523. Why We Dream, Learn, and Adapt Faster Than Any Other Species | Dr. David Eagleman

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with neuroscientist, bestselling author, and PBS presenter Dr. David Eagleman. They discuss brain plasticity, how perception works, whether free will exists (and if it’s superordinate), how willingness to engage with higher entropy indicates sophistication of thought, and the preconditions for forming a Ulysses contract. Dr. David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University and an international bestselling author. He is co-founder of two venture-backed companies, Neosensory and BrainCheck, and he also directs the Center for Science and Law, a national nonprofit institute. He is best known for his work on sensory substitution, time perception, brain plasticity, synesthesia, and neurolaw. He is the writer and presenter of the international PBS series, “The Brain with David Eagleman,” and the author of the companion book, “The Brain: The Story of You.” He is also the writer and presenter of “The Creative Brain” on Netflix. This episode was filmed on January 13th, 2025. | Links | For David Eagleman: On X https://x.com/davideagleman On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/davideagleman/?hl=en Website https://eagleman.com/ Read his most recent book: “Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain” https://a.co/d/cBY6tGx Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The conscious brain is a broom closet in the mansion of the brain, with very little access to what's going on. There may be free will, but it's going to be a small player in it there.

• 0:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Every drive wants to philosophize in its spirit.

• 0:13Speaker 00

  Exactly. Okay, so let's unpack that.

• 0:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  If you understand that aim constrains entropy, then you get some sense, almost immediately, why people cling so desperately to their frameworks.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  This doesn't answer the free will question, though.

• 0:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  I thought we could walk through perception, because it doesn't work the way people think it does.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  You know, when it comes to this question of truth, there is no singular truth, because you've got a completely different set of experiences of where your brain, my brain, everyone's brain, we're all going to perceive different things and seek different things from the world.

• 0:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  You said something else, too, that I don't think I've thought about exactly before.

• 1:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Hello, everybody. I had the opportunity to speak to David Eagleman today. David is an adjunct professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. He doesn't run a lab there anymore, because he runs two companies: Neosensory and Braincheck. David recently did a course for Peterson Academy called "Brain Plasticity", and in the largest sense, that's what we talked about today. Plasticity, to some degree, is an archaic term, and based on an archaic metaphor, but it's been well adopted, thoroughly adopted, in the neuroscience literature, and it means something like adaptive flexibility. And human beings are unique in their degree of adaptive flexibility. Now, the advantage to that is that we can change our environment,

• 1:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  and we can change our perceptions, and we can adapt each generation to a radically new environment. And the price we pay for that is an intensely long period of socialization. And so, we talked about brain architecture, we talked about brain chemistry, we talked about the role of aim and intent,

• 2:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  the role that aim and intent plays in determining perception, which is a very interesting philosophical issue, because...

• 2:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  What would you say? The Enlightenment view of the world, the empiricist view, was that we create our structures of reality by aggregating something like objective data. But the science of perception casts a dim light on that presumption because we prioritize our perceptions and we do that using our aim. And so we don't have perceptions that are devoid of value. And so we talked about that a lot as well. And so if you're interested in a walk through brain science from the structural perspective, the philosophical perspective, the neurochemical perspective to some degree, if you're interested in perception and emotion and motivation and drive

• 3:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  and the competition of personalities and motivational states in the psyche, then this is the podcast for you. So you just recorded a course for Peterson Academy?

• 3:11Speaker 00

  I did. Yep, so on brain plasticity, which is really my favorite topic. It's about how brains absorb the world around them and adapt to them. And you know, the interesting part about this is that we are the only species that is as plastic as we are. So you know, you see a zebra get born and in 45 minutes it's running around or a dolphin is swimming after a few minutes of being born. But if you see a Homo sapien get born, they're not doing it as quickly. And the reason is Mother Nature essentially came up with a different trick with us where she drops us into the world half-baked and we absorb the world around us, our language, our culture. All, you know, we take everything that's happened before us and we springboard off the top of that.

• 3:56Speaker 00

  And this is the reason why Homo sapiens has taken over the planet and been so successful because we, unlike a horse that's essentially living the same life that horses have for, you know, for generations, we are living different lives every time. So that's what brain plasticity is about. And I actually, I actually don't use the word plasticity as much anymore, because that was a term originally coined by William James, because he was impressed by plastic manufacturing. You could mold something into shape and it would hold that shape. And, and he said, that's kind of what brains do. You know, you, you learn the name of your fourth grade teacher, and that gets written down and retained. So he called that plasticity.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  But what we're looking at is a system of such complexity. We've got 86 billion neurons. We've got, you know, 200 trillion synaptic connections. And every moment of your life, this, this forest of neurons is reconfiguring and changing. And so I tend to call this live wiring instead of plasticity, only because I think the days of being impressed by plastic manufacturing are past us now. Where, what we're looking at is a system that, you know, every second of your life, from cradle to grave, is reconfiguring to represent the world around you and, and all of your experiences and all of your memories.

• 5:18Jordan B. Peterson?

  Let's talk about perception. I was reading, let me just, Incognito, The Secret Lives of the Brain. And you spend a fair bit of time in that book, talking about perception. And so I thought we could walk through perception, because it's, it doesn't work the way people think it does. And the fact that it doesn't work the way people think it does has, I think, profound philosophical implications. So I want to walk through some ideas that I've been developing with you and see what, what you think about them. So one of the things you pointed out, for example, in the book, was that if you get people to look at a painting,

• 5:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  which you might think of as a process akin to what a camera does when it takes a photograph, but you ask them different questions about the people in the photograph. So if I remember correctly, the example you used was a picture of a family in a domestic scene, in a house. And you could ask them, people who are watching, who are looking at the painting. What those people were doing just before the painting image was fabricated? Or you could ask them how wealthy they are, or you could ask them how old they are. And while you're doing that, you can track the movements of the viewer's eyes.

• 6:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  And what you see is that the pattern of visual movement, so of eye movement, is similar across people depending on the question that's asked, but different in consequence of the question. So for example, if you ask people how rich the people in the photograph are, they'll look at the clothing and the material objects in the painting. And if you ask them how old they are, they'll gaze at their faces. And a painting isn't, when you're looking at a painting, it isn't necessarily that big an object, but there's still pinpoint perceptions that have a pattern that are, and the pattern reveals the relationship between the goal of the perception and the perception.

• 7:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  I've got that, have I got that right?

• 7:27Speaker 00

  That's exactly right. And so, the key is, if you ask these people, you know, if they did anything different while answering the question, they won't have any idea. But their eyes are like, you know, on a covert operation doing the thing. Yeah, so as you know, of course, you know, eyes jump around about three times a second. Those are called saccades, and then in between, there's little micro saccades. But the point is, we're not aware of that at all. So when your brain is going out to seek the answer to a question, it's running its mission and it's looking at all the points and pieces that it needs to, to gather the information. But we consciously are totally unaware of that. And this, of course, is representative of most of perception.

• 8:11Speaker 00

  We don't know how we're gathering the data, but this is what we do. In fact, so what my book, Incognito, was about, of course, was that almost everything in the brain is happening unconsciously. You just don't have any access to it, and really no awareness or acquaintance with it either. And this is just a good example of that.

• 8:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  I used a couple of words that were interesting in that description. You talked about being, you said something approximating, being on a mission to answer a question. And then you talked about data. And so, I want to take those two things apart. So... One of the sub-elements of the word "question" is "quest", and a quest is a journey, and a journey is a mission. Now, there's a big difference between being on a mission and gathering data. You know, like the empirical view of the world, I think we'll stick with the empiricists particularly. The empiricists believe that we gathered data about the world, and that we could do that in an objective manner,

• 9:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  and that we built the world out of that data gathering process. But that's not the same, it's really, seriously not the same as answering a question, or being on a quest, taking a journey, or being on a mission. Because a mission is goal-directed, and I've been trying to work out a paradox in recent years that emerges because of the difference in those two viewpoints. Data, and you use both those metaphors in your analysis of the eye movement patterns. Data implies something directly that's value-free, but mission implies value, right?

• 9:55Speaker 00

  It's definitely a mission.

• 9:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, okay, okay.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, so in this case, you're asking a question about the painting, and the subject is trying to answer that. But this is true for all of us in all cases. Let's imagine you're on a hike with friends here in Phoenix, and you guys are walking along, and one of your friends is a mycologist, so he notices the mushrooms that you don't notice. And your other friend is a climatologist, and so he's noticing the tree line and where things have changed. And you've got a friend who's a podiatrist, and she's noticing the angle of your feet, and so on. The point is that all the data is hitting all of your eyes, but you guys are seeing different things. You're seeing, you're having different experiences of the world, predicated on what questions you're asking.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  And that, of course, is predicated on, you know, who you are, all of your experiences, and what is relevant to you.

• 10:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  And all your various aims. Yeah, well, so this is, the reason I focused in on the philosophical implications of this is because the empiricists, the philosophical implication of the idea of data as reality is that reality itself is value-free, and value is added to the data. But mission is a whole different way of conceptualizing things, because...

• 11:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  If the basis of data is perception, and perception is mission-driven, then insofar as perception is reality, reality is not value-free. And that's at the level of perception, right? So this is why the difference is so crucial, because the empirical presumption is, the data is there, you add value to it. It's like, no. The value is built into the perception, right? And there's no place in the perception where the value isn't built in. You talked about those micro... So when your eyes move...

• 11:50Speaker 00

  The saccades.

• 11:50Jordan B. Peterson?

  How many different levels of saccades are there?

• 11:53Speaker 00

  There's the big ones about three times a second. And then there's the micro saccades, which are always moving. That's for a slightly different reasoning.

• 11:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, but then you can also move your eyes voluntarily. So there's lots of patterns of eye movement.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  There's smooth eye pers... Exactly, smooth pursuit eye movements when you're following something.

• 12:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 12:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 12:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and then the fact that I can do this, and then I can do this.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 12:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  And then also, one of the things that's interesting about, you could say, the perception of perception, is that we're very much inclined to watch other people's eyes. Like generally, when we're conversing with people, when we're interacting with them, we see their eyes and we can see their face, although somewhat less their whole head, but at least their face, which is an emotional display system around the eyes. And the reason that we want to watch someone's eyes is because we can see what they're looking at. And the reason we want to do that is because we can infer their mission, right?

• 12:46Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 12:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  We can infer their motivations, which is crucially important. Well, if it's a defense... If you're in a defensive situation or a sexual situation, or, well, any situation for that matter. And so by watching someone's eyes, you can infer their mission. But one of the corollaries of all of that on the philosophical side is that this is such a bizarre thing to understand, is that our aims structure our perceptions, right? So they... So I've been separating that. And I want you to tell me what you think about this. So I came up with a hypothesis when I was writing my last book, which is that a story is a description, you could say, a story is a description

• 13:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  of the value hierarchy that structures perception. That's actually what a story is. And so part of the reason that we're so interested in stories is because...

• 13:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  As you pointed out, when you look at the world, there's many, many ways you could look at any scene. Many, an infinite number of ways, in fact. So you have to navigate your way through every glance. And the structure of navigation you use determines the purpose of the perception, but it's also a strategy. And so if I know your story and I can see that you're successful, then I can adopt your mode of perception, right? It's not your mode of adding value to the world. It's way more fundamental than that. Is that, and does that...

• 14:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, tell me what you mean by adding value to the world?

• 14:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, you could think of the world as a place of dead facts, that they're all equally perceivable. It's like, well, no, because perception's value-based. Like, because we've always thought, in some ways, folk psychology is perception first, right? And then it's motivation or emotion after that, let's say. And then it's cognition. And that, and it's sort of in a linear chain. And that turns out to be, like, it's staggering. It's not just wrong, it's staggeringly wrong. Because the values inform the perception so deeply that in many ways, they determine the content of the perception, as we were talking about with regards to the painting.

• 14:55Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, that's absolutely right. And the fascinating part is that all this is happening unconsciously. We're going and we're seeking out answers from the world. But, you know, and it's a matter of what your attention is drawn to also. So, you know, if I say, hey, what's the feeling of your shoe on your left foot right now?

• 15:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  You can become aware of that. You've got all the data, if we want to call it that, available to you, but you're only seeking little parts. And this all depends on your internal model of the world in terms of, you know, who you are, what is relevant to you. And that's the filter through which we interpret everything. And so, you know, when it comes to this question of truth, there is no, there is no singular truth because you've got a completely different set of experiences of where your brain, my brain, everyone's brain. We're all going to perceive different things and seek different things from the world. Something we might get into later, that I'm very interested in, and I know you are too, is this collection of...

• 15:57Speaker 00

  Neural networks or personalities that we have inside. And Nietzsche's view on this was that they each have their own truth. They're each perceiving.

• 16:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, we could talk that way.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. So I know you and I are both fans of Nietzsche and the...

• 16:17Jordan B. Peterson?

  Every drive wants to philosophize in its spirit.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  Exactly. Okay, so let's unpack that. So it's, you know, you've got all these neural networks that have different drives and want different things. And each, what Nietzsche meant by that, just for the listener, of course, is, you know, that each of those drives puts together a story or its truth about why it's seeing the world that way. So the information that you would go out into the world to seek, the mission that you run depends on who's ascendant at that moment.

• 16:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's for sure. Okay, fine. So let's delve into that. Okay, so when psychologists first started talking about drives, who was that? Can't remember the name of the psychologist. He was an early behaviorist, but a sophisticated one. The name will come to me later. They were working at building a model of the nervous system, really from the reflex up, right? And so their behavioral hypothesis was, don't explain anything using any more complex terminology if you can explain it in terms of reflex. And you can get very basic neural systems that are reflexive, that are basically spinal, and they really run in an automatic way.

• 17:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so then you could imagine chains of those reflexes. You could imagine those reflexes chained together so that more and more complex behaviors could come about. And there's some truth in that. But the problem with the drive metaphor is that it's kind of like a wind-up doll, right? A drive implies, first of all, that it's motoric, that it's movement-oriented, and second, second that it's algorithmic or deterministic. Now, and Nietzsche...

• 18:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  Offered a more sophisticated view than that when he said, when he associated drive with philosophizing, because a mechanistic and deterministic, motoric algorithm doesn't philosophize. And if you can piece this together from Nietzsche's work, and it's really clear in Jung, that it's much better to conceptualize what we think of as drives as personalities. And then the huge advantage to that is that it brings in perception. Because, and you already, you already pointed this out, at least implicitly, when we were discussing the painting. If I'm angry with you, okay, so now I'm, you could say I'm under the grip of a drive.

• 18:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  But it's much more sophisticated and accurate to say it's no, that the personality of defensive or predatory aggression now has me in its grip. It's dominant from a neurological perspective. It's suppressing all other personalities. And so then what that's going to mean is that when you talk to me, any word that you say that I could interpret as irritating is going to be much more obvious. And anything that you say that would be peacemaking, I would regard cynically, let's say. And I would be looking in my interaction with you for pathways to victory. And it wouldn't only be that I would see that,

• 19:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  but also if you asked me to justify my actions while we were arguing, even if I became cruel, that drive that's a personality would have all those arguments at hand too. So it's a full-fledged personality. It also has its own emotional systems. Because if I'm gripped by rage, I could easily be happy to see you suffer, right? And if I'm gripped by compassion, say, well, seeing you suffer is going to put me in pain. And so I think it would be very helpful if the psychological field in general updated its model of drive, so to speak, or even motivation for that matter. To concentrate more on this personality-like model.

• 20:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, and you talked as well in the book about the diverse range of, I don't know, I think you used the word personality as well, the diverse.

• 20:24Speaker 00

  I called it team of rivals.

• 20:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:28Speaker 00

  By which I mean, you've got all these, you know, all these, let's call them personalities, under the hood. You know, it's interesting because I think I, maybe I dial it back one step from personality. You've got different neural networks that want different things and we can measure these. Just give an example, which is, you know, when you're making a financial decision about what you're gonna buy, you have certain networks that care about valuation, that care about the price point. And they're thinking about, okay, how much is that worth? How much is that worth? Why? So on. You have completely separate networks in front of the globe that care about the predicted emotional experience. You know, let's say you're looking at two restaurants that you're trying to choose between. So, you know, you're making a simulation of what you see, oh, that's gonna be delicious and good, and that one's not gonna be so good.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  You've got other networks that care about the social context, as in, what do my friends think of this? Is this cool or not so cool? All these things, you've got this and more, they're all battling it out under the hood.

• 21:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 21:24Speaker 00

  And they're all trying to steer the ship of state. And when you make a decision, it's because of how, it's because of the vote of the neural parliament. So it's, what's interesting, I do wanna get at this because your view of a collection of personalities where one of them is dominant, and my view of a team of rivals is slightly different in this way, which is that, you know, there's this battle going on and you reach these sort of consensus things, just like in a parliament where different groups will collaborate and coordinate. Say, okay, like, you know, two out of three think this, and so we're gonna go for that restaurant.

• 22:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that would be calculated, my suspicions are, is enough of those rivals aggregate together, they can inhibit everything else.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  That's exactly right.

• 22:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  So they'll join forces and then their rivals will sink into silence because they've gripped the, they likely gripped the neuropharmacological circuits that can inhibit the rivals.

• 22:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

• 22:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, some of that would be calculated unconsciously, right?

• 22:24Speaker 00

  Almost.

• 22:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  But then, maybe we could, maybe we could hash this out a little bit, so. Imagine it's something like this, so you're making a decision. A lot of these you make pretty quickly. And so what I would presume that would mean is that the rival systems that are doing the computations already have a behavioral pathway specified and practiced that's in keeping with their aim. So nothing new has to be instantiated. But imagine, imagine that there are situations where a novel situation arises and rivals emerge, but there isn't a clear pathway, even if one system obtains dominance. I suspect that's when you have to become conscious and you have to think. Because one of the mysteries in your book,

• 23:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  and it's a mystery period, is given that we can compute so much unconsciously, and given how narrow the focus of consciousness is, and even how limited its ability to control, let's say, what's it good for at all? Now, we do know where, we do tend to become conscious, at least in some times, of things that are novel. So novelty seems to have something to do with it. But, so I'm curious about what you think about that.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, great. I mean, the thing is, when you look across the animal kingdom, you find these rivaling networks everywhere. So just as an example, you take a mouse, you put it in a maze, and you put cheese at the end. And you can put a little harness on the mouse and measure how, how much he's pulling towards cheese. Then what you can do is switch it, where instead of a piece of cheese, you have an electrical shock at the end. And you can put the harness on and measure how hard he pulls away from the electrical shock, okay? Now what you do is you put a piece of cheese and an electrical shock at the end of the thing. And the poor little mouse gets stuck halfway and turns and turns and turns at exactly the place where the two vectors cancel out, which is to say, he's running both networks. And he gets the cheese and avoids the shock. And, and he gets stuck there in the middle. You see this across animals.

• 24:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  Approach avoidance conflict.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. It's the conflict part, okay. Take another example. The stickleback is a bird that will attack things that are red. And if you get something, what's that?

• 24:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Fish.

• 24:34Speaker 00

  Oh, fish, right, right, yeah.

• 24:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  No, no, wait.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  Stickleback? Stickleback gull, wait, what's the? It's a, it's a bird. It's a bird, yeah.

• 24:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, because there's a, okay. There's a stickleback fish, too, okay.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is a bird. I think, I'm 99% sure I got the name right. Stickleback gull. Okay, it'll attack things that are red. It will sit on anything that's egg shaped. It'll sit on it. So if you put a red dot on an egg, it'll both sit on it and attack it at the same time. Okay, what these represent are rivaling networks, right? Okay, here's where I think the role of consciousness is.

• 25:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  Is in mediating this.

• 25:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  This is what we've gotten better and better at. And so we have rivaling networks in the new, in the novel context.

• 25:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that would be a novel context, right? Where, where you have a system that's automated, another system that's automated, but the conjunction produces a paradox. Okay, so we could think of the rea... Okay, so we could think of the reason for the emergence of the cortex in that regard. Because, so I read a series of brilliant papers on hypothalamic cats, right? So these are cats whose entire cortex is... Decerebrate cats. Their entire cortex has been taken out, and most of the limbic system. And these are mostly female cats for various reasons. Female cats are more functional with only a hypothalamus, as it turns out. And if you keep them in a simple environment, like a cage, they can pretty much do what cats do. Now, they're hyper exploratory,

• 25:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  which is pretty damn weird for an animal with almost no brain, because that's not what you'd predict.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  And by the way, they can also walk on a treadmill.

• 26:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right. Well, they can mate, they can eat, they can regulate their temperature, they can defend themselves. Okay, so now imagine this. So now you have all these automated systems that you described, but they can produce conflicts, and they can produce conflicts in the moment, and they can produce conflicts across time, and they can produce social conflicts. Okay, so now you need another part of the brain that emerges, as you said, to mediate those conflicts, and that's what the cortex does. And that's the... So that would imply that some of that lengthy socialization that you described, actually what that socialization is, at least in part, is the environment-specific means in which those conflicts that will arise

• 26:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  in consequence of built-in motivation will be mediated. Right, so, right.

• 26:53Speaker 00

  And now, here's the thing, rats and cats have cortex.

• 26:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yep.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  But what we have that they are not so good at is the ability to mediate well, such that we don't get stuck in the middle of the maze, but we can make a decision about, we can actually weigh in and say, "Okay, you know what, I'm not gonna get stuck with these two networks. I'm gonna, I'm gonna decide on something." This is what I think consciousness is about. It's the higher level abstraction that allows you to say, "Okay, look, this isn't something that's automated. This is, you know, this is a new situation I'm in. I don't know what to do here." And then the CEO, you know, gets called up. And, yeah, there's like a large, you take a large company, the CEO can't possibly know what's happening in the company. There's, you know, 100,000 employees, right? The CEO's job fundamentally is to wait for the phone to ring and say,

• 27:42Speaker 00

  "Hey, there's trouble here. There's something going on that we don't know what to do." The CEO makes a decision. That's, and also, of course, to do future planning.

• 27:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes, that, yes.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  Consciousness is essentially about that.

• 27:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yes. That's also a conflict mediation process, future planning.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  So that the present doesn't interfere with the future.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right, that's right. And so, I think what this, what, what I suggested in Incognito is that maybe we can look at the way that animals resolve conflict, or don't, like the poor rat that gets stuck in the middle. And we can use that as at least a rough metric for the degree of consciousness that an animal has. Because the assertion there is that, you know, consciousness allows you to mediate these things and figure out a path forward there.

• 28:27Jordan B. Peterson?

  Would you, okay, so, so, a couple of things. So, you could imagine a mechanism that would allow that to, to... Okay, so here's two potential mechanisms. So like, System A has a goal. And System B has a goal, and now they're locked together. Okay, so now you need a superordinate goal that's higher than both of those, that can be used as a reference point to rectify the conflict, right? You can imagine chains of those superordinate goals, right? So we get stuck in a conflict here, we're gonna do this. We get stuck in a conflict here, we're gonna do this, and so forth, like ad infinitum. Okay, so the cortex is going to produce those melding goals.

• 29:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Then that might be something like sequencing. I'm hungry and tired, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna eat now and then sleep, or I'm gonna sleep now and eat. And that way, the conflict between those two things is reconciled in a higher-order frame that would take the future into account.

• 29:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and so, but then, maybe the physiological mechanism is that, you know, so let's say you could turn left in the maze, or you could turn right in the maze, and you're spinning because you're in this conflict. The mechanism for resolution could be that the inhibitory capacity of the free cortex, so it's not bound by any given motivational state, is shifted in favor of one of the systems, right? So, because focus of attention seems like that.

• 29:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  So if I'm angry, for example, and I really focus my attention, well, I could inhibit the rage or replace it with something, but I could also amplify it. Like, there does seem to be a... voluntary attention seems to be something like the capacity to amplify it. You'd think that would be something like the turning of spare, multipurpose neural tissue to one side of a particular operation, so...

• 30:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. The difficulty with the consciousness question, of course, as we know, is there's no single spot in the brain that is, you know, consciousness. And so, when I think about rivaling networks, I tend to think about them rivaling directly with one another. You're, of course, totally correct that, you know, for example, visual attention can amplify certain things.

• 30:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  It's like coming from visual cortex, or you can pay auditory attention to something, or something like that, but...

• 30:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so you're gathering more resources for that.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 30:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  For that phenomenon.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  Exactly, but I, you know, I have to confess that we just don't know. What consciousness is, where does consciousness live in that? I mean, we can talk about visual attention, auditory attention, and so on, but where's this, it's not like an extra bit that just

• 31:03Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right.

• 31:04Speaker 00

  is attention consciously, so that's still a bit of a mystery.

• 31:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, well, it's a major mystery because nobody can figure out what the awareness element is for, right, especially since it's so, it's so limited.

• 31:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, what it's for, of course, is what you said at the beginning, which is the way that we go on missions into the world. You know, if I'm looking for the red object, then I find the red object. If I'm looking for the thing that looks like a broom, then I find that in the crowded space and so on. So visual attention is, is what allows us to parse the world in a way that's aligned with our mission, that what we're trying to answer in that moment.

• 31:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that's it, it's in the moment, right? It's got to be something like that because you could imagine that there would be quests that are automatized so completely that that the circuitry is completely there, right? But then there are new quests, so to speak, that, well, because they're new, the circuitry isn't there. Now, Goldberg pointed out, when he was looking at, is L. Conan Goldberg, he was Lurie's student. He pointed out that when we are learning something new, much broader areas of the cortex are activated, it's much more energy demanding. And then as we learn something and automate it, this is in the typical right-handed male,

• 32:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  so first of all, it's the patterns of cortical activation are very widespread and there's a lot of energy that's being, what, used, probably because perceptions aren't well specified and there's many potential pathways of action.

• 32:42Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 32:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  And then the activation pattern shrinks away from the right hemisphere into the left, and then it moves from the left Front to the back and as it moves, it becomes smaller and smaller area until little machine is built essentially that's automated. And once that's built, well, you don't need consciousness and it's hyper efficient.

• 33:02Speaker 00

  That's exactly right. So the unconscious brain, which is most of what's happening, is all about speed and efficiency. So if you look at, for example, this study has been done with playing Tetris. So you take a bunch of people, male and female, of course, left and right handed, and you teach them to play Tetris. So when they're first learning, they're amateurs, their brain is on fire with activity as measured functional magnetic resonance imaging. So you're measuring their brains. After they become good at it, the activity shrinks and shrinks.

• 33:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 33:31Speaker 00

  It's less and less. I did this, I competed against this 10 year old world champion cup stacker. So he takes these cups and stacks them. It's this routine that you do as quickly as you can. I had never done it before. So we both wore high density EEG caps, electroencephalography, and we looked at what was going on. And of course, my brain was on fire with activities. I was trying to figure out what the heck to do. But he, practicing four hours a day on this, his brain is essentially quiet while he does this incredibly rapid routine. So it's exactly right. The job of the brain is to take novel things and say, hey, if this is relevant and I need this, I'm gonna burn it down into the circuitry so I never have to think about it again. Like bicycle riding. You know, when you're first learning, you're paying attention to your torso

• 34:14Speaker 00

  and your legs and you don't know what you're doing. When you get good at it, then you can text on your phone, you can talk to someone while you're biking because it's now part of the machinery of the brain.

• 34:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. So you could think about consciousness as something that's continually climbing up a ladder of automated processes, right? So you think and practice, and that all automates and you become hyper efficient in your perceptions and your actions. And that disappears in some ways from consciousness. It becomes some of the, becomes part of the substructure of consciousness.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 34:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  But then consciousness itself climbs on top of that. So it's like, consciousness is like the bleeding edge of adaptation.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  Oh, nice. Oh, I like it.

• 34:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:55Speaker 00

  That's exactly right. And what's interesting, by the way, I talked about this in the Brain Plasticity Course and in my book, LiveWire. What's interesting is that, given who you are and what you've already packed down into your machinery, that determines what is relevant to you for the next thing, such that the only, you know, there's a million things you could learn or could pay attention to at every moment, but you're only going to... Take on those things that are relevant to you and push them down into the unconscious brain as a result. And we know, for example, these acetylcholinergic systems are involved in this process, which is to say, they tag relevance. They say, hey, this is something that means something to you for whatever reason, who knows? But you really care about, you know, stamp collecting,

• 35:40Speaker 00

  or genealogy, or artwork, or whatever it is that you care about. And so then you go on these missions from the world, and you take stuff in, and you start burning that stuff down, and it means something to you, whereas the rest of the stuff just goes...

• 35:53Jordan B. Peterson?

  Help me distinguish between the dopaminergic and the acetylcholinergic functions. So if, my understanding is that if I, and this is part of the structuring of perception, if I posit an aim, my perception is first going to specify a pathway to that aim. So that's how the world organizes itself. And then, things in the world are going to stand out for me as things that will facilitate my movement forward and things that will interfere. Everything else is irrelevant virtually. And there's a social equivalent. So people who will facilitate my movement forward are friends, and people who won't are foes, right?

• 36:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so you have tools and friends and obstacles and foes. And you can also perceive things that'll transform your aim. I think those are magical things, by the way. That's that category and narrative that's magic. It transforms your aim and puts you into a new game. Okay, the dopaminergic system will tag progress towards a goal, and it'll reinforce the systems, neural systems that were active just before that progress was made, to make them more dominant. Now, that's partly an indication of relevance, because... What's positive towards a goal is relevant. I don't understand how that differs from the cholinergic marking of relevance.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you've got these acetylcholinergic systems that say, hey, this is important. I want you to initiate plasticity here. And by the way, these systems, just like dopamine, actually broadcast all around the entire brain. So the dopamine system is involved in saying, hey, that was better than expected. I wasn't expecting that to happen. You get a burst, a positive burst of dopamine. If, in contrast, you're expecting reward and you don't get it.

• 37:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  And

• 37:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's a punishment, essentially.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  Of dopamine. Have a little baseline going on.

• 37:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Absence of an expected reward is technically a punishment.

• 37:50Speaker 00

  Exactly right. Yep. And so that's what the dopamine system is for, saying, oh, better than expected, worse than expected. But acetylcholine is what happens when you're saying, I want to make plastic changes to the system. Let me just give you an example. An experiment with mice. And they have to learn how to reach through a narrow slot to grab pellets or whatever. And they get better and better at it. And the parts of their brain that are involved in this task actually grow in their real estate. Okay. Now you take an equivalent set of rats. You give them an acetylcholine blocker. They do exactly the same number of trials, they're doing the thing, but they don't get better and their brain doesn't change. They don't ever get better at the task. They're not faster at doing it because

• 38:33Speaker 00

  because they don't have the plasticity available to them anymore. Because you need these By the way, something that, of course, we know is all of the neurotransmitters, these are all working together in a very complicated dance. So, you know, dopamine is involved in saying like, hey, that was, you know, good, bad, better or worse than expected. But acetylcholine is the thing that says, hey, let's make plasticity available here.

• 38:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  So it's a broader marker of relevance?

• 39:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Is it like potential relevance? Is it something like that? And is there a, is there an emotional experience that's associated with that? What? I mean, if you block dopaminergic receptors, people lose positive emotion.

• 39:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  But what do they lose? What do they lose if? Acetylcholinergic transmission is blocked.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  You know, I don't know the answer to that in humans.

• 39:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's partly why I can't figure out how that damn, I can't get a handle on, on, to understand that, how that system functions.

• 39:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's interesting because there's so many acetylcholine blockers that are used in animals for things, but I don't know what the emotional experience is for a human on that. My guess, if I were just pulling some out of my hat, would be that they just feel like they don't care about this particular thing. So for example, let's say you take.

• 39:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that's a major, that's a major function, caring.

• 39:47Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  And that is, that's a weird, that's a weird emotional condition because it's, it doesn't exactly have a valence. It's more like, like, does the feeling of this matters? Could you characterize that as positive or negative? Because it could matter in a negative way, right? And it could matter in a positive way. So it seems like that would be something like the broad category of potential significance. What happens, what happens to eye, to, to pupillary diameter? If acetylcholine increases, does it, does, do eyes dilate?

• 40:22Speaker 00

  I don't know. I don't know. Good question. But, but just, you know, I'm trying to think through what it would feel like. Imagine that you were trying to learn a new sport that you haven't played, um, you know, pickleball, let's say. So you're, you, we're both, we're both learning the sport at the same time. And for some reason, it's really relevant to us. But if one of us got acetylcholine blockers, my assumption would be that we feel like, we just don't care about this thing. You know, I'm more interested in what's going on over there or something. We wouldn't, we wouldn't particularly care.

• 40:51Jordan B. Peterson?

  So it sounds like it's a broader marker of relevance. Okay. Well, I'm going to have to look that up and see if I can specify it more particularly. Okay. So you talked about, we had a bit of.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  Sorry, let me just give another example of that. You know, okay. So when somebody gets a stroke and let's say they get a stroke and they lose the function in their left arm. Their left arm's mostly paralyzed and they can do things with their right hand. Well, so the way that you need to operate to get the left hand working again.

• 41:19Speaker 00

  Do you know what they do clinically? So what they do is what's called constraint therapy. This is the single best move. You take the right hand, which is working well, and you pin it down. You strap it so that they're forced to use their left hand.

• 41:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Necessity.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, necessity, that's the relevance. So now I want to get the sandwich to my mouth. I have to use the left hand. I need to get my zipper down to go to the restroom. I have to use my left hand. These are the sorts of things that matter. This is what causes brain plasticity.

• 41:45Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  Relevance.

• 41:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, and if you strapped down the functional hand and you used a cholinergic suppressor, would that stop the person from learning?

• 41:56Speaker 00

  That's exactly.

• 41:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and that seems to be... Would they still try? Or would they just stop trying?

• 42:02Speaker 00

  Ah, I don't know. I don't know what it is in humans, would we use this?

• 42:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, because you could imagine the acetylcholine might mediate trying, or intensity of effort, or duration, or rate. But you could also imagine that it would mediate capacity to learn if the practice was occurring.

• 42:19Speaker 00

  You know what? I think it wouldn't directly be mediating the trying because I think what would happen is you would try it, but you wouldn't have the plasticity that says, "Hey, something useful happened here, so let's make changes to the motor cortex over here." You just wouldn't have that. And so the system would stop trying that.

• 42:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so back, we had a bit of a... I wouldn't call it a dispute, but a slight difference of agreement in relationship to this model of personality. And you talked about rivals. I mean, rival is a narrative-like metaphor, right? To have a rivalry is a rivalry between beings, generally speaking.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  It's all we ever have in narrative metaphor.

• 43:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  But I think there's something worth taking apart is because maybe you could say, well, if the rivalry is primarily played out at an unconscious level, then the metaphor of personality is not quite accurate. And so I'm just trying to think through if that's true because if the systems are automated completely...

• 43:19Jordan B. Peterson?

  I wonder if they're automated. I don't know if they would come replete with perceptions and thoughts exactly.

• 43:25Speaker 00

  I have a suspicion that it's not, as Nietzsche said, that each, or he didn't say, he implied it maybe, that each one is coming with a personality or something. But my suspicion is that each one is reaching out to other spots, like visual cortex, like your limbic system, like your frontal cortex. When a network is dominant, it's sort of pulling information and sort of constructing a personality.

• 43:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that's a good idea. That's a good idea. Well, that, okay, so that would account for the archaic conception of possession. It's something like that, right? Well, obviously, if a drive comes to dominate your behavior, it's taken possession of your personality, like clearly.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 44:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so that's, so then you can imagine that there's... Okay, so maybe it's something like this. So maybe, imagine in a motivated state that there's an automated core. And that automated core isn't going to be accompanied by a tremendous amount of consciousness. But the more additional neural system it aggregates around it, the more consciousness it accrues, right? And that would partly be because it's actually building something like a novel structure. It's got this automated core, which we would consider the drive. But then it's pulling in different elements of the totality of what's available, and that would make it more and more personality-like.

• 44:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. In terms of deciding what to say next, for example, you know, it's looking at the, you know, at your whole speech system, Wernicke's and Broca's and all these errors, and saying, am I going to say something cruel or kind or whatever? But it's still using those basic mechanisms. It's taking advantage of the machinery that's there, and it just has the ability to draw on it differently than a different...

• 45:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  So I've been trying to...

• 45:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  En conservación de este modelo de objetivos superordenantes que la función ejecutiva podría referirse para mediar el conflicto, he estado tratando de entender si hay principios por los que esos objetivos superordenantes se construyen para que sean válidos. ¿Qué quieres decir por válidos? Bueno, esa es una buena pregunta. No probablemente produzca conflicto, por ejemplo. Así que, por ejemplo, aquí hay una idea. Así que tú y yo podemos pensar en el uno del otro como una agregación desplegada de estados potenciales motivados, pero podemos llegar a un acuerdo. Bien, entonces podemos juzgar la calidad del acuerdo, creo. Hay una variedad de estándares.

• 45:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Podemos decir que es un acuerdo de mayor calidad si puede sostenerse a sí mismo a través de un amplio rango de contextos. Así que si tenemos una amistad, que es un tipo de acuerdo de contratistas, y podemos ir de acuerdo en muchos lugares diferentes y bajo muchas situaciones diferentes, entonces pensamos en eso como una amistad profunda. Así que es una amistad bien constituida. Y luego también podemos imaginar que si la amistad se mantiene a través del tiempo, entonces eso sería otra indicación de su validez, ¿verdad? Y luego podemos imaginar que una tercera dimensión sería si estaba estable a través del contexto y estable a través del tiempo y mejoró mientras lo implementábamos. Eso sería un tercer criterio.

• 46:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Eso sería como una buena estrategia de evaluación para un buen matrimonio. Funciona en todas partes, funciona durante mucho tiempo y mientras lo juegas, mejora. Bien, entonces he estado tratando de pensar si hay un conjunto de reglas que obtienen, como serían los principios de ética, que vinculan esos tipos de acuerdos. Te daré un ejemplo. Piaget spend a lot of time analyzing how children learned to play games with others and made friends. Okay, so the first rule of a game is something like both people have to want to play it. Okay, then the next rule is something like you get a turn in the game and then I get a turn, right?

• 47:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  So I have to sacrifice my turn to you, but vice versa. And that's a stable arrangement. And the reason we're willing to do that, instead of me fighting to have the turn all the time, is because it's a better game if I get to play it with you. So I'm, okay, so then you could imagine now, if we come to a voluntary agreement about the aim, we unite our perceptions, we unite our emotions, and then we reciprocate. Okay, now if we can do that once, then we've established a precedent. And if we can repeat that, we have a friendship. Okay, but then that implies that the friendship is based, like there's rules. The aim has to be shared. The aim has to be voluntary. The participation has to be reciprocal.

• 48:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, Panksepp showed this with rats when they were playing. Because Panksepp, first of all, took a kind of dominance approach to play. He showed that if you took two juvenile rats and you paired them in an arena, they'd work to play, but that the rat that was 10% bigger across rats could reliably pin the smaller rat. So then that sort of provided proof, evidence, for a dominance theory of play. But then Panksepp realized that rats don't play once. They're communal. So then he paired them repeatedly and he found that if the big rat didn't let the little rat win, at least 30% of the time, the little rat wouldn't play anymore. So you could see there that there's an ethos that's emerging that's...

• 48:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Now, the reason I'm mentioning this is because...

• 48:57Speaker 00

  You're thinking about neural networks as being the rats and the kind of collaboration that neural networks work out through time?

• 49:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  That and across people, right?

• 49:06Speaker 00

  Okay, yeah.

• 49:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  So I'm trying to figure out the preconditions for something like a stable social community. What works across time to mediate conflict? And then what works across people? And that's like a bounded world.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  So here's what I think. I think, so you have all these different tribes, some of which are very primitive, you know, hunger and thirst and sexuality. And so you've got all these different tribes. But you have more sophisticated drives too, including various forms of short-term thinking versus long-term thinking. You have these different financial drives I was talking about with valuation or predicted emotional experience or social context. You've got all these different things going on. The way that they form these agreements through time, they form these friendships, let's say, I think that makes an integrated personality. That's what makes you you and me me, is the way that we let these things win or lose in different circumstances.

• 50:02Speaker 00

  In other words, all unconsciously, these networks have worked out ways of saying, "All right, look, I'm gonna let you in here and I'm gonna do this." And maybe there's an advantage to letting anger win out in this moment. You know, I find that that works sometimes. But in this other moment, I know that letting compassion win out is gonna be the optimal thing for my marriage or whatever.

• 50:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 50:25Speaker 00

  Okay. So there are these things. But what interests me is that no matter how integrated a personality we think we have, we're constantly in conflict. I mean, every moment of our lives, we think, "Oh, should I do this or that?" Or we're making decisions, right? This is what decision-making is about. And so there's a sense in which there's never a stable scenario where we say, "Okay, look, these guys have figured out how to get along." What I find interesting is ways that we can...

• 50:59Speaker 00

  Put ideas into place like the Ulysses Contract. So, are you familiar with Ulysses Contract? So, okay, just as a, you remember Ulysses, Odysseus was coming home from the Trojan War? And realized he was gonna pass the island of the sirens. And he wanted to hear the song of the sirens, but he knew that like any mortal man, he'd crash into the rocks and die. So you remember what he did, he filled his men's ears with beeswax, he had them lash him to the mast. And he said, "No matter what I do, just keep on sailing." Okay. What was happening here was that the Ulysses of sound mind way back here, knew that the future Ulysses would behave badly when he passed the island. Yes. He knew that there was no way he wasn't going to behave badly there.

• 51:43Speaker 00

  So what he did is he made a contract with himself. He said, "I'm gonna lash myself to the mast so that I can't do the wrong thing." Okay, so this is what philosophers call the Ulysses Contract. And I'm fascinated by these because we use these in all kinds of ways in our lives. And I, actually, one of my next books is about this, because I think it's the most practical way when you're in a moment of sober reflection to think about, "Okay, who do I want to be? And how can I establish a Ulysses Contract with myself?" Yes, yes, definitely. That I can't break, it's an unbreakable kind of contract. Yeah. And so, I'll just, I'll just give you an example of this. Why were you driven, why were you attracted to the terminology "contract"? Because it's not something you can break. Because it's not that Ulysses said,

• 52:25Speaker 00

  "Okay, tie me to the thing, but leave a little string here that I can pull and let the ropes down," or something. It's that he was bound to that mast. He was, he was attached to it and could not get off the mast. Okay, that's the important part. It's like a marriage contract. Yeah, exactly. But even more, you know, a marriage contract you can break also. But the key with Ulysses Contracts is you really want to make them unbreakable. Here's just a couple of examples. For example, in Alcoholics Anonymous, the first thing they have you do is clear all the alcohol out of your house. Because even if somebody feels like, "Hey, look, I'm done, I'm not gonna drink, but I'll leave those things in case I have a party or whatever." They know that on some, you know, festive Friday night or a lonely Sunday night or something, you might, okay. So you get rid of it.

• 53:08Speaker 00

  So that the temptation can't be there, or with drug addiction programs. First thing they tell you is like, don't ever walk around with more than 20 bucks in your pocket. Because even if you think you're over it, at some point, someone's gonna offer you drugs. If you've got the money, you might spend it. So there's a million ways that we can make these kinds of contracts with ourselves. And the reason it's important is because what we're doing is setting up some kind of higher order ideal.

• 53:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  And I know you think about this in terms of religion.

• 53:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  I think religion is this religious, the religious enterprise is the, what would you say? It's the establishment and analysis and experience of those higher order contracts. I think that's a way of defining it. So you can think of the higher order the contract, the more religious like it is.

• 53:55Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting.

• 53:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  This is a definition, by the way.

• 53:57Speaker 00

  I don't know that I agree with the definition, but um, because, let me think. Because all the Ulysses contracts that I try to always set up in my life, I don't think about them as being religious, although they are. I mean, they're.

• 54:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's why it's a matter of definition.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 54:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, well, so, so, so let me ask you a couple of questions based on what you just said.

• 54:15Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 54:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, because there were, I couldn't, there were two ways you went, as far as I could tell, and I can't reconcile them.

• 54:22Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 54:22Jordan B. Peterson?

  So we started talking about games and you started talking about the manner in which these teams of rivals interact. And there was a suggestion there for a moment that there is something game-like about it, that so that rival systems might be integrated into a higher order agreement, which is essentially what a game is, right? I mean, when two teams are competing on a playing field, you could say they're competing, but they're also cooperating in that they're playing the same game. Like if the game degenerates into a fistfight, a basketball game fistfight and a hockey fistfight are the same thing.

• 54:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? They're not basketball or hockey, they're a fight.

• 54:59Speaker 00

  Right.

• 55:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so you can imagine a higher order agreement that has a, okay, so then the question would be. Is the mediation between rivals best conceptualized as a game? And you pointed in that direction for a minute, but then you switched to the Ulysses contract. So I'm wondering, like, how would you contrast a game with a contract?

• 55:21Speaker 00

  I think the contract is part of the game, which is to say, which is to say, "Gosh, I know I'm gonna behave badly in that situation, so as one twist on this game, as a play in this game, I'm gonna put something in place so that I can't do it."

• 55:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  It forbids it.

• 55:35Speaker 00

  It forbids it, exactly. It's a way of saying, "Look, I know I've got all these rivaling networks, and I'm not gonna get through this." Like, I know that right now I feel like I'm not gonna drink or smoke or whatever somebody's trying to get, or die. Okay, so I've never had a drinking or smoking problem, but one thing I do try to prevent is, um, you know, I'm in a restaurant, and let's say it's a predefined meal, and they put a dessert down. I wanna have a taste of dessert, but I don't wanna eat the whole thing, okay? And what happens is, as I'm sitting there talking to everyone, I end up eating the whole thing like an idiot. So what I do is I take a bite or two, and then I take the table salt and I cover the thing in salt, the chocolate cake. Um, so that, that's my Ulysses contract, 'cause I know that the me of three minutes from now is gonna keep sticking my fork in it.

• 56:18Speaker 00

  So I'm making a contract of myself that I can't break, 'cause now the cake is ruined. And so, this is just one play in the game of dealing with these rivals.

• 56:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  It seems to me that there's a deep analogy between that Ulysses contract and something like the rule of a game. I mean, if you, if you set up a basketball game, there are moves that are forbidden, right? And so, you can think of games as enabling principles. Here's things you can do in the game, but there's, there's rules that are forbidding as well. Is it with the Ulysses contract concept that you're looking at the rules of the game that are, that forbid? Is that, is that the fundamental concentration on the Ulysses contract side? There are limitations rather than enabling conditions? 'Cause you have both in a game, right?

• 57:11Speaker 00

  Right.

• 57:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Things you can do and things you can't do. Every game's like that.

• 57:15Speaker 00

  Right.

• 57:17Speaker 00

  I guess you could think of it that way. I think of it as just another move in the game of life, in a sense, which is to say, you know, I could eat it, it's a rich energy source, it's delicious sugar, whatever. And I've got this other move I can do. I guess I think about it in terms of long-term versus short-term networks in the brain. And so, how do I get those networks? Because, you know, we can image this in fMRI. We see these areas that are involved in long and short-term thinking. So how do I get these guys to play together in the same game? But in a way that aligns with who I want to be, with my long-term thinking?

• 57:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, let's take that example. Because I think it provides a very concrete representation of the relationship between superordinate and subordinate goals and future and present.

• 57:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 57:58Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so you already outlined the reasons to eat the chocolate cake, right? It's delicious, and it's delicious because it is a source of energy and a high-impact source of energy. So there's reason to eat it. And the reason is immediate, and it's tied to immediate gratification. But now you're... So that's one game, the game of immediate gratification and energy acquisition.

• 58:21Speaker 00

  Right.

• 58:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  But you're putting that underneath a higher-order game. Okay, so one of the questions we might ask is, well, why? What game are you playing when you forbid yourself the cake?

• 58:31Speaker 00

  Right.

• 58:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  What are you... what's your aim there?

• 58:33Speaker 00

  That game has to do with health, has to do with, you know, keeping slim, has to do with, you know, all of the things, you know, vanity, all of the things that I want to make sure the kind of person I am who doesn't gulp down the entire chocolate cake.

• 58:48Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. So self-control, discipline, attractiveness, health.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and so now, now, one of the things we might ask ourselves, see, this is what I was trying to get at, you know, two discussions ago, trying to lay out the preconditions for what constitutes a higher-order game. Because one of the things we could ask is, why prioritize the constraint over the eating? Like, there's a reason for that.

• 59:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  Because you value the constraint more now, but why? Why is the health... You know, you alluded to that. You said, "Well, part of it's future. There's more future," for example.

• 59:21Speaker 00

  This is just part of the passage into maturity, right? We realize that it's a long game. And so, we get to know that, you know, as kids, we eat the cake every time. Maybe we get sick from it. And what we realize is that the things that we want for our lives are a different category of things. And so, these are part of the networks that are right.

• 59:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so you brought in maturity. Okay, so that's... Well, that's an extremely interesting move. And it seems to me to be precise and accurate. Because we could think of cortical development as maturation. We could think of socialization as maturation. Okay, so here's some principles for socialization.

• 1:00:02Speaker 00

  Those are the same, in a sense, you know.

• 1:00:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  I take turns, right? So that means that I regulate my lower-order, immediate motivations communally.

• 1:00:12Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:00:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? But then, there's another axis, which is I regulate them in relationship to the future. And the more mature you are, this is a definition again, you can tell me what you think about it. The more mature you are, the better you get at regulating the immediate in relationship to the future, but also the local in relationship to the communal. So if I'm really mature, I'm going to sacrifice the present for the future and the communal. And that's better. That's a definition of better, right? So, we're starting to lay out a taxonomy of value, right? In terms of conduct and in terms of perception.

• 1:00:47Speaker 00

  I totally agree. And by the way, you introduced this idea of, you know, thinking about the future and thinking about community, but I think we'd agree those are not orthogonal axes.

• 1:00:55Jordan B. Peterson?

  Not at all.

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  Exactly. They point in the same direction, or in similar directions.

• 1:00:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  I don't think there's any difference between your future self and a stranger. I think they're the same thing. So here's an example of that. This is so cool. I figured this out a long, 30 years ago. Psychopaths have no compassion.

• 1:01:16Jordan B. Peterson?

  But they don't learn from experience either. And so that means that not only does the psychopath have no compassion for you, he has absolutely no compassion for himself tomorrow. And then you think, "Oh, well, those are the same thing." Right? There's no difference between those two things. That's the... Because both... Why? Why? Well, you're not feeling what your future self is feeling now any more than you're feeling what someone else is feeling now. Like a normal person can... A mature person, you might say, can think of their future self and they can think of the experience of that self and it matters. Just like they can think of the experience of someone else and it matters. The psychopath either can't or won't do that. Right? But it's the same mechanism. You said, "Well, there's... There isn't a conflict between future orientation and communal orientation."

• 1:02:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  I don't think there is. I think they're the same thing.

• 1:02:02Speaker 00

  You know, I... I... I think they're very similar.

• 1:02:05Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:02:06Speaker 00

  Thinking about a stranger and thinking about yourself. For some reason, we have this... We have this special attachment to our future selves. So we do things like put money into an IRA. Uh, we do all kinds of things that we're doing for our future selves. So our future self will be, you know, happy, we imagine, even though our future self will be unrecognizable to us. You don't know who that future person is. Um, and you're making all kinds of decisions in deference to...

• 1:02:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, well, that's... So one of the... That begs the question, right? Which is, what are the preconditions for people to form an alliance with their future self? And it is... And, you know, it could easily be... You tell me what you think about this. There was a psychiatrist, a very famous psychiatrist. He used to be taught personality theory all the time. And I can't even remember his name now. But one of the reasons that he was taught personality classes is because he studied the development of childhood friendships, like Piaget. But one of his hypotheses was that, essentially, that the close friendships that children develop in early childhood, like a best friend... A best friend was something like, first of all,

• 1:03:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  a practice trial for a long-term marriage, but also the way that you learn to take care of your future self. So that it was through taking care of someone who wasn't you that you developed the capability of making a relationship with something that was abstract and that that would transfer to your future self.

• 1:03:31Speaker 00

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:03:31Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  I'm not sure I would think you would need that piece.

• 1:03:35Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that's the question.

• 1:03:36Speaker 00

  I'll think about that further. But here's what I would say. It's the experience of time that children have that allow them to think about time. In other words, if you and I talk about ancient Rome, we're at an age where we can kind of think about 2,000 years and think about what that means. An eighth grader learning about that in school really can't imagine 2,000 years, much less imagine 50 years, what that time scale.

• 1:03:59Jordan B. Peterson?

  Or even next week.

• 1:04:00Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:04:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:02Speaker 00

  But as you mature in the world, you're able to think about time scales that you simply weren't able to before.

• 1:04:08Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so some of it's directly experiential.

• 1:04:10Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:04:11Jordan B. Peterson?

  You do learn that if you do X today, two days from now isn't so good.

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  And you can make that connection and that wouldn't be intermediated by some other person.

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:04:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so, well, there's no reason to assume that there aren't multiple sources of information that would mature you.

• 1:04:29Speaker 00

  Agreed, agreed. Okay, great. So where we get then is maturation leads to an ability to think long-term. It's this capacity to think about, who do I want to be? Is something that requires experience and some amount of wisdom? And this is, I know that we share an interest in stories and how this can set, this can help us set an idea in our heads for, hey, that's who I want to be. I hadn't thought about this because I've, you know, my short-term networks have been having fun and I've been, you know, in elementary school and middle school and so on. But now I'm really starting to think about this and what impact I want to make in the world. Anyway.

• 1:05:13Speaker 00

  When you have that idea in mind, even let's say, let's imagine a person is religious and really has established, "Hey, I want to be like this deity," or, you know, this role model of any sort. There's always conflict though, right? Because then you've got temptations in front of you, all around you. And so there's always this rivalry. I only mention this going back 10 minutes because the issue of, you know, do these systems work out some sort of nice gameplay? Sort of, but there's also the fact that they're always in conflict. You're just always dealing with this, even when you have...

• 1:05:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, that's also, well, maybe, I would say that even if you work out a harmonious game, which is probably not a bad model for a well-integrated psyche, right? It's a well-integrated game because you're not across purposes to yourself, let's say. There's enough novelty that's constantly being infused that conflict's going to emerge. I mean, even imagine you have a stable marriage, right? But a new problem emerges with a child. Well, that doesn't exactly mean that the marriage contract has been violated, but it does mean that now you have a new, complex situation to deal with, where you might say that not only is conflict inevitable in that situation, you might say that it's desirable.

• 1:06:30Jordan B. Peterson?

  Because now imagine that, you know, your child has hit puberty or something, and so like, new problems emerge. The truth of the matter is, you actually don't know how to deal with those problems. And so, conflict would be useful there insofar as it's identical with diversity of opinion. You know, and then you can imagine your wife has a temperamental take on the problem, and classically, that would be, she would be more compassionate and more upset, and you would be more judgmental and less upset. That's the classic male-female dichotomy in terms of temperament. But you can imagine that those are useful stances to begin the problem-solving process too, because it's a completely open question of whether or not the child would say needs

• 1:07:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  a more stringent, future-oriented disciplinary structure, let's say, and to have that imposed, or whether they need more careful understanding so that you can understand what the problem is. There's no way of mediating that without conflict. And so, the fact of the conflict also wouldn't necessarily indicate that the initial contract was faulty, it's just that...

• 1:07:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  You're never gonna have a contract that'll deal with all possible novel situations, hence possibly the reason for consciousness.

• 1:07:40Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:07:41Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right.

• 1:07:41Speaker 00

  And this allows us to go back and tie two pieces together, which is that, you know, the, the brain's job is really to burn things into the unconscious when it says, "Oh, I've got this, I've got that, this is a routine I've seen before." Right? But the reason we're always conscious, the reason the brain's always burning a lot of energy, is because the world throws lots of novelty at us. And so, despite all our best efforts, every day is full of the unexpected, and, and therefore, we're always in these novel conflicts.

• 1:08:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, now, you, you, you said something else too, that I don't think I've thought about exactly before. We, we're talking about the different functions of consciousness. We would never presume that there's a single function, although dancing on the edge of chaos is, is not a bad,

• 1:08:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  you know, comprehensive shorthand.

• 1:08:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Consciousness also seems to be the place where these visions of variant future play themselves out, right? So that's like, that's the theater of the mind. And so, you could imagine that if a new opportunity or crisis emerged, you could envision a variety of different futures, which would be a variety of different contracts, or solutions, or people that you wanted to be. And you play out those in the theater of the imagination. That seems to be conscious, and it's logical that it would be consciousness if it's associated with novelty, because these new response patterns to this new emergent reality, they're not automatized. They can't be.

• 1:09:10Speaker 00

  That's right, although I suspect that a lot of our future simulation is unconscious, because some amount of our future sim is, you know, is something that we've-

• 1:09:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, it's using the machine.

• 1:09:22Speaker 00

  It's using the machine, exactly.

• 1:09:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah, definitely.

• 1:09:24Speaker 00

  Um, and so, we certainly can pull things up into consciousness and think, "Okay, I really wanna, I really wanna understand what it would be like if I did this, and if I moved to this other city and got this other job." But much of the time, we're just slamming things forward.

• 1:09:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, then, you, you could make a rule with that, or principle for that, which is that the deeper the crisis, the less automated circuitry is at hand to deal with it. That's a definition of deep crisis, right? So, well, so for example, like moving houses in the same city is not as complex as moving to a house in a new city.

• 1:09:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and it's because more of your subroutines can be maintained if it's just moving within a neighborhood.

• 1:10:01Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:10:02Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, so, and that's, that, see Carl Friston, the neuroscientist, he's, he's derived a pretty decent model of anxiety as an index of entropy. And so, right, right.

• 1:10:12Speaker 00

  Cool.

• 1:10:13Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, and so that would be anxiety as entropy and entropy as disruption of automated subroutines.

• 1:10:22Speaker 00

  Let me make sure I can unpack that. It's that if you're looking at a high entropy state where there's lots of possibilities, then you have higher anxiety.

• 1:10:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Anxiety actually indexes that, that's what it's for. Well, then, but then the, the higher the degree of possibility, the less reliable the automated systems. That's almost by definition.

• 1:10:42Speaker 00

  And by the way, this goes back to what we were saying also about, you know, for example, the Tetris players, or let's just say, I don't know, say when you, did you play soccer as a kid? Okay, so when you first were learning how to play soccer, again, your brain, if we could have measured it while you were running around on the field, it's on fire because you're, you're trying to figure out, wait, where's the ball? Where's everyone else? You know, it's all knees and elbows and you don't know what's going on, okay? A professional soccer player is 100 times better than you, but his brain isn't burning nearly as much energy as the child trying to figure this out.

• 1:11:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:11:13Speaker 00

  And so.

• 1:11:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's right, he's in a much lower entropy state.

• 1:11:17Speaker 00

  Exactly, he's in a lower entropy state, and so.

• 1:11:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's because his movements are more efficient and.

• 1:11:22Speaker 00

  Right, but the reason, oh, sorry, but the reason, the reason is because the child is trying to simulate all the possibilities. The professional has sort of seen everything play out before.

• 1:11:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:33Speaker 00

  That's the key, he's got the patterns, but the child has the high entropy state because, you know, what if I try this? What if I try that?

• 1:11:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:39Speaker 00

  And so on.

• 1:11:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, and it's very localized too, because when the child is starting to play soccer, his field of attention is going to be like this big, right? He's going to be thinking. How many different ways could I move my foot? And that makes him a pretty spectacularly horrible soccer player, because he's not paying attention to anything that's going on.

• 1:11:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:11:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  In Gretzky, for example, the hockey player, one of the things he was renowned for, and you can imagine this as a consequence of layered expertise, was that he was paying attention to what was happening everywhere on the ice.

• 1:12:10Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:12:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, why? Well, because he didn't have to pay attention to skating. He didn't have to pay attention to how he was holding his stick. He didn't even have to pay attention to where the puck was on his stick, because that was all automated. So he can move up to higher and higher levels of abstraction.

• 1:12:23Speaker 00

  And what he famously said is, "I'm not thinking about where the puck is. I'm thinking about where the puck is going to be."

• 1:12:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right, right. Well, and you do that when you learn to drive.

• 1:12:31Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:12:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Like, as you get to be a better and better driver, you look farther and farther down the road.

• 1:12:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:37Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's also the case, too. They've studied this with expert piano players who are playing with sheet music. They look ahead of where they're playing.

• 1:12:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:12:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, and so what they're doing, in some sense, I think probably what they're doing neurologically is disinhibiting automated subsystems. And that's essentially... So I can give you an example of that. It's an example that sort of reconciles the free will deterministic conundrum. So if you do this, this is a ballistic movement. You wrote about these in your book, right? So if I do this, the lag time for neural transmission from here to here and back is longer than the duration of that movement. So then the question is, how do I control that movement? And the answer is, well, I've automated this routine, which is why I can stop my hand, because I can't stop it voluntarily, right? So what happens is, I have the routine at hand,

• 1:13:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  I disinhibit it, and it runs, runs automated. Now, I have no free will during that ballistic movement.

• 1:13:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so what seems to happen with free will, so to speak, is that as the horizon of the future approaches, free will disappears. We devolve into automation as the present makes itself.

• 1:13:50Speaker 00

  Oh, that's very interesting. So a lot of what I've studied in my career has to do with time, our perception of time. And the bottom line, of course, is that we live slightly in the past. Why? Because it takes time for signals to get, you know, processed and integrated, right? So when signals hit my, for example, I used to play baseball. And, you know, when you're swinging at a fast pitch, this all happens unconsciously. The best you can do is this ball is traveling from the mound to the plate is to adjust your swing up or down as you're already swinging. But all this is happening unconsciously. My experience has always been when I hit the ball, I become aware that I have just hit the ball.

• 1:14:35Speaker 00

  And I say to myself, throw it out the bat and run. Right, right. Um, because it's already flying. The reason being, of course, because it takes at least half a second before you get conscious awareness of anything. The signals have to move around in your brain. As you know, signals are very slowly in the brain. About a meter per second on unmyelinated axons, maybe, you know, 10 times faster than unmyelinated axons. And 10 times faster. Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. And what's interesting, you know, we've got big bodies, right? So, you know, if I touch your toe, the signals have to travel all the way up, you know, up your leg and up your spinal cord to your brain. But here's the weird part, you know, if I touch your toe and your nose at the same time, you'll feel those simultaneously. And that's weird because how does your, you know,

• 1:15:18Speaker 00

  does your brain feel the signal from the nose and then say, okay, I'm just gonna wait and see if anything's coming up. Is that true if your eyes are closed? Yeah, yeah. That's weird. Yeah, so here's the thing. Yeah, yeah, that's weird. This, by the way, led me to a hypothesis years ago that taller people live further in the past than shorter people. Because your brain has to wait for all the signals to come together, your vision, your hearing, your touch, touch from your toes, all this stuff to come together. It puts together your conscious perception of what's happening right now. And that's slightly longer lag time. Slightly longer lag time, if you're taller, yeah. It's a very funny hypothesis, by the way. So.

• 1:15:54Speaker 00

  Yes, so we live a little bit in the past. And during that time, I totally concur. There can't be free will involved in any of the processing or certainly reflexes, but also ballistic movements that we're doing. There's just, there's no possibility for free will to operate there. If we do have free will, the argument I made at the end of Incognito is that, you know, there may be free will. It's very difficult neuroscience-wise to nail this question of if there is or not. But if there is, it's a bit player in a much larger system. And so, you know, you've got all this unconscious processing. Most of what's happening in the brain, I think of the conscious brain as a broom closet in the mansion of the brain.

• 1:16:35Speaker 00

  I should say, the conscious mind is a broom closet in the mansion of the brain with very little access to what's going on. There may be free will, but it's going to be a small player if it's there.

• 1:16:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, but I mean, we could reconcile, we could integrate what we discussed earlier with a free will view, because you could say, and tell me what you think about this. I mean, obviously, our choice isn't unconstrained. We're not omniscient. There's lots of things we can't do. So even if we're free will absolutists, we're still playing within a confined domain. But can't you say, given what we discussed like throughout this entire conversation, that you choose what to automate? I mean, like you have, like, imagine this. So you have a novel situation. You envision these variety of different futures. There's some volunteerism in that. But then you can direct your attention towards what you determined to practice.

• 1:17:30Speaker 00

  Right. This doesn't answer the free will question, though, because if I choose this particular future, we can still question whether I had free will to choose that or if I rewound history 1,000 times, would I always choose that?

• 1:17:42Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, but I guess the question then would be, if that's the case, why would it be useful to have the multiplicitous futures make themselves manifest? Like, if there's no choice between them, why have an array?

• 1:17:55Speaker 00

  One argument for this is that when you simulate a future, you then feel emotionally what that future feels like and you compare that to the next future and the next future.

• 1:18:04Jordan B. Peterson?

  There's obviously truth in that.

• 1:18:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, and maybe you need to simulate each one in order to make your evaluation. But the question is, you know, I say, "Oh, that future feels the best to me. That's who I want to be in long term." But was it a free choice? I don't know. Just for the record, I don't come down one way or the other on the free will because I don't know.

• 1:18:23Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, I think probably, we probably have the question formulated wrong in some fundamental way, which is why it can't be resolved. But it's also, there's also likely such a constant play of indeterminacy and determinacy at every level of decision that you actually can't parse them apart. Right? Because I think your argument that we lay out these different simulations and then we evaluate them, well, that's obviously what you do when you go see a movie, is like you're evaluating the decisions that different characters are making, and you're feeling that, and that is informative, and you could think about that as deterministic. But then with that argument, you have the problem, well, the reason those simulations feel the way they do was because you chose the aim that you were using to inhabit while you were doing the evaluation.

• 1:19:07Jordan B. Peterson?

  And so it just flips you into the problem right away again.

• 1:19:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. That's right.

• 1:19:12Jordan B. Peterson?

  And you said you were writing a new book.

• 1:19:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  We're running out of time on this side. So tell us, I'd like to know where your interests are going and what your new book is about.

• 1:19:21Speaker 00

  Right. Okay, well, I'm writing a couple of new books. And so one of them is called Empire of the Invisible. And this is about all the stuff that we don't see. In other words, I've always been fascinated by this question of why do each of us think we know the truth? And if we could just shout it on X in all capital letters enough, everyone would come to agree with us. Everyone would see the wisdom of our point of view.

• 1:19:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  I assume firsthand that that isn't true.

• 1:19:48Speaker 00

  Exactly. So everybody on social media knows the truth, and on any side of the spectrum, whether you're a denizen of Wokistan or Magastan or whatever, everyone feels like it's clear. And my question is, why do we all have such limited internal models where we think we know the truth? I'm saying this in a way that's free of any political opinion. I'm speaking meta-politically now. And so this is what Empire of the Invisible is about, is how do we come to our internal models? And why do we take them so seriously when we...

• 1:20:20Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, this is why Friston's work, by the way, is so helpful. Well, if you understand, at least in part, that aim constrains entropy...

• 1:20:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Then you get some sense almost immediately why people cling so desperately to their frameworks. Right? It isn't just that the framework lays out the pathway or specifies the perceptions.

• 1:20:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:40Jordan B. Peterson?

  It restricts entropy.

• 1:20:42Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 1:20:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, then...

• 1:20:43Speaker 00

  Let me just unpack that for the listener. It's that when you say, okay, like, this is my view. I've got this. Then the uncertainty is reduced. And yeah, you've got...

• 1:20:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, to almost nothing. Well, and then there's actual physiological consequences of that. Because what happens if you, especially involuntarily, enter a high-entropy state, you start burning up future resources. You burn up resources that could be conserved in the future, in the present. And what that actually does is age you. Right? So that's an elevate... Imagine a chronically elevated stress response in response to additional uncertainty.

• 1:21:20Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:21:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  And it's terrible.

• 1:21:22Speaker 00

  Exactly. One of the main goals of the brain always is to reduce energy expenditure.

• 1:21:25Jordan B. Peterson?

  Of course.

• 1:21:26Speaker 00

  On the immediate time scale, yeah.

• 1:21:28Jordan B. Peterson?

  Of course.

• 1:21:28Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:21:29Jordan B. Peterson?

  Of course. So that's... The other thing that happens too is that... And this is, I think, the other side of the emotional landscape. So a specified and constrained aim reduces entropy. That's very... That's like, I think that's the crucial issue. But it also sets up the framework within which hope is possible. Because to the degree that hope is dopaminergically mediated, right? It's a consequence. See, Friston actually had a unified theory. He told me about this when I interviewed him. Because I had worked out the anxiety-entropy theory with my lab in a separate paper. But he said something that I didn't know at all. Dopaminergic pleasure is also an entropy-reduction phenomenon. And this is why it's so cool.

• 1:22:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  So imagine that you have your aim, your goal, and now you can compute the energy required to get there. Okay, now, the farther you away from their goal, the more uncertainty there is in the pursuit. Now, if you take one step toward your goal, and you do that successfully, you get a mark of positive emotion from that. That's a dopamine-ergetic kick, but that does indicate an entropy reduction.

• 1:22:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, both positive and negative emotion regulation are associated with entropy reduction.

• 1:22:43Speaker 00

  Oh, lovely.

• 1:22:44Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, no kidding. Well, that's a key thing to know when you're thinking, "Why are people so glued to their worldviews?" It's like, well, because their positive emotion is dependent on and the regulation of their negative emotion. It's like, oh, okay.

• 1:22:57Speaker 00

  And it's a positive feedback loop, because once you have your point of view on something, then, of course, we know about confirmation bias and other ways where you seek data that merely validates, and you ignore the data that speaks against it.

• 1:23:09Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, you can see that, given what we talked about with regard to perception, you can see why that's the case. Once I specify an aim, what I'm going to see are things that move me towards the aim.

• 1:23:20Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:23:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  That means the contradictory information not only is irrelevant, should be irrelevant. Like, if I'm trying to walk across the room, I shouldn't be attending to every potential obstacle that could conceivably exist.

• 1:23:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:32Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? I've already simplified things. So, the obstacles aren't even there.

• 1:23:37Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. By the way, which makes me want to come back to a point that you mentioned about socially seeing people as friends or foes. In fact, the way we see most people in the world are strangers. They don't need to worry about it.

• 1:23:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, exactly. Irrelevant. Most things are irrelevant.

• 1:23:51Speaker 00

  Exactly, most things are irrelevant.

• 1:23:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah. And thank God for that.

• 1:23:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. So, that's analogous here.

• 1:23:57Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, hallucinogens seem to blow that into pieces, by the way. That's what they do, is they ruin the relevance.

• 1:24:04Speaker 00

  They cause you to pay attention. Yeah, exactly right.

• 1:24:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, yeah. You pay attention, everything becomes relevant. So, that's the awe-inspiring element of the experience, but it's also very, very, very high entropy.

• 1:24:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:15Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right.

• 1:24:16Speaker 00

  And you know what I was gonna say? That also ties it back to another thing about maturation. Maturation, as, who is it? I think it was Fitzgerald who said, "Is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind at the same time." So, what we're trying to do is... To do always is get our our aim to reduce the entropy, our worldview. But you know, as we mature, we say, okay, look, it could be this. On the other hand, it could be that. And the ability to hold that and not have that, to have a slightly higher entropy and not have that be stressful to us. I don't know that I have a model.

• 1:24:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  That's not a bad, that's not a bad definition of a kind of a true confidence.

• 1:24:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:54Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right. Well, but it's also the, it is the model of sophisticated thinking. Because one of the, one of the things you do when you think is voluntary enter into a higher entropy state. Because to really think something through is to allow internal conflict to manifest itself. Everything, the different ideas you have are different manifestations of, of different aims. And so when you think, this is what we're trying to train people in university. It's like be resilient in the face of voluntarily confronted entropy, at least on the cognitive side.

• 1:25:28Speaker 00

  That's great. And maybe instead of think, we could call it something like reconsider. Because it's, I mean, there's a, I only say this because thinking is sort of a term that might have too much semantic weight on it.

• 1:25:39Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:39Speaker 00

  But reconsider, meaning, okay, I've already considered this. I know exactly how to think about it, low entropy. But now I'm going to reconsider this. I'm going to think about what if I, what if I'm wrong about this? What if it's a totally other bottle?

• 1:25:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Well, so there's also evidence, this is very cool too. There's evidence that if you do that involuntarily, the entropy state is higher than if you do it voluntarily. And the evidence is very profound. It's very profound. And so if you take a stance of voluntary confrontation with conflict, the stress consequence is much minimized over when it happens voluntarily. That's partly why exposure works in, in behavior therapy. So if you have someone who's traumatized and they're involuntarily exposed to a trigger, they get worse. But if they voluntarily expose themselves, they get better. Right? Even though the, you know, the stimulus, so to speak, is the same.

• 1:26:34Jordan B. Peterson?

  And I think it's, it has something to do with a high order meta narrative. Like the highest order meta narrative should be something like, I can contend successfully with.

• 1:26:46Jordan B. Peterson?

  Maybe with entropy, certainly with chaos. That's the sort of creature that I want to be, that I should be.

• 1:26:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:52Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. Because then when it comes up, you don't...

• 1:26:55Speaker 00

  You don't have a reaction to it. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:26:56Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:57Speaker 00

  Oh, that's interesting. And I imagine this comes up a lot because people are involuntarily confronted with their, let's say, their political views. Often, there's a whole social component to that, which is, "I'm getting challenged by this person, maybe in front of other people."

• 1:27:10Jordan B. Peterson?

  Oh, yeah, definitely.

• 1:27:12Speaker 00

  And so there's all this other stuff that comes into play.

• 1:27:14Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:14Speaker 00

  But if you get to sit in the piece of your own home and think, "You know, what if I'm wrong? What if the other parties point on this bill?"

• 1:27:21Jordan B. Peterson?

  What would that look like?

• 1:27:22Speaker 00

  What would that look like? Yeah, that's a much calmer situation.

• 1:27:24Jordan B. Peterson?

  Yeah, well, the social element of that is also an entropy issue, as far as I can tell, because imagine that... This took me a long time to parse through. So the higher you are in a hierarchy, social hierarchy, the lower entropy your state. Your connection networks are better, your shelter's better, your security's better. Like, that's all part of being higher in a hierarchy. Okay, now the question is, what gives you the right to that position? And the answer to that is something like the accuracy and your accuracy in view and your competence. Right? If it's a functional hierarchy.

• 1:28:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:00Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so now I come along and challenge you. Okay, so part of that, I'm going to cause internal distress in the manner that we described. But I'm also questioning the validity of your grip on the position in that hierarchy. So imagine a faculty meeting, where you make a presentation, or a professor makes a presentation, and a first-year graduate student stands up and issues a successful challenge. Now, some of that's ideational. And you might say, "Well, maybe he's got a better theory." But some of it is a challenge to the validity of the fact that you're higher in the hierarchy than he is.

• 1:28:33Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:28:33Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? And that, you know that's played out, right?

• 1:28:35Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:28:36Jordan B. Peterson?

  So, yeah.

• 1:28:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:38Jordan B. Peterson?

  So that's also an entropy issue, even the sociological element of it.

• 1:28:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I'm always interested in these old, you know, the physicists in the early 20th century. You know, Einstein was giving a presentation, and I'm afraid I forgot if it was... I think it was Heisenberg who challenged, a young kid challenged him, and Einstein said, "You know, I think you're right." And he went home and worked on the problem for five days and came back. But I'm just, you know, these stories of that kind of challenge. And Einstein had, you know, a very mature reaction to it.

• 1:29:06Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right, right. Well, that, I think a fair bit of the... What would you say the fundamental psychological necessity of something like hero mythology is the inculcation of the attitude that you just described as characteristic of Einstein? It's like, here's a challenge. It's like, I can handle that.

• 1:29:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:29:26Jordan B. Peterson?

  I don't have to get defensive. It's not going to throw me off. Maybe there's opportunity. That's the dragon and the treasure, by the way. Maybe there's opportunity here in this challenge. That's a very high-order match. It takes very high-order maturation to realize that. In every challenge, there's opportunity. Right?

• 1:29:43Speaker 00

  Excellent.

• 1:29:43Jordan B. Peterson?

  Right? And that's something you can practice. It's an attitude that you can practice.

• 1:29:46Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:29:47Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, we should stop this.

• 1:29:48Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:29:49Jordan B. Peterson?

  We're going to move to the Daily Wire side. What are we going to talk about on the Daily Wire side? I think we should delve more into your book. Can you have some ideas?

• 1:29:56Speaker 00

  Great. Well, yeah, my brain plasticity said we didn't talk about that at all, but I've got all kinds of cool stuff to talk about there.

• 1:30:01Jordan B. Peterson?

  Okay, so everybody who's watching, if you want to join us on the Daily Wire side for an additional half an hour, please feel free to do that. Apart from that, thank you very much for your time and attention. Thank you very much for coming here to Scottsdale today. Much appreciated and for teaching our course on the Peterson Academy, which has got a lovely trailer, which I think we're going to incorporate into this podcast, actually. And I know that the reaction to your course has been very positive so far, and so we're thrilled about that. You can catch that on Peterson Academy, by the way. Thanks for your time and attention, everybody.