Episode 48: Genetics and Universality (part 2): How Our Genes Coerce Us

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Transcript

[00:00:11]  Blue: Welcome back to the theory of anything podcast. Hey, cameo. How’s it going? It’s excellent, Bruce. How are you? Good. Let’s pick up where we left off. So we left on a bit of a cliffhanger that I just introduced the idea that the genes can control how we’re wired for pleasure or pain centers in our brain or for feelings in general.

[00:00:31]  Red: Yeah.

[00:00:31]  Blue: And that through these they can coerce or encourage us using those feelings. And then we talked briefly about can I’m feelings just be ideas? Are they just a type of idea? And we talked about antidepressants, the fact that you can take a pain pill that it can quote, change your ideas. That doesn’t make sense. So I don’t think we’ve got good reason to believe that feelings and ideas are the same thing. And just at a straight intuitive level, they don’t seem like the same thing. I think feelings often conflict with our ideas and it’s they are sources of information, but they are ones that are evolved. And I think that they are distinct from or at least it is at least possible that they are distinct from the types of ideas that you build as a universal explainer. Because of that, this has to be taken seriously as a possible way that the genes could influence us as universal explainers. Now, I don’t think this is actually a particularly controversial idea. If I were out in the world and I were to say to your average person, oh, yeah, the genes evolve pleasure and pain centers as a way of influencing us or coercing us to do what they want us to do. The reason why you feel pain is because the genes want you to take care of your body. The reason why you feel pleasure around sex and romance is because the genes want you to replicate. I suspect I would for the most part get a complete yawn. Like, yeah, that’s like so obvious. I can’t even believe you’re bringing it up.

[00:02:01]  Blue: However, I have found that there is a group of those who are fans of David Deutsch that feel very strongly against this idea. So we’re going to start with talking about the arguments that I’ve had online. I’m actually not even sure if they are arguments. This is part of the weirdness of the conversation, the conversations that I’ve had online. But to get into that, let’s talk briefly. This was all in context of David Deutsch’s statements about the genes coding for happiness. Well, happiness is a feeling. So could the genes code for happiness? Could the genes say there’s this happiness center, you know, in your brain? And the genes say for some people, I’m going to activate it more and for some people, I’m going to activate it less. So the answer is I don’t know for sure. But what do you think, cameo? Does that seem like something reasonably that could happen? Or does that seem like maybe we’re pushing things too far?

[00:02:57]  Red: If I stumble over the idea that that the genes want us to do something, because it implies in like a intent that doesn’t that baffles me like why would the genes care if we were happy? Rewarding us for reproduction makes sense because because they do want us to reproduce, I guess, I mean, they just giving that personification to I

[00:03:30]  Blue: agree. I agree

[00:03:31]  Red: with me. But so if we can figure out a different way to describe, like, I don’t, I don’t know why our genes would care if we were happy. I go, we could go through our entire lives and be morose. And, and it wouldn’t matter, right? I mean, is it unless we as opposed if we killed ourselves instantly, then then it would be a waste. I don’t know. I’m it’s kind of funny to me.

[00:03:58]  Blue: Yeah. Okay. So one thing I should probably call out is that whenever we talk about the genes wanting something, Richard Dawkins says, we have to always understand that as a shorthand for something that’s got nothing to do with actual intent.

[00:04:11]  Red: Yeah,

[00:04:12]  Blue: genes evolved a certain way that if they make us feel pleasure around sex and romance, that will the genes that cause us to feel that way, that will cause those genes to replicate better. There’s no, there’s no actual intent where we are intentionally personifying as a shorthand, it’s got nothing to do with what we actually believe. All right,

[00:04:32]  Red: I’ll get I’ll get over that silly part then.

[00:04:35]  Blue: However, the rest, the rest of your criticism is very valid. Why would you would have to answer that question? You would have to answer, why would the genes want us to be happy or not happy? I think part of the problem here, and this is my opinion. And let me just admit that to David Deutsch’s point, which I completely agree with, we don’t really have a theory of happiness. We don’t even know for sure what we mean by happiness. While happiness is a feeling, maybe in most people’s minds, it’s not a simple feeling. If I can maybe describe it this way, I think there are certain feelings or affects that really are just coated for by the genes. Pain would be, it’s very simplistic. I think that and pleasure. I think that there are other feelings that are actually labels that we use for a complex of ideas and feelings combined. And I suspect happiness falls more into that category. Now, let’s say I’m wrong. Just, I always want to consider the possibility that I’m wrong. Let’s say happiness is in fact something that is directly coated for by the genes. Then honestly, my theory that I am advancing here would have to say, yes, it is entirely reasonable that genes because you know, let’s pretend like we have some sort of basic statement now observation or experiment that shows there’s this specific happiness center of the brain, right, that just produces happiness. Well, then yeah, genes could code for happiness. There would be nothing ridiculous about the idea that genes could code for happiness. But if I’m right, that it’s not a feeling that the genes would ever code for directly.

[00:06:13]  Blue: And in fact, it’s what we might call a feeling idea complex or something like that, right? Then it should be impossible for the genes to code for happiness. There could there could not be a gene that codes for happiness per say. And this is my actual opinion. And so I’m actually agreeing with David Deutsche on that. Okay. Here’s the problem, though. Can the genes code for pain and suffering? Yes, I’m absolutely saying that that is a based on our best current neuroscience or our best theories. We’ve got specific pleasure pain centers and the genes code for it, it wires up to those centers. And it’s a little different for each person in part because the genes have variation and in part because just developmentally, we have different variations in part because we have different ideas and those ideas differ on how we interpret those. But let’s say that there was a genetic defect that caused you to experience pain and or suffering. We talked about how those aren’t necessarily the same thing all the time. Okay. Would this over a population, so you have a group of people who have this defect, would this over that population would you find that their overall happiness was affected? Yeah, you would because they would be in pain and or suffering all the time. Yeah. Okay. So in a sense, then while you can’t directly code for happiness, genes could code for something that affects happiness. And it may even be a feeling like pain and suffering. It may not be attractiveness. We’ve been talking about attractiveness. Attractiveness within a certain culture, if you happen to have genes that code for attractiveness, that that culture accepts as attractive, then that’s going to maybe affect your happiness.

[00:07:51]  Blue: Actually, there’s some studies that suggest it doesn’t affect your happiness that much.

[00:07:54]  Red: Yes.

[00:07:55]  Blue: Okay. But we’re pretending like I mean that was the argument. Let’s say that that argument is true and I actually don’t find it that hard to believe despite what some of the studies say that attractiveness does affect your overall happiness. That would be a way genes could code for happiness through physiology. They could also code for happiness through creating suffering by through feelings, but it would be simple feelings like suffering. This is at least reasonable. Now, let’s say then though that we invent a drug that counters that problem or if so that drug would be an example of a source of knowledge or let’s say you sought out meditation and you taught yourself to ignore the feelings of suffering that your brain was producing due to this genetic defect.

[00:08:39]  Red: Okay.

[00:08:40]  Blue: That’s another source of knowledge where we’ve developed and there’s the ability to practice at meditation. Let’s say we can see how knowledge would prevail in the long run, but in the short one and for any one particular person’s life it could be that the genes are coding for mental suffering and that that would impact happiness and it may be that you don’t gain that knowledge at first or maybe even in your entire lifetime that allows you to prevail over it. You would then therefore find that genes code for happiness in a sense. Okay. Do you follow my argument here? It’s kind of indirect. I’m saying Gene can indirectly code for happiness.

[00:09:18]  Red: It’s indirect. I also think it’s a bit of a stretch, but okay.

[00:09:24]  Blue: Okay. Let’s take the example that I’m actually using. If, is there such a thing as a genetic defect that would cause the brain to experience suffering?

[00:09:34]  Red: There are physical, I am not aware of anything that would cause suffering although I have I have read that that that they know that just some people like that in a way that maybe that’s what their

[00:09:51]  Blue: depression is. Yes. That was where I was going with this. Is coded

[00:09:55]  Red: for for suffering versus coded for happiness. So

[00:09:59]  Blue: it’s a theory and it may we know so little about it. I don’t wish to advance the theory beyond what its actual strengths are at this point. But what I’m really saying is that would not if that were true it would not violate universality. Therefore we have to consider that it could be true. It’s not something that we can dismiss using the theory of explanatory universality because it is at least a possibility that there are some people who have a genetic defect that there that’s an existing theory that we are considering that we’re doing experiments on that may be where certain kinds of clinical depression come from. Right.

[00:10:41]  Red: I can get behind that.

[00:10:43]  Blue: So in those cases we would expect people with that problem to have lower happiness overall compared to an average population. That doesn’t mean they can’t overcome the problem. That doesn’t mean we can invent a drug that overcomes the problem. But so knowledge can still be the prevailing factor in the end which is one of the things that we predict from explanatory universality. But that the difference might be real. And my point here isn’t that I know it to be real. I think there’s always this fine line I feel like I’m walking where when I give examples like this people assume I’m advocating for that theory where what I’m really advocating for is we can’t dismiss that theory yet. Therefore it’s one that has to be considered seriously on the table. But I’m not necessarily sure if it’s true or not. But it’s at least a possibility. So now here is something that David Deutsch said about neuroscience in one of his interviews. He says of course neuroscience is very important. If something goes wrong with your brain you want medical science to know as much as possible about it. But you the interviewer asked whether it was relevant to our ideas I think only in a very marginal way. So the host then says the brain gives us a starting point but we can always erase all of that so that it’s not primary to our understanding. And David Deutsch says yes. And I guess not important either not very important or not at all. Okay. Now this quote I think a lot has been interpreted from this quote maybe correctly maybe not. I don’t know. I want to point out though that he’s talking specifically about ideas. So ideas in the mind.

[00:12:22]  Blue: There could be ideas that we come pre -wired with from the genes. There’s some theories about that. About we come pre -wired with a certain kind of parochial understanding of physics. I don’t know if that’s even true. Like I really don’t know. Yeah.

[00:12:39]  Red: I struggle with that quite a bit actually.

[00:12:45]  Blue: So but if there was would that then be a destiny that we would have to have keep this parochial version of physics and couldn’t learn real physics. Well obviously not. Okay. Universal Explanorship. While it doesn’t rule out the possibility of the genes have certain ideas that we come with. It does say we should be able to override them. Okay. As long as we’re talking specifically about ideas everything that is said in that group of sentences makes sense to me. But I’m talking about feelings and feelings are not ideas or that is what I am theorizing. This is where neuroscience may become very important to us is understanding our feelings and emotions and how those affect us. Because that is something that I’m hypothesizing is outside the areas of the brain they’re used for Universal Explanorship. It’s in a different part of the brain. It’s in the lower part of the brain. It’s the part that animals have. It’s it’s a different thing and it’s used possibly used by the genes to try to align their replication interests with our interests. Okay. And again the most obvious example here is pain. We have pain because the genes want us to take care of the body that is in their interest in terms of getting us to replicate. Okay which replicate our genes. So I think that this distinction needs to be made. And I don’t know that it is. And for the kind I’m going to give some sample conversations I’ve had with people online who have kind of pushed back with me on this. And I don’t think they’re making this distinction. They’re kind of assuming there is no distinction here. Whereas I’m assuming that there is. Okay.

[00:14:28]  Blue: Or at least I’m open to there being one. And they again I don’t want to like put words in somebody’s mouth. It’s unclear what they’re saying at times. At least I can’t always figure it out. But I think it’s because of quotes like that from David Deutch is why I get a lot of pushback that he said neuroscience can’t be particularly important. They’re assuming everything counts as an idea. Maybe that’s what’s going on. But let me give an example. So first of all, I’m going to be paraphrasing some real conversations. It’s actually conversations with two different people that I’m bringing together as if they’re a single conversation. Okay. I’m trying to give a feel for what is the concern that they’re expressing and analyze that. So for example, I might make the following claim. Try to explain our obsession with romance and sex without referencing feelings as caused by genes. Any explanation for that that doesn’t reference the pleasure of such activities, which is in part at least controlled by the genes, would have to be a bad explanation since we know that is why the genes want us to feel pleasure around sex and so that we will want to replicate our genes. That just makes sense. That’s a well understood best theory that exists. Okay. What’s the alternative to that is what I’m asking. Can you actually give me an alternative theory that is as good as that one? So here’s an example response. They might say, well, you know, celibate people have the same genes for pleasure as, you know, those that aren’t celibate. So we see people who are influenced by their genes to like obsess over sex.

[00:16:02]  Blue: We see some that instead practice celibacy and it’s the same genes either way, whether someone who’s denying sex and romance for themselves or obsessing over it, they have the same genes. So that would be an example response I would get to what I just said. That’s

[00:16:17]  Red: an awful explanation. Honestly,

[00:16:20]  Blue: that’s the starting point, right? It’s not really an explanation at all. All right. It’s being worded like a refutation. Yes. But I’ve never actually claimed that feelings forced us to act. In fact, I’m claiming the opposite that it’s just an influence that the genes can’t code for you will replicate. So instead, they try to give us feelings to encourage us and that overpopulation will make a difference. It won’t be 100%. There’ll be exceptions because we’re universal explainers. There will be exceptions. That’s part of what I’m assuming.

[00:16:51]  Red: So

[00:16:51]  Blue: when I heard this response, the first thing that came to my mind was, oh, they must not understand what I’m really saying that they must think that even though I didn’t say it, they must be under the mistaken impression that I don’t believe in universality and that I don’t think knowledge and ideas are paramount. So they’re trying to give me an exception case to show that exceptions can exist where I’m assuming exceptions exist. Part of my theory is that because ideas are paramount, there will be exceptions, but the genes can influence us over a population. So I would then end of the conversation spend maybe let’s this was on Twitter’s and several tweets explaining that. Okay, no, I don’t misunderstand me. I do believe in universality. I do believe in knowledge and ideas as being paramount. So yes, of course, there would be exceptions like that. But I’m trying to explain not the exceptions. I’m trying to explain why over a population it’s so rare that there are exceptions. Most people really do care about sex and romance. And I feel like this is a really easy explanation is that the genes make it feel good. So we like it. Like this is a hard to very good explanation. It’s even testable. We can figure out ways to test an explanation like this. We could suppress the feelings and see if people’s behavior changes. Okay, let’s say we had a drug that such drugs do exist that suppress those feelings. Would that change people’s behavior? Well, we know. We know the answer is yes. Right? This is an imminently testable and has been tested, has been corroborated theory. So after I go through and explain all that, I might say it.

[00:18:30]  Blue: So what I’m asking to do is give me an explanation for why sex and romance are more popular than celibacy. Try to come up with a good hard to very explanation for the pattern that we see that does not reference feelings caused by genes. I don’t think it can be done. So two different, I got two different responses to me saying this. One of them came back and said culture benefits from reproduction. That’s my explanation. That’s also not an explanation. No, it’s not. That it is, but it’s a pseudo version of my explanation because the word reproduction in humans specifically references sex and romance. Right? We reproduce through sex. That’s the way it is. So it’s kind of a vaguer version of exactly what I’m saying. The other response I got back was I don’t have an explanation, but that’s just because no such explanation exists. Okay, so I said, no, no, no, no. I’m saying I’ve got a good testable hard to very explanation and it’s because romance and sex are pleasurable. We like them. That’s why we do it. That’s and the genes made it like so we like it. So that’s how it encourages us. Right? That’s a very straightforward testable explanation. And here was the response I got back and notice how this is worded. Let me read this response directly because I don’t want to misrepresent it. So the response was we’re talking about ideas in human brains put there by genetic mutation of the structure of the brain and persisted by conferring a replicatory advantage to the genetic variant over competing ones that structure the brain differently. This kind of thing cannot exist in human brains where at least some ideas are capable of universal explanation.

[00:20:11]  Blue: And then somewhere down the line I got a response that added to this. Besides this hardly explains why people are into say a dominatrix. It’s interesting that this response specifies ideas. So we’re talking about feelings but it’s confusing the two concepts or maybe not confusing maybe maybe he’s taking this the position they are the same thing. I don’t know it’s not clear from this response. So the conversation continues and we start discussing a similar case. Does hunger influence the behavior of eating? Is hunger one causal factor in the behavior of eating? And so I’m arguing yeah hunger is a basic feeling that you get it’s unpleasant. And so the genes give us feelings of hunger so that we won’t eat. You know that’s in their interest that we can take care of ourselves. So I believe that that’s an example of how the genes could influence us through feelings. So here was the response I got. He said that an explanation that hunger is unpleasant so it encourages people to eat was a bad explanation. And he said it was because he says the explanation the genes cause hunger is the same as the one that says birth causes death it’s true but it doesn’t explain. And then he went on to say there’s a whole bunch of theories that interfere with the supposed link you’re concocting between genes and hunger. The brain interprets what the body is doing. And at this point I wasn’t sure what to say. I felt like I had strongly explained that I’m talking about a single causal factor. I’m talking about over a population. So I wasn’t really trying to rule out the idea that of course how I think about my hunger affects how I feel about it.

[00:21:55]  Blue: So I just clearly play a role in that also. I’m not in any way denying that Gandhi could basically decide to ignore entirely his the unpleasantness of hunger and do a hunger strike. Clearly he was able to do that. But I don’t think any of that changes the fact that hunger influences us that it’s supposed to that’s why it exists. I finally thought go ahead. Above why I don’t

[00:22:19]  Red: spend very much time on Twitter honestly.

[00:22:22]  Blue: Okay, so the thought occurred to me. So at first I thought he was just misunderstanding my position. I thought maybe he really is trying to tell me that he believes that feelings in no way influence us. So I asked Tim outright, I said, okay, I can’t get you to say that feelings do influence us. Are you willing to say that hunger does not influence the behavior of eating? If hunger does not influence the behavior of eating doesn’t that mean that hunger does not influence the behavior of eating? So he kind of stopped and thought about that and he came back with a response that said, well, no, not exactly because like hunger does influence a lion to eat. Because they’re not universal explainers. So I thought, you know, this was all in context of a human. So but maybe he missed that. So I said, okay, let me restate. For humans, are you saying that the feeling of hunger does not influence us to eat? And he was not willing to say, yes, that’s what I’m saying. Instead, he gave me a kind of a roundabout answer that was unclear. At that point, I realized, okay, I’m not quite sure what’s going on here. It’s hard to even say what the alternative theory he’s advancing is because there’s a certain vagueness to the responses. So I want to and I actually started talking to them about this started having a conversation about, okay, let’s talk about hard to varianess versus easy to varianess, right? I’m advancing a hard to vary theory.

[00:23:56]  Blue: I’m saying, I’m giving you an empirical theory, one that’s been tested many times, which is hunger influences as one of the causes and we’re talking only over a population the behavior of eating because it’s painful and unpleasant until you eat. That’s a testable theory. If we take like I actually sent one of the people that I was having conversation with a message where there was this shot that they were testing where you would take the shot and it would suppress your hunger feelings of hunger and they were testing that that would did that really work and then the result would be that you would lose weight because you can eat as much. Okay. Now, if we are argue if if you and I don’t know that he was arguing this I don’t and I’m not trying to put words into his mouth at all. Let’s say that he was arguing feelings do not influence us. Then this shot should not exist, right? It would the existence of the shot refutes the theory that feelings do not influence us. Now, I doubt that he was actually saying that, right? If he was then I think he would have been more clear when I asked him out, right? Are you saying feelings do not influence us?

[00:25:04]  Red: Right.

[00:25:05]  Blue: But that’s really all I’m saying, right? I’m saying, yes, it’s a causal factor. It’s an influence. And the idea that it can’t be tested that it’s similar to saying birth leads to death. It’s not the same thing. Like you can actually plan a real intervention. We haven’t done a podcast on Judea Pearl’s causal inference. So there’s a theory of causation that comes from Judea Pearl and basically to differentiate between a correlation and a causation is the concept of an intervention. So if we remove, if we do an intervention and remove one of the causes, does that lead to a change? If it’s just a correlation, it won’t. And if it is a causation, it will. Now, causation here is not defined as direct causation. There may be a giant chain that exists. But if the intervention makes a difference, we consider it a causation. That’s really what we’re talking about. If I can take a shot and it suppresses my hunger pains and the amount of eating goes down because of that. Then that was a testable theory. And that is what we, that is what we mean by it’s a causal factor. So this is actually a fairly specific theory. So what I want to do is to try to explain. I want to take these arguments. I want to put them into a slightly different context. So one of the things that’s really common is for fans of David Deutch to be kind of libertarian, either outright or just bending libertarian. We’d have to probably do a whole separate podcast on why that is. But they often have a very strong feelings against use of coercion.

[00:26:40]  Blue: And so they, this is a very typical libertarian thing even if you’re not a fan of David Deutch. But there’s this strong belief that coercion is wrong. So let’s, now here’s the thing. When we talk about coercion, physical coercion, what you’re doing, if I take a stick and I say, you know, you know, cameo, I want you to do X or I’m going to hit you with this stick and it’s going to be unpleasant. Okay. And I’m going to make you feel pain. That might change your behavior because what I’m doing is I’m utilizing the coercion sources that the genes use. Okay. The genes give you the ability to feel pain because they want you to take care of your body. I’m taking advantage of that fact. All I’m doing is adding one more layer onto the explanation. It is not a separate explanation. If the genes, if you, if you aren’t influenced by pain, then it’s unclear why physical coercion would work at all or that coercion could even exist. So here is the same conversation with the different responses. Only I’m going to just shift it so that we’re talking about third -party coercion, physical coercion. Okay. Try to explain why it’s me, try to explain why people often change their behavior when coercively tortured. Any explanation that doesn’t reference the unpleasantness of pain caused by the genes is a bad explanation. Response. People that resist torture have the same genes as pain suffering, pain and suffering. Yet, we see people who are influenced by their genes to give them into torture and other people with the same genes who resist torture. So your theory about coercion is incorrect. Me.

[00:28:11]  Blue: Then give me an explanation for why many people change their behavior when coerced. Response. I don’t have one. That’s because no one has such an explanation. Me. No, I do have a testable, hard to vary explanation. It’s because pain is unpleasant so we don’t like it. Coercion uses that pain caused by the lower parts of the brain against us. Response. There’s a whole bunch of theories that are interfering with your supposed link. You’re concocting between feelings of pain and how the brain uses feelings to interpret what the body is doing. Your explanation that torture causes pain and that causes compliance is at the same level as one that says birth causes death. It’s true, but it doesn’t explain. It also doesn’t explain why some people are into sadomasochism. What is this person arguing? Right? I mean, obviously. Yeah, I have no

[00:28:56]  Red: idea, honestly.

[00:28:57]  Blue: Okay. It sounds like they’re arguing that there’s no such thing as physical coercion. We know there is. I mean, that’s a basic statement, right? By observation, I can see that there is. They never actually come out and say there is no such thing as physical coercion, but it sounds like they’re arguing that there isn’t. And it’s hard to figure out what else they are arguing. Are they arguing that coercion doesn’t exist? Are they agreeing with me but they’re upset that I didn’t say it in a certain way? Are they just not understanding the concept of causation? It’s really unclear. Okay, there’s something going on here, but it’s unclear what it is that’s going on. So I want to emphasize this. The fact that ideas are paramount in no way affects the existence of physical coercion by others. That is just a fact, right? The existence of the fact that we are universal explainers doesn’t mean other people can’t physically coerce us. If this is a good set of arguments, which it isn’t, then we just refuted the whole libertarian point of view because there’s no such thing as coercion. We know that’s wrong. We literally just know that’s wrong. Also note that this is the same explanation, almost word for word, but it just has this extra unneeded layer where it’s a third party doing it to you instead of the genes directly doing it to you. So this would be, I guess this is the argument I want to make here is if you are going to use arguments like this, then you need to do them all the way, right? This let’s go all the way. There must be no such thing as physical coercion. We all know that’s not true.

[00:30:29]  Blue: Okay, then let’s stop using this argument. There is something to this idea that the genes do influence us through feelings. How much in what ways that’s an open question? How much can our ideas affect that? That’s an actually that’s not an open question. With the right knowledge, the effect will be that they can’t affect us at all. Once we learn how to take painkillers, we can control our pain. Once we know that’s all a matter of knowledge. So why is there such strong pushback on this? I’m not sure I actually know. I suspect, and this is just a suspicion, I suspect what’s going on is actually a moral objection, not a intellectual objection. I think that there is a concern that is being indirectly vocalized, which is, I don’t want to give any support to the idea that you are controlled by your genes and therefore you’re not responsible for your actions. And I guess I can see why there might be some concerns around that. If it’s true that the genes do influence us through feelings, and they do in different ways, so some of us are influenced differently, does that take away personal responsibility? That’s a very, very good question. And I kind of wish that the person, people that were arguing with me, had just stated that and we could have talked about that.

[00:31:41]  Red: I don’t know that that’s, I mean you’re trying to find a reason to, to, you’re trying to find an explanation for why they have the opinion that they do. I don’t know if that makes sense with their comments.

[00:31:58]  Blue: Yeah, I think it is hard to make sense of what they’re saying. Yeah,

[00:32:04]  Red: I mean I don’t, I don’t know that they’re bringing like this idea of personal choice into it or that, that we have control over ourselves or it, I don’t know, I’m kind of baffled honestly by their comments.

[00:32:22]  Blue: Okay, let me, let me move this, move this along now. So here’s the thing though, let me admit this up front. I mean like there’s no point in me hiding where, what the implications of this are. If it is true that the genes influence us through feelings. If that is a true statement. Okay, and I am advancing that as an alternative theory. I can see that there are moral ramifications. So I can understand why there might be some concerns around that. Nevertheless, if it’s actually a true theory, it’s a true theory. The key thing here though is if we’re saying the genes influence us through feelings, then that does not violate you know, explanatory universality and we’re going to have to accept that. Then that opens a floodgate because that means the genes probably have some fairly compelling ways to get us to do things that they want us to do. And now all you have to do is reference feelings. Yes, that may be something that has moral consequences that we’re going to have to think carefully about. But I think we want to emphasize though, the good news. Yes, the bad news is certain moral consequences will follow from this. The good news is that this is a really highly still optimistic viewpoint. Even if it’s the case that this all started from Tracy asking about narcissism. Okay, even if we wanted to make the case that narcissism is somehow related to the genes affecting you through feelings. There’s a lot of steps in between those statements and I admit that. Okay, but even if even if we want to admit that, it still comes down to that person’s a universal explainer. There is real hope of helping that person.

[00:34:00]  Blue: Maybe we don’t have all the right knowledge to help them today, but there’s going to exist knowledge that is able to help that person. And when I said that to Tracy, she said that is kind of cold comfort that in the future there will be knowledge to help with somebody who’s in a bad situation now. I admit it might be cold comfort. Okay, there is there is an optimistic side to this. That there’s no such thing and that the genes could code directly for narcissism. Therefore, problems around narcissism, even if they are heavily influenced by genes, which they may be, maybe they are. There is great hope that we can help such a person and that one day we basically know we’ll be able to take a person with that sort of problem and help them. And they won’t be damaging to everybody in their lives anymore. And I think this is where universality really is a meaningful moral thing. Even if we’re admitting that genes can influence feelings and feelings can influence you. It doesn’t change the underlying optimism that comes from universal Spanish. That is my honest feeling there. In any case, even if you don’t buy my theory that genes can influence us through feelings, the real point I want to make at this point is that there’s no that it is, it is a viable theory, right? There is no way you cannot reference universality, the explanatory universality as proof that genes do not influence us through feelings. You just cannot do that. Right. I agree. It’s a viable alternative that has to be considered on its own merits and will affect how we perceive universality.

[00:35:37]  Blue: But since it doesn’t actually violate universality, since we’re talking about feelings being separate from ideas, it has to at least be on the table as a viable theory at this point. Now there’s actually another piece of good news that comes out of this. If you really pay attention to what I’m doing, I am improving the theory of universality. So if we’re taking the point of view that if that being feeling hungry makes you want to go eat, violates universality, then unfortunately we know that people getting hungry go eat and that we’ve already got tons of tests on that. So that would be then a refutation of universality. The good news is, is that I just made it so it’s no longer refutation. I’m now saying, no, actually that’s consistent with the theory of universality. Furthermore, I just made it more testable. I now have laid out under what circumstances can the genes influence us and under what circumstances can they not and it’s in really, I’m doing it in a testable way. So we’re increasing the empirical level of the theory of universality. It’s all good, right? In terms of we’re improving the theory by both getting rid of refutations, potential refutations and we’re doing so not in an ad hoc way, but instead in a way that increases the empirical nature of the theory. That’s exactly what makes a good explanation. This is why I actually feel very strongly about we’ve got to explore this path. Let me make a bit of a point here though. So let’s go back and let’s talk about animal intelligence as an example.

[00:37:05]  Blue: So one of the things we talked about when we were talking about animal intelligence was that there was examples of animals showing understanding of things. Okay. And one of the theories that has been advanced by David Deutch at the beginning of infinity is that animals don’t have any understandings. Now, I understand the connection there. They’re trying to say only universal explainers understand things. And let’s be honest, the word understanding is very vague. Yeah. So the fact that an animal understands something in some sense doesn’t mean it does so in an explanatory sense. So and even if they understand an explanatory sense, it doesn’t mean they do so in a universal explanatory sense because there could be levels of explanations some that aren’t explanatory. I mean, I don’t know that to be a fact in any way, but there could be. So the idea that animals understand something does that in fact refute universality? Well, there’s kind of a feeling among some of the fans of David Deutch that it does. And so that’s why they push back on a lot, lot of the experiments that we’ve talked about. So let me give some examples. Alex the parrot we talked about understands the concept of numbers up to number six. In fact, Alex the parrot, according to the experiments that were done and that were published in peer reviewed journal Nature, Alex the parrot understood equivalents. So for example, so first of all, they would like give Alex the parrot a number of objects underneath cups and maybe there’s like two underneath one and three underneath the other. They would show Alex the parrot the two items cover it, then show Alex the parrot three items then cover it.

[00:38:39]  Blue: And then they would ask Alex the parrot how many items and it would say five which is at least at some level an ability to kind of do addition. Yeah. Agreed. Okay. I mean, kind of an intuitive level not like algorithmically.

[00:38:51]  Red: Yeah. Okay.

[00:38:52]  Blue: Yeah. Okay. So then they gave Alex the parrot blocks and they would have a block with the number five written on it. So Alex the parrot could also answer is, you know, what is this to the Roman numeral five and it could say five or a six and say six. So they wanted to know if it understood the concept if the industry equivalence because little children can count but they don’t understand equivalence yet. They want to know where Alex the parrot was. So they would show it show Alex a block that had a five on it and a block that had six on it and then they’d be different colors so that it would, you know, one’s blue one’s red and then the block that is a five would be larger than the block that was a six. Okay. And they would say which is which is bigger and bluer and then it has to answer bluer red and it would say so it would answer six is larger even though the block with the five written on it is larger suggesting that Alex the parrot actually did understand the number six is a larger number than the number five. Okay. So that is the result of an experiment.

[00:39:56]  Blue: We had talked about elephants the fact that they have to work together to obtain food that they won’t even bother to pull unless the other one’s there if the ropes out of position they won’t they won’t bother to pull because they can see that the ropes not there for their partner so they just won’t even bother because they understand it has to have the rope Ravens they didn’t experiment with Ravens where they put meat on a string and the Raven would sit there and think about it then it would come over and it would grab the string with its big pull on it latch onto it with its hand pull on it with its big again it would reel the meat in on the string and it wouldn’t do it through trial and error it wouldn’t like be playing around and then figure it out it would just in its head figure out how to reel in this meat right and then as a sign you know they would test does it really understand the string means it can’t take the meat with it if you normally just had meat there and you like shoot it away it would grab the meat and run but when it was on the string it would just fly away it wouldn’t try to grab the meat suggesting that the Raven actually understood this string is connected I can’t bother with this and it had actually used a mental model in its head to to try do trial and error and in its head just in its imagination to figure out oh if I do the following thing I’m going to be able to to reel in this this meat now these are experiments that actually exist and these are results from experiments they’re what Popper would call a basic statement at this point they’ve been repeated by by multiple groups and they’ve found that in this case I we’ve intentionally picked all animals that burn would consider animals with insight so they’re they’re the smartest animals in the world right they’re smarter than a normal animal that just uses trial and error learning so I mean I’m intentionally picking this small group but for these small group of animals you’ve got these repeatable experiments that can be done where you can get this observation that’s what a basic statement is so it’s a tested observation not just a casual observation it’s been repeated by multiple groups it’s been criticized and at this point we’ve got this this observation that exists and we now use it as a potential refuting observation my experience is is that when I give examples like this they’ll often say something like this oh no that there’s something wrong with that experiment because that would violate the theory of universality well no you don’t get to do that under Popper okay and here’s the reason why it’s because if you are going to inoculate your theory if you’re going to say my theory is the preeminent theory and therefore any observation that refutes it doesn’t count okay if you’re going to give truth level to the theory first and not to the observation then you can’t refute that theory it becomes impossible to refute that theory which is what you’re not allowed to do under Popper you’re not allowed to inoculate yourself from refutation because of that basic statements under Popper’s epistemology will always be given preeminence over a theory okay you just have to that’s just a convention that you have to follow or else you’ve inoculated your theory from refutation so the proper way to go about this is never to reference your theory you must at this point under Popper say if if it’s really the case that the theory of universality makes the claim that animals can’t understand things if that’s really the case then you have refuting examples to your theory and that is therefore a problem with your theory yes you can now challenge those but you have to actually challenge them you don’t get to just casually add hoc challenge them you have to actually come up with here’s what was wrong with these experiments here’s how to do the experiment differently and you’ll get a different result because this is what was misunderstood has to be explanatory pop preparing epistemology is a harsh mistress you aren’t allowed to dismiss things like this when a basic statement exists now there’s another possibility though and that is the theory of universality does not make the prediction that animals don’t understand things well of course this is my viewpoint as I just said the word understanding is too big anyhow I don’t think there’s any real sense in which the theory of universality actually says a raven’s not going to be able to understand that a string tied to a piece of meat means it can’t fly away like that I do not see how the theory of universal explanatory explanatory universality it even implies that if this is the case then these basic statements do not represent a refutation of the theory but what I’m the implication of me saying that is that the theory of universal explainership does not imply that animal knowledge is in its genes okay I mean you have to know follow that through okay in a nutshell you’re not allowed to throw out basic statements and if you are going to claim that no this doesn’t violate the theory then that was never an implication of your theory to begin with and so you can’t use your theory to imply it do you see where I’m trying to go with this there’s a thought here I’m maybe I’m not making as clear as I can’t as I should I

[00:44:58]  Red: do see I do see where you’re trying to go I think I think you’re making it pretty clear

[00:45:04]  Blue: okay so basically you got two choices you either have to admit that a basic statement is a problem for your theory if in fact it’s showing something that is different than the implications of your theory or it’s not an implication of your theory and so you don’t don’t get to use your theory to imply it those are your only two options with animal intelligence this one’s fairly easy and I don’t know that there’d be that many people would push back on me there’s I know there’s a few I think most of us understand there could be animal understanding of at some level and that wouldn’t really mean that they’re universal explainers right it’s it so therefore it isn’t really an implication of the theory however I’m using the exact same argument here in it but it’s I’m using it in an area where it’s a little bit more controversial if the fact that hunger does in fact over a population lead to the behavior of eating if that really does violate universality then that’s a refuting case you don’t get to just ignore it you don’t get to just explain it away you have a problem with your theory that now needs to be solved an empirical problem with your theory that now needs to be solved if on the other hand it’s not an implication you’re saying that it’s not an implication of your theory then you should never have used your theory to imply it to begin with right because it’s not an implication of your theory sure okay that’s my argument in a nutshell okay

[00:46:26]  Red: I love your argument in a nutshell that argument is never going to work against that person that you’re that you were arguing with on twitter because they’re not not only are they not operating from the same viewpoint but they’re ignoring problems

[00:46:50]  Blue: yes that that may well be true

[00:46:52]  Red: I think they are willfully choosing to to try and argue around the edges of things I think

[00:47:05]  Blue: yes or maybe I’m right that this is more of a moral concern I don’t know that for sure and you make a good point that that’s not clear from the statements either but I think it’s very common for people to have moral concerns that they don’t state outright so that’s why I’m kind of favoring that point of view that maybe there’s maybe the moral concern needs to be addressed and I do agree it has it needs to be addressed and we’re not going to in this podcast maybe we will in a future podcast but there are legitimate concerns wait a minute does this mean that we’re not all equal yeah that’s what it means it means that it is entirely possible that some people start with genetic disadvantages in personality that is at least a possibility that we have to consider as a possibility I

[00:47:52]  Red: I don’t I guess I don’t understand why that would be a problem for people like we are not when it comes to our kind of our chemical makeup or or whether you want to blame it on our genes we our emotional responses to things are not equal anymore than our physical responses to things are equal

[00:48:17]  Blue: yes I agree I mean even just simple things like level of anxiousness that we know at this point there’s that there’s an anxious center in the brain right I mean it’s there there are certain feelings that our neuroscience tell us exist as as atoms basically and some people have that turned way up and some people have it turned way down and that’s going to affect your personality you know at least at first again I I think because we are universal explainers there’s very real hope that you can do something about it right and I and I

[00:48:51]  Red: suppose there are of you know there’s a fair amount of argument and debate still in the you know nature versus nurture side of things but in general like I have I guess a and I don’t want to turn this into an nature versus versus nurture I definitely believe people can be taught to be anxious and I believe that or or can have that be a learned behavior brought on to them but I do believe that the inclination towards anxiety is is also a chemical thing that happens to us

[00:49:34]  Blue: yeah okay let me go through quickly other things once I’ve number four that the genes can influence us through feelings I feel like that opens a flood gate right that by far and away this is going to turn out to be the most important one but let’s talk about other things where the genes could influence our ideas indirectly so according number five according to Richard Burn genes control how animals gain ideas via attention so he claimed that this is true for humans so he gave the example of this is from our previous podcast a bird that does not know how to seeing the species specific song that it needs to learn how to sing some birds come pre -programmed with the knowledge in their genes how to seeing the species specific song other birds don’t other birds have a species specific song but they have to actually learn it by hearing it from their father so he says that the genes can make it though so that it will learn the species specific song by making it so it only pays attention to certain kinds of songs so he gave the example of they tried to teach one of those birds the song for a different species and it just wouldn’t learn it but then they tried to teach it the species specific song backwards so it’s a different song but it’s the same notes and it then learned it backwards oh wow okay

[00:50:50]  Blue: okay so he calls that genetically channeled learning where it still has to learn it the the knowledge of the song does not appear in the genes but the genes have a range through genetically channeled learning that it will learn the species specific song by the way as a just a side note that’s completely irrelevant to the point I’m making Richard Dawkins in his recent interview with Sean Carroll said that there is experiments that show that there are some species of birds where the birds actually creatively compose their songs so what they do is they by trial and error just try out different notes and when they find certain notes and phrases of music that sound good to them they’ll pick those up and then they’ll use they’ll string those together into their final song so in this case there’s no knowledge in the genes as to which song they’re going going to sing but instead they’re actually using their sense of beauty of musical beauty to be able to through trial and error compose their own song so that would be an example of animal creativity kind of limited form of creativity clearly not not open -ended creativity like humans have but anyhow I thought that was interesting and he says there’s there’s many experiments to back this up at this point another example of basic statements you don’t get to just say no that’s impossible because creativity is only for universal explainers you have to now take this basic statement seriously and address it so he also said that humans have genetically channeled learning he gave the example of how we talk cute to kids and then he gave the example of how when you get sick and you throw up then you may dislike that food even if you know playing well the food had nothing to do with why you got sick he considers those examples of genetically channeled channeled

[00:52:34]  Blue: learning in humans so that would be another way you know you can think about this a little bit further you as universal explainers we should be able to overcome genetically channeled learning if we need to eat a food that makes us sick because we once got sick you could think through you know what I’m gonna die if I don’t eat this food I better eat it you know and it’s it’s gonna make a difference right so this is an example of how genetically channeled learning should be strongly influenced by the fact that we are universal explainers and it is right on the other hand I would suspect that a great deal of genetically channeled learning happens when a person’s very young maybe even before like the age of two

[00:53:19]  Blue: and if the genes wanted us to pick up certain ideas at a young age it could through genetically channeled learning at least in principle it could through genetically channeled learning make sure we pick up certain ideas at a young age before we really have full language ability before we really have the ability to be kind of open -ended with our creativity it could probably do a lot with us by the age of two so this may actually be a powerful way in which the genes could influence us again it’s not destiny it’s not something we couldn’t overcome but even even the Deutschians would admit that ideas are sticky from the ones I’ve talked to they’ve had no problem with the idea that positivism and reductivism you know reductionism and the bucket theory of knowledge are all ideas that are false but that they’re hard to overcome right because ideas are sticky and that if we have certain intuitive ideas that exist it’s really hard for us to realize that those are wrong ideas so I mean like they’re they’re okay with the idea that ideas are sticky and that just because a problem is an idea that doesn’t mean you can just wheel the problem away right I mean you’ll hear all sorts of them say things like that so if the genes are causing us to pick up ideas through genetically channel learning at a young age those ideas may be sticky and it may be that those are hard to overcome for all I know okay at least that’s a possibility number six the genes can influence culture so often this is put as a contest between genes and memes

[00:54:52]  Blue: but in fact this is similar to nature versus nurture genes being the nature and memes being the nurture but in fact there is no clear line between those two so we talked earlier about the western market fact now I’m going to talk a little bit more in detail to explain how nature versus nurture is in some ways a false dichotomy so the western market fact never mind if it’s true or not we’re going to pretend it’s true for the sake of argument the idea is that up through the age of two that anyone that you grew up with that uh you experienced you know reduced reduced sexual interest in and also it works in reverse if you’re older than two but you knew the person up through age two then you have reduced sexual interest in them and this is used to explain why siblings and parents and children don’t regularly become sexually attracted to each other and have sex now the western market fact basically says here’s this really simple rule now simple rule should be implementable by genes if the genes and and we’re talking about feelings okay the genes control feelings so it’s at least reasonable the mesh work effect is reasonable based on everything we’ve said so far whether it’s true or not I don’t know but it’s reasonable it could be that the genes simply shut off those feelings for anyone that it happens to pick up as uh that you happen to know prior to age two and then after that it stops working that way that that could be and that’s the western market fact in a nutshell there is some controversy around it they’ve done tests on this it has shown up like there’ve been certain communities that have tried to do a communal raising of kids so that you don’t raise them with families the vast majority of cultures have always tried to have parents raise their own children but there have been a few

[00:56:40]  Blue: experiments with parents not raising their own children let’s let’s raise them as a community and in that case we get a chance to actually test the western market fact so the in this in some of these religious communities that did this they would want those children to later get married but now they’ve been raised together as if they were siblings and what they found and it wasn’t it wasn’t 100 percent and this is one of the things that then becomes controversy around the west market fact some of them did get married but the desire to marry the children that they were raised with was much lower than if they had just met at a later age and so these religious communities had a hard time getting their children to marry members of their own community because they had raised them together and so therefore the western market fact had kicked in or at least that’s the theory okay

[00:57:31]  Blue: but when we talk about this is this a genetic effect or is this a cultural effect well it’s it’s neither it’s both the genes have a rule anyone you’re raised with by age two don’t have sexual attraction to or have reduced sexual attraction to but it’s completely it’s it’s not directly coding do not have sexual attraction to your siblings it’s starting with a certain cultural meme that parents to raise children and that they raise them together that they tend to have children clumped together in age based on that meme that exists it’s the genes literally using that piece of culture as it’s jumping off point for this reduction to sexual attraction now why would the genes want a reduction to sexual attraction amongst siblings well because that’s a waste of genetic resources children amongst siblings tend to have genetic defects the genes would want to reduce our desire to spend sexual resources on a sibling so it would make sense that if there were a western market effect and if it were genetically activated that that would that a person who had that would have a genetic advantage would would would reproduce more and then that gene would spread throughout the population okay so in terms of the western market effect it’s a pretty good theory it’s testable we’ve had some tests that have corroborated it it’s consistent with universal explainership because it utilizes feelings it only implements a very simple rule doesn’t require the genes to somehow work out some rule like if if if we were to say the genes implemented a rule don’t have sexual relationships with your siblings how would the genes even implement that right it’s not at all clear how the genes could know who’s a sibling and who isn’t so a simple rule those that you were raised with up to the age of two that’s your siblings that would be a rule that we would expect the genes to be able to do so this is actually a fairly reasonable theory and it’s been tested it’s been corroborated to some degree now and even those that have kind of been against the western market effect I think usually the the criticism is that it can’t be a very strong effect that that we do find that in these communities that have tried to raise children together that some of them do get married so it’s not like a 100 % effect now it makes sense the west market effect would maybe be gentle it would be light that there’s a slight reduction to genetic sorry sexual interest in the people you’ve been raised with but you can see how this in turn might create a cultural rule so let’s say that most children are raised together most kind of have a lack of sexual interest in each other in fact they kind of think it’s a little bit gross that the idea of having sex with your signal well that’s very quickly going to become a meme in and of itself the incest taboo okay now we know there is a meme the incest taboo it exists what you probably have never asked about is whether the genes were in part responsible for that taboo and the answer if the west market effect is true is yes that the genes created in some sense that incest taboo that’s why it’s hard to separate culture, nature and nurture they’re actually a big complex that mixes together with no clear delineations until you have a really strong theory like when I say strong theory I mean precise theory not like strongly tested theory but like a theory that says here’s the rule it’s age two we can now test that once you have kind of the real specifics the theory becomes empirical and you can start to test it the theory the genes cause siblings to not have sex with each other that’s a true theory but it’s not empirical there’s no way to test it directly we’re not really sure what the heck’s going on but this is this is what I’m getting at though is this idea that the genes might actually be the cause of certain means now here’s where things get interesting could you test this theory that the western market effect is distinct from the incest taboo because a counter theory might go something like this there is no western market effect but instead there is an incest taboo the incest taboo is purely mimetic it has no genetic factors that are played at all and because we raise people and we tell them oh that’s gross the idea of sex with your siblings that’s gross people pick that up and they that is because of the mean that people don’t have sex with their siblings and this mean came about because people didn’t like having children that were initially that children were that that were defective so it led to the mean okay notice that this is still the genes influencing the mean because the genes influenced what was defective but you could see how this now removes the western market effect and yet we end up with the same explanation but it’s it’s a far less it’s far more mimetic and far less genetic explanation now and this is actually a fairly reasonable explanation we’ve had a chance to test it though so in terms of a competition between these two explanations here’s the test you would do what if you had siblings that were raised apart they’re still going to have the incest taboo mean in their heads yes okay when they come together do they have a lack of sexual attraction just like siblings that are raised together or do they find themselves sexually attracted to each other well we’ve done these experiments by accident you know we never intentionally did this experiment we have cases of siblings that were raised apart didn’t know about each other came together and this and this is from my psychology textbook by the way my psychology 101 class in college it said when this happens in real life the siblings find that they tend to have a very strong attraction for each other and that they feel guilty over that fact and they feel shame over it you can actually see that there are two forces at work here one mimetic and one genetic and you can see that there’s the incest taboo that is causing them to feel the shame and that there’s the western mark effect or in this case the lack of western mark effect which is causing them to feel attraction for each other even though they’re siblings because they weren’t raised together the key point I want to make here this is interesting in and of itself is that the western mark effect if it’s real and certainly the experiments I’ve laid out corroborate the theory so far at least as a mild effect they aren’t really separate from memes they the western mark effect both relies on the existence of the meme that we raise children together and in fact could very easily be the source of the incest taboo that we have these negative feelings towards the idea of sex towards siblings most of us do and therefore it became a taboo that’s within the culture that we then feel that then continues to influence us so that would be number six the idea of genes can affect culture and then last week number seven genes can affect the non -universal parts of the brain so humans may be significantly affected by older animal modules in the brain in some cases and we have no reason to believe that all knowledge that we learn is via the universal explainer part of the brain so let me give an example of this face blindness now I don’t really know what face blindness is and so again I don’t want to necessarily say the theorem about to advance is actually true but it’s at least plausible and would not be violate would not violate explanatory universality so what is face blindness some people are unable to recognize faces imagine a person that like a person with face blindness a man with face blindness had to actually ask his wife to wear a bow at a party so that he could pick her out at the party because otherwise he wouldn’t be able to know which one was her so face blindness is this interesting problem that exists where the person apparently is trying to recognize faces using the parts of the brain that are used for object recognition rather than the parts of the brain that are used for face recognition there’s a giant part of the brain that is set aside for face facial recognition

[01:05:24]  Blue: that most people have but for some people it’s deactivated and it’s much so imagine trying to recognize your friends by their hands okay you probably could eventually learn to do it but it would be way harder than recognizing a face we’ve got something in the brain that is helping us recognize faces fast and is that something that we learned as a universal spider do we do that through explanations it doesn’t feel like it to me it seems like when we recognize faces it’s an almost instantaneous thing that takes place where you just suddenly recognize the face and you know the name jumps into your head and I’ve had an interesting experience it’s at least in part based on where you are and who you expect to see I had an interesting experience where my I think I mentioned this at a past podcast where my sister I didn’t realize she was on campus and she so there’s this girl wearing sunglasses that’s waving at me like I should know who she is across campus and the sunglasses are kind of heavily covering her face and I don’t even remember that my sister is on campus so I do not recognize it as my sister and I’m like what is that crazy girl doing I don’t know who she is and I’m walking towards her

[01:06:41]  Blue: and I suddenly realize who it is and it suddenly comes back to me oh yeah that’s right my sister moved moved to Utah and I thought she was in California it wasn’t even in my mind that she was in the same state as me and she goes did you not recognize me and I go I do recognize you now but yeah I didn’t expect you to be on campus and it was a weird experience I literally could not recognize my own sister because I was in the wrong setting for my facial recognition module in my brain to activate for her so that must be what it feels like to have face blindness where you just cannot bring to mind who is this person now here’s where things get interesting face blindness can come from an injury so a regular person who recognizes faces can suddenly stop recognizing faces if they get like a blow to the head and it damages a certain part of the brain it’s this one specific part of the brain getting damaged that causes facial blindness so we know it’s actually a certain area of the brain I can’t remember if it was in the lower parts which are probably hardwired areas if it was the higher parts which would be more of the soft plan but like it’s typical that there’s a certain part of the brain and if it gets destroyed you lose your ability to recognize faces and you gain face blindness and you cannot relearn it

[01:08:06]  Blue: okay it is not possible we do not have cases of people who have face blindness overcoming it they can learn strategies where they can you know have their wife put a bow on their heads to recognize them at the party they can learn to cope through explanatory strategies but apparently you cannot use your explanatory universality to relearn how to see faces instantly this seems suggestive and I don’t know this for sure but this seems suggestive that this might be an older animal part of the brain it might be that the algorithm for recognizing faces isn’t doesn’t use explanations at all but instead is some sort of algorithm that existed that animals would have to have this too right animal has to be able to recognize each other so it makes sense that that might be an involved thing you could almost imagine this like a machine learning algorithm although I doubt it’s that much like a machine learning algorithm imagine that you had like a machine learning algorithm was in your head and it fed to you the name it did a recognition and fed to you to your thinking part of your brain who that person is and then you could use that in your explanations and it might be wrong in some cases like in the case where it couldn’t recognize my sister so you could imagine though that this piece of knowledge on how to recognize faces might have nothing to do with explanatory universality and therefore that’s why you can’t relearn it when you lose it you can see though how this would affect people if there are such modules that exist in the brain if you didn’t have one you would be at a disadvantage compared to somebody else we talked about the possibility this might be the explanation for why someone with Williams syndrome can’t learn numbers and space as well there could be a animalistic part of the brain that understands space intuitively I don’t know there is but there could be and maybe that part becomes isn’t connected as well in a Williams patient because they overused a certain part of their brain you can see how genes might affect things like that where people have certain more natural knacks for certain things that not everything is necessarily done by the universal explainer module okay do you follow my argument there

[01:10:26]  Red: I do I totally follow your logic that makes sense to me

[01:10:31]  Blue: okay so summary then we got seven things that I’ve come up with that genes could influence our ideas without violating universality they can control physiology and that can in turn impact our personality they can control how we grow various parts of the cortex like the Williams syndrome example and that might affect our personality and our interests which would affect our ideas they can control our perceptions like with dyslexia and that can in turn impact our ideas they can control how or why our pain and pleasure centers and control and affect our feelings and that could in turn affect our personality and our ideas they can control our attention what ideas we take in through attention particularly at a young age they can affect our culture the example there was the western work effect it may be that there are older parts of the brain that affect how easy some things are for us like recognizing faces in the case of face blindness and that might affect what our interests are that might affect where we decide to put our time and effort into learning and that could affect our ideas so here’s my list of what I think is possible without violating universality and I think this is actually a fairly powerful list now I want to emphasize

[01:11:45]  Blue: that I’m not necessarily saying that these are true one of the things I want to make clear is that I’m putting these forward for consideration as non -refuted theories not that we know for a fact that these are all true or even if they are all true they may have a relatively negligible effect in a lot of cases but I want to put forward that anytime we want to come up with an explanation for the genes affected somebody’s personality which people do all that’s very popular right now to claim oh the genes impact happening is 50 % that if we instead of just saying the genes impact happening is 50 % we put it in terms of a more testable explanation using one of these seven explanations and turn it into an empirical theory that we can actually test for what the cause is that we should take that idea seriously that those should be considered valid ideas that don’t violate universality however let me just say though that we could make a counter case and in fact we should if the genes could impact us so strongly that they could get us to do whatever we wanted whatever they wanted that seems like that would be a very bad thing because then that person would be very inflexible and they would not be able to adapt to just a regular changing world environment so we should expect that even if the genes do have access to these seven methods of impacting our ideas that they wouldn’t necessarily use them for every imaginable case that there would be something to be said for not impacting us too strongly and allowing us to be able to choose things on our own so that we are more flexible creatures and we’re more likely to survive in a strange environment that the genes can’t predict so we’re looking for some sort of balance here yes it’s possible for the genes to affect us but they can only they can only affect us in limited ways like this and even then we’re not saying that the genes do select for affecting us a lot of stuff probably really is just ideas in our head a lot of things that we confuse for genetic impact may be primarily ideas in the head and the impact may be something genetically may be something very downstream like physical attractiveness are you with me so far and will you at least buy that these are possibilities that the genes can impact us

[01:14:02]  Blue: I am I am with you and I I do buy that there is a possibility I I you’ve made a pretty compelling point I think okay I good because I am now going to challenge that in a very visceral way I’m going to give you an example this is a real scientific study that was done that is really a little hard to believe that the genes could impact in this way here it is so Essie vitting in her study evidence for substantial genetic risk of psychopathy in seven -year -olds what a name for a paper she found the following she said the twins with milder antisocial behavior showed a moderate genetic heritability of 30 percent the remaining influences were entirely environmental this is by the way I’m quoting this not directly from her study but from the book Evil Genes which was the basis where I first read read about this she says but for the antisocial behavior of those twins who were highly psychopathic was under much stronger genetic influence a heritability of 81 percent wow so she and this is in seven -year -olds wow okay she is claiming in her study this is what her study found was that genetics heritability that psycho high psychopathy in seven -year -olds in children was genetically influenced and was heritable 81 percent this is really the same argument that we just used for in the previous episode for dyslexia where the the fruit and boot rhyme that because of dyslexia that that that’s actually the genetic impact was dyslexia that’s what caused those children to suddenly sort into genetic categories that was a high genetic influence and high degree of heritability it’s exactly the same thing it’s the same argument in fact

[01:16:01]  Blue: I don’t know what to make of this even with all seven of the ideas I’ve laid out it’s genuinely hard for me to accept the idea that psychopathy is inherited and that it is determined primarily according to this study by the genes there is a how do I put this I mean I was talking about how maybe some of the pushback I get is moral I feel that moral pushback even just reading this like oh my gosh are you saying that you’re born bad and that there’s no real hope that you’ll overcome it at least not at our current level of knowledge that is precisely what S.E. Bidding is saying she is making the case that extreme you know high psychopathy is genetic is genetically determined and that is determined at a young age that interventions do not make a difference and that there’s nothing you can do in terms of nurture that’s gonna not nothing because it’s not 100 % genetic nothing ever is so based on twin studies and such sometimes there is occasionally one twin that was highly psychopathic and everyone wasn’t so nurture must have made a difference in that case but that there isn’t much hope that the chances that nurture is going to make a difference aren’t strong how do you feel about this I mean this is a study I’m not saying it’s true or not

[01:17:28]  Red: well I I don’t have a moral objection to that inclination I mean or to to her study it doesn’t cause me a moral objection to the idea that people could in fact be born bad and nothing could change that it happens in a really small percentage of people I think yeah yes if anything I kind of find it a little bit comforting

[01:17:59]  Blue: well okay let’s talk about that because some people do the author of evil genes actually found it comforting so I would like to hear why you find it comforting

[01:18:09]  Red: I find it comforting because because it it it means that people also can be born good and and that that maybe we can eradicate badness if if we don’t if those people don’t continue to I mean not that I would want to ever suggest we should keep people from procreating just because they have bad genes but you know like the level of of what of badness that happens when when people are our sociopaths is it’s really detrimental to our world and to know that that that’s that that’s just really a brokenness that they come into the world with yeah I don’t know I think it I think it does have some comfort

[01:19:02]  Blue: okay you know what I’ll actually that is that is that’s not quite the same as the reason that that the author of evil genes gave what was your reason you know I wish I had the quotes I don’t want to misquote her but if it going off of my memory from years ago it seems like her argument was there is some comfort in knowing that as the parent there was there was nothing you could have done that there are some cases that just aren’t your fault

[01:19:30]  Red: well however the if if it’s genetic the implement the the the genes came from somewhere right they came from the parents

[01:19:43]  Blue: yeah

[01:19:44]  Red: and

[01:19:44]  Blue: not your fault in terms of your your raising strategies well but

[01:19:48]  Red: here’s where I’m going to potentially challenge that if I’m a parent who’s a psychopath I typically am going to be exhibiting though that persistent antisocial like that impaired empathy and remorse I’m probably going to be treating my children poorly and so so maybe

[01:20:16]  Blue: a nurture in that the parent was psychopathic and therefore treated the child poorly and that that passed along the psychopathic maybe

[01:20:25]  Red: well I’m just saying it maybe could be exacerbating yeah situation

[01:20:30]  Blue: so Barbara the the author of the book neither her mother nor herself had these sociopathic tendencies but her sister did so I think in context she was maybe talking about her own personal her own experience yeah

[01:20:49]  Red: that that that is interesting and I can see for in that situation how she would find comfort that it wasn’t it wasn’t her mom’s fault and that there was nothing anyone can do you know if you if you have a genetic problem in your family and you know your I I have a family friend and like every single one of his children was born you know very very damaged their their physical bodies and he can’t do anything about that either right I like that’s yeah yep it’s a sad outcome but it’s that’s what that’s what his genes spin up is broken children

[01:21:32]  Blue: yeah so by the way here’s a quote from bidding she says of a seven -year -old in her study Mark does not feel guilty if he has done something wrong he does not show feelings or emotions and he is rarely helpful if someone is hurt from page 55 of evil genes

[01:21:48]  Red: interesting

[01:21:49]  Blue: let me just say that while I’m and this is why I kind of drew out this online arguments I’ve had with fans of David Deutsch I feel they’re pushing it too far but when you use an example like this I kind of see where they’re coming from it is very hard for me to believe that psychopathic could be 81 % heritable and yet that is what the current studies are showing now we have to understand that in light of everything we’ve just said we have to understand that heritability can’t be directly coded for because we’re talking about universal expanders and we’re not claiming that it is and really that’s at the level of a bad explanation to say that at this moment yet something is going on and it is a basic statement and if it poses a problem for explanatory universality which maybe it does then that’s a problem that needs to be addressed you don’t get to just sweep it away I’m going to hold myself to the same standard and the case of hunger I have no problem with saying the genes cause hunger and the hunger causes behavior and that’s the way the genes keep us aligned I have no problem with that that doesn’t bother me in the slightest and I do not see that as even slightly causing a problem for universality I don’t feel the same for this example here it’s interesting this is a problem and this is in a nutshell the problem Tracy raised to me that I’m trying to explain but admitting I don’t have all the answers and I’m not going to tell you it’s not a problem because I think it is I think that we’ve got a bit of a situation where it is unclear how to entirely reconcile some of our studies with genes and psychopathy sociopathy with universal explainership I think it can be done I don’t know how as of today but I think I’ve laid out a series of testable possibilities that are worth pursuing notice I really emphasized with that glass quote feelings or emotions he does not show feelings or emotions now feelings and emotions we said that is that’s my number four on my list of seven that is something the genes can affect so that is at least consistent with my theory but we are talking about something far more complicated than an atomic emotion here right we’re talking about empathy basically that some people are unempathetic that’s the problem with narcissists is that they are unempathetic how do we address this problem now one more thing I should mention the author of evil genes Barbara Oakley

[01:24:20]  Blue: okay she ends her book with a twist so this is a this is not a fictional book this is a you know a science book but she ends it with a twist that was really kind of chilling and I’m not trying to back her theory but I am going to explain what her theory was and it does make a certain amount of sense why does psychopathy or sociopathy or Machiavellianness why and narcissism why do they exist in the population if they are in fact genetically caused to some degree why do they exist in the population her answer is that evolution selected those people to be our predators oh because really because that is a viable replication strategy yeah so again I’m not trying to back this theory but that is what her ultimate theory was and you know what this isn’t something she totally made up I have since reading that book read that multiple times from serious scientists trying to study that I don’t think they usually use the word predator but we do use the word predator I mean that is a word we use for people who have certain type of sociopathic tendencies this does have to be consistent with evolutionary theory so it would have to be that if the genes create a predilection towards certain kind of negative personality traits it would have to be that those negative personality traits have an advantage of some sort now she points out that this is the typical like if you’ve ever read selfish gene by Richard Dawkins he points out that people mistake this as

[01:26:01]  Blue: psychopathic is superior to empathy that’s not the way this would work right if he calls it hawks and doves if you’ve got like an animal and some have a tendency to fight and some have a tendency to not fight there are certain replicating replicating advantages to fighting and certain ones that are advantages to not fighting because if you don’t fight then you don’t get injured if you do fight you become dominant and you get more mating opportunities so what you would actually expect is that there would be a there would be a limit that would be reached let’s say that if all the animals had a fight instinct and they fought every single time that would be bad for everybody if all the animals had a don’t fight instinct then that would the moment by chance a fight instinct came along that would be a giant advantage for the one who had the fight instinct so that would then start to replicate through the the genes would that fight instinct then take over no because we know that at 100 % it’s bad for everybody so what we would expect is we’d expect that to flow through the gene pool up to say 20 % and then some sort of tipping point is reached where you’ve got too many fighters in the population and that gene starts to become a disadvantage and you would find an equilibrium would be reached okay she’s actually making that argument she’s saying there are certain advantages to being apathetic there are certain advantages to not being apathetic and that there is a as there are more people in the population that are Machiavellian the empaths become less trustful and it becomes less an advantage to be a Machiavellian but as there are fewer in the population to become more trustful and it becomes more an advantage to be in Machiavellian so we would expect them to represent a certain segment of the population that represents the tipping point of where it’s an advantage and that they would stay a consistent presence within the population at whatever that point is and by the way that point can change based on culture as we get better at catching Machiavellians we would expect there to be fewer of them because it would be less of a replication advantage and that’s that’s her whole argument again not trying to support or before against the argument but wanted to lay that out one thing that comes to mind here that I think deserves some mention although this may turn out to be like not at all related to what we’re talking about is the idea of madness or insanity so something that has been pointed out by Michael Golding who’s a psychiatrist who’s also a friends with David Deutsch you know David Deutsch fan

[01:28:30]  Blue: he’s pointed out that you know certain madness is just real right and we have to do things to try to save a person from being in a state where they’re insane and we’re he even went so far as to say we’re trying to save the person that was there before and because a different person has taken over well what causes insanity it’s something wrong right that we talked about the different parts of the brain and that that if something goes wrong with one of them it starts to change the personality in certain ways that they can’t you know if the part of the brain that allows for inhibitions disappears the person starts to not have inhibitions and that changes the personality there was a guy real life case where he he started off normal he got married he was living a normal life and then he started to have lots and lots of infidelity sexual infidelity to the point where he’s like asking every woman he comes across you know and things like that interesting okay okay and it turns out he has a tumor so they take him into the hospital to address his tumor to save his life and he’s so bad that in the hospital he’s asking each of the nurses for sex as they walk by okay he’s that bad right his wife has left him long ago right is is cheating the cheating jerk I’m done right sure she’s not okay

[01:29:52]  Red: for that

[01:29:54]  Blue: and they cut out the the tumor and he wakes up from the surgery and his sexual problems are gone and and he he has gone back to his normal personality okay and he lives a normal life from that point forward not no longer has the sexual problems and until they start to come back again and so they go uh oh they’re coming back they go scan his brain and sure enough that tumor has returned holy cow this is a real life case right yeah sure okay I mean how do you reconcile that with universality in this case I actually don’t find this one that difficult to understand killing the part of your brain that’s got the inhibitions right of course you’re gonna end up acting in weird ways okay but I think we would say in this case that he’s not functioning quite right so it’s it’s maybe not fair to compare him to a regular universal explainer

[01:30:53]  Red: well and the other thing is what we can’t know was did he have more sexual desire or than he than he had had previously or was his inhibitions the thing that went away or no no good question the portion that controls like our choices and maybe not it maybe it’s not even inhibition the the part part of our brain that makes us like be able to make good choices or there’s lots of things that could have been happening to him that aren’t necessary that the manifestation of the of

[01:31:36]  Blue: of the sexuality could have

[01:31:38]  Red: there’s just so many other things that could have been

[01:31:40]  Blue: yes okay but we have to we have to accept it’s possible to have a defect that can impact you that much absolutely it’s a

[01:31:49]  Blue: basic statement absolutely okay here’s something that’s interesting though we all actually know what it’s like to be insane and you’ve probably never thought about this before but you become insane every single night when you dream when you’re in a dream state if if you were your normal self if you were a regular thinking universal explainer it would be trivial to realize you’re in a dream but you never do even sometimes you do but it’s rare that you do and you don’t think straight in a dream ideas popping to your head that make no sense and they feel like they make sense something that makes no sense when your normal universal explainer self waking self is thinking about you go that made no sense but in the dream state you really it just seems like it may seem so obvious that it makes sense right this is really what it’s like to be insane and one of the reasons why I know that is because Stephen Peck who’s a BYU professor and he’s a biologist at BYU he has a paper called my madness which I’ll put a link to where he got a problem with his brain where there was a virus that got into his brain and he he was went into a state of waking madness for a period of weeks and then they eventually figured out what the problem was killed the virus and he went back to normal again so it was a lot like being in a dream it wasn’t it was different from a dream in many ways and he actually calls this out but one of the things that that was very similar to being in a dream state was that ideas would occur to him and he would just believe them things like his daughters had put a picture of some drawings up on the wall and he would become convinced that the people in the drawings the little figures that his daughters had drawn were the leaders of an evil conspiracy with Walmart to take over the world and he would go talk to them and they would talk back to him and mind you the picture on the wall wasn’t of the evil leaders of the conspiracy it was the evil leaders of the conspiracy

[01:33:53]  Blue: and he would he would just know it was true and so and you couldn’t convince him it wasn’t because he knew it was true and this continued for weeks and he would hear like people would the the guy who’s going to put him into a brain scan the person in his mind would tell him I’m going to kill you while you’re in this brain scan you know and of course the doctor didn’t really say that you know but he would be convinced the doctor had said that and he thought he all his children had been cloned and that the clones were evil and that they were ninjas I mean like he he describes all these just crazy things that he believed during this time period and yet during this whole time he’s still able to reason right he’s still able to to some degree work out a certain amount of reason reasonableness and leave his life and explain to people why he thinks what he thinks is true and and at the end when they finally give him the stuff to take care of the virus he has been told by his clones that the clones of his the evil clones of his children that they’re all going to come by at one o ‘clock and that they’re going to make a decision about and he’s like panicked he’s like I have this moral responsibility to take care of these clones and nobody’s taking me seriously and they’re evil and I don’t know what to do with them like he’s literally having giant moral crisis and everybody’s kind of downplaying oh no it’s no big deal you know and he’s like panicked over this he’s like they’re all going to come and I’ve got to decide how I’m going to take care of these these evil clones of my children and they give him the the medication to remove it and he continues to think they’re going to stop by and nobody stops by at one o ‘clock and finally the thought occurs to him oh maybe they were right that I was just insane because it’s starting to lift

[01:35:42]  Red: right so he’s coming out of it now and realizing oh yes and he has this giant relief right it’s it’s an insane story literally an insane story it’s amazing that he would see things that were there and he would believe them and it seems to just be the case that there’s something like a partial universal explainer now let me make sure I explain what I mean by that because there should be no such thing as a partial universal explainer by definition unless you mean by it what I’m about to describe

[01:36:13]  Blue: universal explainer ship undoubtedly takes place in the brain and requires the brain to be functioning correctly if the parts of the brain aren’t doing their role whatever that role is we don’t know what that is because we don’t understand AGI yet it would make sense that the other parts might still be functioning and so you would end up with someone who’s really no longer a universal explainer because they’re insane but they still have a degree of reason they’re not they’re not clearly off or on they’re not clearly an animal they’re able to talk and reason and reason certain things out but they’re also no longer able to fully engage their rationality and therefore end up believing things that are ridiculous right actually ridiculous

[01:36:56]  Blue: at the end of the day this is a basic statement we know such people exist so if that makes you uncomfortable then unfortunately that’s a problem with your theory you’re going to need to adjust your theory could it be and we and we know that we become like this when we go to sleep and we even know that that’s because certain parts of the brain shut off why in your dreams do you act out things you wouldn’t do in real life it’s because you have lower inhibitions inhibitions in your dreams yeah so you do things that would be morally unacceptable to the point where this became a huge part of Freud’s theory right that we use our dreams to act out the things we really want to do but we can’t you really not yourself probably never thought of this you always think of yourself as being in the dream the person in the dream isn’t you right it’s you’re actually experiencing what it’s like to be an insane person it’s a different person it’s a different personality than you in your dream state I’ve wondered also if this could explain why we have the existence of being in a mentally challenged state I’ve always wondered about that I have a guy in my neighborhood

[01:37:55]  Blue: who he’s very severely mentally challenged and and you can tell immediately and based on the way he’s you know his physiology he probably has one of those genetic disorders that led to it and yet he can he can talk to you and he can actually make sense of what you’re saying as long as you keep it simple and he can he can clearly understand certain concepts and talk with you about them is a person like that a universal explainer no of course not okay and yet they’re clearly not an animal either they’re somewhere in between they’re way smarter than even animals with insight right okay and yet they don’t really they’re not really a universal explainer you could not probably ever explain quantum mechanics to this guy right because he’s mentally challenged he’s just too severely mentally challenged I’ve wondered if it’s the same thing that if you get certain parts of the brain shut off you end up in a sort of partial state where you’ve still got the ability to reason sometimes but you just can’t do it is this related to psychopathic don’t know but I’m gonna just throw it out there as another possibility that we could put on the list here empathy though is a feeling although it’s a complex one it’s not clear if a lack of empathy could be explained by my seven things or not by itself maybe okay what possibility comes to mind a couple of possibilities come to mind though what if empathy what if an empathy module was an older animal module that was built out of feelings okay per my number seven and let’s say that it was shut off for some people so just like face blindness could that explain psychopathic don’t know maybe we could also imagine it the other way around maybe by default all universal explainers are empathetic but we have a module that the genes created for us to make us egocentric and for some people it’s much stronger and so we call them having a lack of empathy when we’re what they really are is they’re just strongly egocentric again I’m here hypothesizing this is in the animal part of the brain not the universal explainer part of the brain and that it does this through feelings how good is this explanation that I’m listing out there probably not very good at this point no I agree not very good these are more like ad hoc saves they’re possible research directions not good explanations I don’t really know the answer is the bottom line I know that empathy does deal with feelings and feelings are under the control of the genes but that is just not enough and it still leaves me feeling like I haven’t really addressed the problem if that makes any sense it

[01:40:30]  Red: does it does and I think you’re right there’s some gaps here in this

[01:40:35]  Blue: now on that note we have to wrap up yes we do

[01:40:39]  Red: we have to admit that we haven’t solved this one and we have to move on

[01:40:44]  Blue: yes so what we’ll do is Tracy also asked about AGI safety we’ll do as the next podcast based on the fact that we did not come to definitive conclusions we have at best some research directions

[01:40:59]  Red: we’re going to try to now

[01:41:00]  Blue: yes and the outcome is not good right I mean like the idea that that psychopathy is heritable that’s an uncomfortable idea but let’s how does how would that apply to AGI safety if at all that’s what we’ll talk about next time okay I love that perfect well

[01:41:18]  Red: thank you Bruce all

[01:41:19]  Blue: right the end the theory of anything podcast could use your help we’re still struggling to really find an audience and we know that one of the main reasons why is because we release episodes far too haphazardly the main reason this happens is because it’s fun to record episodes but not so much fun to edit them since we’re on a shoestring budget we have to wait for someone to have the free time to edit an episode so that we can release it between school and work it’s hard to find that time we wish the show pulled in at least enough money to pay for editing so that we could just concentrate on making episodes so we’d like to ask our existing audience to help us out by spreading word about the show so that we can grow our audience and our advertising revenue please post or tweet about episodes you like and please go to apple podcasts and give us a five star review if you wish to donate to the show so that we can afford to pay for editing you can do that at anchor.fm slash four strands that’s F -O -U -R -S -T -R -A -N -D -S or you can do that at our related blog four strands.org and if you’re someone that enjoys editing podcasts for fun but no pay boy do we have a fun opportunity for you

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