameras they're uniformly distributed across the spectrum which is sort of a poor man's spectrometer. You've got three across the spectrum. You put them

uniformly. But in fact ours is this. We ended up with another cone sensitivity right next to the other one. They're exactly side by side in a really weird peculiar way. Why would you want to have a third cone sensitivity the same part of the spectrum? It's just like 15 nanometers away. Right, because in principle, it wouldn't be detecting anything radically different. No. That's the problem.

Okay, so that's the problem you're trying to address. Right. So I'd realize later that when you look, you know, I'd notice that one of the things that matters is blood under the skin, blushes, blanches, health modulations. All of these kinds of emotions, signals that humans and other primates are doing on bare skin is shown by virtue of the blood under the skin.

And it's by virtue in particular of the oxygenation, deoxygenation of hemoglobin under the skin. And it turns out that when you're looking at the completely arbitrary and weird spectrum of hemoglobin under the skin. And it turns out that when you're looking at the completely arbitrary and weird spectrum of hemoglobin, which is a bunch of... it has a little W in this one part. So it goes like this and there's a little W. And that's when it's oxygenated. And when it deoxygenates, that W in that little region turns into a U. And so these little peaks right there in the W part, if you wanted to be sensitive to this oxygenation,

deoxygenation, you actually have to have two cones right there, so the little W peak in the middle as it goes down in terms of U and the other parts that go up, you have to sense it, you have to have a peculiar spots of two cones in this exact spot. So I was like, oh my God, exactly where you'd have to put cones to be sensitive

to the only spot where you could tell that it's getting oxygenated versus deoxygenated is exactly in the spots where we have our cones. Okay so you're let me sum that sum up that just so that I make sure I'm following you so the first the objection you have to standard theories of trichromat perception is that the two of the color spectra that we see are so close together on the electromagnetic spectrum that there's no advantage to distinguishing them

that's clear in the natural world as such. And you're associating that with the enhanced ability to detect difference in oxygenation in the skin. And you're gonna associate that, I presume, with emotional display, is that right? So this is an empath sense. In short, our color. Is that right? So this is an empath sense. In short, our color vision, our primate color vision, is an empath sense. It's only by virtue of that that we can see these blushes and blanches.

And it's only by virtue of that that you can actually see veins at all. The veins, of course, are the deoxygenated parts. And the more fleshy red parts are the more oxygenated parts. This stuff is completely invisible if you're colorblind. If you're a colorblind doctor, even going back to Dalton, he had complained about, you know, his complete inability to see if someone had, you know, infected in one eye versus the other, no idea. If they've got blood or stool on their pants, they can't tell the difference between whether it's blood or stool. These things go back for a long way.

As soon as you're color deficient, you're missing one of those. Now it's just, you can't distinguish these things at all. Do we know if people who are colorblind are deficient in facial emotional processing? That has been very hard to test because, but what we do know is that there's a long history of medical doctors who have known problems in just detecting blood state related diagnosis, symptoms that are recognizable by blood state. But actually doing controlled experiments where you're able to do this with, it has been very hard.

So no one has quite that data. There's a lot of, my dad's colorblind and he's emotionally dense. What would happen if you did rapid presentation of angry faces, like almost at a subliminal level. Do you think that people who were colorblind would be less able to detect the difference between angry and non-angry faces if at least to the degree that that's signaled by facial flushing? Well yeah I mean you can certainly mimic on on screen you could

try to mimic the the spectral difference in some sense. So that, first of all, just to back up. One of the interesting side effects of this is that your camera doesn't show you color vision, your TV doesn't show you color vision. All the cameras that we use are still in some sense to color vision because their third receptivity is way out, you know, it's distributed way out there. So none of those cameras that we take these pictures of are able to sense these oxygenation modulations.

So that's an experimental problem. Yeah. So this is what makes it deeply difficult. It also means that literally we're not seeing all of the states that we experience in real life. The glow of youth, when you see glow of youth, you're talking about the glowing of oxygenated blood and skin. None of that's available. Is that, is okay, so you mentioned the glow of youth. I mean, hypothetically, one of the markers that could drive transformation of color vision in the direction of emotion detection that was blood related would be for picking up

signs of fecundity. And that would be a direct association. And there is evidence that I think is quite compelling that one of the things that makes women attractive to men are signals of health that are associated with enhanced fertility. All of those signals seem to be associated with what people conceive of as feminine beauty.

And you picked one that was cardinal there, which is that flush. You call it the flush of youth. Right. And it's not just on or off. I mean, different motions will lead to different kinds of gradients on the face. And of course, it's not just the face. The whole body can flush. And the other primates, the rump, become so exaggerated that literally the UK would take some of the females when they were having estrus out because it was almost embarrassing for the kids to come and watch. So it's you know there's it's multi-dimensional it's certainly it's color related but it's not just red red green but there's actually you know where you have more like if

I squeeze my hand and let go you get yellow blue differences. Now it's not because when it's squeezed out it's more yellow when there's squeezed out, it's more yellow. When there's more blood, it's all things equal more blue. But if it's oxygenated blood, then it's blue and red. So it's more purple. If it's deoxygenated blood, it's green and blue, and so bluish green. So in fact, you end up by virtue of concentration variations,

blue-yellow, and oxygenation modulations, red-green, you can get any possible hue at all. Which is why, if you're a painter and you're trying to actually red, green, you can get any possible hue at all. Which is why if you're a painter and you're trying to actually paint human faces, when we go back and look at their paintings, which I could never do, you're like, oh my God, they're using all the hues. Yeah, right.

You know, cause we don't typically consciously notice it. We just look at the skin and we think of it as sort of this matte, you know, like a doll. But in fact- Pink. Yeah, some pink, but of course it's not. And you're really seeing the blood. You are not looking, skin is not, if you've yeah, some pink, but of course it's not. And you're really seeing the blood. You are not looking, skin is not, if you've ever,

you know, if you get a bruise, the first thing you notice is that it's of course total discoloration. And so we, you're really seeing a dynamic view into the very state and function and health of the individual. It's completely a highly transparent surface and we're not consciously aware of it, although we're certainly reading it of the individual. It's completely a highly transparent surface and we're not consciously aware of it, although we're certainly reading it all the time.

Hmm, hmm. And so how has that, so that's a theory of color vision as health detection. Is it a theory that- Well mostly, I don't know whether it's mostly health or mostly emotion, it's certainly emotion, state, and health, all of it. Right, it wouldn't only have to be one of those things anyways.

Okay, well, could you make a separate case for emotion? Okay, so one of the things that I've read, I don't know if you believe that this is true, but you know, cause everything turns out to be debatable among scientists, just like everyone else. But I've read that one of the things that shaped the evolution of our eyes is they're shaping to be maximally visually evident to perceivers.

We're unbelievably good at determining exactly where someone's eyes are pointed. So even if someone is sitting across the room from you, you can tell if they're looking at your eyes or at the tip of your nose, which is such a tiny fraction of movement at the eye level or a fraction of angle that it's almost amazing. It's amazing that you can detect it at all and that we have the white background and the colored iris and the black pupil partly because that maximizes the degree to which our eyes are salient. The hypothesis being that anyone in our evolutionary history

whose eyes weren't salient was salient with someone whose intentions were very difficult to determine and was much more likely to be misunderstood, say, and killed in consequence, or much less likely to find a mate. And so our faces have evolved at least at the level of of our perception of the eyes of others to ensure that we can understand intent and we do that by inferring attention by looking at eye gaze and you're making a strong case in your work for the relationship between perception,

color vision and emotion perception. So we talked a little bit about cues of health that might be associated with skin coloration and cues of fecundity, but tell me about the emotional cues that are associated with differences in color. So, you know, the first thing I think people think about with spectral skin signaling is blushes, right?

And blanches and flushes, but that's really just the beginning. You know, that's barely touch the surface. So you can imagine someone's angry and they can get a red face, which is very different from when somebody blushes and they get with embarrassment. And people actually, if I'm in front of a stage

and something happens to slightly embarrassing and the audience is over there and I'm looking this way, you actually blush more on the side that's facing the audience. Your body is back. This is known, this is a Drummond. Wow, that's a very specific response. So these are strong arguments that these are signals, not just automatic side effects of, you know, some kind of implicit side effect with no purpose. Well that's so complex too, because it opens up the question, like, first of all, not everybody blushes.

And the issue is, well, what does the blush signify? And it signifies something like self-conscious shame. And then the question is, well, why would you want to signal self-conscious shame to people? I mean, because it's a shameful signal, but it does indicate that you're the sort of, one of the things that might indicate is that you're the sort of person

who can't get away with what exactly? Violating the social norm? Something like that, right? And it's an honest signal because it's out of your control. So honest signal just in this context is a sort of a technical term of art. So we mean by honest signal that you have no control over it

and it wears its meaning on its sleeve in some sense. Right, right. So yeah, that's right. It's a signal of your intent beneath your conscious awareness. Laughter, genuine laughter seems to be a signal like that too. And there's some evidence that genuine smiles are like that too, right?

Because if you smile falsely, your eyes don't smile. Although I think you can train yourself to do that. But generally speaking, if someone is- It's hard. Yeah, it's hard. If someone is manipulating with a smile, they don't do it the same way they do when they smile spontaneously.

And so those rapid onset implicit emotional displays are a signal about our genuine motivations. And if those signals are obvious, it's in principle easier for people to read us. And therefore, in principle, easier for us for them to engage in trusting negotiations with us. Right. Because we wear our heart on our sleeve. That's right. And so, I mean, other predictions that come out of this, by the way, it should be the case that if this is true, then the primates with color vision, as opposed to the primates that didn't have three color vision, the primates with color vision should have more naked spots.

They should have bare faces. And in fact, when you look, the primates with color vision are the ones with the naked faces. They often have naked rumps, you know, naked genitalia, which, because all of these things are signaling, the ones without color vision are furry face like your typical bunny rabbit, typical dog. Nakedness and color vision, three-color vision, are opposite sides of the same coin.

Hmm, okay, okay, okay. Does the theory that trichromate vision evolved at least partly or perhaps in the main as a aid to emotion detection contradict the frugivore theory? Is it possible that colour vision also gave us an edge at least in some environments with regards to the detection of higher quality food sources? It's certainly possible but it wouldn't have driven, there's no reason to think that fruit would have driven

those particular wavelength sensitivities of the middle and long wavelength sensitive cones. Particularly given that they're so close together. Right. That's the crucial issue. Yeah, and there's all kinds of things where we, we leverage our color vision, which is peculiarly for empath kind of health senses, but we obviously use it for lots of things,

probably in nature beyond that, and in culture all over the place. But that doesn't mean that doesn't amount to an explanation for what drove it. Yeah, well, I mean, part of the problem, I guess, that people have with evolutionary, functional evolutionary explanations for the purpose of any given human attribute is that there's no reason ever to assume that any given attribute is

singular in its function. It's sort of like asking what the hand can do. What's the hand for? Well, you know, the hand is for a lot of things. Is there a cardinal purpose to the hand? That's a hard question to ask, but there's no reason to assume that evolution wouldn't operate so that a given biological phenomenon would be other than multipurpose. Right.

Well, so everything might be multipurpose, but the odds of there being two competing or multiple competing desiderata that are determining the design, that they're close to one another, are going to be typically fairly rare. Typically one of them might be ten times more important than the other. Right, right. You know, or a thousand times more important. Usually in my experience it turns out that one of these is the principal drivers. It can explain first order, even second order properties of the thing. And yeah, there can be other third or fourth order stuff,

but that's mostly irrelevant. So you can get away with explaining. So for example, another one, why we have forward-facing eyes. Standard story. And the fun thing of all of these explanations, whether it's pruning fingers, still probably in the Wikipedia page, it says it's a side effect of osmosis or some bull crap, right?

It's just, it's still there to this day, these old narratives. And then for forward-facing eyes, it's always has something to be about predators want forward-facing eyes. Well, except that every fish is a predator eating a smaller fish. All the birds are predators.

They're all have sideways-facing eyes by our standards. They're all sideways-facing eyes. Even all the carnivores, the paradigmatic mammalian meat-eaters, predators, have sideways-facing eyes relative to us. I mean, they still have forward-facing eyes in terms of the big picture of things. So there's a lot of variability in forward-facing-eyeness across the mammals. And the question is, why is there this variability? And so there's been multiple kinds.

One is stereoscopy, better stereoscopy. But you even get stereoscopy in a bunny rabbit. Bunny rabbit has a very thin binocular field and it can see stereoscopy within a thin binocular field. But it also gets the benefit of seeing everything. You can see directly behind it, below it, above it. So you've got this full panoramic vision, whereas we've chosen to lose. Right, a lot. Half of our've chosen to lose half of our visual

field or a lot of our visual field just to have better stereoscopy up in front. So one of the bad sorts of you have these two currencies, like the standard arguments, oh, I've got this great wide stereoscopy field of better 3D vision up front at the expense of losing everything. How do you balance those things? How is that an argument that I would want more of, you know, apples to have while getting less adverbs in the back and not even obviously comparable things that I can trade off? So my argument was like, first of all, stereoscopy is not, it's like the, it's the least important 3D sense.

We have all of these, there's many, many three-dimensional senses. One is just what kinds of objects they are, how far down towards the horizon are they? How they overlap? Yeah, occlusions in front of other things. If I just do this with one eye, even with one eye, I'm getting amazing, much better than stereoscopy. All these things when you do, if you're a perception psychologist who creates stimuli that have competing cues of two different kinds and they say which ones Trump Stereoscopy loses always all these other ones Trump they win if there's Oh, yeah, oh, I see. So that's a good way of testing. Yeah, what's the most cardinal element of the right?

Oh, yeah And so none of the stereoscopy always lose and if you've played first-person shooter video games You're you might yeah, you have both eyes, but you're being fed one image on screen. And these things are so immersive, you never are confused as to where the guys are that you're shooting, right? They're always really unambiguously in one particular spot, yet you're a cyclops, right? So it had occurred to me back then, I said, I don't think it has anything to do with stereoscopy whatsoever.

And it turns out it's all about one currency. This is again to this idea of why aren't there three, two, or three or more equivalent kinds of functions that are all competing, and then it's just some ugly mess, and it's not a good design hypothesis at all. It's going to be sort of ugly kludge that happens to. It's almost never a kludge. And so in this case, the reason that we have forward-facing

eyes and the more forward-facing they are is to see better in clutter. And so what I mean by that, animals that evolved with leaves all over the place. When there's leaves, if your eyes are more widely separated than the clutter leaves, let's say. So for example, if you played this game, if I hold my finger up in front of you, it's very thin, and I look at you but not my finger, I see two copies. Unless I've got a dominant eye, but for those of you who don't have a dominant eye, you'll see two copies of your finger

and each will be semi-transparent. Right. Right. Now, you're seeing, you know what- You can see through it. Right, so what- Essentially. What one eye is being blocked with, the other eye is seeing the world beyond that. And so your brain has evolved

to just create two copies of it. And you're not confused like, oh my God, I've got two figures. No, you know what's going on. It's just, you have this perception that combines them and creates semi-transparency so that you can see beyond it. Now, I could even my whole hand, I'm almost missing nothing even with my whole hand in front of me.

There's a little bit of a core in the middle, but I'm capturing most of it. So for objects that are less, the objects that are not as big as this interpupillary distance, the separation between my eyes, big as this interpupillary distance, the separation between my eyes, then when you're an animal in that with those kinds of eyes in a forest with leaves that are typically smaller than that, you actually get, I call it X-ray, you actually can see, it's probabilistic summation, you actually can see much, much more of the environment beyond than when you're a cyclops. So and in fact, I noticed this playing video games back 20 something years ago, when I would be,

because you're a cyclops and you're hiding in bushes and I'd be trying to snipe people. And then when you're in a bush, you can't see anything. And of course, these are fake bushes, I get it. You can't see anything because you're just looking at these, but we're in real life, you're in a bush, you pretty much see the entire world outside of it. You can peek from outside of your bush.

Oh yeah, that's interesting. So you had to keep shaking to get different shots than someone shoots you because they see you wiggling in the bush. In real life, you're designed to be in these cluttery environments and to see perfectly well beyond that. Without having to move too.

Without having to move. And yes, you're losing what's behind you, but then you can start calculating how much of the environment can I see if I'm a forward-facing animal with this X-ray ability, that is my eyes are bigger than the leaves, versus a rabbit, let's say, effectively, who has a full panoramic view,

yeah, he can see entirely behind him, but you can actually then calculate how much of the world outwards can you see. He's actually, I can see if you think about it two dimensionally, I can see if the one, two, three, three and a half times better than him if you think about it as a two dimensional grid, but in fact, it's more of a three dimensional grid,

then you have to sort of think about spheres, sphere packing problem. And so I can see only the front half of my little sphere, but if the world was sort of built out of these spheres of these little, surrounded by lots of clutter, I can see the six spheres in front of me fully, and I can't see beyond that, and only half of mine, but I can see now six and a half times more of the – there's like simple models that you can build of simple models of forested kinds of environments where you can show that, no, you can see really almost an order of magnitude more.

It's see the most, right? It's not a little bit more stereoscopy here, but a little bit less seeing – no, it's just see the most. And so animals have, depending on their environment, they have more forward-facing eyes, the more – the greater the extent to which they're in cluttered, forested kinds of environments. And so one, the siderotum, see the most suffices to explain all the variability that we find across mammals in terms of how forward-facing eyes.

So does that mean that our forward-facing eyes evolved when we were still in primarily arboreal environments? And are chimpanzees still primarily in arboreal environments? I guess they're, are they? Yeah, I would say they are. Yeah, I think, yeah, yeah. So the fact that we were on the African Plain for some millions of years wasn't sufficient to.

Even there, even in the African Plains. So even when you have animals in the same habitat, you have some animals that find micro-niches, for example, cats, who like to hang out in the clutter and wait for their prey. And then let's say the gazelles, who don't want to be anywhere near that clutter because they can't see crap while they're inside it.

So they will find micro-environments within even habitats that at first glance, we kind of don't think of them as very cluttery, but animals that are good at clutter will find those cluttery spots and leverage them. Okay, okay, okay. Well, that's an interesting account of binocular vision. Let's, if it's all right, let's turn our attention back to emotion perception and then segue from that

into the development of language. In this book, Expressly Human, which was published in 2022, you talk about the evolution of language, which is a relatively new phenomenon. You date it back several hundred thousands of years, and we could talk a little bit about that, but you also make the case that our linguistic ability, although it's relatively newly evolved, is scaffolded on an understructure of emotional display and emotional language. And so this is in keeping with the notions of perception that you put forward that our faces, our skin surface, but primarily our faces, our emotional display mechanisms, and

that we can read a tremendous amount about the intent of others, intent and desire of others merely as a consequence of reading off emotions, and that language evolved with that as its underlying axiomatic, set of axiomatic presumptions. I mean, one of the things that I can't remember even where I read about this, but it's the problem of infinite regress in language, you know, and how we solve it. If I tell you, I was angry this morning, your likely question is what made you angry? Not what do you mean angry? And the reason that you don't ask what do you mean angry is because you know what it's like to be angry. And so we share the underlying psychophysiological platform and all of the experiences that are part and parcel of that

platform and then we can use words to refer to those. That's a situation where you can think of emotions. And I think object perceptions are the same, by the way. Emotions are the axioms of the linguistic, of our linguistic capacity. And you seem to be making an argument that's analogous to that in your book. And that-

Way before there were social animals, every animal would have had emotions, right? So these are just rough and ready. One way to think about emotions, it's just states that you're in that feel like something that motivates you to engage in certain kinds of behaviors, right? And none of the, they would have all been dead-eyed

shark-like creatures that have, they're filled with lots of emotions, filled on the inside with emotions. But they're not social animals, so they never had to signal to anybody anything. So what really, what Darwin was concerned about, it was like, okay, that's great. There's all these animals with all these emotions

and it feels like something to be them. And it's like all this internal stuff. And there's no reason for them to tell anybody. So why are all these social animals signaling so much to one another? What's the point of it? What does this language mean? So what we do here is just

ask if you're social animals and you don't have a language of any kind that we're so used to, you need to have a... What is the optimal language stimulus signaling system such that you can carry out negotiations and compromises and you can negotiate and someone can back down or can someone can raise and someone can do. So let me give you an example where we do where people can come to a decision and come to an agreement without ever saying a word. We do this when we play poker. So I know something and you know something.

I've got cards a certain hand, you've got cards a certain hand and we don't know and imagine that we can never talk about it. Like it turns out I could say, actually it's, but imagine I've got these things that I know in the world and you've got these things certain hand, and we don't know, and imagine that we can never talk about it, like it turns out I could say, I actually, it's, no, but imagine I've got these things that I know in the world, and you've got these things that we're arguing over, zucchini bread keeps it, arguing over some particular thing that we wanna split, and here we wanna split the pot, whatever, the ante,

there's the ante in there, and we wanna get the ante out, and I can't talk, and we can even play online where we can't even talk, right, there's not even any emotional expression, sir. But what I do to make my case is I just slide in a certain amount of stake. I stake something and then you stake something. And it could be that after a while,

I go, okay, I think he's, Jordan's pretty confident. I'm going to, I'm going to fold. As I'm agreeing, okay, your hand is stronger than mine. We've come to an agreement. I never signaled anything. I never spoke. But we nevertheless managed to solve a potential conflict because it could call. Call would be to say, screw you. I'm going to like, we're going to go all in. And that means in this, in the case of poker, just laying down to see whose cards are better. And so figuring

out who, you know, whose cards are better in real life might be, oh yeah, I'm a better fighter than you or whatever it might have come to blows or whatever it might be, or something that we don't wanna have to get involved with all the time. We'd like to make our lives much smoother in terms of the utility. The path to negotiation. Right, so poker is how you do it. And so what we're able to show is that

you need to have the ability, you need to have a signal that says, I think I'm really confident, or really, really confident. And you do this by shoving in social capital chips, shoving in reputation. So when you signal pride, or I also signal that I don't think you're confident at all, I have disdain for you.

So you either I'm signaling that I'm really confident or that your claims are not very good, you've got a bad hand. Either of those things amounts to a certain amount of stake or bedding social capital. But I can also show humility, and now I'm sort of pulling off chips to say, okay, I'm not so great,

or I show respect to you. I'm also pulling out chips off the table. So you can't do that in actual poker, but you can just start to working out, you need to be able to both make claims strong and weak or pride and sort of humility about my own confidence, and also respect or disdain concerning yours. And then you can start to work out,

I also need to have the ability to acknowledge what you just claimed. Okay, you're saying that you're really confident that I'm, and I'm not confident. Well, given that, that also is a particular signal and it has something to do with happy versus- That confidence too, you know, that confidence must be something like the end result

of an internal Darwinian competition between different competing motivational states, right? Because you might ask yourself, why should I accept your confidence as a signal of your competence? Right? And one answer to that would be, I know something about you and know that you can do things. And so that would be a consequence of me actually knowing you in a social circumstance. But another would be that if your evaluation of the situation is sufficient so that the emotion of moving forward and dominating isn't being challenged by a number of other potential emotional states like anxiety, I'm going to be able to read that on your face. So I'm going to know that you undertook the internal computations that were sufficient

to at least convince you that you're correct. I mean, I think you're overthinking it. Here for this argument, we don't even have to think about it being honest signals like for color vision. Even if we were, and we're not consciously doing these, we have evolved to just do these signals often implicitly without really, and that's really when we're good is when we're not consciously thinking it through. But the reason that you're willing to believe me when I show confidence that I'm the one who should get

most of the cake that mom laid out, let's say you're my brother, is because we're part of a social community and I'll get humiliated if it turns out that mom tells people that I'm wrong. The reason that it works is because I care about what I've staked. I care about the reputation, they're at risk.

And the social community is always watching and gossiping and I'll lose reputation. The reason that it's all about these reputations. Okay, so you're building in, I think you're building in something like appreciation for the fact that the reputational exchanges that we're making are cumulative across time in a social community that's actually

continually interacting. So it's never a one-off game. And so that means that also- It's sometimes managed, somehow with humans, it seems to sometimes work even with one-off, right? Like, because we're so instinctively doing, but we've been instinctively designed thinking that we're part of a single community,

that we seem to get off, we get on pretty well and we're all nice to the baristas and everybody's nice to one other. Even though we could be real jerks, right? Yeah, definitely. So it seems to hold over pretty well, but yeah, it definitely brings up more troubles in bigger cities where there's fewer interactions

with the same people. Yeah, well, I've also been, well, I'm curious about what you think about this as well, because I've been working out the idea, it's not only me, obviously, but many people work on this idea that, and I think it's associated with this, it's the same idea as the idea of natural law

in more pure philosophy, is that there's a pattern of ethos that emerges as a consequence of the fact of iterated exchange. So I'll give you an example of this from the animal literature. So when animal behaviors first started studying rat play and were trying to understand it physiologically and functionally, one of the things they would do was match juvenile rats together so that they could wrestle.

But they do one-offs. And what they found was invariably that if one of the rats had about a 10% weight advantage over the other rat, that he could win the vast majority of times. And so the idea of play was something like you put two animals into a ring, they compete with one another, the larger animal can dominate the smaller animal. And the purpose of the play bout is to establish dominance without damage. Right? But, but the problem with that hypothesis was that rats don't play with each other once. They play repeatedly. And it turned out that if you put rats together, juveniles, repeatedly, the big rat has to let the little rat win at least 30% of the time or the little rat won't play anymore.

And so this is, it's a remarkable discovery. This is Jak Panksepp's discovery. It's an absolutely brilliant discovery because it shows first of all that the purpose of play is not dominance. It also implies that the social hierarchy order isn't dominance related, but even more importantly it shows that reciprocity is the basis for social organization even among rats and not the expression of power. And that's like, that's a radically different idea.

Now, friends, DeWalt has found something like that, as far as I'm concerned, something very similar with his studies of chimpanzees, because it was thought for the longest time, I think by Marxist-oriented evolutionary biologists fundamentally that the substructure for dominance with regard to the alpha chimps was the physical expression of power.

But what DeWalt showed was that that happens now and then. You get a chimp troop where the major alpha is a bully and a successful one, but he tends to get torn to shreds as soon as he has a weak moment by like two subordinates who've had enough of being pushed around. The stable alphas are often smaller males, although that's irrelevant in a sense. What they are is extremely good at continuous reciprocity, and they tend to rule over much more harmonious social troops and have a much longer reign.

So the reason I'm asking about this is because you talk about the importance of staking social capital when making a claim for confidence. And I'm curious, I'd like to have you elaborate on that more. You used the poker game analogy. You said, I'm staking something and you implied that, well, if I'm wrong in my confidence and word gets around, it's gonna damage my reputation, which means that the next time I act confidently, no one's gonna believe me.

So the implication is, is that if you're reciprocating with people across a long span of time, then you're only going to make confidence claims where you're relatively certain that being wrong isn't going to damage your long-term reputation. That's basically the... Right. Yeah.

Okay. So, and I haven't, there's two different, this is a, and here we work out the, in some sense, argue it. Here's the fundamental and minimal signaling system that is absolutely needed for two creatures to engage in these kinds of staking conversations. You have to have exactly 81, it's a four dimension of signals. Now the optimal way to use it is like asking

what's the best way to play poker. Now there's more than one way to play poker. It's deeply complicated, this is one of the most complicated, it's the most complicated game that exists as long as there's no limits poker, super complicated. So there's certainly more than one way to play. One way is to say, no, you go first. No, you go first.

And you're always being, you never go, you're never more confident than your actual levels of confidence. You're not blustery. And that kind of, you can build up a reputation over time and you probably are helping your friends also build up their reputations, which is kind of what reciprocity is.

As opposed to the blustery kind of, who just bluffs his way to the top and is just mean to everybody around him. He's a chip bully, right? He's a chip bully. He's got a big stack of chips and poker, and he's just pushing everybody out. They bet something, he's shoving it in his fold.

You got to fear. There's other ways, and you can rise to the top that way as well, but it's probably fragile. The question is for how long. Yes, exactly, exactly. So, but key here is, what is the language that you need? And it turns out the language, once you work it out, it's exactly the space of emotional

expressions that we have. The emotional expressions that we have are exactly what's needed to engage in exactly the kind of generalized poker game that social animals that don't have language need to actually communicate and stake things and carry out. So that would be the basis for establishing cooperative endeavors over the medium to long run, but also properly regulating competitive endeavors so that they don't end in catastrophe, both of those.

That would be the negotiation landscape. Okay, so why don't you tell us why you think that our emotional displays are optimized for solving the problem of cooperation and competition. They probably are. All I'm saying is that my ability to, I didn't try in this book to work out what are the, it would be nice to be able to say,

and here's the optimal way to use this, or here's, let's say, several optimal strategies. That's the study of ethics in general, right? The optimization of strategy. I mean, the philosophy of ethics is exactly that study. And it does have something, I think it has something to do with, it's something like optimization of reproductive strategy,

but over the largest possible number of environments and timeframes, it's something like that. Right, because one of the things you pointed out with the poker example is the strategy that you use while you're playing poker is going to be dependent to some degree on how many times you're gonna play poker with these people. No, that's true.

Right, right, right, so that's like- But less so, because in poker, when you earn currency money in poker, it's spendable anywhere, right? But social currency is inherently often spendable only within the particular community that you're involved in. Right, so the rules there are even more constrained. Yeah, well, so this is a very cool thing to understand.

And I think it's one of the things that's very powerful about your book is that I have thought for quite a while that the analysis of reciprocal interactions, this is something economists did very badly for a very long period of time because they thought of people as rational maximizers, but their notion of the timeframe across which you maximized rationally was one interaction. And that's just absolutely 100% not true. And it's also not how people behave, right? There's that famous behavioral experiment where you can take two people

and you can say to one of them, you can make one offer to your partner, you get $100, you can make them one offer, you have to give them some money. If they reject the offer, neither of you get anything. And across cultures, the standard offer is 50-50. And if you take poor people, they're even more likely to make a 50-50 offer

rather than less, which is not what they should do if they're rational self-optimizers. But it doesn't take into account something you alluded to, which is we're very, very cognizant of the manner in which our decisions propagate reputationally across our social space. Because I think there isn't anything that, it seems to me that for social animals there actually isn't anything more important than reputation.

I know for example among hunter gatherer hunters, there are rules for how you conduct yourself if you're a successful hunter. The rules are very interesting and they're quite stable across different cultures. So imagine that you're the best hunter in the group. You still fail most of the time and you would fail almost all the time alone. So even if you're the best hunter, you need all the other hunters.

And so, and even if you're the best hunter, you're going to fail a lot. So you can't only rely on your own skill. Now the problem with being the best hunter is that you can provoke jealousy and disruption in the group and so people will be jealous of you and they won't cooperate with you properly and so even if your skills are optimized,

if you disturb the skillset of the group, you're all going to fail. And so one of the rules, for example, if you're a good hunter in a hunting community is that you don't take the best cuts of meat for yourself, you distribute them. If you're the guy responsible for the kill and you also downplay your contribution. Oh, this old thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, you know, you were very, very helpful. And the idea, it's quite straightforward, I think, once you understand it properly, is that you're storing the results of your current hunt,

where you've actually brought down an animal that's larger than you can consume or that your family can consume, you're storing that in your reputation among the other hunters. And that's by far the best way to store it. And you could think about that as a, I think you can think about that as the basis

for something like natural law. It's like, because I was think about that as a, I think you can think about that as the basis for something like natural law. It's like, because I was thinking about that, there's an injunction in the gospel accounts about storing treasure up in heaven rather than on earth where it can rust or where moths can consume it. And I have thought recently that that's what, a reference to the utility of storing your treasure in reputation.

Because that's the best possible currency. If you have a stable social group and people think highly of you, they know that you've contributed generously in the past. If you hit a rough patch, the probability that you're going to invite reciprocity on the part of people you've aided in the past is extremely high.

Okay, now your concept of the relationship between emotion and language is that we're using, we need to bridge that gap. We're using emotion to signal our strategies in reciprocal interaction so that they're structured optimally. How do you see language emerging out of that? We've got this emotional under Structure. I mean language is a whole other story But you know one thing this does is and I'll get to language in a second The way that often we think of language is that you've got this really, you know rigorous grammar You know these propositions and then emotions are these little colors that they've added to it. Like there's a little bit of flavor and color and...

Or something that's interfering with rational discourse, right? Right, but really I think it's the other way around. The real language that we speak, even on Twitter, even when it's just text, is ultimately, it's all of this stuff. It's all of these emotional expressions being done in very complicated ways. And nowadays with GIFs, and you know GIFs, if you look at the GIFs that we use, the animated GIFs that you use, they're all deeply, they're ways and nowadays with GIFs and you know GIFs if you look at the GIFs that we use the animated GIFs that you They're all deeply there are ways and memes. These are all ways of getting across your archetypal emotional expressions. Yeah, really it's all emotional expressions sprinkled with

with propositional like content attached to it rather than propositional content sprinkled with emotions This is the wrong way to think about it Most of what we're doing, all of these things are amounting to pushing in chips because I've said that I'm so right about something for these reasons, or I think you're so wrong for these reasons I'm pushing in social capital chips when I tweet, or I'm saying I'm not really sure,

but maybe it's this, so I push in one tiny little chip. So it's a betting market on the validity of propositions using social capital as the, yeah. That's exactly what I said. It's a betting market on the validity of propositions using social capital as the... Exactly what I said. Yeah. Yeah. It's a market. It's a marketplace.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's what the... This is how... That's why free speech is necessary. Free speech is really a marketplace of ideas. Yeah. Yeah.

Literally, because one of the interesting things about social capital is a decentralized currency, right? Now the other... Most of us didn't know anything about decentralized currencies until Bitcoin came along, and now we've got all these cryptocurrencies, which are decentralized currencies. And one of the interesting things about decentralized currencies is because there's no bank

with some boss looking at the ledgers of who sent money to somebody else. And so that's not gonna work, because the whole point of a decentralized currency is that it's not in any one person's hand. Instead, it's spread across many, many. It's an unfalsifiable ledger. That's right.

So this notion of a blockchain, and a blockchain is just like, okay, today, Doug sent Susie 0.3 Bitcoin, and it's just a list of all the Bitcoin transactions that occurred. And it's in everybody's computers everywhere. And when there's a new block added to the chain, there's some particular work that has to be done called proof of work or there's proof of stake. There's different kinds of ways of adding it such that it, once you've built up, let's say years worth of these sort of repute block Bitcoin, let's say transfers, it's impossible, practically impossible to go back and mess with the history of it.

And the reason it has to be like this is because it's decentralized and there's no other way to do it. There's so well, reputation is another decentralized currency. How do you get it so that within a community, a social community, you can make sure that when I had an argument with you and you won, I don't go around later and say, oh, actually, I won that argument. I totally humiliated Jordan. I could just start lying about the past, about what happened. It's like me saying, no, actually you gave me the Bitcoin, I didn't give you the Bitcoin.

And that word we call double spending, like I give you Bitcoin, but I still have the Bitcoin. Because it's not, the ledger's not keeping track of the fact that I gave it to you. This would undermine the currency, nothing would work. So the same problems that decentralized currencies have that lead to blockchain is why we end up

with social narratives. Social narratives are the answer that we already had up and running. Social narratives are the human social groups way of remembering, okay, this week, Mark lost social capital to Jordan, and Susie lost it to Betty, and we keep track of these little stories. The most stories that we remember are,

one, stories about the argument that we had, Mark was being a douchebag, but it's also really about the Mark lost social capital to Jordan because of those things. And those things are helping me remember how much social capital that I lost. So, and there's like often people that are good at gossip. These are the people that are good at miners.

These are like, or proof of, well, one is proof of stake. They own a lot of, they're already high reputation people in the community. These are like people who own a lot of Bitcoin, say, or some other currencies. And then they can say, we have a higher vote as to whether a new block comes onto the chain. And they're worthy of listening to because they care about the validity, whether that currency stays good. So gossippers are typically high ranked reputation people in the community.

And they spin stories about what happens taking sort of accumulating so they come up with simpler versions of whatever happened that helps it remember it gets added to the chain and often gossip is really easy to check that it's preserving what actually happened in the community but it's really hard to come up with good gossip. Good gossip that elegantly explains the happenings of the week. It's like a condensed narrative. Like a really condensed narrative, easy to verify,

hard to come up with, only certain kinds of individuals are good to come out with. So these are a lot similar to what's called proof of work. Proof of work are things that are really hard to do this work to glue one block to the next, but they're really easy to verify that it's a correct solution. So you end up with these sort of analogies

that we've already been using for hundreds of thousands, well, millions of years, well, at least hundreds of thousands of years, that we ended up with these social narratives that in order to have a reputation currency that is preserved over time and we can't muck with, build these blockchain-like social narratives. That's great. But the downside is that once a narrative gets up and running, just like once a blockchain gets up and running, you can't muck with it.

And so if it creates something false, you're stuck with it for generations potentially. So this is one of the things that I talk about a bit here and I'm trying to work into an next book, taking seriously some of these kinds of emergent phenomena that you have to deal with when you have decentralized currencies like these blockchain like properties, which are what social narratives are, have

these downsides of being almost unalterable. Right, right. Permanent mistakes. Permanent mistakes that go on and on forever. The Jews deal with this. I think the Jews got added to as being the evil goblin-type group that's controlling and puppeteering everything two or three thousand years ago, and it just never goes away.

You know, it just keeps on, and it just keeps getting added to the same kind of narratives, keep moving on. So there's all these terrible things, but there's also all these great things because you wouldn't have reputation systems that work. None of our social, none of the public square would work. None of the social interactions would work at all

without it, so. So let me ask you one of the things that I've been concerned about for whatever that's worth is online anonymity. We know there's an endless number of, I think, valid social psychology studies, which is a very small proportion of social psychology studies, by the way, that show that when people are shielded from the

reputational consequences of their actions, they're much more likely to misbehave. And that's why, for example, if someone steps in front of you while you're walking down the street, you're very unlikely to curse, whereas if they cut you off in your car, you're very likely to curse. So anonymity facilitates a more psychopathic and impulsive style of responding. And one of the problems we have on the net now is that anonymity, I wouldn't say reigns, but it's very, very pervasive. And that means you can say whatever the hell you want with absolutely no reputational consequence. And so my view of the online world, this might be particularly relevant on X, is that anonymous

signaling facilitates a psychopathic and sadistic form of social interaction. Yeah, I hear that a lot. I've argued against that often. And the reason I don't think that's right is every day you have countless encounters with folks in real life at the coffee place or wherever it is, cars signaling to one another and we emotionally signaling our cars all the time. And you don't know these folks

and you know that you don't know these folks. And what's usually there that's not there on the web is full rich socio-emotional interactions that are allowing you to go through your day. Yeah, you're too embodied. Yeah, you're really able to get along well, I think because all of your emotional expressions are there. I think that online- And well, and your habits too. I mean, because it's an embodied environment, you're running

on the habits that are a consequence of the fact that you are in something approximating an intact social environment. No doubt, no doubt. But then, and let me give you an example online where things are work terribly. Unlike X or Twitter, where we typically don't know people in real life, in Facebook, you kind of know who they are, like at least back in the day, you know that that's Doug's friend, whatever. You kind of have some idea who these people are in real life. And people are even meaner on Facebook. It's one or another of these little comment arguments.

They're just vicious and vile. And they're so mean even though they know each other. I think that what's into the, I think that really what matters in both of these worlds is having some notion of identity that extends over time and allows you to, and you need to be able to socially, socio-emotionally express yourself as best you can. So on Twitter, I think really what matters is pseudonyms. Pseudonyms are fine. You know, I can't say it's pseudonymity.

Because they're stable? They're stable. You know, there's some of the best accounts with these folks, they've, once you've built up a thousand or 10,000 or hundreds of thousands, it takes years to get to this point. You've got a voice. No one knows who they are,

but they don't want to lose their account. Well, then you're not exactly, I see. You're making a distinction between they're an individual in that world. High reputation anonymous is not the same as low reputation anonymous. And that's true, right, yeah. They're real people the same as low reputation anonymous. And that's true, right, yeah. They're real people as far as they're concerned.

They really have something. Well, it might even be that their pseudonymous identity is actually trumping their genuine identity if they have like 500,000 followers online. Yeah, often these people are nobodies in real life and they could well be jobless, living in their parents' bay, who knows? No one knows, but they've got something really good to say as far as their followers are concerned and they could well be jobless living in their parents' bay. Who knows?

No one knows, but they've got something really good to say as far as their followers are concerned, and they care, and they have a lot to lose if they were to start saying things that ruin their reputation and they lose their followers. So I think that what's important is that continuity over time, and pseudonyms are fine, it's the anonymous folks. It's not anonymity that's fine. Okay, well that's a good objection. That's a good objection because you're basically

pointing out that stable pseudonyms that extend across time and that accrue reputation then become subject to the same regulating forces as a genuine identity. Okay, that seems perfectly reasonable to me and there are anonymous accounts or pseudonymous accounts that I follow in X that I think are of high quality. So I don't think there's a necessary relationship

between the use of a pseudonym and pathology. And frankly, 99% of the people who have their real names are, I don't really know if that's real names. I'm never gonna meet them in real life. It's so abstract that it's academic. Really what matters is their identity there. I'm never going to meet them in real life. It's so abstract that it's academic. Really what matters is their identity there. Even their real name there amounts to a pseudonym, as far as I'm concerned, practically speaking.

Yeah, well, there's always the lurking possibility that they'll be discovered. But I get the, okay, fair enough. Okay, so let's leave out the more reputationally significant pseudonymous accounts and concentrate on the non, so a lot of the, I read a lot of comments, partly because I find that's a very useful way of, first of all, evaluating how people are actually responding to the material that I'm putting up, you know, and that's very necessary if I'm going to be communicating with a very large number of people. But it also gives me a good sense of the tone

of the social world at any given moment around any given topic. Now, there are a multitude of accounts that are anonymous, that are low reputation, no followers, no postings, right? And they're often exceptionally vitriolic. And I guess one of the concerns that I've had is that the lack of consequence that they experience as a,

because of their derisive and pathological utterances, polarizes the social discussion in a manner that's genuinely counterproductive. So tell me what you think of this. So imagine that there's a distribution of attitudes around any given concept, right, or any given topic. And the more extreme attitudes are rarer. But if the extreme attitudes are emotionally amplified

and there's no punishment that's consequential to that emotional amplification, in fact, perhaps the reverse, because if it's pithy and striking, even if it's derisive and denigrating, it's going to pick up more influence than it would under normal circumstances. So I've wondered if the political polarization that characterizes our time is partly a consequence of the exaggeration of long tail distribution opinions in a manner that would never occur in face-to-face social interaction. Yeah, I mean, the folks that have, you know,

let's just say a dozen followers, and they certainly have very little to lose because they can just restart a new account, and for some reason, if those 12 followers stop following they're just like, screw it, I'm gonna start over again. So they've got the very- Sure, they might have two dozen accounts to be in there. But they're a lot like the town drunk, for example.

They could cause a lot of havoc and they can enter into conversations to sort of cause havoc, but no one really would be listening to them. I suppose you could argue that they're getting their, they're getting to say something with the same status as somebody else with a lot of followers right there in the stream.

Whereas in real life, and that may not even be true. It could be that Musk has it so that often when they're, they're just not even visible and say there's more and you got to click it and then it opens up some others that it is suspicious whether you even want to hear. So they may be doing some mechanisms that hide the very low reputation, low follower account folks, which is probably a good idea at some point because you need to have these

people earn their earn your way to being listened worth listening to it. Of course. Yeah. Of course. Otherwise, you'd have to have 7 billion people in your house all the time. Right. Right, right. Yeah. So I think there's that and thousands of other issues

in terms of how to optimize social networks and public squares, given that it's no longer, 100 people in your village, or maybe 500 people in your village, or high school- Well, there's also not face to face emotional display as we've been discussing. So there's been an evolution towards that.

Now in the last three or four or five years, you can do different kinds of emotional expressions. On Facebook, you can choose to laugh or smile. There's a lot of these, you can just respond not just with a like or not like. And even a like is effectively an emotional expressive response. And we manage just in the prose that we use,

of course we're using constantly emotional pros that we use, of course, we're using constantly emotional responses that amount to an emotional response even if you don't think of it as emotional. You're either showing confidence in yourself or disdain in the other. These are emotional expressions as far as because you're staking or pulling off stake almost at all times. That's how you show confidence to real people, not P values. We do it through staking stuff, that's how we do it. So the way that, that hopefully the designers don't need to fix it. In real life, the public square has local spots

where people, let's say in their local village argue, and then maybe the best couple of them go to the bigger city and they argue with other people from different villages in the big city. these are just basic and then those some represent it ends up hierarchical the public square in the old days and in principle if you look at the hierarchy that happened organically through through something like Twitter I think you're gonna see similar kinds of hierarchies that you do. Well I think you do. I think you do already. So it self-organizes so that it's not just a bunch of

everybody talking to everybody right it under self-organizes so that it's not just a bunch of everybody talking to everybody, right? It ends up self-organizing into a kind of representative democracy kind of way so that you end up dealing with this. Yeah, well, Musk is gambling with X that that's what will happen organically as well. I guess part of the problem there is that we don't exactly know what the algorithms that operate behind the scenes, how they're weight waiting the discourse in manners that we might not understand. Well, you ran afoul of that, which is something that we're going to talk about more on the daily wire side of this.

So, yeah, so you, so you're not, you don't seem to be as concerned as I am potentially with the pervasive polluting effect of the anonymous troll demon types, amplifying viewpoints that under normal circumstances wouldn't come wouldn't rise to the top. I'm skeptical of their ability to do any amplification because they they have no followers so no one is seeing them. Now you may not sometimes I see them just because even though I don't follow them I do go through my comments as well so I do end up seeing some of them to the extent that they're not themselves de-boosted,

but they in principle should have very little effect. Right, okay. Unless the algorithms are somehow accidentally augmenting their comments. Could they make up for their effect in volume, what they lack in specific following? Like the anonymous troll types, there's a pattern to their communication

and they're relatively interchangeable. There's a lot of resentment and derision that characterizes the landscape of that kind of communication. And so... Well, you certainly have to be... I mean, someone like Moscow has to be aware of bot farms that create bots that can then leverage and hack, you know, diagonalize against whatever their systems are so that they... Turns out when you have tens of thousands of comments in the right way, it ends up ends up doing something

to the algorithm that ends up boosting the wrong not yet it ends up allowing them to boost things on just on the basis of a whole bunch of no follower bots. You can imagine having the wrong kinds of algorithms. So those are the kinds of things they have to be aware of. And no matter what they do, it could be that I haven't thought about this kind of problem could be there's ways of sort of always finding some new crack and they've got to come up with new measures. Well, it's gonna be an evolutionary arms race, obviously.

And whether the rules can keep up with the most creative trolls is, it's unlikely, I would suspect. I guess so, but it's- Because they never do. I mean, we wouldn't have criminals in the real world if people couldn't gain even well-established reputational systems. So, but you know, it's weird.

I guess we can think about this from an evolutionary perspective because a lot of online activity is criminal or quasi-criminal, probably half of it, right? It's about 25% pornographic and about 20% outright criminal. So that's 45% right there. Then there's a periphery of pathological troll types

that's gotta add at least another five or 10%. And so one of the things we might ask ourselves is like, is that a devolution to the standard form of human interaction? Because before there were well established, free, rule-abiding, law-governed societies, it was probably something like a quasi-criminal Wild West. And it looks like to me like we're duplicating that

at least to some degree online. I wonder if the fact that we've removed so many of the cues that help us regulate social behavior by abstracting up our communication patterns so intensely, like narrow channeling them, these 144 character tweets, for example, whether we've lost a lot of the systems that allowed us to regulate social interaction, like we stepped out of our evolutionary landscape. So that to me is more important than, pseudonyms are fine.

To me, a lot of the reasons, a lot of these small accounts that walk up with all this attitude out of the blue, if I saw them in real life, I guarantee you they would have a different behavior toward me in real life. There's no doubt. Absolutely, 100%. And not to mention that I'm probably twice their age

and I've got a little bit of gray and just younger men typically just behave a little differently to older guys. There's just something that happens in normal life when you see someone that just happens. Yeah, well you never have an interaction like that in normal life, ever. I don't think anybody has ever spoken to me once in my life the way people speak in the troll comment sections. So I don't know whether there's some way to, I've thought a lot about how can you allow much more full expressive,

I now know what full expressive capabilities are. How can you add them so that you can actually, for example, not just like, or not just happy. You actually pull up a two dimensional array and actually just pick from at least the two dimensions, a full four dimensional space, but at least a two dimensional quick space to give you a much more exact,

but still it's not gonna be the same. It's going to be still some technical. So well, it's also not the same partly because, you know, you talked about the way that young men react to you or men in general. I mean, one of the things that regulates male communication, at least in the public space, is the probability if you say something sufficiently stupid, you're going to get smacked. And so and that's definitely not something that happens online. And you might think, well, that's good

because we've abstracted ourselves away from the violence. It's the risk of a fight. Always, there's the call and without the call, poker wouldn't exist, right? Poker wouldn't exist if I knew that you couldn't call. There was a risk of us turning our cards over. The entire game of emotional expressions is trying to avoid the call. But the fact that the call is there is an ever present, that we could fight about it and lawyers are involved. The

entire game of lawyers is each of them potentially willing to call and let's go to court, but they're all trying to bluff that they're totally willing to go to the court, but no one wants to go to court. They all want to pretend like they are. That's all emotional signaling to avoid the fight, to hopefully settle and come to an agreement without having to go to court. Yeah, well, that's another kind of stake. It's like there's hierarchies of stakes, right?

So to begin with, you signal your willingness to potentially sacrifice your reputation. So it's sacrificial signaling. It's not sacrificial because I'm saying that I'm really confident or I think, or I'm showed the same for you. Right, but you'll take the risk. Well, yeah.

That's the value of the signal is that you think that you're right enough so that you'll take the risk that you might have to sacrifice something. Yeah. Right, right, right. Which shows that I think I'm gonna win. Right, right. Or that you're, well, and not only win the immediate argument,

but win in a manner that sustains your reputation across time. Well, when you jump out of that domain, you're in another domain of stake, because when I move from reputational fighting, let's say, to physical fighting, what I'm putting online is my psychophysiological integrity, right? I'm willing to say, no, I'm putting online is my psychophysiological integrity.

I'm willing to say, no, I'm going to stake myself on this particular proposition, even if it's at risk to my physiological integrity. And so we try to avoid that, obviously. Anxiety is one of the things that helps us avoid that. Pain signifies actual physical damage and anxiety just the threat of that but it's interesting that just as language grounds out in emotion negotiation grounds out in something like willingness to to contend physically yeah or signaled willingness you know a lot of us of course bluff of course of course and with anyone with anyone with any sense it's of course bluff. Of course, of course. With anyone with any sense,

it's bluff until that's absolutely impossible, but it's a pointless bluff if the reality isn't there at some level. And people are always checking each other out to see whether or not that bluff is pointless as well. So, yeah. So what are you working on next? Well, I was gonna quickly, we sort of skipped language.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the real, and this is not just language, this writing language and music and all of the things that make us human 2.0 is as I call it. So in my second book, Vision Revolution, in addition to some of these, you know, color and four-facing eyes and why we see illusions, which we didn't talk about,

the reason that we can read at all. So if you think about it, reading, we didn't evolve to read. It's just 2000 years old at best. Often our great grandparents didn't even read. Most of us have illiterate great or great great grandparents. Reading is much too recent and yet we seem to have visual word form areas. I mean, neuroscientists know that we didn't evolve, but they've named some of the areas of our brains even basically reading areas. We know that they're not actually reading areas. So how did that happen? In fact, we read't evolve, but they've named some of the areas of our brains, even basically reading areas.

And we know that they're not actually reading areas. So how did that happen? In fact, we read so well, it really is like an instinct. We read often more than we listen to all day long. Reading is, and we're so amazingly good at it, even children are great at it by four years old, and they're barely being read to, that is, they're not having much practice

compared to being spoken to, right? So it's almost as if it's an instinct. So how is that possible? And so what I argued 20 years ago is that over time, cultural evolution itself shaped the look of writing to look like nature. So we already have visual systems that are incredibly good at processing natural scenes, object recognition. And so all that culture had to do was invent

writing systems that looked like nature. In our case, so for example, you've got L-junctions, just whenever there's some kind of contour in the world meeting the tip of another contour. You've got T-junctions whenever something goes behind something, there's my contour here,

goes up against this contour. Those are the two main ones. There's X-junctions, but X-junctions don't happen in a world of opaque objects. It's very rare, in fact. And then you can look at all the different kinds of junctions that have three contours. Let's say Y junctions and K junctions. And it turns out there's 32 of these different kinds of topologically distinct junctions with three contours. And then you can ask, well, how commonly do these things happen in natural scenes of just opaque objects? Either you can look at like different kinds of varieties of scenes as well as just turns out doesn't really matter where you look

It's all the same as just a world with opaque objects strewn about is basically that drives the same relative probability of which of these Junction types happen and then you can just ask well This is if this idea is right then you should find that across human writing systems writing Tends to have the junction types that are found in nature. In those proportions? In those proportions. And is that the case?

And that's the case. In those proportions. Right. This is a 2006 paper by an American naturalist. Oh, that's cool. So the idea is that we read, we can only read, which is part of what we take to be central to our human nature even is the ability to be literate, right? I mean, of course, it's not part of our human nature. This is culture which is harnessed-

Especially silent reading. That's right, not to mention silent. This is a cultural evolutionary process which has harnessed a visual object recognition brain for reading by tricking it, not because we've evolved for it, but instead evolving writing to fit us. Now the same idea, I argued then the next book in Harnessed

that spoken language is like this as well. So spoken language, instead of writing evolving to look like nature, it's spoken language evolved to sound like nature, in particular sound like solid object physical events. When there's solid objects... That's a consonant? That's a consonant. Well, a plosive in particular.

This is a plosive like puh, duh, cuh. And then you've got fricatives. Well, this doesn't make any sound at all. You got sliding sounds. And then you have, when either of those things happen, the things vibrate. They ring. And those are like the sonorants. Sonorants are things that ring. Vowels and any kind of like yuh and wah and also just a-e-i-o-u. The basic notion of a syllable is a hit and a ring. It's either, you know, suh is a slide and those objects are vibrating. Or a bah is, there's a collision.

Like a bell. Yeah, it's like a bell. Something hits and something ringing thereafter. And then this is just, what you can then start working out when I do the book is like, look, there's all of these grammars of what solid object events do. So you can actually work out, they typically are gonna start with a consonant

or a plosive or a fricative, because those are just the, more often with a plosive, because that's what starts the event. And it'll typically end in certain kinds of ways, because that's what physical events amongst solid objects do. And you can start working out all of these

many dozens of kinds of regularities and then ask whether across human languages, you find the same morphemic regularities at that level. So a pool ball, the white ball hits the black ball, the black ball hits a yellow ball, that black ball, yellow ball hitting is something like, cuck, right? Starts with a consonant, ends with a consonant. In that case, because the rolling maybe you can't hear, but if you something like kuk, right? It starts with a consonant, it ends with a consonant.

In that case, because the rolling maybe you can't hear, but if you're imagining sliding bricks it could be b-b-sh. Right, right. Say bosh. Right, right. Like bash. Right, and if it ran into something else there'd be another consonant at the end of it. And there'd be a consonant at the end.

Oh yeah. Right, so when you work out, but you can work out many kind of mathematical regularities that happen exactly in those systems and are peculiar and then across humankind, you can show that, oh my gosh, over and over again, these same regularities of solid object physical events are found as universals across human life. So the story in both these cases, and then music, let me before I make that kind of summary thing, music also sound like speech, but of course it's fundamentally different. It's utterly evocative. We can listen to music all day long in the car in our houses. My music is on literally all day long. We just enjoy it so much.

Why would I enjoy listening to these weird sounds that some people have thought, well, they're like mathematical things from Plato's realm? This is always bull crap. This doesn't make any sense. We didn't evolve to like mathematically beautiful things. We evolved to like things that are human. Those are things that we want to touch and be with. And the humans are the most important stimuli in our lives, which is why colors are so important.

Colors are ultimately emotional and evocative because they're about human skin and bodies and emotion and health, so forth. And the sounds of music, I hypothesize, and this was, I guess, 15, 20 years ago, are the sounds of humans moving in your midst. In fact, this has been an old idea, even since the Greeks said music has something to do with movement or some sounds of, but trying to make it rigorous, so working out,

okay, what do humans sound like when they move? Well, one of the most basic things is there's a gate. There's the footsteps. Sure. And that's just the beat. And then of course, there's loud gate, there's the footsteps. And it's just the beat. And then of course there's loudness modulations, which is the fortissimo down to pianissimo, and there's the scales at which those things change.

And you can work out what are the scales at which those things change. There's also the do- We wouldn't be able to dance to music if that wasn't the case. That's right, you wouldn't be able to dance. So it's not like some accidental side effect that you're able to dance to it.

No, it's literally designed to be the sounds of a human mover moving evocatively in your midst. And another thing that happens when things move through the world is you actually hear their Doppler shifts. Now, Doppler shifts, you know, ee-ya-ow, right? And faster it is, it's ee-ya-ow. Bigger Doppler shifts are faster moving things.

Now, even the movements of humans, which are a little bit, they're much smaller kinds of Doppler shifts, but my claim in that book was that the kinds of patterns that you end up with with the Doppler shifts, which are exaggerated Doppler shifts, as if it's moving faster, still have the fundamental signature of human movement. And so, for example, if you're moving faster, there's a bigger difference between high pitch

and low pitch because of the Doppler shift. But also if you're moving faster, the tempo of the song is going to be faster. It's going to be a faster, the tempo of the song is going to be faster. It's gonna be a higher, faster tempo, right? Those two, the faster moving things will have a bigger difference between top and bottom and in music that's called the tessitura. The difference between the top and the bottom.

But also, so the prediction here is that faster tempo things correlates with higher, bigger tessitura that's sort of in real world movement. Is that true in music? Do higher, bigger tessitura, sort of in real world movement. Is that true in music? Do higher, bigger tessitura songs actually tend to be more bigger, faster in tempo or vice versa? Which is not what you want when you're the piano player. When someone says, here's a much faster song, you're like, great, hopefully it's a really small tessitura. Because I can just, no, no, no. In fact, the faster the song, the tessitura is getting wider

and wider, for example. So these are these kinds of predicted regularities between these different kinds of patterns of modulations of loudness, beat, and rhythmic things that are connected to the beat, as well as to... So there's like 80 something different kinds of regularities you can show. For example, how fast do humans turn? And so we got data from soccer players, how many steps do they take to turn 90 degrees? And so at the top of the high pitch

is when it's coming directly toward you. Low pitch is when it's moving directly away from you in a tessitura. So typically people, when they turn 90 degrees, take about two steps to do it on average. They can go obviously faster if they just go one way really quickly. And so it's 100, you know, so to go from toward you to away from you quickly would still be about

four steps. And so that would be about four beats. It typically takes a measure. So you can actually look across thousands of songs and ask, is it usually the case that you move a half a test of Torah in about two beats? And in fact, you can show, yeah, these in fact determine the baseline time ranges of how quickly melodies move through the testors, things like that. Yeah, I see. So you're mapping the basic structure of music onto the kinetics of human movement.

That one makes, like I said, if that wasn't the case, the dance wouldn't work. That's right, exactly. And music is very evocative of motion. It's very weird that we sit in concert halls like in classic music concert halls, sit still. No one wants to sit still. We want to move our body in time. And not only that, it's interesting too because music unifies us socially as well because when we're moving in time to the music, we're all moving in the same way. Exactly. So

it's evocative of a pattern of movement that unites everyone. Right, right, right. Right, well there's also the emotional display element, I mean, you can see in musical compositions argument, there'll be a proposition and then a counter proposition for a dialogue. Yeah, that's right. It's not always just one guy or gal walking, it's often complicated, the duets and different things are going on. And in some sense what I work out in the book is sort of the baseline boring, you know,

here's the baseline, baseline kind of things that humans do. Any good composer is deviating from that baseline to create interesting stories, right? So I'm not the artist type. I'm trying to like, here's the typical baseline. That's what determines the average across all these songs. None of which would be potentially very good

if they actually stuck to the average that I'm finding. So we're all deviating from that. But the bigger story about these kinds of cultural harnessing of us, I call this harnessing, by looking like nature, sounding like nature, is that we often think of ourselves as the speaking animal, or as the music animal, right? Or as the music animal or the artistic animal.

This is what often we define what it is to be human by a lot of these things, the arts and the ability to talk, the ability to be literate. But up until just a couple hundred thousand years ago, and it's exactly unclear, we didn't have language at all. We certainly didn't have writing. We didn't have music. We may have had some vocalization stuff that people did,

but probably a million years, we didn't have music. We may have had some vocalization stuff that people did, but probably a million years, we may not have even had that. All of the things that we mistakenly think of ourselves as human aren't human 1.0 at all. All of the stuff that we take to be human today are really human 2.0s. These are things that are products of cultural engineering that now is harnessing us

and giving us all these modern powers. So, you know, it always was remarkable that you've got chimpanzees with their encephalization quotient, you know, and it's a little bit bigger than these other great apes and so forth. And then you've got us, again, it's a little bit bigger on the log scale, but it's not, you're not looking at it, you're going, oh, this totally explains the difference between us and chimpanzees. No, chimpanzees are like super dumb compared to us, because look at all the stuff that we can do.

We can ride, drive cars, and we can like do math and all the crazy stuff that we can do in our real lives makes us seem like we're literally off the page and miles away. So how can you make sense of the fact that we're only just a little bit higher and yet we're, it's because biologically our human one point of selves

are just this little bit higher. You know, when in this world, you know, just expressions, we're just a little bit smarter. You know, in this world, you know, just expressions, we're just a little bit smarter. Yeah. But what we have is all this- Which is why we can understand other animals when they emote very, very directly. That's right, and dogs and we get along great.

Yeah, yeah. It's the cultural technology that's fundamentally changed who we are. So the first big one, of course, was the language, which has made us the language ape, but we're not the language ape per se at all. This is a cultural product of this evolution, cultural evolution, co-evolving, not co-evolving,

just evolving for us to plug into our brains and give us language when we never had one. Harnessing object event systems to make it so that we can suddenly communicate with one another. And then music is evolving to the sounds of human movement recognition systems. And then much more recently, writing evolving, culturally evolving, just to look like natural objects allowing us to read.

All of these things are exactly who we take to be human today, but none of this is our human 1.0 selves. Right, but you draw a continuum, because you're pointing out that even these abstract capabilities are grounded at a perceptual level in our ability to perceive phenomena that were real world phenomena. That's right. That's very cool.

But yeah. I never thought about consonants as collisions, but of course that makes perfect sense. I like the idea of vowels as the ringing element. That's right. Right, right, right. I feel like this is a, so for example, typically for language, you've got two sides. You've got, and they're gorillas,

like Steven Pinker and Chomsky. Chomsky's been on and off of this for years, but roughly you've got the language instinct folks that we've evolved over millions of years or hundreds of thousands of years to evolve to really have a language instinct. There's part of our brain that's designed for language, and I think that's wrong.

And the other side, all these years was like, no, we're infinitely plastic, infinitely malleable. We do all these things we never evolved to do like riding horses, whatever. There's millions of things we do, we're just infinitely plastic. Well, that's totally wrong as well. And in fact, Pinker is one of the best people that argues against that. Neither of these are right, right? So my view is like completely, it's like, no, this is a kind of zoo-o-centrism,

in my opinion, because each of these are violating zoo-o-centrism. Zoo-o-centrism is the hypothesis that we're animals, for God sakes. We're not special having a language. Right, you assume continuity. There's just continuity. We're not special and have a language instinct

that makes us human like nobody else's language instinct, but we do, and we're not special in the blank slate. All these other animals, they're filled with instincts, but we, we're blank slates. We're like totally have all these general plastic mechanisms. No, that's just another violation of zoocentrism. We are just animals. And to the extent that we now seem to be something

fundamentally different is because of cultural evolution, another blind designer, blind watchmaker that has got up and running several hundred thousand years ago, mildly, that's been designing all this tech for us and giving all these new powers. And the fun, of course, language is a big one, writing is another huge one, but all around us right now, there's so much more

we can't even put our, like, the phones, all of these things are constantly evolving to raise us to be becoming more and more intelligent and farther from the other great apes. Well that's probably a good place to stop as it turns out. That wraps things up quite nicely. You are making in a way a modified language instinct argument it seems to me, although

what you're doing is pointing out that the instinctual elements of language have to do with the fundamental elements of language and their ability to, what would you say, abstract out of a substrate that's associated with our evolved perceptions of the natural world. Right, so it's not language per se that is the instinct. But it preserves zoo-centrism, it would be the way I'd like to say it. It makes, so I'd like to think of this,

if you really wanna be the Galileo of biology, like insane, like no, there's nothing special about the earth. you know, the world doesn't move around the earth, the earth is just one part of the, and same thing for us, we're not special, then you have, then this allows you to say, there's no language in sync, it's really, we're just animals, and to the extent that we seem

not to be, it's because of culture, but we're truly a zoo-centric creature. Right, right, right. All right, so look, for everybody watching and listening, we're going to switch the topics up when we switch over to the daily wire side because Mark is also somewhat famous, I would say, for running afoul of the internet sensors

in a very interesting way. I follow him on Twitter, that's where I've discovered him and his work. And I had two reasons for inviting him as a guest today and one was because we share an interest in the evolution of perception and cognition and language for that matter, and art for that matter. And so I wanted to have that discussion, which I thought was very productive. But there's another element to Mark too, which is his conflict with the powers that be behind the scenes at the social media networks. And he was subject to relatively draconian censorship

in the COVID era. And we're gonna talk about that on the Daily Wire side. So join us there. Thank you very much, sir, for coming in today. Pleasure. Yeah, very good talking to you. Thank you everybody for your time and attention. Music