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

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Unofficial, reviewed transcript. It may still contain mistakes; check the podcast when wording matters.

Speakers are labeled by first name where identified. Unidentified-speaker labels may refer to different people. Bracketed question marks indicate uncertain wording.

Transcript

[00:00:10]  Bruce: Welcome back to The Theory of Anything podcast. Hey, Cameo, how's it going?

[00:00:14]  Unidentified speaker: It's excellent, Bruce, how are you?

[00:00:16]  Bruce: 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.

[00:00:30]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:00:30]  Bruce: And that through these, they can coerce or encourage us using those feelings. And then we talked briefly about, can 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 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.

[00:01:25]  Bruce: 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. 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 conversations that I've had online.

[00:02:21]  Bruce: 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 in your brain and the genes say, for some people, I'm gonna activate it more and for some people, I'm gonna 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]  Cameo: I stumble over the idea that the genes want us to do something because it implies like an intent that baffles me, like why would the genes care if we were happy? Rewarding us for reproduction makes sense because they do want us to reproduce, I guess. I mean, it just giving that personification to...

[00:03:27]  Bruce: I agree, I agree.

[00:03:31]  Cameo: Which makes it, 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 could go, we could go through our entire lives and be morose and it wouldn't matter, right? I mean, unless we, I suppose if we killed ourselves instantly, then, then it would be a waste.

[00:03:55]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[00:03:56]  Unidentified speaker: It's kind of funny to me.

[00:03:57]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:03:58]  Bruce: 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]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:04:11]  Bruce: Genes evolved a certain way that if they make us feel pleasure around sex and romance, the genes that cause us to feel that way, that will cause those genes to replicate better. There's no actual intent. We are intentionally personifying as a shorthand.

[00:04:29]  Unidentified speaker: It's got nothing to do with what we actually believe.

[00:04:32]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[00:04:33]  Unidentified speaker: I'll get over that silly part then.

[00:04:35]  Bruce: However, 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. I, 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 coded for by the genes. Pain would be an example. 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.

[00:05:33]  Bruce: 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 coded for by the gene. Then honestly, my theory that I am advancing here would have to say, yes, it is entirely reasonable that genes, because 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. 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.

[00:06:21]  Bruce: There could not be a gene that codes for happiness per se. And this is my actual opinion. And so I'm actually agreeing with David Deutsch on that. Here's the problem though. Can the genes code for pain and suffering? Yes. I'm absolutely saying that that is based on our best current neuroscience and our best theories. We've got specific pleasure pain centers and the genes code for it, wire us 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. 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?

[00:07:21]  Bruce: Yeah, you would because they would be in pain and or suffering all the time. 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 gonna maybe affect your happiness. Actually, there's some studies that suggest it doesn't affect your happiness that much. 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.

[00:08:10]  Bruce: They could also code for happiness through creating suffering, 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, 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]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:08:40]  Bruce: 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 run, 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 genes can indirectly code for happiness.

[00:09:18]  Unidentified speaker: It's indirect.

[00:09:19]  Cameo: I also think it's a bit of a stretch, but okay.

[00:09:23]  Bruce: Okay, well, 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]  Cameo: There are physical, I am not aware of anything that would cause suffering, although I have read that they know that just some people, like that in a way that maybe that's what depression is.

[00:09:52]  Unidentified speaker: [Overlapping speech] Yes, that was where I was going with this.

[00:09:54]  Cameo: Is that your brain is coded for suffering versus coded for happiness.

[00:09:58]  Bruce: So 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 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.

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

[00:10:43]  Bruce: 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't 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.

[00:11:38]  Bruce: 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. 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. 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.

[00:12:35]  Bruce: I don't know if that's even true. I really don't know if that's even true.

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

[00:12:45]  Bruce: 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. Universal explainership, 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. 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 that are used for universal explainership. 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.

[00:13:42]  Bruce: It's a different thing and it's possibly used by the genes to try to align their replication interests with our interests. 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, 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 con… 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. Or at least I'm open to there being one and they, I'm, and 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.

[00:14:39]  Bruce: But I think it's because of quotes like that from David Deutsch 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. I'm trying to give a feel for what is the concern that they're expressing and analyze that. 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 that is why the genes want us to feel pleasure around sex, so that we will want to replicate our genes.

[00:15:36]  Bruce: That just does make sense. That's a well understood best theory that exists. 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. 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. That would be an example response I would get to what I just said.

[00:16:16]  Cameo: That's an awful explanation, honestly.

[00:16:20]  Bruce: That's the starting point, right? It's not really an explanation at all.

[00:16:23]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[00:16:24]  Bruce: It's being worded like a refutation.

[00:16:26]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[00:16:26]  Bruce: 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 over a population will make a difference. It won't be 100%. There'll be exceptions, because we're universal exploiters. There will be exceptions. That's part of what I'm assuming. So when I heard this response, the first thing that came to my mind was, oh, they must not understand what I'm really saying. 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.

[00:17:15]  Bruce: 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, in the conversation, spend maybe, this was on Twitter, spend several tweets explaining that. Okay, no, 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-vary 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.

[00:18:13]  Bruce: Okay, let's say I 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 eminently testable and has been tested, has been corroborated theory. So after I go through and explain all that, I might say, 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 vary explanation for the pattern that we see that does not reference feelings caused by genes. I don't think it can be done. So I got two different responses to me saying this. One of them came back and said, culture benefits from reproduction. That's my explanation.

[00:18:54]  Unidentified speaker: That's also not an explanation.

[00:18:56]  Bruce: No, it's not. 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-vary explanation, and it's because romance and sex are pleasurable.

[00:19:31]  Unidentified speaker: We like them.

[00:19:31]  Bruce: That's why we do it. And the genes made it 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. 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.

[00:20:23]  Bruce: So we're talking about feelings, but it's confusing the two concepts. Or maybe not confusing. Maybe he's taking 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? So I'm arguing, yeah, hunger is a basic feeling that you get. It's unpleasant. So the genes give us feelings of hunger so that we will eat. That's in their interest that we eat and 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 of genes cause hunger is the same as the one that says birth causes death.

[00:21:23]  Bruce: 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. So ideas clearly play a role in that also. I'm not in any way denying that Gandhi could basically decide to ignore entirely 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. It's supposed to. That's why it exists. I finally thought, go ahead.

[00:22:17]  Cameo: And why I don't spend very much time on Twitter, honestly.

[00:22:22]  Bruce: 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.

[00:22:37]  Unidentified speaker: So I asked him outright.

[00:22:38]  Bruce: 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 hunger does influence a lion to eat, because they're not universal explainers. So I thought, this was all in context of a human, 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.

[00:23:36]  Bruce: 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 about this, started having a conversation about, okay, let's talk about hard-to-vary-ness versus easy-to-vary-ness, right? I'm advancing a hard-to-vary theory. 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, did that really work?

[00:24:30]  Bruce: Then the result would be that you would lose weight because you didn't eat as much. Now, if we are arguing, and I don't know that he was arguing this, and I'm not trying to put words into his mouth at all. Let's say that he was arguing, and he was saying, if feelings do not influence us, then this shot should not exist, right? 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 outright, are you saying feelings do not influence us? 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. You can actually plan a real intervention. We haven't done a podcast on Judea Pearl's causal inference.

[00:25:26]  Bruce: 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 mean by it's a causal fact. 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.

[00:26:22]  Bruce: So one of the things that's really common is for fans of David Deutsch 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 very strong feelings against use of coercion. And so this is a very typical libertarian thing, even if you're not a fan of David Deutsch. But there's this strong belief that coercion is wrong. So 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, 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. But 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.

[00:27:20]  Bruce: 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 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—[unclear: “it’s me”]—try to explain why people often change their behavior when coercively tortured. Any explanation 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 and suffering, yet we see people who are influenced by their genes to give in to torture, and other people with the same genes who resist torture.

[00:28:08]  Bruce: So your theory about coercion is incorrect. Me. 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 doesn't explain. It also doesn't explain why some people are into sadomasochism. What is this person arguing?

[00:28:54]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I have no idea, honestly.

[00:28:58]  Bruce: It sounds like they're arguing that there's no such thing as physical coercion. We know there is.

[00:29:05]  Unidentified speaker: That's a basic statement.

[00:29:07]  Bruce: 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.

[00:30:00]  Bruce: 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? Let's go all the way. There must be no such thing as physical coercion. Well, we all know that's not true. 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? Actually, that's not an open question. With the right knowledge, the effect will be that they can't affect us at all.

[00:30:47]  Bruce: 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]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know that that's...

[00:31:43]  Cameo: I mean, you're trying to find a reason 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]  Bruce: Yeah, I think it is hard to make sense of what they're saying.

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

[00:32:23]  Bruce: Let me move this along now. So here's the thing, though. Let me admit this upfront. I mean, there's no point in me hiding 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 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.

[00:33:14]  Bruce: 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 [unclear: “isn’t really”] some really highly still optimistic viewpoint. Even if it's the case that this all started from Tracy asking about narcissism. 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. But 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. 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.

[00:34:07]  Bruce: 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. But there is an optimistic side to this, that there’s no such thing [connection unclear], 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 [unclear: “explainership”].

[00:35:04]  Bruce: 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 it is a viable theory. There is no way [sentence break unclear]—you cannot reference universality, explanatory universality, as proof that genes do not influence us through feelings. You just cannot do that. It's a viable alternative that has to be considered on its own merits and will affect how we perceive universality. 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 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.

[00:36:11]  Bruce: So that would be then a refutation of universality. The good news is that I just made it so it's no longer a 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, under what circumstances can they not, and 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.

[00:37:00]  Bruce: So let's go back and let's talk about animal intelligence as an example. 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. One of the theories that has been advanced by David Deutsch 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. Let's be honest, the word understanding is very vague. The fact that an animal understands something in some sense doesn't mean it does so in an explanatory sense. Even if they understand in an explanatory sense, it doesn't mean they do so in a universal explanatory sense. There could be levels of explanations, some that aren't explanatory. I don't know that to be a fact in any way, but there could be.

[00:37:50]  Bruce: The idea that animals understand something, does that in fact refute universality? Well, there's kind of a feeling amongst some of the fans of David Deutsch that it does. And so that's why they push back on a 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 equivalence. So for example, so first of all, they would 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. 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, right?

[00:38:47]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I agree.

[00:38:48]  Bruce: Okay, I mean, kind of at an intuitive level, not like algorithmically.

[00:38:51]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, okay, yeah.

[00:38:53]  Bruce: 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 six and say six. So they wanted to know if it understood the concept, if they understood equivalence, because little children don't, it 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.

[00:39:33]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:39:34]  Bruce: And they would say, which is larger—[unclear: “which is bigger and blue or red?”]—and then it has to answer blue or 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. So that is the result of an experiment. 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 rope's out of position, they won't bother to pull because they can see that the rope's not there for their partner. So they just won't even bother because they understand it has to have the rope. Ravens, they did an experiment with ravens where they put meat on a string, and the raven would sit there and think about it.

[00:40:23]  Bruce: Then it would come over and it would grab the string with its beak, pull on it, latch onto it with its hand, pull on it with its beak again. It would reel the meat in on the string. And it wouldn't do it through trial and error. It wouldn't be playing around and then figure it out. It would just in its head figure out how to reel in this meat. And then as a sign, 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 shoo 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 do trial and error in its head, just in its imagination to figure out, oh, if I do the following thing, I'm going to be able to reel in this meat.

[00:41:17]  Bruce: 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 multiple groups. And they found that in this case, we've intentionally picked all animals that Byrne would consider animals with insight. So 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. It's 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.

[00:42:07]  Bruce: 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. OK, 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. OK, 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.

[00:42:58]  Bruce: OK, 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 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 ad 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. It has to be explanatory. Popperian epistemology is a harsh mistress.

[00:43:44]  Bruce: 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 vague anyhow. I don't think there's any real sense in which the theory of universality actually says a raven is not going to be able to understand that a string tied to a piece of meat means it can't fly away. I do not see how the theory of universal explanatory universality even implies that. If this is the case, then these basic statements do not represent a refutation of the theory. But the implication of me saying that is that the theory of universal explainership does not imply that animal knowledge is in its genes. I mean, you have to now follow that through.

[00:44:38]  Bruce: 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. Maybe I'm not making as clear as I should.

[00:44:57]  Cameo: I do see where you're trying to go. I think you're making it pretty clear.

[00:45:04]  Bruce: 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 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 who would push back on me. I know there's a few. I think most of us understand there could be animal understanding at some level, and that wouldn't really mean that they're universal explainers, right? So therefore, it isn't really an implication of the theory. However, I'm using the exact same argument here, but 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.

[00:46:01]  Bruce: 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, 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, because it's not an implication of your theory.

[00:46:22]  Unidentified speaker: Sure.

[00:46:24]  Bruce: That's my argument in a nutshell.

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

[00:46:50]  Bruce: Yes. That may well be true.

[00:46:53]  Cameo: They are willfully choosing to try and argue around the edges of things, I think.

[00:47:04]  Bruce: 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 the moral concern needs to be addressed. And I do agree, 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.

[00:47:51]  Cameo: I guess I don't understand why that would be a problem for people. When it comes to our chemical makeup or whether you want to blame it on our genes, our emotional responses to things are not equal any more than our physical responses to things are equal.

[00:48:16]  Bruce: Yes, I agree. Even just simple things like level of anxiousness, we know at this point that there's an anxious center in the brain. I mean, there are certain feelings that our neuroscience tell us exist 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, at least at first. Again, I think because we are universal explainers, there's very real hope that you can do something about it.

[00:48:49]  Cameo: And I suppose there's a fair amount of argument and debate still in the nature versus nurture side of things. But in general, I have, I guess, and I don't want to turn this into a nature versus nurture. I definitely believe people can be taught to be anxious and I believe that or can have that be a learned behavior brought on to them. But I do believe that the inclination towards anxiety is also a chemical thing that happens to us.

[00:49:34]  Bruce: Okay, let me go through quickly other things. Number four, that the genes can influence us through feelings. I feel like that opens a floodgate, right? 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 Byrne, 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 sing 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 sing 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.

[00:50:23]  Bruce: 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 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.

[00:50:48]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, wow.

[00:50:49]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:50:50]  Bruce: Okay, so he calls that genetically channeled learning, where it still has to learn it. The knowledge of the song does not appear in the genes, but the genes have arranged through genetically channeled learning that it will learn the species specific song. By the way, as 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 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.

[00:51:47]  Bruce: So that would be an example of animal creativity, a kind of limited form of creativity, clearly not open-ended creativity like humans have. But anyhow, I thought that was interesting. And he says 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 plain well the food had nothing to do with why you got sick. He considers those examples of genetically channeled learning in humans. So that would be another way.

[00:52:37]  Bruce: Now, you can think about this a little bit further. 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 going to die if I don't eat this food. I better eat it. It's going to make a difference. 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. 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.

[00:53:40]  Bruce: 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 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—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 okay with the idea that ideas are sticky. And that just because a problem is an idea, that doesn't mean you can just will the problem away, right? I mean, you will hear all sorts of them say things like that.

[00:54:31]  Bruce: So if the genes are causing us to pick up ideas through genetically channeled 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. 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 Westermarck Effect. 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 Westermarck Effect, 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 you experienced reduced sexual interest in.

[00:55:28]  Bruce: 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 Westermarck Effect basically says, here's this really simple rule. Now, simple rule should be implementable by genes. If the genes... And we're talking about feelings, okay? The genes control feelings. So it's at least reasonable, the Westermarck 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, that you happen to know prior to age two. And then after that, it stops working that way. That could be.

[00:56:20]  Bruce: And that's the Westermarck Effect in a nutshell. There is some controversy around it. They've done tests on this. It has shown up. There have 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 experiments with parents not raising their own children. Let's raise them as a community. And in that case, we get a chance to actually test the Westermarck effect. So 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 100% and this is one of the things that then becomes controversy around the Westermarck effect. 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.

[00:57:17]  Bruce: 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 Westermarck effect had kicked in, or at least that's the theory. But when we talk about this, is this a genetic effect or is this a cultural effect? Well, 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 not directly coding. Do not have sexual attraction to your siblings. It's starting with a certain cultural meme that parents 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 its jumping off point for this reduction to sexual attraction.

[00:58:12]  Bruce: 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 Westermarck effect and if it were genetically activated, that a person who had that would have a genetic advantage, would reproduce more, and then that gene would spread throughout the population. So in terms of the Westermarck 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. It doesn't require the genes to somehow work out some rule. 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?

[00:59:08]  Bruce: 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 Westermarck Effect, I think usually the criticism is that it can't be a very strong effect, 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. It makes sense the Westermarck 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.

[00:59:57]  Bruce: 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, the idea of having sex with your sibling. Well, that's very quickly going to become a meme in and of itself. The incest taboo. 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 Westermarck 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.

[01:00:53]  Bruce: 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 what I'm getting at though, is this idea that the genes might actually be the cause of certain memes. Now, here's where things get interesting. Could you test this theory that the Westermarck effect is distinct from the incest taboo? Because a counter theory might go something like this. There is no Westermarck effect, but instead there is an incest taboo. The incest taboo is purely memetic. It has no genetic factors [unclear: “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.

[01:01:44]  Bruce: People pick that up, and it's because of the meme that people don't have sex with their siblings. And this meme came about because people didn't like having children that were initially that children were that were defective. So it led to the meme. Notice that this is still the genes influencing the meme because the genes influenced what was defective. But you could see how this now removes the Westermarck effect, and yet we end up with the same explanation, but it's far less—it’s far more memetic, 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 meme in their heads. When they come together, do they have a lack of sexual attraction, just like siblings that are raised together?

[01:02:39]  Bruce: Or do they find themselves sexually attracted to each other? Well, we've done these experiments by accident. 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 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 memetic 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 Westermarck effect, or in this case, the lack of Westermarck effect, which is causing them to feel attraction for each other, even though they're siblings because they weren't raised together.

[01:03:31]  Bruce: The key point I want to make here, this is interesting in and of itself, is that the Westermarck 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. The Westermarck 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 lastly, 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.

[01:04:22]  Bruce: 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 theory I'm 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.

[01:05:18]  Bruce: There's a giant part of the brain that is set aside for facial recognition that most people have, but for some people it's deactivated. And it's much harder. 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 explainer? 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 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 in a past podcast, where my sister, I didn't realize she was on campus.

[01:06:18]  Bruce: 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's 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 and I suddenly realize who it is. And it suddenly comes back to me. Oh yeah, that's right. My sister 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.

[01:07:17]  Bruce: 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 [unclear: “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. Okay, it is not possible.

[01:08:07]  Bruce: We do not have cases of people who have face blindness overcoming it. They can learn strategies where they can have their wife put a bow on their heads. They 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 doesn't use explanations at all, but instead is some sort of algorithm that existed that animals would have to have this too, right? An 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.

[01:08:59]  Bruce: Imagine that you had like a machine learning algorithm that was in your head, and it fed to you the name, it did a recognition and fed 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 that this might be the explanation for why someone with Williams syndrome can't learn numbers and space as well.

[01:09:51]  Bruce: There could be an animalistic part of the brain that understands space intuitively. I don't know if there is, but there could be. And maybe that part 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 more natural knacks for certain things, that not everything is necessarily done by the universal explainer module. Do you follow my argument there?

[01:10:26]  Cameo: I do. I totally follow your logic there. It makes sense to me.

[01:10:31]  Bruce: 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 our 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 could in turn impact our ideas. They can control how we're wired to 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 Westermarck 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.

[01:11:27]  Bruce: 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 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 happiness 50%, that if we instead of just saying the genes impact happiness 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.

[01:12:32]  Bruce: 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.

[01:13:29]  Bruce: So we're looking for some sort of balance here. Yes, it's possible for the genes to affect us, but 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 could impact us?

[01:14:02]  Cameo: I am with you and I do buy that there is a possibility. You've made a pretty compelling point, I think.

[01:14:11]  Bruce: Okay, 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, Essi Viding, in her study, Evidence for Substantial Genetic Risk of Psychopathy in Seven-Year-Olds. What a name for a paper.

[01:14:39]  Unidentified speaker: She found the following.

[01:14:40]  Bruce: She said, The twins with milder antisocial behavior showed a moderate genetic heritability of 30%. 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 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%.

[01:15:09]  Unidentified speaker: Wow.

[01:15:10]  Bruce: So she, and this is in seven-year-olds.

[01:15:15]  Unidentified speaker: Wow.

[01:15:16]  Bruce: She is claiming in her study, this is what her study found, was that genetics, that high psychopathy in seven-year-olds, in children was genetically influenced and was heritable 81%. This is really the same argument that we just used for in the previous episode for dyslexia, where the fruit and boot rhyme, that because of dyslexia, 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. 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?

[01:16:25]  Bruce: 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 Essi Viding is saying. She is making the case that extreme... You know, high psychopathy is genetically determined and that is determined at a young age that interventions do not make a difference and that there is 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 the other one 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 gonna make a difference aren't strong.

[01:17:23]  Bruce: How do you feel about this? I mean, this is a study. I'm not saying it's true or not.

[01:17:30]  Cameo: Well, I don't have a moral objection to that inclination, I mean, or 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.

[01:17:52]  Bruce: Yes.

[01:17:53]  Cameo: If anything, I kind of find it a little bit comforting.

[01:17:59]  Bruce: 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.

[01:18:08]  Cameo: I find it comforting because it means that people also can be born good, and that maybe we can eradicate badness 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 the level of badness that happens when people are sociopaths, it's really detrimental to our world. And to know that that's just really a brokenness that they come into the world with, I don't know. I think it does have some comfort.

[01:19:03]  Bruce: You know what? That's not quite the same as the reason that the author of Evil Genes gave.

[01:19:12]  Cameo: What was your reason?

[01:19:14]  Bruce: You know, I wish I had the quotes. I don't want to misquote her, but 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 nothing you could have done, that there are some cases that just aren't your fault.

[01:19:30]  Cameo: Well, however, if it's genetic. The genes came from somewhere, right? They came from the parents.

[01:19:43]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:19:44]  Bruce: Not your fault in terms of your raising strategies.

[01:19:47]  Cameo: Well, but 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 that persistent antisocial, that impaired empathy and remorse, I'm probably going to be treating my children poorly.

[01:20:14]  Bruce: So maybe a nurture in that the parent was psychopathic, and therefore treated the child poorly, and that passed along the psychopathy.

[01:20:24]  Cameo: Well, I'm just saying it maybe could be exacerbating.

[01:20:28]  Unidentified speaker: [Overlapping speech: “Yes”; “situation.”]

[01:20:30]  Bruce: So Barbara, 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 situation.

[01:20:48]  Cameo: Yeah, that is interesting. And I can see in that situation how she would find comfort, that it wasn't her mom's fault, and that there was nothing anyone can do. If you have a genetic problem in your family, and I have a family friend, and every single one of his children was born very, very damaged. Their physical bodies. And he can't do anything about that either, right? It's a sad outcome, but that's what his genes spin up is broken children.

[01:21:31]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:21:33]  Bruce: So by the way, here's a quote from Viding. 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. 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 psychopathy 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 explainers. And we're not claiming that it is.

[01:22:28]  Bruce: 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. In 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.

[01:23:05]  Cameo: It's interesting.

[01:23:06]  Bruce: 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 last quote, feelings or emotions. He does not show feelings or emotions. Now, feelings and emotions, we said that is 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.

[01:24:04]  Bruce: 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, she ends her book with a twist. This is not a fictional book. This is 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 Machiavellian-ness, 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.

[01:24:59]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, really?

[01:25:00]  Bruce: 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 psychopathy is superior to empathy.

[01:26:02]  Bruce: That's not the way this would work, right? 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 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 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 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 genes.

[01:26:51]  Bruce: 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 empathetic, there are certain advantages to not being empathetic, 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, they become more trustful and it becomes more an advantage to be a 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.

[01:27:50]  Bruce: 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 her whole argument. Again, not trying to support or be for or 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 friends with David Deutsch and a David Deutsch fan. He's pointed out that, you know, certain madnesses, they're 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 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.

[01:28:48]  Bruce: Well, what causes insanity? It's something wrong, right? That we've talked about the different parts of the brain and 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 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. 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.

[01:29:42]  Bruce: Okay. He's that bad, right? His wife has left him long ago, right? He's cheating, the cheating jerk. I'm done, right? Sure.

[01:29:51]  Unidentified speaker: She’s not [unclear] for that.

[01:29:53]  Bruce: And they cut out the tumor and he wakes up from the surgery and his sexual problems are gone. And he has gone back to his normal personality. And he lives a normal life from that point forward, no longer has these sexual problems, 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.

[01:30:22]  Unidentified speaker: Holy cow.

[01:30:25]  Bruce: This is a real life case, right?

[01:30:27]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, sure.

[01:30:28]  Bruce: 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. Of course, you're going to 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 maybe not fair to compare him to a regular universal explainer.

[01:30:53]  Cameo: Well, and the other thing is what we can't know was, did he have more sexual desire than he had had previously, or was his inhibitions the thing that went away?

[01:31:13]  Bruce: No, good question.

[01:31:14]  Cameo: The portion that controls our choices, and maybe it's not even inhibition, the part of our brain that makes us 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 sexuality could have... There's just so many other things that could have been.

[01:31:40]  Bruce: Yes. But we have to accept it's possible to have a defect that can impact you that much, because that's a basic statement.

[01:31:50]  Unidentified speaker: Absolutely.

[01:31:52]  Bruce: 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 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, I mean, sometimes you do, but it's rare that you do. And you don't think straight in a dream. Ideas pop into 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 [unclear]—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 Steven 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.

[01:33:00]  Bruce: And he 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 was different from a dream in many ways, and he actually calls this out. But one of the things 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]  Bruce: And he would just know it was true. 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 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. And of course, the doctor didn't really say that. But he would be convinced the doctor had said that. And he thought all his children had been cloned and that the clones were evil and that they were ninjas. I mean, 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. He's still able to, to some degree, work out a certain amount of reasonableness and [unclear: “leave his life”] and explain to people why he thinks what he thinks is true. And at the end, when they finally give him the stuff to take care of the virus, he has been told by his clones, 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…

[01:35:00]  Bruce: 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 a giant moral crisis. And everybody's kind of downplaying. Oh, no, it's no big deal. 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 evil clones of my children. And they give him 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, right?

[01:35:42]  Cameo: So he's coming out of it now and realizing.

[01:35:45]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, yes.

[01:35:46]  Unidentified speaker: He has this giant relief, right?

[01:35:50]  Bruce: It's an insane story, literally an insane story. It's amazing. 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 am about to describe. Universal explainership 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 is really no longer a universal explainer because they're insane, but they still have a degree of reason.

[01:36:37]  Bruce: 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? Rationally ridiculous. 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 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 in your dreams. So you do things that would be morally unacceptable to the point where this became a huge part of Freud's theory, right?

[01:37:25]  Bruce: That we use our dreams to act out the things we really want to do but we can't. You're really not yourself. You probably never thought of this. You only think of yourself as being in the dream. The person in the dream isn't you, right? 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 who, he's very severely mentally challenged. And you can tell immediately. Based on the way he's, his physiology, he probably has one of those genetic disorders that led to it. And yet, he can talk to you. And he can actually make sense of what you're saying as long as you keep it simple.

[01:38:14]  Bruce: And he can clearly understand certain concepts and talk with you about them. Is a person like that a universal explainer? No, of course not. And yet, they're clearly not an animal either. They're somewhere in between. They're way smarter than even animals with insight. And yet, 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 psychopathy? Don't know. But I'm going to 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.

[01:39:03]  Bruce: 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 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 psychopathy? 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 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.

[01:39:57]  Bruce: And it does this through feelings. How good is this explanation that I'm listing out there? Probably not very good at this point.

[01:40:04]  Unidentified speaker: No, I agree, not very good.

[01:40:06]  Bruce: 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.

[01:40:29]  Cameo: It does, it does. And I think you're right. There's some gaps here in this. Now, on that note, we have to wrap up. We have to admit that we haven't solved this one, and we have to move on.

[01:40:44]  Bruce: 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.

[01:40:58]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:40:59]  Bruce: We're going to try to now… Yes. And the outcome is not good, right? I mean, like the idea that that psychopathy is heritable, that's an uncomfortable idea. But how would that apply to AGI safety, if at all? That's what we'll talk about next time.

[01:41:15]  Cameo: Okay, I love that.

[01:41:16]  Unidentified speaker: Perfect.

[01:41:17]  Unidentified speaker: Well, thank you, Bruce.

[01:41:18]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[01:41:20]  Unidentified speaker: The end.

[01:41:24]  Bruce: 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.

[01:42:10]  Bruce: 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 dash S-T-R-A-N-D-S. Or you can do that at our related blog, fourstrands.org. And if you're someone that enjoys editing podcasts for fun but no pay, boy, do we have a fun opportunity for you.