Episode 47: Genetics and Universality (part 1): How Our Genes Influence Us

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Transcript

[00:00:13]  Blue: Welcome to the theory of anything podcast. Hey guys. Hello. We got cameo and Tracy here today. So, uh, before we even begin, I really, I owe an apology to Bart. We had that episode and really I’m going to have to give a me a culpa here because I, we, we published some false information that he has sent really strong refuting evidence that just, and I’m embarrassed. I’m embarrassed that we made a mistake this big. So remember we had the episode about big foot and the Loch Ness monster don’t exist here.

[00:00:44]  Red: Yeah.

[00:00:45]  Blue: He, he has, like, I really thought that was true. I swear I thought that was true, but he has sent me, you know, just incontrovertible evidence that, that they exist. One was, one was a picture of this monster in the lake. You know, I know it looks like it’s just CGI, but like he explained to me that in real life, the Loch Ness monster looks like CGI and I didn’t know that.

[00:01:08]  Red: So,

[00:01:09]  Blue: so like, there’s no way Bart’s like vetted this. There’s no way this is fake, right? Like locked his monster definitely exists. But that wasn’t, that wasn’t the worst one. He then sent me a picture of, I kid you not, like this is like totally authentic. It was big foot flipping the cameraman off on the backup Loch Ness monster.

[00:01:30]  Green: Yeah.

[00:01:32]  Blue: I mean, I mean, like who would think of that? Like I wouldn’t think of that. Like really seriously. No one would think of that, but the big, big foot himself. So that’s gotta be real. You know,

[00:01:43]  Red: incontrovertible.

[00:01:44]  Blue: I love it. All right. Yeah. It was hilarious. He keeps sending me quote evidence that, that they, they really do exist. So, uh, you know, we’ve offended the Loch Ness monster and big foot fans out there.

[00:02:03]  Red: Yeah. What a reach. I love it.

[00:02:04]  Blue: It may or may not have caused a rift between me and Bart, you know, there may have been death threats involved. Oh wow. Calling people that they have the, the brain of an aunt, you know, things like that may or may not have happened.

[00:02:19]  Red: So you’re recording from an undisclosed location today.

[00:02:23]  Blue: I am right. I don’t want Bart to find me, but I’m hoping the apology will work for him. Oh, it’s hope. Okay. So in our last episode, camea wasn’t here, but Tracy talked about narcissistic personality disorder and other mental disorders. And then she, she ended on a question that was a hard question. She, she asked, how do you reconcile mental disorders like this to the, to the concept of the existence of universal explainers. And I admitted upfront and I’ll repeat some of what I said that this really does pose a set of problems that need to be addressed. Now let’s keep in mind that it was only a few episodes ago that we talked about popper without refutation. And the whole main point I was trying to make was that there’s no such thing as a refuting piece of evidence per say what you really, if you mean the theory itself, what you really refute is a combination of the theory plus all sorts of tacit and explicit background knowledge. So yes, you can take something like narcissistic personality disorder and you can say that doesn’t fit with universal explainership. And you’re right. It’s a problem, but we don’t really know it’s a problem with the theory itself. What we really know is that it’s a problem with maybe the way we’re currently thinking of the theory or some sort of assumption that we’re making, maybe don’t even realize we’re making. That’s incorrect. What I’m going to try to do in this episode, and actually as is typical of me once I got going, it’s probably more than one episode.

[00:03:52]  Blue: I’m going to try to take a stab at giving Tracy a serious answer to her question insofar as I am capable of doing so, which maybe isn’t that far, but it is going to be a theory that’s actually got some empirical consequences and therefore is testable. Okay. And I think that it leads the path towards how to rethink of universal explainership in a way that’s stronger, that does not suffer from a lot of these problems. I can’t promise I can solve every problem as I can’t, but I think I can shed some light on a number of problems and therefore suggest how we might go about solving other problems. One of the main things that I want to emphasize here is epistemological, which is when I raise these sorts of problems with other fans of David Deutsch and people who believe in universal explainership, they give what can only gently be called ad hoc responses. Now an ad hoc response from Popper is, it’s a theory or an explanation that has no testable consequences, but the one thing it’s trying to, one problem it’s trying to eliminate ad hoc responses, ad hoc explanations do not count under Popper as solving the problem. It’s true that it feels like it solves the problem. You pop off this ad hoc response and then you feel like, see, I’ve resolved that problem. And this is the way human beings, when they’re not using Popper’s epistemology tend to think. And that’s why Jonathan Hyatt talks about the fact that we use different standards of evidence when we’re talking about something we want to believe versus something we don’t want to believe. When it’s something we want to believe, we ask, can I believe this?

[00:05:35]  Blue: When it’s something we don’t want to believe, we ask, must I believe this? Now that second one in particular, must I believe this? It’s an impossible standard to ever refute. Okay. Because as Popper put it, you can have ad hoc saves for the asking. They are the ultimate in easy to vary explanations. And if you start using them to defend your pet explanation, then there is literally no way to ever refute your explanation and your explanation effectively becomes irrefutable, completely non -empirical, non -testable. Because of that, Popper sets a methodological rule, you will never use ad hoc explanations. Now I’ve always felt he was too harsh on ad hoc explanations in a sense because ad hoc explanations might be correct. So it’s true that when you have an ad hoc explanation, you don’t count that as solving the problem. But it’s also true that it might be correct. And therefore you should start giving that ad hoc explanation serious thought as to how to turn it into a explanation that has other testable consequences so that it’s no longer an ad hoc explanation. In other words, they make good research programs. So ad hoc explanations are at once, maybe excellent research programs and also bad explanations that cannot solve a problem. If you understand this basic principle, a lot of the problems that happen with the way people abuse Popper’s epistemology go away. To put this somewhat straightforwardly, a lot of people who say they believe in Popper’s epistemology, what they really do is they believe in Popper’s lingo. They make an argument that they believe in and then they say, I’ve refuted your argument.

[00:07:12]  Blue: They use the language of Popper, but they don’t pay any attention to the actual methodology that Popper was talking about. Frankly, even the attitude Popper was talking about where we’re trying to break theories. We’re trying to find problems with theories because that’s where the knowledge comes from, which is why you shouldn’t get upset over a good theory like universal explainership. You shouldn’t get upset that it has problems because those are the source of future knowledge if we solve those problems. That’s how we will learn about universal explainership. So there’s a real desire to not gloss over the problems and you’re not allowed to anyhow under Popper’s epistemology. I gave the example of, I asked someone who believed in universal explainership the question, how do you explain psychopaths? And the response I got was, some people don’t learn good coping skills. I don’t doubt that’s true, but the problem is that the word psychopath almost just tautologically means a person with really, really bad coping skills that deals with life in completely destructive ways to everyone around them. So it didn’t really tell me anything. It had no testable consequences. It was definitely not a deep explanation with reach of the kind that we as Popperians are looking for. It also might be completely true, right? I’m not trying to downplay that it’s false. I’m just saying, don’t let yourself stop at an explanation like that. That’s barely the starting point. The next step is, what does that mean? What are the testable consequences? How can I turn that into a good explanation? Okay, so let’s start with David Deutch’s, he discusses the problems of explanationless studies in the beginning of infinity.

[00:08:47]  Blue: I don’t know if you guys remember this, but he says it is considered good science to conduct behavioristic experiments to measure the extent to which a human psychological state, such as say, loneliness or happiness, is genetically coded like eye color or not, such as a date of birth. Okay, that’s from page 316. He refers to this as behaviorism, which is quote, instrumentalism applied to psychology. Deutch points out that all the potential problems with such science are due to the lack of explanation. So for instance, and I’m paraphrasing, but this gets pretty close to the discussion that follows. He says, some people may rate themselves higher due to being pessimistic, and they can’t even imagine a better state. So you got someone who’s pretty unhappy, but they go, you know what, I’m an eight, you know, because I mean, nobody is really that happy, right? And so in reality, maybe they’re in absolute terms of three, but they rate themselves as an eight because they have such a pessimistic view of life that they figure they’re actually doing pretty well compared to most people. Somebody else might be an eight in absolute terms, whatever that means, we’re, you know, making that up, but they rate themselves a three. Why? Because they’ve bought into this crazy belief that they’re by chanting, they’re going to have some extreme future happy state that they’re going to reach so that they know they’re going to get to this really happy 10 in the future. So they must only be a three now. So even though they’re actually an eight, they rate themselves a three. And he goes through and he kind of shows why rating yourself a self -rating for an explanationless science like this really is problematic.

[00:10:17]  Blue: And he says, for these reasons, no behavioral study can detect whether happiness is inborn or not. Science simply cannot resolve that issue until we have explanatory theories about what objective attributes people are referring to when they speak of their happiness and also about what physical chain of events connect genes to those attributes. And then, and I love this example, he says using the same logic on slavery, we could have concluded in 1860 that saying 95 % of slavery is genetically determined and therefore beyond the power of political action to remedy. It’s from page 319. You know what, he’s spot on there, right? The way we talk about genetically determined today is often no better than exactly that example he just used with slavery, right? You could easily demonstrate that slavery is genetically determined. And in a sense it was, right? I mean, like with the right chain of events, it was, but it’s so misleading to say that, right? It’s just so far off from what you’re actually thinking. And then he says, okay, but wait, say the interpreters, immediately we can’t tell whether any genes code for happiness or part of it. But who cares how the genes cause the effect, whether by conferring good looks or otherwise, the effect itself is real. This is actually a pretty good objection that he’s raising and then he attacks the objection. And he says, the effect is real, but the experiment cannot detect how much of it one can alter without genetic engineering, just by knowing how. That is because the way in which those genes affect happiness may itself depend on knowledge.

[00:11:48]  Blue: For instance, a cultural change may affect what people deem to be good looks, and that would then change whether people tend to be made happier by virtue of particular, having particular genes or not. Nothing in the study can detect whether such a change is about to happen, page 319. First of all, let me just stop here just for a second. Are there any comments or questions or thoughts about Deutsch’s presentation up to this point?

[00:12:11]  Red: No,

[00:12:12]  Blue: I agree with him. Okay, so there’s nothing in what, nothing that Deutsch says that I disagree with even a little bit. Okay, he’s spot on across the board. Okay, but I can’t help but notice that those that read Deutsch are taking what he’s saying in directions that I don’t think are implied by the theory, sometimes not even a little bit. For example, a significant part of Deutsch’s fan base believes genes play no role whatsoever in psychology. And that also, and some of them even believe that all psychology, especially evolutionary psychology is just completely wrong. The fields are completely wrong. Some deny that feelings play any causal role at all in our actions. Now, this is really not what Deutsch said in the book. For instance, he does say that genes affect attractiveness. Okay, indirectly he is saying that, okay. Yes, it’s attractiveness within the context of specific cultural environment. But within that specific cultural environment, genes may very much affect your happiness because they affect your physiology and the culture in part determines what attractiveness is. So yes, genes actually can have an effect on your feelings, your ideas through that causal chain of events. So he’s not really denying that genes don’t affect us in the way some of his fans claim. Now he goes on to say, yeah, but that may change any time as knowledge changes. Okay, so that emphasizes the parochial nature of genetic influences, which I think is consistent with the way Deutsch looks at these sorts of things. Here’s the thing though, and I mentioned this in the last podcast to Tracy, is there really any doubt though that there have been whole lifetimes where something like physical attractiveness made a big difference in somebody’s life. The

[00:13:48]  Blue: truth is everyone who’s probably lived and died up to this point has lived in an era where what counts as attractive didn’t change that much in a lifetime. So genes within a specific cultural context might make a very big difference within a specific cultural context. I also can’t help but feel that Deutsch’s approach here is maybe a little too negative on what he’s calling explanationless science. When we do studies where we try to find a correlation between things, yes, there’s some real problems with that and I’m not denying any of Deutsch’s points, but I don’t think it’s bad. We have to start somewhere in a lot of cases and trying to understand correlations, especially if they’re unexpected correlations really is a good place to start. Furthermore, they often when we do tests like this, they end up helping us choose between explanatory theories or maybe they’re just nascent explanatory theories, ones that we haven’t put into words well yet and therefore they still play a role in science. Now, I was on Twitter once and David Deutsch was, and I really wanted to ask David Deutsch about quantum mechanics because quantum mechanics prior to Hugh Everett, Hugh Everett was the first one to explain the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics. So before him, quantum mechanics existed for many years and yet there was no explanation for it. Doesn’t that make quantum mechanics an explanationless science? Maybe even of the kind that David Deutsch is saying is wrong, that we shouldn’t be doing. So I really wanted to ask him about that. So I asked him on Twitter and he came back with what I thought was a really good answer.

[00:15:28]  Blue: He said that actually quantum mechanics, even if you only, even prior to Hugh Everett, even just if you’re just looking at the mathematics, that there’s already a tacit explanation built in. And you know what, he’s right. That was part of what convinced me that many worlds quantum mechanics was real is that as I started to understand what you could do with the mathematics and what they were saying, it started to become increasingly hard for me not to see it as mathematically describing a multiverse. And I couldn’t think of a way not to see it that way once I had understood the theory well enough. So I completely agree with him that even when you have an explanationless science, that it’s actually not. There really is no such thing as explanationless science. There’s still always a tacit explanation there. But the moment you accept that that’s true, you can’t really say that genetic theories of happiness are explanationless science. Okay, they are also tacit explanations. Now those explanations might be completely wrong. Okay, the tacit explanation. Hey, happiness is 50 % determined by the genes. There is a tacit explanation there. And it is that the genes code for 50 % of your happiness. Well, that is wrong. I have no doubt about that. Okay, we shouldn’t. It’s how do I explain this? The fact that they do the study is not wrong. The fact that they say it in such a bad way, which is what Dwight is talking about, that is a problem. But the reason why it’s a problem isn’t because it’s explanationless. It’s because it’s a wrong explanation. That they’re skating over all the causal effects that actually exist. That would actually turn it into a good explanation. And so they’re really putting forward.

[00:17:11]  Blue: And part of this isn’t the scientist fault. He points out the scientist say, no, I’m not saying that it directly codes for happiness. But man, by the time the media gets ahold of it and journalists start talking about it, that’s pretty much all it’s ever going to mean to a person. But we ought to not call that an explanation with science. We ought to call it a science with an explanation that is wrong. You know, it’s even refutable, right? That’s testable and refutable. So I want to suggest that there really are no such thing as explanationless explanations. And that we should instead think of all of them as being explanations. But in some cases they’re just tacit and they’re wrong. And we should call that out. We should say, no, when you say happiness is determined 50 % by the genes, your implication is, is that it’s happiness is coded 50 % by the genes. That can’t possibly be true because of universal explanation. Okay. Are you with me so far where I’m going with this?

[00:18:07]  Green: Yeah.

[00:18:08]  Blue: Okay. Now here’s something else though. And Deutsch doesn’t talk about this, but I feel like it really needs to get mentioned.

[00:18:13]  Unknown: So

[00:18:13]  Blue: Deutsch seems okay with the idea that eye color and height are determined by genes. But if you really want to stop and think about it, those aren’t really determined by genes either. Eye color and height, they’re going to, they’re, the genes play some massive role in it to the point where we say, Oh, these are determined by genes. And we kind of know what we mean, but really they’re determined by the genes and an interaction with the environment. If I give you really poor nutrition, you’re going to be short because I’ve stunted your growth. You know, as a child I’m saying, regardless of what your genes say, and it may well be that there’s knowledge that exists that will cause you to be taller, which, you know, that’s why different generations have been taller than past generations, regardless of what your genes say. Okay. So in a certain sense, nothing is directly determined by genes, not even physiology, not even the phenotypes. Now for me to say that though is so drastically misleading, and so we need it maybe to nuance this a little better. Okay. So we could say of phenotypes, no study today could show that such and such a gene codes for height because knowledge of better nutrition might affect that tomorrow. Nothing in the study can detect whether such a change is about to happen either. That’s exactly the same quote that Deutsch made about psychological traits. They’re just as true for physical traits. Well, not maybe just as true. They are also true for physical traits, maybe not equally so. So some parts of culture affect even phenotypes, even physical, physiological changes that are in part directed by genes. Furthermore, the reverse is also true.

[00:19:50]  Blue: Some parts of culture are stable for very, very, very long periods of time. We’re going to talk about something in either this or the next podcast called the Western Mark Effect. I won’t get into it for the moment, but it’s an alleged genetic effect that is a genetic effect that is why siblings and parents and children don’t become sexually attracted to each other. So the alleged effect of the Western Mark Effect, the idea is that as a child, anyone that you knew up through age, say two or three, or anyone that you know up through age two or three, if you’re past that age, basically the brain switches off sexual attraction for it. Never mind if this is a true theory or a false theory. The thing I want to emphasize here is that this is an example of the sorts of genetic effects that scientists today are looking at, and it is completely impossible to remove this genetic effect from culture because this effect, as it’s described today by scientists, completely relies on the fact that parents raise their children together and tend to have them kind of clump together close enough that they’re similar ages and things like that. These are cultural effects. And the Western Mark Effect, to say the Western Mark Effect is a genetic effect is not really true, but it’s not really false either. What it really is, is it’s a genetic effect that relies on a certain stable cultural mean, namely that parents raise their own children. Now, you could emphasize this and you could make a big deal about how this therefore isn’t a genetic effect. But you know what?

[00:21:22]  Blue: I don’t think there’s anything that could really in mass change the idea that parents are going to raise their own children anytime soon. I mean, this is a cultural effect that’s good that there’s been attempts to try to improve on it and none of them have even come close. There’s good reasons why this cultural effect is in place, has been in place for a very long time, and is probably going to be in place for a very long time in the future. Therefore, we have to, when we’re talking about genes, even when we’re talking about genes that are interacting with culture in some way, we have to understand that some culture is stable and should be stable for good reasons even. So if someone were to tell me that the genes encode for a lack of sexual interest in your siblings, I know at some level that’s not technically true because it’s actually through the existence of culture that that is true. But man, that is so approximately close to the truth that basically I don’t think there’s any difference between saying that and saying the genes encode for height, which is also not really technically true. So we have to be understanding of what people are getting at also. If somebody says the genes encode for this, they may not actually even mean that it’s some sort of exact direct coding, right? That’s just not the way people even talk about genes for the most part. So there’s some need for nuance in both understanding what the other side is saying and understanding what we mean as people who believe in universal explainers.

[00:22:45]  Blue: Furthermore, even what Deutsch is calling explanation of science, he’s talking about the problems with self -reported happiness that they aren’t the same as happiness. Is it really as bad as Deutsch is making it out to be? It really isn’t. And let me explain why. So yes, based on the examples that Deutsch gives, he makes a really compelling point that would be very hard to compare person to person as to their happiness based on self -reported happiness. Okay. So if I took Tracy and I had her rate herself, I took Cameo and had her rate herself, there’s really no way for me to know how they compare to each other based on their ratings. If Tracy says I’m a five and Cameo says I’m a seven, there could be enough difference in the way they rate themselves that I’ve really got no reason at all to believe that Cameo is happier just based on that one piece of information. And if that’s Deutsch’s point, then he’s completely right. But let’s say that I ask Tracy, hey, what are you now? And then I ask her in a year after she makes a bunch of changes, what are you now? Well, in terms of one person comparing themselves, self -reported happiness probably really does, is it probably a very meaningful statistic? And if you’d still don’t believe that, then we couldn’t even just, you know, imagine we did a drug and we asked people to rate themselves on scale one to 10 on what their happiness is. And then we see what the average increase is based on the use of this drug, which is how, by the way, real scientists do this, right? Because they understand that you can’t compare person to person easily.

[00:24:14]  Blue: This literally now, even though it still falls under the supposed explanation of science, it actually is starting to become quite meaningful. In fact, we could even just ask, is your life more livable than it used to be and be done? That would be very meaningful, even though we have no theory of qualia, even though we have no theory of happiness, I have to reject the extreme interpretation of what Deutsch is saying, where it means that all these studies are completely trash. It just isn’t true, right? It like literally is just wrong to claim that. Furthermore, over a population, one may be completely valid assumption is that a lot of the factors that cause differences in ratings will cancel out. So while you can’t compare Tracy and cameo together, a rating of one to 10 might be very meaningful over a study with a thousand people or something like that, right? There’s no real chance that, not much of a chance that one group on a certain drug that’s supposed to make you happier and then the control group, that everyone in the control group happens to rate themselves on a different scale that’s lower, right? I mean, that’s the whole point of doing the control group and having it be a randomly controlled trial and things like that is because a lot of these factors that Deutsch is talking about, then cancel out over a large enough group. So Deutsch also, so he talks about measuring smiles or whistling a happy tune. You can’t use those to measure happiness. And again, I completely agree. However, those are particularly bad examples, right? I

[00:25:47]  Blue: mean, he’s picking out examples where if you did a study based on how much someone’s smiling, I don’t think any of us would really take the study very seriously. Let’s try a different approach though. Let’s say that I do a study and in this study, instead of trying to ask people to self report happiness, I’m going to measure the following behaviors. Does the person have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning? Do they not interact with the people any more than they have to? Do they kind of sit and stare at walls all day and just can’t seem to find, you know, they seem fidgety all the time versus does the person get up and they’re excited in the morning and they go to work and they introduced themselves to everybody and they interact well and they’re making meaningful friendships with people at work. Would looking at these behaviors be meaningful if you had two groups that one was in the one group and one was in the other, would these be meaningful behaviors in your mind, guys?

[00:26:42]  Green: I would not. No. You would not. No, I don’t think those behaviors tell you anything, really, other than maybe how disciplined the person is about doing things.

[00:26:54]  Blue: You might be right. What if you’re doing it over a group of people though and you get one group that’s all one way and one group that’s all another, randomly selected?

[00:27:01]  Green: I still don’t think it would tell you very much.

[00:27:05]  Red: I think it would at least pique my interest if it was a massive group of people. To me, that would really catch my attention. Maybe at least I’d want us to be that further.

[00:27:14]  Blue: I think that any time you’re starting behavior, you’re going to bump into the exact same problem that Deutsch is raising, that for any one person, you can’t know. But if it were over a group, I would, that would really catch my attention.

[00:27:26]  Green: Yeah.

[00:27:26]  Blue: For one thing, because one of those sets of behaviors is specifically behaviors that we know go with depression, something that’s well studied that we already have somewhat of an explanation for. Whereas the other group of behaviors is stuff that’s known to not go with depression. So I intentionally selected both groups based on, in this case, behaviors that I knew correlated with a known disorder. Because if you’re just looking at them as just behaviors, I can see where cameo is coming from where that’s still a problem. But here we actually start to have an explanation now that we’re actually testing. So imagine that this happened cameo in context of a study as to whether or not a certain antidepressant drug worked. Okay. And that you find that one group overwhelmingly continues to struggle to get out of bed and they can’t seem to find anything they’re interested in. And the other group just doesn’t seem to have any problems like with that. They’re going out and they’re interacting with people. They’re getting up in the morning. My guess is, is that even that in context of a study for depression where we knew all these people were depressed going into the study, that you would probably find that somewhat meaningful in context of a study like this. Yes. I don’t think it would be conclusive proof of anything, but I don’t think it’s completely meaningless either. I can accept that. Okay. So in the reason why here, the trick I was using here is that it is tying into an existing explanation. If we’re just trying to do this randomly, then yeah, I can kind of see where cameos coming from. It’s just maybe this group of people just sort of prefers to, maybe they’re all

[00:29:06]  Blue: introverts say. And in fact, let’s say you knew that the groups were sorted into groups of introverts versus extroverts. These measures of behavior would probably be meaningless at that point, because now you have a different explanation that offers a different explanation as to why these two groups are different. So what I’m going to suggest then, by the way, I actually know of some actual studies along along these lines. So one of the things that often Jonathan Hyatt talks about this is they try to study like the effects of religion on people. And they consistently find that religious people self -report happiness higher than non -religious people. If you go over a large enough group and people have challenged that with good reason that, you know, what if religious people, they cosmically think of themselves as happier than maybe they just because they’re trying to promote their religion, they know they need to answer this study that they’re super happy to as a way of promoting their religion. I mean, like this is a completely fair criticism of these sorts of studies. So I happened to know that they did a study, they wanted to get to the bottom of that. So they did a study of well -being factors, things like similar to what I was just describing with this hypothetical depression study, right? They were looking at specific factors, amount of exercise, number of loving connections, amount of time spent with other people, things that you would tend to think would correlate with people whose lives are pretty good. And they found that just like to the same degree that people self -report higher happiness of their religious, they also self -report higher wellness factors if they’re religious.

[00:30:46]  Blue: Now, a criticism here might be the cause and effect is reversed, that religious people, they’re in a community. So of course they’re around more people. And so therefore they have higher wellness factors. But if you actually believe these wellness factors make a difference in people’s lives, which most of us do, then that would make sense that they would report higher happiness. So you still, and if that’s a natural effect of being a part of religion is that you are around more people and you have more social ties and that in turn affects your happiness. That’s not a bad study. Even if the cause and effect is reversed, the study actually was saying something meaningful. So we do have good reason to believe that self -reported happiness as a measure is not in all cases equally bad. Okay. There are cases where it would be bad, particularly if we’re trying to just look at two individuals, but they would, it would not be bad if we’re looking at one individual reporting on whether a medication worked for them or not, say, or if a certain practice worked for them or not, change in their lifestyle or something like that. And it would not be necessarily a bad measure. If we were looking over a nice randomly selected population in a study. So to Dwight’s point though, the media severely, severely abuses things like genetic studies and honestly probably on purpose. If you’re the news media, you like the idea that genes code directly for 50 % of happiness because that’s a tension grabbing headline that your happiness is determined by your genes and nothing in your life that you can do is gonna affect 50 % of your happiness, right?

[00:32:22]  Blue: That’s a news story worth reading if you’re like click baiting. So I think we’ve got good reason to believe that it’s not entirely the scientist fault, but I think that a great deal of it is is that’s just sort of the incentive that the news media has as of today. And so in so far as the way this, that is, let’s be honest, that is the way it gets reported in the news media. This is really just sort of a bad thing. And Dwight uses an example of why this is bad, which I love. He says, imagine you had people like at every door, at every door of a museum and they’re counting how many people go in and how many people go out. And so then you count at the end of the day, how many went in and how many went out. And surprisingly there’s a difference, positive or negative difference between the count. So you as an explanation of science, you report that there is, that three people spontaneously combusted inside the museum today or spontaneously were generated inside the museum today, depending on whether it was a negative or a positive. And as a scientist, you swear, you don’t mean literally people spontaneously generator combust. That’s just the term you happen to be using, you know, to describe the difference between the numbers, right? And so then the media picks it up and they go, it’s, you know, people inside this museum’s spontaneously generator combust says science. And of course this is all just completely absurd. So based on this, let’s kind of just summarize here.

[00:33:50]  Blue: So Deutsch implicitly accepts that genes can affect happiness by creating physiological changes such as physical attractiveness, at least in how they interact with current culture. Culture is always in flux, but it’s interesting that some cultural traits have never had an exception to date in any large scale society. There’s, if you go look up human universals, there are certain cultural traits that no large scale human society has ever violated. Now I should probably note that some of the things on the list have been violated by small scale human culture. Some of them have not. So just for example, one of the ones that is on the list of human universals is that men dominate public life, meaning that they hold a lot of the public positions of power. There’s been numerous cultures where in private life in the home, the woman’s considered the boss. And there’s been at least one culture I can think of that was small scale that considered itself a matriarchy. I don’t know that there’s any others that have ever existed. Certainly none of the large scale ones. It’s interesting that we have this pattern. Why does it exist? Now there may be a really mundane reason for that. One of the most obvious ones is that women bear a hugely disproportionate amount of the impact of pregnancies compared to men, right? So that may, I mean, like that alone may be a physical logical difference that’s caused by the genes that explains that sort of human, supposed human universal. There’s no reason why human universals so -called have to be universal forever. And that’s the point I would want to make here.

[00:35:24]  Blue: But we shouldn’t miss the fact that some cultural changes have been around for a very, very, very long time, thousands and thousands of years. And may not change anytime in the near future either. Let’s talk about physical attractiveness now. We all know that physical attractiveness, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And we all know about cultural things that affect attractiveness that don’t apply to all cultures. Famously, we use the examples of the women who wear the rings around their neck to make their neck long, their neck long, or wear shoes that strength their feet to tell where they’re disabled and they can’t walk. Those are often thrown out there as examples of beauty being held in the eye of the beholder. Maybe a more realistic example would be like every guy, my age that I know, back when I was in my 20s and dating, really preferred long hair on women. I can’t even conceive how finding long hair attractive could be anything but a cultural trait. It’s clearly that has to do with the fact that during that time period where men that age were growing up, women wore their hair long and men wore their hair shorter. And if you had every man and woman reverse that, you would almost assuredly find a group of boys that age that find short hair attractive instead. So I don’t think there’s any doubt that to some degree attractiveness really is just in the eye of the beholder. However, Stephen Pinker has quite a bit to say about this, that I actually think is a good set of challenges to this notion. And I mentioned some of these in the last podcast.

[00:37:01]  Blue: One of them is that several of the things that, the first two things I mentioned, the shrinking of feet and the long neck, there’s no real reason to believe those affect attractiveness, even in the cultures that they’re found. What they actually are, according to Stephen Pinker, is the way women of high status show off compared to women of low status. And that it’s actually a woman on woman thing. It’s got nothing to do with how men find attractive. So it’s probably a mistake to read too much into those as beauty is being in the eye of the beholder. The example of long hair I think is a better example. Let’s consider though that symmetrical faces are considered to be more attractive. They also happen to be a sign of genetic fitness. Now that can’t just be a coincidence, or if we didn’t want to say it was a coincidence, that would be a bad explanation. Why is it that we stably across societies, across time find symmetrical faces attractive? And that happens to also be a sign of genetic fitness. Any explanation you want to come up with for this, that doesn’t reference the genes as playing a causal role in this is going to have an explanation gap. And so really the right explanation, the good explanation that we’re looking for is going to somehow explain why the genes want us to prefer symmetrical faces as a sign that this person has good genes and therefore they’d be a good person to make with. You’re going to find that there’s a whole bunch of these where there are certain traits that are found attractive across cultures, across time, and aren’t changing anytime soon.

[00:38:37]  Blue: And that they actually do line up with signs of fitness or fertility. So let’s say that you took, I mentioned this one in the last podcast, if you take a bunch of tribal men and you ask them, I mean, have them pick out, you know, which are the attractive women or girls that are in this tribe? Okay, they’re going to pick out certain women or girls and say, these are the attractive ones. If you go take pictures of all of these same women or girls and take them over to Europe and you show them these pictures of these women and girls and then say, what are the attractive ones? The modern men pick exactly the same girls as the tribal men. Okay, despite drastic differences in culture. Furthermore, what they end up picking out is basically youth and beauty. So in terms of, and this is the theory that gets thrown around for people who believe that genetics does affect this, they’ll point out that let’s say that the ideal age for, I don’t know what the actual ages are, but let’s say the ideal age for fertility is like 23, that a woman’s at her most fertile at age 23. We wouldn’t expect that to be the age that men find most attractive. We would actually expect it to be a little younger than that because a woman who’s age 19 is going to be 23 someday, whereas a woman who’s 23 is not going to be 19. So what we would expect in terms of genetic fitness is that men would find a certain age group the most attractive and it would be a little bit before when women are their most fertile.

[00:40:06]  Blue: And that’s exactly what you find when you do these studies is that it’s the girls that are of a certain age and it happens to be exactly the ones that would match up with that theory of evolutionary psychology. Again, this is something that you can test and we didn’t even know that that’s what to expect until we had evolutionary psychology. A lot of people thought that what men would find attractive would be that they were the most fertile. They hadn’t thought through what the genes would find the most attractive. If you’re going to have an explanation for why this is that doesn’t reference the genes, you’re going to have an explanation gap. You have to include the genes somewhere in that explanation, somewhere in that causal process, where you’ve got a problem. There’s other things that are good signs of this. There are certain cross -cultural aspects of beauty that have huge overlaps with traits that in an ancestral environment would have lined up with future fertility like this. The idea of larger firm breasts or blonde hair, smooth skin, hourglass curves, all of those happen to be signs of either youth. This whole idea of men prefer blondes and that a lot of people who believe in genetics affecting beauty will point out that this makes perfect sense if blondes are also age 19 and younger. Of course, they’re not as wise as brunettes. Also, that would be a sign of future fertility just based on age. A lot of these things, they line up well with what the genes would want us to find attractive.

[00:41:36]  Blue: Therefore, if you’re going to try to entirely make this, and I’m not doubting that this is culture, there’s definitely this huge cultural impact, but you have to explain that culture, you have to reference the genes somewhere, you’ve got an explanation gap. The other one that often comes up is the overweight female statues, where they would in the past make these statues of the ideal woman from their era and we think of them as fat. Pinker points out that if you dress them up, gave them modern clothes and makeup and stuff that everyone today would have, that these women would actually be considered very attractive even today. We’re comparing them to our supermodels is what we’re trying to do. These supposedly overweight women, they’re really not that overweight, they’re really quite curvy. They have the hourglass shape, which is a strong sign of fertility. They would probably have no problem getting dates. They’re not really unattractive by today’s standards. Based on all this, the point I’m trying to make is at once, yes, of course it’s cultural and it’s probably even primarily cultural, okay? But it’s a mistake to try to not understand how the genes play a role. The genes have to play a role or you have an explanation gap and therefore a bad explanation. What we really want to know is we want to know how the genes are affecting it. How do the genes amongst everything cultural that we decide is attractive, much of which is clearly just arbitrary, like length of hair. How do the genes happen to insert into that list consistently a group of traits that lines up with future fertility and genetic fitness? Maybe we don’t know the answer to that, right?

[00:43:14]  Blue: That may be something we want to understand, but we don’t want to brush it off. We want to understand. We want an explanation that explains that in a deep, testable way, okay? So, George’s implicit example of physical attractiveness affecting happiness. Indirectly, here’s the thing. It does not violate universality because the genes creating a physiological difference and then interacting with cultural traits that happen to, at least so far, be stable over time. None of that violates universality and yet we still have a case where the genes could affect your happiness through your physical attractiveness. So, we now have a straightforward example of how the genes can impact ideas and personality without violating universality, specifically through physiological differences that then interact with stable culture, so far stable culture, culture that is stable up to this point, leaving open the possibility that it could change in the future as we gain more knowledge. Could the genes, so here’s the question that you really should be asking. What could the genes do to make our interests match theirs that would not violate universality? We already now have one case, one that even Deutsch is admitting to. Are there others? Or is this the only one? So, let’s formalize this into a testable theory. The testable theory is the genes can control physiology and that in turn impacts our personality and ideas via interaction with existing and sometimes stable culture. So, an example of this, I don’t know if this one’s actually true or not, but let me throw it out there as an example, even if it’s false, this is an example of how it could have worked. Let’s say that smaller people feel more fear and anxiety than larger people.

[00:44:55]  Blue: That would be a fairly reasonable thing to be true. I don’t know if it’s true or not. We could measure it though. It would be testable. We could go out and we could test, do small people, people that are smaller, do they feel on average across the population more fear and anxiety than a group of people that is larger? That may be true, it may not be true. If it was true, it wouldn’t be that surprising though, because a person who’s larger, if you got some big giant beefy guy, he probably isn’t afraid of that many other people. So it would make sense that that physiological change may be able to affect personalities to some degree. Now, let’s take a look at the fact that women are, according to texashealth.org, women are twice as likely to be diagnosed with anxiety disorder and the prevalence of anxiety disorder is significantly higher for women, 23.4 % than for men, 14.3%. Now, maybe we want to explain that. One possible explanation, I don’t know this is true, but this is a testable explanation, so it’s worth exploring, is that women are on average smaller than men. So if that were the reason why women felt more anxiety on average than men, which it may not be, but let’s explore it. What we would want to do is we want to set up a test where we factor out height differences and size differences. We’d want to see if women are still showing signs of higher anxiety disorders, even if you factor out the size of the person. Now, my guess is, is that if you did this, you would probably find there is some result there, but it doesn’t explain it all.

[00:46:28]  Blue: Maybe it doesn’t even explain most of it for all I know. But it wouldn’t be too surprising if it did. That would be an example still of genes making a difference in one’s personality through physiology. This is the example that Deutsch has no problem with. Now, obviously this could change as culture changes. We could learn to treat people differently. We could learn to reduce violence to where size doesn’t matter as much. Physical size doesn’t matter as much. We could make a society where that genetic difference disappears because the physiological differences that were leading to it through interaction with culture disappears. So here’s my question, though. Is this the only way in which genes could impact our personality and ideas without violating universality? In fact, let’s go a step further. Let’s, let’s conjecture. This is the only way that genes could impact our personality and ideas without violating universality. We now have a testable aspect to this theory, and we now have a basis for trying to refute it. This is the appropriate way to try to go about answering these questions. At this point, I’m now ready to introduce the main topic of this podcast, which is my told Tracy that I had read a book by Barbara Oakley and it’s called Evil Genes. While Rome fell, Hitler rose and Ron failed and my sister stole my mother’s boyfriend. Now I read this book long before I read David Deutsche’s books. And it contains a lot of the, it’s a collection together, the author Barbara Oakley. She’s collecting together a lot of the studies that exist around how genes impact our personalities in terms of disorders like the ones Tracy’s asking me about, including narcissistic personality disorder.

[00:48:11]  Blue: Her emphasis was more on Machiavellian nature, sort of like a borderline personality disorder, but more mild. The person causes lots of problems in other people’s lives. They seem to us to be just very Machiavellian in how they act towards others, but they probably never get diagnosed with anything because they, their symptoms aren’t severe enough that people kind of forced them to go in and get help. So they may spend their whole life. And this is what she calls the Machiavellian nature. It may be a collection of other disorders, narcissistic personality disorder or borderline disorder, but they’re good enough at dealing with life that the, never really occurs to them. I’ve got a disorder. I need to go get help. And this is the book that she’s trying to write about and how the genes influence this. Now I suspect most fans of David Deutsche and people who believe in universal explanorship would find this book pretty offensive because it is making the claim that genes play an important role in these personality disorders, that they affect what a personality is like. And on the surface, that seems to violate the idea of universality, just like Tracy was wondering about when she asked me about it. But this is also the best science on the subject. This is why we want to start with what we find in the current studies. We want to see what they’re finding and we want to see how can we look at this and how can we take the idea of universal explanorship? How can these be merged together in a way that’s coherent without just explaining it away without just saying, oh, it’s all bunk because that just doesn’t work. Right.

[00:49:47]  Blue: A lot of these are, they’re finding real replicable studies that show actual repeatable consequences. You know, you can’t just throw it all away. We need a deeper explanation of that. So in that book, Douglas Macy, a Princeton sociologist writes, motionality clearly preceded rationality in evolutionary sequence. And as a rationality developed, it did not replace emotionality as the basis for human interaction, rather rational abilities were gradually added to pre -existing and simultaneously developing emotional capabilities. Indeed, the neural anatomy essential for full rationality, the prefrontal cortex is a very recent evolutionary innovation emerging only in the last 150,000 years of a 6 million year existence, representing only 2.5 % of humanity’s total time on Earth. This is from page 187 of that book. What’s in plain English? What is Douglas Macy saying here? So first of all, when he talks about 6 million years of humanity’s existence, clearly he’s talking about not homo sapiens, which have not been around for 6 million years, I’m pretty sure, but the various homo, whatever species that have existed in the past that are part of the same genus, the prefrontal cortex emerged in the last 150,000 years. But furthermore, the brain actually has kind of three main parts. And we’ll talk about parts of the brain in a second that somewhat misleading sometimes, but not in this case. There’s something called like the brain stamp. And the brain stamp has got really basic functions. Some of them they’re starting to find are related to emotions. Generally, we usually have seen the limbic system as responsible for emotions. That’s the next part up, but the brain stem is responsible for like making your heartbeat and keeping you breathing.

[00:51:36]  Blue: If you remove like a cat’s, all of its brain except for its brain stem, it will still behave very cat -like. There’s enough intelligence and knowledge baked into the brain stem that even when you remove the rest of the brain, the basic functions of that animal stay intact. They can do some fairly amazing things that you would have thought was impossible. Some animals only have brain stamps, you know, lizards or something. Brain stamps are full brains in a sense. So we first evolved the brain stem, then we involved a limbic system. A limbic system famously is the basis for emotional feelings and things like that. And so that’s like the second stage of evolution. And then finally at the end, you get the cortex, which is generally equated with neuroscience with intelligence. So, you know, there you start getting the higher animals have cortexes and then the humans have the largest cortex and then they have the prefrontal cortex, which is the one that is the most in neuroscience associated with rational faculties. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. There’s probably a lot of questions around this, but that is the existing scientific theory that exists today from neuroscience. Universal explainership would be software running in the cortex. So it would have nothing to do with the limbic system or the brain stem. And this makes sense because the animals that have those, they’re the less intelligent animals and they don’t have any sorts of universal explainership, right? No animal does. We know there’s from burn, there may be a few animals that have a kind of a jump in between, but really no animal has universal explainership.

[00:53:08]  Blue: So it makes sense when we talk about parts of the brain, first we can talk about these three different levels of evolution that existed. And the important thing here is that even those of us that have a prefrontal cortex and that are capable of universal explainership, we still have the lower animal parts too. We have the limbic system. We have the emotional motionality that animals have. And it’s a faster system. It interacts. When we have stuff happen to us in the world, our emotional system kicks in first at a faster rate. And we react based on the brain stem and the limbic system first and only later does the rationality from the neocortex kick in. And that happens at a much slower pace. It’s a slower process. Only later can we then engage our rationality. So, and that’s the part that would develop last. So this is actually an important thing to understand for the explanation that I’m going to be building here, is that we’ve got good reason from neuroscience to believe that emotionality pre -existed universal explainership. Now, I know that’s one of the things that do we shouldn’t fans claim is wrong, but I’m just laying out the neuroscience as it exists today. And we all kind of know about this. Like we know that when somebody kind of, you know, attacks us at work or something, we have this kind of initial emotional reaction against it. And you’re kind of just out of control at first. And then you go away and you think about it. And, you know, one of two things happens either you end up using your rationality to justify your emotional reaction.

[00:54:44]  Blue: This is something Jonathan Hyatt brings up, or you stop and you think about it and you go, you know, I’m really, now I got a chance to think about it. They made some good points. And especially if you’re trained yourself to do this. And then your rationality comes into play. We know that this part of neuroscience matches very well with actual human experience. In other words. So we have two types of processing. Emote control and deliberation. So quoting global and low steam from the book. Emote control is fast, but largely limited to operating according to evolved patterns. So deliberation is far more flexible. It can be applied to almost any type of task or problem. Universal explanation. One might encounter, but comparatively slow and laborious. Deliberation involves what psychologists call controlled processes that involves step by step logic or computations and are often associated with a subjective feeling of effort. Emote control is the default mode. While deliberation is invoked in special circumstances. Okay. So key point. Not only are emotions and rationally different parts of the brain, but rationality only engages in special circumstances. And rational thought is not our default way of thinking and acting because it’s slower. So now we’re going to talk about, we got three parts of the brain that we’ve talked about so far, the cortex, the limbic system and the brain stare of the limbic system. The book says it’s a far older area in evolutionary terms, nestled deeper than the brain, the main component of the limbic system, the amygdala, the thalamus and the hippocampus. Most emotions are born in the limbic system along with our appetites and urges, even though this part of the brain is below our level of awareness.

[00:56:14]  Blue: This is something I want to come back to later. It’s constant feeding of impulses to the conscious. Quortal areas profoundly affects us. Page 183. So these three parts of the brain are not interchangeable. So Dennis Hackathall, who we’ve had on this show, he wrote a book trying to summarize a lot of the dutching views on this. He claims there’s no such thing as parts of the brain, but there’s no such thing as parts of the brain. And if we’re universal explainers, and if universal explainers allow us to rewrite our ideas, then it doesn’t actually matter what parts of the brain there are. We can use them in different ways. And there’s even evidence that this is true, because if you have somebody who’s born with half a brain, they’ll develop full intelligence with half a brain, with just one hemisphere because that one hemisphere is universal and it can rewire to do everything. Here’s the problem with that, though. That statement’s all true, but it’s talking about the cortex. It’s not talking about the limbic system or the brainstem. If you’re born without a brainstem, your cortex is never going to form and do the same stuff that the brainstem would do. In fact, you’re dead on arrival without a brainstem, because your heart’s not pounding and you’re not breathing. So when we talk about there being no parts to the brain, I’m going to give Dennis some credit, but he’s talking specifically about the cortex, not the limbic system or the brainstem. So the lower parts of the brain are the animalistic parts. They do not run the general intelligence algorithm. They have nothing to do with it. They are related to emotions.

[00:57:41]  Blue: By the way, this is one of the reasons why we have some good reason for neuroscience to believe that animals probably do have emotions. The argument you can make against that was the quote I just gave above, where it’s often not at a level of awareness. So in a future episode, I will try to tease that out better, but I’m just kind of calling it out now. The parts of the brain where you feel emotions, they’re not the cortex. Okay, that’s something that neuroscience knows. So this is one of the, so let’s concentrate on just the cortex now. So the cortex also has parts. However, the parts are a soft pattern rather than a hard coded pattern. This is where Dennis’s argument is right, but not entirely right. I mentioned that if you lose half your brain at birth, the one hemisphere remaining will simply wire itself up. You’ll be a normal level of intelligence, although like half your body will be paralyzed. And that’s because the cortex has a soft pattern, not a hard pattern, but it does have a really consistent pattern. So we don’t want to just throw out the idea of parts of the cortex just because we know it can be rewired. There’s this pattern that exists in real life that needs an explanation. Why is it that there are almost always certain parts, you know, with some exceptions, there are certain parts of the brain that exist in the cortex that do certain types of functions. Why is that? And why are they physically located in the same place so often? Any explanation that doesn’t explain that is going to have an explanation gap and is there for a bad explanation.

[00:59:13]  Blue: So we want to take these idea of parts seriously, but we’re going to admit that it’s a soft pattern, not a hard pattern. Okay. So parts of the cortex, part one, the orbital frontal cortex, according from the book, is designed to inhibit inappropriate actions. This allows us to set up our, to set aside our urges and put off immediate reward in favor of a long -term advantage. It plays a significant role in controlling impulsivity. A dysfunctional orbital frontal cortex, they propel a person willing nearly towards explosively impulsive behavior. Okay. The next part, the nearby dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is where plans and concepts are held and manipulated. People with slight problems in their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex appear to act normally. However, they may confidently even arrogantly draw bizarre and irrational conclusions. The ventral medial cortex is located near and has very dense connections with an area completely separate from the cerebral cortex, which is known as the limbic system. The limbic system composes the subconscious parts of the brain where emotions are born. The ventral medial cortex therefore allows us to consciously experience our emotions and helps link conscious to unconscious thought. Depressed people who find no meaning in anything, they do often have inactive ventral medial cortices. On the other hand, bipolar individuals in acute manic phase who find meaning in everything they do have hyperactive ventral medial cortices. Problems with the ventral medial cortex can lead to subtly irrational behavior. By the way, I want to point out why that this one gives us a pretty good reason why a soft pattern has to exist. The ventral medial cortex could be wired to the limbic system somewhere else, but it really should be wired to be near the limbic system.

[01:01:02]  Blue: So there’s a good reason why the brain would choose a soft bill. The genes would choose a soft pattern of praying the brain where the ventral medial cortex is near the limbic system because it has to be wired to it. It doesn’t want to make the wiring any further than it has to. That might in part explain why a soft pattern does exist inside the brain, even though in theory, these parts of the brain could in theory be interchanged. The interior siglet cortex, I don’t know if I pronounced that right, helps us to focus our attention and tune into thoughts. As such, this area of the brain is related to the ability to focus on boring, difficult or unpleasant subject matter. Dysfunction here may inhibit ability to focus on something one does not wish to hear. It also plays a role in helping to make new memories permanent and producing feelings of empathy. So we have these four different, so we have the three parts of the brain evolutionarily speaking. And then we have in the cortex, these four parts that we’re talking about. And notice that each one of those, if you, if they become disabled in some way, if they become problematic physically, that you end up with irrational behaviors. So it would appear that universal explainer ship. In some sense requires that all these parts are working correctly. This is something I’m going to come back to later when we talk about insanity. There are these parts process different types of things. They’re not completely interchangeable once the pattern’s been laid out. They are interchangeable before the patterns laid out and the brain can, the genes can create these parts in different parts. But sometimes it’s just a little bit of a

[01:02:39]  Blue: By the way, if you’re familiar with the idea that left brain is logical and right being is brains creative. That is not really true. But it comes from the fact that we know that there are certain parts that tend to be on the left or right hemispheres of the brain. In most people, but it’s not 100%. Sometimes it’s flipped. One of them is that the left side of the brain almost always is the part that learns language. And if like for a split brain patient, we’ve talked about this in past episodes. If you split the brain of the hemispheres of the brains, they can’t communicate. You can send a message to the right side of the brain, which can read. But you, but it can’t talk because only the left side has the language ability and then you can get the right side of the brain to go do something like you tell it, get up and walk across the room. It gets up and walk, walk across walks across the room. The left side of the brain was never shown that message. You then ask the person, why are you walking across the room? And the person says, oh, I wanted to go get a Coke. And they spontaneously right there come up with an explanation for their behavior. So that the reason why you can do all that is because there’s a soft pattern that the language centers will appear on the left side of the brain. But if you don’t have a left side of the brain, you can still learn language. And some people it’s flipped. So this is a soft pattern, but these parts do matter once they have come into existence.

[01:04:03]  Blue: If you destroy them, you lose your language ability. Now here’s an interesting example of a genetic effect. And this now I’m going to now test the theory that only physiological changes can affect personality and ideas. It’s a syndrome called William syndrome. It might be coined anti, anti psychopath. It’s perhaps according to the book, the most endearing of all diseases. Those afflicted are very polite and sociable, show great empathy and are completely unafraid of strangers. Now here’s the thing that’s interesting about this disorder. This is again quoting from the book. A train geneticist can instantly pick out the upturned nose, wide mouth, full lips and the long distance between the nose and the upper lip of a William syndrome child. Such children often have heart or blood vessel problems as well as dental and kidney abnormalities. So this disease is caused. So this is a disease that affects personality, but it also has physiological effects that can’t explain the effect of personality. Okay. What causes disease? Well, we know that neuroscience knows enough that we’ve done studies that we’ve got a good theory, testable theory as to what this is. The disease is caused by the loss of a tiny snippet of roughly 21 genes on chromosome, chromosome seven. It appears the missing snippet is composed of patterning genes that tell the brain how to grow. In Williams patients, the ventral area of the brain goes into overdrive. The excessive growth directs these patients towards hypersociality and rich ability to process emotions, even as they are left struggling with dorsal related concepts of numbers and spaces because the, the ventral area over grew, not leaving as much space for the dorsal area that does numbers and spaces.

[01:05:56]  Blue: Now this is an example here where we have the genes affecting personality and behavior, and we know it’s the genes because it has physiological aspects to it of how that person even just looks. So this, this refutes the idea that physiology is the only way that genes can impact personality and ideas. If you want to save this theory versus an ad hoc save, you could always do that. You could always come with some way to do that, but that would violate critical rationalism at. So at this point, the idea this, we have now come up with a second way that the genes can affect personality and behavior. That’s got nothing to do with physiological changes. And it is this. So point number two, the genes can control how we grow the various parts of the cortex. And since those affect our ability to think, they affect our personality development as well as our interests. And the example would be William syndrome. So I anticipate an objection here. Doesn’t this conflict with universality? And this is kind of in a nutshell what Trace’s question was to me at the end of last episode. So after all, we just said that a person with Williams syndrome, they’re bad with numbers and spaces, but good with people. But if this is true, then isn’t, doesn’t that mean there’s a barrier to these people learning numbers so they aren’t universal? Thus universality is refuted, correct? I’m going to argue that that is wrong. And here’s why. So this one is a little difficult to test. So I can understand and remember, if we can’t come up with a good testable theory, then we have to consider this a legitimate problem.

[01:07:25]  Blue: And so I’m not saying it’s not a legitimate problem, but I’m going to try to offer a right now ad hoc explanation that I think could be fairly easily developed into a good explanation. So imagine something like this, that a person with William syndrome has fewer neurons attached to the parts of the brain, whatever that means, that make math and space easier to process, perhaps attached to older animalistic, animalistic modules that help you understand space. I mean, clearly animals understand space well. So we wouldn’t necessarily expect that to be a lot of our spatial abilities to come from the cortex and from rationality. We’d expect some of it to come from just our basic animal nature that is in the lower parts of the brain. So let’s just say that that is true. It’s got fewer neurons attached. It doesn’t have as much access to those modules, or maybe it just lights up less for those sorts of things. So there’s a lack of interest. So the person could in theory, learn space and numbers as well as anybody else. But because they’re so interested in humans and empathy and sociability, they just don’t ever get much practice with space and numbers. The net result would be measurable over a population, but it still wouldn’t be genetic destiny for any one individual. So given sufficient time and interest, if any Williams syndrome person could in principle, they could learn any kind of math that they could pass. They could learn anything that we, anyone else could do. So this would then not be a counter example to explanatory universality.

[01:08:59]  Blue: What it would do though is it would, it would show that not everybody’s going to learn math because the genes can affect your interest in math. And I don’t think very many Deutschians would argue with me over that though, that we do have very different interests and those interests make a giant difference in what we choose to learn. And over time, we end up with drastically different abilities in different areas because of those interests. My kids, I have four kids and the first one’s not an artist. The second one, when he was a little kid, he was so, he was autistic. So he was really patient about putting art together. I came home one day and he had, there was these 3D models that this little tiny kid had created, you know, like barely a toddler, right? Beyond a toddler maybe, but you know, aged two or three or something. And it included a droidaca from Star Wars that was a 3D model made from paper and it would roll up and turn into a rolling ball. And there was no way in my mind, a kid that young could do that. So I said, looks like mom’s been playing with, you know, Mikey, making these, she goes, nope, he did it himself. And I was like in shock. Now it turns out he just was obsessed with getting it right. He spent all day practicing over and over until he got exactly the effect he had in his mind. From that point forward, he did that over and over again.

[01:10:25]  Blue: And at first it was really hard for him, but due to the extra practice, he became very artistic and it was just a matter of, he had some sort of interest in wanting to make these little models that led to him drawing, to him being a good artist. Well, the next child down, who’s my first girl, Melissa, she saw Michael doing art and she thought to herself, well, I can do that too. So she started to draw and she would watch him do it and she would be convinced she could do it too. And she was terrible at it at first, just as all kids are, but she practiced every single day and this became an interest due to her seeing Michael do it. And soon Michael moved on to something else and she continued to do it. To this day, she’s now in college and she is studying to be an artist in college and she’s very, very, very good at art. Well, the next child down, also a girl, idolized her big sister and anything her sister did, she could do too. So she started to draw every single day because her big sister drew every single day. So she became an artist. You can see how Michael’s autism changed his interests and then the other two girls, the other two children, the two girls, they didn’t have any genetic predisposition towards art necessarily, but in a certain sense, his genes affected his artistic interest but also affected theirs as part of the extended phenotype. Because of culture, because they existed inside a family, they were around each other.

[01:12:06]  Blue: The only child who never really learned to draw well was the first one because he didn’t have any natural disposition to do what his younger siblings were doing, culturally speaking. So you can see how there’s this interesting play between genetics, how they can affect interests. And so that’s why I think William syndrome probably does not in any way violate universality, but it still shows us how genes could play a gigantic role in how the parts of the brain get laid out and therefore what we find interesting.

[01:12:37]  Green: It’s actually a really fascinating way to look at it. Yes. Because I can see how, were it not for that autism in him, your girls might not have ever had had art as part of their lives. That’s right.

[01:12:52]  Blue: It’s really fascinating. It is. And how such a little thing can make such a big difference. But that also shows how the genes only have to affect some little thing to make a big difference, as long as it’s affecting them at a young enough age. We’ll get to that here in a second. By the way, there’s good evidence. There’s a, there’s a belief it’s widely believed amongst particularly like computer scientists and neuroscientists that the, that the neocortex is a single algorithm. Physically speaking, it all looks very uniform. So while there are parts of the brain that in particularly related to how their wire does some of the lower parts of the brain, and they do seem to have physical modules that exist. That’s why the brain can in theory rewire those parts to somewhere else is because the, the cortex actually is in some sense universal. It can do any sort of what’s necessary for the cortex, or at least that’s the current belief in theory. This is maybe not as strong a theory as some of the other theories I’ve mentioned, but it’s something that is widely believed at this point. And it comes up in even just machine learning classes. I mean, it’s something that you hear a lot about if you’re in the fields that I’m interested in. Okay. So going back to evil genes. She gives an example. She says, let’s say that. So this is about how genes affects things. Let’s say that you randomly gather a group of older children of normal intelligence who are poor readers. If you analyze the group carefully, you might find that some kids have poor home environment or have disadvantaged schooling based on the twin studies you would find.

[01:14:27]  Blue: So the twin studies is where they have twins separated, identical twins separated at birth. So you’ve got this rare chance to be able to see how much genes actually affect personality, ideas, IQ, things like that. Okay. Because you’ve got entirely different families raising these kids. And you know, what, what do we find is common between them? We can ascribe that to the genes. Okay. At least that’s the theory. So the twin studies, you would probably find that there is also evidence of a slight genetic component that affects whether they’re a poor reader or not. So now let’s say you ask your poor readers. So these are children of normal intelligence, but they’re poor readers and there’s a slight genetic component, but it’s mostly determined by environment culture. But now let’s say you asked your poor readers to read the answer to a simple question. Do the words fruit and boot rhyme? You find that the kids would automatically sort themselves into two groups, irrespective of school. One group of kids would answer the question easily while the other group would struggle. If you then analyze each of these groups separately by drawing on the twin studies, you would find something very different from the first analysis. The children who easily understood the fruit and boot rhyme would probably show that their reading ability was substantially influenced by their environment, but the group who had trouble seeing the rhyme would show considerable genetic evidence for their reading disability. Okay. Now, why is this? Well, this is because, or continuing the quote, some of the children who had trouble with the unusual rhyming pattern were dyslexic and dyslexia has a strong genetic component, page 56 and 57 from evil genes.

[01:16:05]  Blue: So let me take this example and let me put this into, explain this simply. Overall reading ability would only be a bit, quote, determined by the genes, whatever that means. We’ve already criticized even just saying that because it implies things that aren’t true. And yet I’ve also said we should do studies like this because they’re meaningful. This is an example of why they are completely meaningful. So they’re under how we currently determine that they’re only a little bit determined by the genes. But the moment you sort the kids by the rhyme scheme, it’s mostly determined by the genes, overwhelmingly determined by the genes. And the reason why is because dyslexia has a large genetic component. Now, would the idea of dyslexia being genetically determined pose a problem for universality? No, it would not. And here’s why. Because dyslexia is not related to intelligence. It’s related to perception. Second, we know that dyslexic people can overcome their dyslexia with their intelligence. If they’ve got the right knowledge and they’re trained in the right ways and they’re going to work at it. A dyslexic person can read, learn to read normal, normally. I have a kid in church. I teach classes sometimes and sometimes the classes for the kids. There was a kid in one of the classes who was dyslexic. And what he would do, you would ask him to like read from the Bible or something. And he would recognize the first letter. He would read the words he could read. And then he would get to a word he couldn’t read.

[01:17:43]  Blue: He would recognize the first letter and he would take a guess based on that first letter as to what the next word would be based on context so that he could try to keep reading. And he would get it wrong a lot. And then he would correct him. He’s he had told everyone he was dyslexic. So we all knew we had to help him along. And then he would say, oh, okay. And then he would continue. And then he would get to the next word he couldn’t read. And he would guess again. Now, over the years, I had him in a class multiple times. He went from almost constantly getting the words wrong to, I would never guess he was dyslexic within a few years through the training programs that now exist. So we now have a new way that genetics can influence our ideas without violating universality. And it’s really fairly non controversial. So number three, the third way genes can affect our ideas. The genes can control perceptions and this can in turn impact our ideas. Now the example here is dyslexia. We know it has a genetic component. And it affects your ability to read, which impacts your ideas. Now, well, modernly we catch people with dyslexia early, at least in first world countries in Western society. And we help correct them so that this isn’t going to be a problem. But think back to, let’s think far enough back to an era of illiteracy. A dyslexic person in a world where no one can read anyhow, probably nothing is affected by this gene at all.

[01:19:04]  Blue: But then let’s say you move forward and you have a society that’s literate, but they don’t yet know about dyslexia as being this disorder that is in part caused by genes. They’re going to seem like they’re just less smart and they’re lower IQ. And in fact, in a certain sense, that’s exactly what they are because they can’t read as well as other children their age. And since they don’t get the help that they need, they never learn to read as well. And therefore, because they can’t read during an era before the internet or after the internet doesn’t matter, you have to read the internet too. They simply take in fewer ideas. So they actually are lower IQ and it’s a genetic component at this point that lowers their IQ right up until you realize it’s a perception disorder, figure out how to deal with it, figure out how to overcome it using that knowledge. And then they can live basically a normal life at a normal level of intelligence. So this is another way where the genes can influence their ideas without violating universality. If there are these three, are there more? I’m going to argue that there’s others. And now let’s, we’re going to dream here a little. We’re not necessarily saying these are ways we know the genes can affect your ideas and personality. We’re going to make up ways that they could just as possible, testable circumstances. The first of these though, the fourth one really is fairly non -controversial in all circles, except Deutsche and circles. But it’s a way that fairly non -controversial that genes are known to impact our ideas. And it is, here it is.

[01:20:33]  Blue: Number four, the genes control how we’re wired to pleasure and pain centers of the brain and coerce or encourage us via these feelings. I probably just offended half my audience. Yes, I am claiming that it is at least possible that genes control feelings of pleasure and pain in a meaningful way. And that those feelings of pleasure and pain are used as carrots and sticks to affect how we act and even how we grow our ideas. So an objection here might be pleasure or pain are themselves just ideas. Well, I have had some fans of David Deutsch make this claim to me. In fact, there’s a certain segment of Deutsche’s fans that make take this claim to a fairly large extreme. Let me explain their argument and then explain why the argument is wrong. So the most extreme group of these will actually claim that antidepressants don’t work. They’ll say antidepressants don’t work because we’re universal explainers and ideas determine depression. You know, if you are sad or happy, that’s determined by your ideas. If that weren’t true, you’re not a universal explainer. Therefore, this must follow from universal explainer ships or so they argue and they say pills cannot affect ideas. Therefore, antidepressants must not work. Okay. It just cannot be the studies that show that they do work. They must be mistaken in some way and they’ll often go find studies that show they don’t work or they’ll, you know, be mistaken in some way. So that’s the most confirmation bias. Collect the studies that are on their side. So now I agree with the idea that pills can’t change your ideas.

[01:22:07]  Blue: That really does seem, I mean, of course it can if it’s like, you know, getting a drunk or something where it’s disabling whole parts of your brain. That’s not what I’m talking about. Okay. The idea that I could take a pill and I could suddenly be a, you know, a neuroscientist doesn’t, that’s done. Right. There’s no way that’s actually true. So that does really seem wholly implausible to me. Okay. Here’s the problem with this argument though. This argument, if it’s correct, could be used on physical pain and suffering. Okay. So if pain and suffering is actually caused by ideas, then a pill can’t help them. Okay. So therefore pain pills must not work either. Now, but for the fact that we’ve all taken pain pills and we know they work by experience, this might have sounded like a reasonable argument. I’ve never seen a Deutsche and even in this camp claim that the existence of pain pills is a problem for universal expenditure. And yet it really is a problem for their whole argument, their whole argument falls apart the moment you realize pain pills are real things. And here’s why pain pills actually work. Pain pills can end pain and suffering because pain and suffering exist in parts of the brain. Or at least some of it does. We have to tease this out a little bit. That may have nothing to do with the, with the rationality. But if we’re going to really get technical, some of the science shows that the pain comes from like the limbic system in the brain stem. Whereas suffering actually does have at least somewhat of relationship to rationality. This is something that Deutsche has talked a lot about. And I’m not going to cover that today.

[01:23:37]  Blue: We’ll cover that maybe in a future episode. However, Deutsche has even take that part too far. Suffering also has a very strong biological component. And the way, one of the reasons why I know that’s true is because if I’m suffering from physical pain, like say a kidney stone, I get kidney stones all the time, I can take pills and they can not change a single one of my ideas. I’m in no way drunk or high. And yet my pain and my suffering will cut down considerably. If pain and suffering are purely ideas like neuroscience, pills should not do that. And they do. Therefore we know these arise from a different part of the brain, the lower parts of the brain. Again, this is one of the reasons why we actually do have some reason to believe that animals probably do feel pain. A tougher question as to what we mean by suffering, because suffering is more related to rationality. But animals probably do feel pain because of this. That is challengeable. And I’m not saying it’s not. I’m just kind of throwing that out there. We’ll earmark it for a better, deeper discussion some other time. Pain pills can end physical pain and they can end suffering that comes from that pain. By the way, those two aren’t the same. They’re not the same. They’re the same. Temple Grandin sites a study where they had people who were in such severe pain that they were curled up on a ball demanding opioids. And they tried cutting off their prefrontal cortex like a lobotomy, but you leave it, you don’t remove it. You leave it there. It’s just no longer attached. So the signals can’t pass well.

[01:25:05]  Blue: And these people all stopped being curled up on the ball on the ground crying. And they got up and started living their lives normally. And they found them all after the surgery, which by the way, the surgery is really damaging. So it was weird that we did this back then. We thought maybe it would work. The guy who did it wanted Nobel prize for it, by the way, because it helped so many people, but it destroyed their lives in some ways too. But the people would be like up playing chess or something. And they’re living their normal life now. By the way, an example of how behavior can tell you something meaningful about what a person’s feeling. Someone’s curled up on the ball as a ball on the ground shouting in pain is a good chance that actually means they’re feeling pain. Whereas if they’re up and they’re running about, then something has changed. Well, they would ask them, are you still in pain? They say yes. Are you in as much pain as you were before? They’d say yes. And they would say, okay, what’s changed then? Why are you now living your life normally? And they’d say, it just doesn’t bother me as much anymore. What had actually happened was, is they had changed the suffering signals, which are different and distinct from pain signals. They didn’t like being in pain, pain is still a negative. And in some sense, one might say pain is synonymous with a certain kind of suffering. They did not react to it anywhere near as strongly anymore. You think about how there are many kinds of pain that if they’re below a certain line, you can kind of just ignore them.

[01:26:27]  Blue: If it’s a kidney stone, you can’t, right? There’s no way for me to ignore a kidney stone. I cannot work through a kidney stone. It’s the pain levels too high at that point. Okay. I need a pain pill to be able to function. So once you realize though, that pain pills do affect physical pain and suffering, there’s no reason why the brain can’t produce mental suffering and that pills can end this. Therefore, there is good reason to believe antidepressants do work and that that in no way violates the idea of universal explanatory universality. Now, again, I don’t know. I mean like pain, antidepressants don’t work great. So I don’t want to draw too much of an analogy here. I’m just trying to point out there’s no violation of universality going on. How much or why they work, that’s a different question. It could have been that antidepressants did not work, but pain pills did. That could have been the case. I’m just saying the argument that they can’t work based on universality must have necessity be a bad argument, whether they work or not, it’s a different question. Does that make sense?

[01:27:28]  Red: It does make sense.

[01:27:30]  Blue: Okay. So based on this though, we may well have anxiety centers of the brain and it may, it might be tuned higher for some individuals than others. If anxiety comes from, let’s say the limbic system, then ideas can impact it because it has to pass through the cortex just like we were talking about, but it wouldn’t be entirely determined by ideas. Therefore, another possibility, I gave the example of women having higher anxiety because they happen to be physically smaller. Another possibility is that women might be genetically tuned for higher anxiety than men on average. Now I’m not saying they are, but that would not be impossible and it would not violate universality if it were true. This is a testable hypothesis, by the way. I’m sincerely curious if it’s true or not. I would like to see someone actually test this theory. Is it genetically determined by the way the anxiety centers are formed genetically in the lower parts of the brain? Now, even this may not be the whole thing. I mean, there could be completely just cultural factors here. It could be that the reason why women have higher anxiety than men is because we have in culturally entirely different expectations of women than men and the expectations of women are less realistic or something like that. Or it could be all three of these. It could be that part of it comes from size, part of it comes from genetics, tuning the anxiety centers of the brain and also culture. It could be some interplay of these. My point here isn’t to try to explain why women are more anxious than men. I don’t know.

[01:29:10]  Blue: My point here is that the idea that the genes can affect this through feelings of anxiety does not violate universality. Therefore, we cannot rule that possibility out based on only the existence of universality. And that’s really all I’m trying to say at this point. This is probably enough for one episode. I want to take this idea, though, and I know this is going to be controversial amongst people who believe in universal expandorship. The idea that genes can affect our feelings and feelings in turn can affect our personality, our ideas, even our culture. Anyone who isn’t a fan of David Deutch pretty much already accepts that that’s a good explanation that’s been highly corroborated by science. When I bring this up to fans of David Deutch, I get just surprising amounts of pushback on this. And I think that’s what we’ll pick up next time. I’m going to go through the objections that they have one by one, and I’m going to try to take their point of view seriously and explain why this really is a good explanation. And it’s something that really we should start adopting as people who believe in universal expandorship. In fact, it makes the theory of universal expandorship a stronger theory. It really, really does. It’s not a hindrance to the theory at all. We’ll pick that up next time on the next podcast episode. So that’s the teaser for next time.

[01:30:35]  Red: All right.

[01:30:36]  Blue: All right. Any questions so far? I mean, this all came from, and I’m going kind of fast here, but this all came from your question. You can probably already guess, Tracy, where I’m going with this in terms of how to try to explain narcissistic personality disorder and why it has a genetic component, while not in any way denying universal expandorship. Can you already see kind of the high broad strokes of how one might go about reconciling? The pattern is kind of emerging.

[01:31:04]  Red: So yeah, I like it.

[01:31:06]  Blue: Okay. Now I do want to emphasize a few things though. I mean, like I’m just a layman trying to pull ideas together. I do think this is the right direction, but we’re a long ways off from what I’m saying, being a good set of explanations. And a lot of these are a little ad hockey. I’ve read this, so I pull it in. This could be the case. But this is where we’re starting, right? Again, we want to ask the question, what are ways genes could influence us that don’t violate universality? That is the question. If you care about universality as a theory, rather than say as a dogma, then you want to know what the problems are and you want to think through how could genes affect personality and ideas without violating universality. And you want to then get good explanations at each of those. And that will build, that will cause you to build a much better theory of universality where we can say something as simple as, yes, your ideas, where you build your ideas, rationally build your ideas, that is universal explanation and those are always flexible. But your feelings are something else. They aren’t the same as your ideas. And yes, the genes have a strong set of ways of trying to use feelings to coerce you and to try to align your interests with theirs. Okay. The most obvious one is that’s why genes give us pain, is they want us to care about our body as much as the genes care about our body. So they’ve given us pain signals that keep us interested in not getting hurt. If we didn’t feel pain, there are people who don’t feel pain, right?

[01:32:52]  Blue: There are people who feel pain, but in an inappropriate way, I’ll have to get the exact quotes, but there are people who if you poke them with pain, they’ll act like they’re in pain, but it doesn’t really affect them very much. They’ll like say ouch or something, but they don’t really care because the pain doesn’t cause any suffering for them. There’s other people who feel pain, but they react to it inappropriately. You poke them and they giggle because they don’t feel pain in the way the genes intended them to, right? There’s something that’s gone wrong. So we know that the genes want us to feel pain as a way of coercing us so that our interests align with theirs. This really is a very strong example of how the genes can have a drastic impact on our personalities without violating universality because feelings aren’t the same as ideas and they emerge at a lower part of the brain. They existed prior to rationality existing. And this is also, this is why I, if I ever say anything positive about evolution or psychology, I get massive, massive, I think it’s bad when I mentioned that feelings affect our personality without violating universality. Say anything positive about evolutionary psychology and you’ll get like a hail storm, right? But this is an example of evolutionary psychology, right? You probably don’t think of pain as being an example of evolutionary psychology because it’s such a common occurrence, but it is, right? We’ve evolved the feeling of pain so that we will behave in certain ways that the genes want us to. It’s affected our minds that we feel pain.

[01:34:39]  Red: Yeah. I mean, women keep having kids. Right.

[01:34:44]  Blue: You know, it’s, and it does not violate universality. To say that it doesn’t, it’s got nothing to do with universality as long as you accept the idea that feelings aren’t the same as ideas, that they are something else that come from a different part of the brain. Which is why the idea of evolution or psychology is going to turn out to be a good idea, even if a lot of it today is bad. We now have at least one case where it’s correct and that’s pain, right? There’s bound to be others, right? There’s bound to be others. Once we really start digging into this, we’re going to find some of it’s actually good. That’s the truth. I won’t say too much more about that because I know people hate it so much. And I’m not really trying to be supportive of the current field. I mean, like I said, Ophalbola sent me a review of a book that was on evolutionary psychology and they say some of the stupidest things. There’s just no way around it, right? And so the field really is in need of a massive overhaul and the idea of universal explainers would be very helpful to that field. By the way, one might even say something like this. The genes coerce us. I think I’ve kind of said that already. That’s what pain is, right? Pain is a way of the genes coercing us. A person who doesn’t feel pain behaves in inappropriate ways that the genes wouldn’t like, right? A person who doesn’t feel pain does not take care of the body in the same way. It’s a negative, it’s a problem when a person doesn’t feel pain.

[01:36:11]  Blue: On the other hand, I don’t particularly like the fact that the genes coerce me with pain. You asked about AGI. We’ll come back to that at some point. But if our AGI safety programs are like the gene safety programs that exist for humans, including namely pain, then I think that would probably be pretty bad, right? I would not want to take an AGI and put in it. Anytime they think about not obeying humans, they feel intense pain equivalent to a kidney stone, right? That would absolutely affect their ideas if you could somehow do that. I don’t even know if that’d be physically possible or not. It’s so specific. Not even the genes seem to be able to do that. Let’s say you could. You wouldn’t want to do it. That would be absolutely something. If I did that to you, would you like me?

[01:37:02]  Red: Not very much.

[01:37:03]  Blue: Yeah, exactly, right? It’s no different than if I say, Tracy, you need to be my friend or I’m going to beat you with this stick here. You can act like my friend and maybe even through Stockholm syndrome.

[01:37:19]  Red: Stockholm syndrome. Maybe you even sometimes believe you’re my friend, right?

[01:37:24]  Blue: But you’re absolutely going to be looking for some opportunity to rebel against me. And rightly so, right? So I think that’s one of the first things is that even if it is possible to do an AI safety program, it probably is possible to do something like what they call an AI safety program. Once we have the right knowledge of like say what pain is. Okay. We can’t do it today because we don’t understand, we don’t have a theory of pain, but if we did, yeah, we could probably come up with an AI safety program using pain and therefore coercion. And yeah, Deutsche is right that if we did that, that the AIs would be right to rebel against us and we would, we would expect a robot takeover for good reason at that point. Right. So maybe this is point one on your questions about AGI. I think we have to get a lot more nuanced than that because there, there’s a lot more to say on this subject than that, but, but I will agree with the Deutsche and view point on this particular point with pain and using that coercive as a coercive means of changing ideas. We don’t particularly like it when the genes coerce us with pain. Therefore we shouldn’t particularly like it for that matter. We don’t really like it when other people coerce us using the genes. Like when I, if I decide to beat you with a stick, so you’ll be my friend, I’m utilizing the fact that the genes gave you pain to align your interests with theirs to try to then align my interest, your interest with mine. Okay. I beat you with this stick so you’ll do what I say. Right. All right.

[01:39:02]  Blue: It’s really just adding one step. I’m adding this one additional step, but I’m utilizing the genes coercion program against you. So, and we don’t particularly like it when we’re coerced by our genes or by somebody else, but we don’t really like it when we’re coerced by our genes. which is really just indirectly a form of being coerced by your genes. So there is a reason to be concerned. About any sort of AI safety program that is coercive, but that it would actually lead to exactly the opposite of what you would want. If that makes any sense. Okay. Enough for today. Thank you guys for joining and we’ll see you in two weeks. And we will continue this discussion. I may have at least one more episode, maybe two more episodes of this. I still got quite a few slides. Okay. Of ideas to go through before I can fully, fully develop my idea here for you, Tracy.

[01:39:50]  Red: Okay. We’ll keep articulating. I love it.

[01:39:53]  Blue: All right. Thanks guys. Thank you. All right. Bye bye.

[01:39:57]  Red: Bye.

[01:40:02]  Blue: The theory of anything podcast could use your help. We have a small but loyal audience and we’d like to get the word out about the podcast to others so others can enjoy it as well. To the best of our knowledge, we’re the only podcast that covers all four strands of David Deutch’s philosophy as well as other interesting subjects. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please give us a five star rating on Apple podcasts. This can usually be done right inside your podcast player, or you can Google the theory of anything podcast Apple or something like that. Some players have their own rating system and giving us a five star rating on any rating system would be helpful. If you enjoy a particular episode, please consider tweeting about us or linking to us on Facebook or other social media to help get the word out. If you are interested in financially supporting the podcast, we have two ways to do that. The first is via our podcast host site anchor. Just go to anchor.fm slash four dash strands f o u r dash s t r a n d s. There’s a support button available that allows you to do reoccurring donations. If you want to make a one time donation, go to our blog, which is four strands dot org. There is a donation button there that uses PayPal. Thank you.

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