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hello and welcome to psychology 230 personality and its Transformations it's called that because there are two things that you have to take into account when you're thinking about personality and one of those is how personality stays the same across time and that's really what gives you your ident and what allows you to identify other people and then also how personality changes and we're going to discuss both those things from a very large number of perspectives to find out all the information that you need for the course all you have to do is type my name into a browser and you'll get my homepage which is the page that you see here um on the left there's a table of contents that says current courses and then up here there's also a table of contents that lists the courses and this one's this one and then this is the introductory page here and then you can get to the course page like this I don't really like Blackboard so I'm going to use this instead so this is easy to get to and everything you need to know about the course should be here um so we'll start with the very straightforward things the first is there's there's two sources for reading in this course and one is a paperback book which is called introduction to personality and its Transformations um they're book there're chapters that I selected from a classic personality textbook that does a very good job of covering classic personality theorists although not such a good job of covering more recent work uh the book was published in 1982 Freud hasn't changed much since 1982 but there has been an awful lot of Personality research and so that brings us to the second source of readings and the second source of readings is actually this web page so if you go down the web page to lecture topics and readings you'll see in the third column a whole sequence of papers now you have to pay attention to this lectures and reading table more than anything else because it tells you what's going on for the for the duration of the course and tell you what the lectures are so today for example it's January 7th and so we're doing an introduction and overview maybe I can make that a little bigger and next week no on on uh Thursday we start with this reading it's called three forms of meaning in the management of complexity and all you have to use to get that reading is click on it and then you get that reading which is a fairly straightforward process um you would probably like the lectures better if you do the readings beforehand um that's it isn't necessary you can do this any way you want but you'll get more out of the course I think if you do that um there's two Tas for this course they're also listed here one is Vanessa go and the other is Victor Swift their availability is listed here so um Vanessa is available from 445 to 5:45 on Thursdays and Victor is is available from 3:15 to 4:15 Tuesdays their office offices are listed there as are their email addresses so that you can get in touch with them my office hours are Wednesday from 4:15 to 5:45 now the way I handle that is outside my office which is office 446 which is also listed there there are a number of signup sheets that I'm just going to post on the wall I'll do that right after class because they're printed out there's a number of signup sheets that are listed on the wall and your best bet is just to take a 15minute slot um don't take a whole bunch of them because the student to teacher ratio in class is obviously quite high and so just take one for now if you would and maybe if you have a meeting with me you can check back later to see if there's time for another one um I would like to have more time than that available but 90 minutes is what I can spare this semester so anyways they'll be up today now in terms of the mechanics of the course it's pretty straightforward there's no tricks um there's two midterms the first one is February 6th and the second one is March 13th and there's also a final and the midterm and the finals essentially make up 75% of the course it's actually 77.5% of the course but and then there's two writing assignments the first writing assignment is an essay and the essay has a number of different due dates so if you're on the website you can go to writing assignments and then you'll see all these different topics that you can choose from now if you click on one of these you get to this little signup sheet here and then you can put in your name and your email address and that signs you up for that topic and as you can see 10 people can sign up for each topic so if you're in love with a particular topic then you should sign up sooner rather than later um the the due dates fall a little after the course content that's related to that topic so it'll be the next class after the lectures on that topic end and I've spread them out across the year so that the Tas don't die of frustration and so that you guys can get your essays back with a reasonable degree of promptness hopefully within a week although let's say two weeks which seems reasonable so the second um writing exercise which is worth 7.5% the essay is worth 15% is a personality self analysis it's part of a suite of programs that I designed called the self-authoring suite and I can show you those and it's at selfauthoring.com and I'll show you this video at some point but for now there's information here on these programs but I'll give you code such username and password so that you can complete these and what you'll be asked to do is to complete an exercise that's B based on a big five model of adjective description of personality so since about 1930 statisticians have been studying the structure of language at a sentence level and at an adjective level to determine how what's the underlying correlational structure of descriptive phrases as they apply to human beings so for example if you're happy you're talkative and that might not be surprising but the fact that those two things are tightly connected was one of the things that's was discovered by the factor analytic processes that led to the development of the Big Five in the big five there are roughly five traits as the name might indicate extraversion which is a positive emotion trait neuroticism which is a negative emotion trait agreeableness which is warmth and empathy compassion the other side of that is kind of a harsh coldness I guess um openness which is both intelligence and creativity and conscientiousness which is industriousness and orderliness now there are virtues so to speak and faults associated with all of those Dimensions so you can be too extroverted which makes you rather impulsive and if you're very extroverted it's more difficult to get good grades in University because you're always out having fun with your friends and partying and and that might be good in that it'll help you develop a fairly extensive social network which is a useful thing if you're associated with people who are useful for social networking purposes um but it can really interfere with your ability to sit by yourself and study if you're conscientious that's a good predictor of academic success um because conscientious people do what they say they're going to do and they seem to suffer shame and self-disgust and self-contempt and guilt and so on if they don't um if you get too conscientious though you can get quite boxed in and and orderly and narrow and orderliness by the way seems to be associated with uh right-wing political views and when it's extreme it's it starts to get repressive and so the point of all this is that there are five traits and they have positive and negative aspects especially at the extremes and these programs are set up first of all so that you'll see a series of adjectives that are Universal descriptors so it's basically a small set of adjectives 100 that kind of cover each dimension of Personality with a reasonable degree of comprehensiveness then you'll be asked to pick which ones you think are particularly relevant to you and then you'll be asked to narrow that to a final list in one half of the exercise a list that represents your virtues and then in the other half of the exercise a list that represents your faults then you'll be asked to describe a time when that virtue played a positive role for you or when that fault interfered with you and then you'll be asked to describe how you might capitalize on that virtue in the future or perhaps bring that fault under control in the future and it turns out that writing exercises of this sort um are very practically useful they have a variety of positive effects one of which seems to be an increase in academic performance and our research so far has indicated that that increase can be quite substantial among with similar programs at McGill we raised the academic performance of struggling University students by 25% so a whole grade point and at a business school in Holland where this is being studied in some depth we've studied 2,000 people they are did the future authoring program not the present authoring program which is the one you're going to do and we improved their overall academic achievement by about 30% as well turns out that articulating yourself is an extraordinarily useful thing to do you could actually you could you could also think about that in a more comprehensive way as the goal of say Psychotherapy and personality transformation a lot of what's Happening as you mature and develop as a personality is that what you are whatever that means I guess it's your behaviors and your potential and I don't know exactly what potential is but your behaviors and your potential can be increasingly organized at a high level of Consciousness articulated at a high level of Consciousness and articulation is a funny word because partly it means joint articulation you know your hands are very articulated and that's why you can do a lot of things with them and hands and speech are very tightly related which is why most people's speech centers are in the same hemisphere as their dominant hand anyways articulating yourself makes you able to do many more things with yourself and it also seems to quell your negative emotion partly because it's clarifying you you know the more you leave things muddy in your life the less defined things are around you the more active your stress response systems are because if things are murky and undefined your stress systems basically assume that there are alligators and snakes and predators hiding in all that fog and Gloom and that you're in a very dangerous environment but if you clarify that with careful attention and articulation you can clear away the fog and the Gloom and that only leaves you with your actual problems which once Define carefully you might find manageable and an example that would be you know when you go into your room and you haven't done your homework for a while and there's piles of papers piling up or maybe there's piles of junk on your computer doesn't really matter and you'll have a very powerful tendency to avoid that not even to look at it right you don't even want to look at it because it's and that's chaos it's sort of growing in your environment and there's a specific part of your brain which evolved to detect snakes that deals with such little chaotic piles of undone business and the more of those that are around you psychologically or physically the more negative emotion you experience the less hope you experience and the larger your stress response chronically and that's not good because if your stress response is chronically elevated that suppresses your immunological function it makes you overweight it predisposes you to diabetes and cancer it makes you age faster it increases the probability that you'll have anxiety disorders and depression it's a bad thing so so clarifying who you are and what you're doing is a good thing unless you want all those other things to happen which seems highly improbable although people desire some very strange things and that's part of what we'll talk about as this course progresses okay so if you want to find out about the course you can go to jordanbpeterson.com and the courses are listed there or you can just type my name in a search engine and you'll find the courses this course is py 230 obviously I mentioned that there's a reading book which you have to buy the rest of the readings are online the order that you do that reading is listed on the syllabus you also have to do two assignments an essay which is only 750 words by the way but don't let that fool you because a 750w essay can be very difficult to write um the essay and then this personality analysis now the personality analysis all you have to do is show it to the TA to show them that you completed it because we don't want to know what you wrote down and we want to encourage you to write down things that you know that you'd like to write down that are likely private unless you want to broadcast your faults on Facebook which I suppose you could do after you complete the exercise so the reason I want you to do that well there's three reasons right one is well it'll familiarize you more with standard models of Personality because you'll have to apply them to yourself and so then you'll understand yourself better too so that's a good thing and then it's also a quasi clinical intervention and some of you because you're in this course are no doubt interested in CL Clinical Psychology and so this will give you a flavor of the sorts of things that a clinical psychologist might do except a computer is doing it and then which which turns out to be fine um people will actually often tell computers things that they wouldn't tell people because the computer doesn't care what you've done particularly not yet anyways and uh the third reason is that well it should be good for you and you know education should be good for you that's actually the purpose of Education right it's supposed to make you more healthy mentally and physically that's supposed to make you more productive and so that's what education is for and that's what this class is for so that's what we're aiming at so then there's two exams two midterms 25% each approximately they're multiple choice um I'll post sample questions so that you'll know what they're like they're not tricky people get worried about exams and rightly so but these aren't tricky exams if you do the readings and you come to the class the probability is quite high that you'll do at least reasonably well um I don't ask you to memorize dates and that sort of thing I try to keep it at a conceptual level and so the questions on the multiple choice test are usually conceptual questions where I try to get you to take something that you've learned or read and to apply it to the solving of a problem even though they're in standard multiple choice format there's there's usually not a tremendous number of questions so you'll be able to complete the exam in the time allowed without any trouble so now let's see I should tell you guys who should take this course and who shouldn't take it because you need to know that since it's your first day and so this course has two or three aspects one aspect is is scientific that really occupies the last half of the course I would say and in the purely scientific part of the course or the purely research oriented element of the course the first part is scientific too because science has more science is more than mere testing of hypothesis anyways the second half of the course deals essentially with trait Theory and with psychobiology so what I want to do is to tell you about the the basic dimensions of human variability and also how those are represented in the brain so that you can make a connection and and the body so you can make a connection between the theories and and the biological and cognitive substrates and so that's sort of a unifying attempt so you you got to be interested in that if you want to take this course and and you know and and have it go well for you so there's some psychometrics that's the science of measurement there's a little bit of Statistics there's a reasonable amount of neuros pychology and some of it's complex some of it isn't but I try to only pick things that I try to only pick things to discuss with you that are relevant at three levels of analysis I want them to be personally relevant so that they tell you something about yourself I want them to be intellectually relevant but I also want them to be culturally relevant so that not when you walk away from the study not only do you know something more about you and your friends but hopefully you're a better functioning creature in the broader social millu so so everything is picked to that and including the psychobiological or neuropsychological material and the trait material um there's a fairly he heavy emphasis on clinical issues the first half of the course deals with classic theorists of personality and all the classic personality theorists were clinicians now the UV at present doesn't have a clinical program although they're starting it up in Scaro but down here at St George there's not many clinicians I think I'm probably the only one I don't know why they let me in but they did and the the the emphasis on clinici that the emphasis of clinicians is twofold right one is well who is the person or what is the person but more importantly who could the person be or what should they be and that's a very strange thing about people right I mean if you have a cat you don't really sit around thinking what could this cat be because it's a cat and you know if it has spring they're going to be cats and in a thousand years they're still going to be just cats but people well we're strange in ways that are virtually un incomprehensible and we're not only what we are but we're also what we could be and in many cases especially for people of your age you're way more what you could be than what you are and so focusing on what you could be is an extremely important thing to do and in fact there's there's plenty of research and some of it's associated with the writing exercises that I told you about earlier that if you make efforts to Define who you could be and you know in a way that you find interesting because you might as well shape yourself into something that you want to be that that increases the efficiency with which you work substantially and also makes you a better person by reasonable measures of better which sort of means happier and healthier and you know more acceptable or at least less repulsive to other people so the clinical material is very useful for that and the clinical material is grounded in observation so it's kind of like ethology ethology is the study of animal behavior but not in the lab it's observational study and a lot of the clinical stuff has this observational quality to it it's heavily influenced by philosophy if you're not interested in ideas this is a bad course for you because it's it's it's a course that primarily concentrates on ideas I I want them to have practical utility because why not you might as well put constraints on them but but the the fundamental focus is ideas and so when we discuss the clinical material clinical personality material we'll discuss the philosophical background of that and we'll do the same thing when we get to the psychobiological material so you got to decide if you're not interested in philosophical ideas then this is a bad course because you're going to be stuck with with those sorts of things half the time so and there's some there's some elements of the course they almost straight philosophy because some of the clinical schools especially those that were developed in the 1950s like existential psychology are very tightly associated with fields of philosophy existentialism and phenomenology in that case and so um I think that sort of thing is very much worth learning because it's part of the history of ideas and you should know something about it it's also very interesting it's very useful to know something about if you're going to be a clinical psychologist because you should know a fair bit about a lot of things if you're going to be a clinical psychologist but even if you're interested in research science is half Hy hypothesis testing but the other half is hypothesis generation that's the most important half you got to think up an idea before you can test it and you know most of what you'll learn in a methods class has nothing to do with generating research hypothesis they just tell you to do that first generate your research hypothesis it's like yeah that's the big problem right there the rest of it just Machinery right we just grind it through this process and the way you generate research hypothesis is by knowing something and so you have to learn a lot in order to generate a research hypothesis that well first that someone hasn't already el hasn't already thought of and disproved which is highly probable it's actually depressing to gather more and more knowledge because what you find is that everyone's already thought of everything and and most your ideas are stupid so yeah so anyways now let's see oh yes here's another reason not to take the course there's a lot of reading and there's less reading than there was last year I took out one paper that was too hard I think it was too hard for people even though it was a great paper and but I left the rest of it in and so if you're looking for a course with a light reading load this isn't that course because this has a heavy reading load now on the upside for your essays I don't require you to read outside the course you can use the material that's in the course to write the essay so it's self-contained but there's a lot of reading and it's not easy reading and partly because a lot of it is original papers all the stuff that's listed on the web is original papers and then the textbook too it's a tough textbook it's mostly text it doesn't have a lot of pictures in it it has no stories at all about celebrities I think that's the only text left that doesn't have stories about celebrities in it so if you're if you're taking a tough course semester and you don't have a lot of time to read then well this isn't a course like that it's a course where there's an awful lot to read and the thing about the reading too is that you have to think about it you know like how fast you can read something seems to be a function of how complicated the words are that would be function one but the second function seems to be something like how many ideas there are per paragraph or maybe per page there are lots of ideas per paragraph in these readings that's why I picked them so you can't just zip through them you have to think about them and well that's a good thing because if you do read them you'll know a lot more at the end of the class than you did at the beginning of the class and you'll find that that knowledge is extremely useful I truly believe that this knowledge can change your life well that's what it was generated for right it's generated by clinicians and and personality psychologists that's what they're out there to do and they're out there to take unrevealed potential that could be anything and to hammer it and shape it into something that's hard and pure and solid and you have to do a lot of reading and writing and thinking to get to a point like that but it really beats the hell out of mucking about in the MC and unfortunately that's how many people live and I've seen the consequences of that and if you spend the next 30 years like that you will be old by the time you're 50 and so I wouldn't recommend that so it's worth doing the work it's really worth it so let's take a look now well first I'll ask you if there are any questions any questions yes so you said the personality analysis will be posted soon oh yeah I'll get the username and passwords up to you pretty quick so I just had to make contact with the guy designed it with to get the code so won't be long um can you buy the at I hope so that's the plan some of you have purchased it perhaps okay so it appears that you can there's also maybe some old texts from rlock floating about you can use those too you can get a good deal on them you can often get them secondhand on Amazon for like 20 bucks if you look the old text is fine except that it has more chapters in it but if you pay attention careful attention to the syllabus that won't be a problem because all the chapters are numbered and all you have to do is match the number on the syllabus to the number in the book so other questions okay so let's take a look at what we're going to learn about lecture two so you can think of human knowledge in some ways as branching into two components you can think of those two components as has knowledge about the subjective world and knowledge about the objective world that's one way of thinking about it the other way you could think about it is knowledge about what things are and knowledge about what to do now most of what you learn in university is knowledge about what things are but that's only half of what you need to know because you really need to know well what you should go about and do this is a real problem for human beings because we're always trying to think having to think of what we should be doing doing next and like that's the fundamental question of life which is well you know what should I do next or what should I do tomorrow or what should I do next week or next month or next year because that's another problem about being human is that not only do we have to figure out what to do next but we can also see the future or multiple Futures even and then we have to determine what those Futures could be and how to avoid others that we don't want to have come into existence at all and then how to configure our Behavior so that as we navigate through the potential future futes we land up more or less somewhere we want and not somewhere we really don't want and so that's a real problem and what that that's an existential problem in fact and what that means is that we need knowledge about the subjective and about the behavioral it's part of potential how do you unravel yourself across time now it's proved very difficult for human beings to formalize that kind of knowledge now we formalize scientific knowledge which is more knowledge about what things are and about the objective world the scientific method especially the research method formalizes our knowledge about the objective world and about what it's made of but it doesn't give us much insight into what to do about that all it seems to do actually is increase our power to do things but not necessarily to inform us as to the direction in which that power should be exerted and you don't really have to look any farther than the 20th century if you want historical proof of that because as people got more and more powerful so that we could sit in this lovely classroom and all be warm and cozy while it's terrible outside we also learned how to kill each other with unprecedented Gusto and potency and so science has enabled us on both sides and that's how it is good or bad on the behavioral side there's a tradition of knowledge and it's an ancient tradition and it's grounded in for of knowledge that are likely tens of thousands of years old or maybe even older than that and those are forms of knowledge that are essentially mythological or religious and the reason that I start with those is first of all religious systems are in many ways theories of personality um and there's very tight associations between certain religions and certain fields of psychology so Judaism is been identified fairly heavily with Freud and Christianity with Carl Jung's work and also with Carl Rogers work Rogers was actually a seminarian and a lot of the ideas about what a person could be so these are ideas about the ideal are derived from religious and mythological substrates because they have to be derived from somewhere right and so you think well how do people get their ideas about what's possible or what should be part of it's through storytelling that's why you go to movies right you go there to see what people could be and you enact all those people on the screen with your bodies well it's happening and you have a little neural system that does that so it puts you right in the action it's an amazing ability amazing human ability and the reason we're so attracted to that sort of thing is because we want to know what to do with ourselves and there's a very large body of very complex information that pertains to that one of the things that Carl Jung said was that one of the things he believed was that that form of knowledge had developed quite explicitly up to about the time of the Renaissance or about to the time of bacon and decart who who founded and Galileo who basically founded the scientific method and then we sort of stopped developing that kind of knowledge and the knowledge of the objective world just leaped ahead and and like exponentially and so that's left us with the same moral intelligence we had in the 1700s but with 21st century technology not necessarily a good thing so part of what we're doing in a sense is rescuing the past you know in my other class sometimes I show Pinocchio the movie how many of you have seen Pinocchio a lot of you he so yeah it's like the most popular animated movie ever made second I think because the Lion King is more popular in there's one scene in Pinocchio where Pinocchio rescues his father from a whale you may remember that you may notice that you watched that and that was perfectly fine as far as you were concerned right that you could watch a puppet swim with a cricket to the bottom of the ocean and rescue his father from a it's like okay so the first thing you might think about is how in the world could you sit there and swallow that and not even no notice notice that you were doing something as absurd and bizarre as any ritual you could possibly imagine well it's it's partly because we're very attracted to narrative and narratives have structure narrative through about behavior and they have a deep structure and they have a deep symbolic structure so for example the whale in Pinocchio wasn't just any ordinary whale wh right because if you remember it also breathed smoke and fire it's very strange behavior for a whale and not may even a whale that strange and that made it a dragon and so partly what that meant was that Pinocchio was rescuing his father from a dragon that's a very old story in fact that story is the oldest story that we have in written form it's a variant of a story that was told by the Mesopotamians about 5,000 years ago so part of that story means well you should rescue your father well from what well from the murky chaos in which your culture is embedded you know you guys are all inheritors of Rich cultural Traditions you know those aren't just words those cultural Traditions Orient you they keep you sane and if they're desicated and broken up and dead and archaic and lying in the bottom of the chaos then you better get them back out of there because without of them you're going to live shallow and difficult lives and that's a bad idea so starting with the historical perspectives we can situate ourselves in maybe some hundreds of thousands of years of History maybe even longer I can I can tell you in one manner it might be longer it turns out that part of the reason that we can see so well which we can human beings can really see well way better than almost any other animal except hunting birds h birds can see better than us but other than that man it's us and that's especially rare among mammals and particularly rare among primates so you might ask yourself well why can we see so well well it turns out that part of the reason is that we co evolved with predatory snakes so predatory snakes are newer than lizards by the way even though you wouldn't think so and there's a woman at UCLA named Lynn isbel who was thinking why do people see so well and so she went she had this snake detection Theory because she'd worked with primates she knew they could really see the sort of camouflage patterns that snake had snakes have and the motion that they make they're really good at detecting that plus human beings are very afraid of snakes innately plus if you take chimpanzees who've never seen a snake and you throw a rubber snake in their cage assuming they're in a cage then they jump to the top of the cage and because they're not happy about that snake but then they look at it and then if they're out in the jungle jungling around and they see a big snake then they have a specific sort of cry they make and they'll stand there for like 9 hours watching a big snake making this noise and all the other chimps depending on how afraid they are also come and look at the snake and so yeah because they want to know what that snakes up to and that's what we want to know too we want to know what the snakes are up to that's for sure and the circuit that we developed to detect snakes the visual circuit is partly what gives us such tremendous acurity of vision and partly the way is Bel figured that out was by correlating primate visual Acuity with the pre and its development over evolutionary time with the prevalence of predatory snakes in that geographical region and she found that there was a very high correlation so we can see sharply partly because we're always looking for snakes and you know that pile of undone homework in your in your in your room that's snakes as far as the part of your brain that developed to deal with snakes is concerned and so you know if you leave a lot of things undone around you then all you've got is snakes and you're their target and so that's no way to live and so that whale down there at the bottom of the ocean that's kind of a variant of a snake it's a dragon even though it's a whale it breathes fire right so let's call it a dragon because that's what it is and the idea that you have to rescue something from the dragon is an unbelievably old story and so that's partly what we're going to be doing at the beginning of this course we're going to be going way back into the MC and and mock of prehistory trying to understand what the hell we've been up to for the last 60 million years cuz that's when our tree dwelling ancestors first really started to deal with predatory snakes and my suspicions are that you're all evolved from one of those little tree dwelling Rats the first one who figured out that if you dropped a snake a stick on a snake it would probably run away so that's what we've been doing for 60 million years throwing sticks at snakes so that's the first lecture and you'll see why when you do the reading why this is broadly relevant because it also Accounts at least in part for the human tendency to demonize people who aren't like us because it turns out that we use the same circuit that we would use to handle predatory reptiles let's say we use that circuit to First process people who are straight strange to us and it makes sense because people who are strange to us who come from different cultures and who represent different ideals are unbelievably dangerous even though they might also be unbelievably beneficial you know the poor Native Americans they came out and they shook hands with the Europeans and then 95% of them died in the next 150 years right they all died of plagues they died of small pox they died of measles measles just wiped them out by the time the pilgrims came to North America which is you know fairly early in North American European history 95% of the Indians were already dead they were welcoming the Europeans because they didn't have many people to get their crops off so meeting someone who's strange is no trivial thing and even if they don't poison you with some horrible illness they'll come along with some cockamamy idea like Marxism and you'll be Chinese and then it'll be the 20th century and 100 million of you will die it's very useful to understand the Deep mythological structures that we live inside and the relationship to our brain and our body really gives you insight into how people function it's helpful the next lecture is on heroic and shamanic initiations and that brings us closer to the present than say 60 million years ago it's more like 50,000 years ago there are shamanic Traditions all over the world and the shaman is kind of the pre cursor to the to the to the to the man of intelligence to the man of intellect the man of culture and he's sort of a doctor and a scientist and a priest all wrapped up into one thing and he's often the person who's in charge of the culture many in many shamanic societies the shaman has a vocabulary vocabulary that vastly exceeds that of his peers and that's because he's been taught it in his initiatory process so that the culture within which that particular people survives can be transmitted down the generations with very little error people can remember things that are transmitted verbally in in pre-literate cultures with unbelievable accuracy and the the the shamanic initiation is very and the heroic initiations as well are very interesting processes because they involve they involve death and rebirth and death and rebirth is more or less equivalent to change so here's something to think about so if there's a mosquito and it wants to make another mosquito it basically lays 10,000 eggs right and then all those eggs hatch and 99,999 of those little mosquitoes die and then one mosquito makes it and lays another 10,000 eggs so it's pretty costly reproductive strategy right but so the way the mosquito works is that it knows that the world is chaotic and dangerous and it has no idea how to survive in that so it just makes a whole pile of mosquitoes and it hopes that one of them will sneak through and each of those mosquitoes is a tiny bit different from each other mosquito in terms of time and place and also genetic structure and maybe one's got some little advantage that allows it to survive but it's costly right it's 9 9,999 to1 otherwise we'd be covered with mosquitoes so so the way the mosquito deals with the fact that you can't figure out what's going on is by producing lots of mosquitoes but the way people figure out what's going on is by producing lots of ideas and ideas are the relationship of ideas to you and the external world is the same as the relationship of animals to the environment so there's a philosopher named Alfred North Whitehead who said human beings evolved to let their ideas die instead of them now that's a smart way of thinking thinking CU it means that you can parse off a little subpersonality of yourself maybe it's angry subpersonality or sad sub personality or an irritated or resentful or you know those aren't exactly ideas they're more like little spirits that are partly you they're kind of stupid because they've only got one direction but there's still variants of you and maybe you can present one of those to someone which you might do if you're dating someone and you want to assuming you still do that if you're dating someone and you want to press them maybe you spin off some little variant of yourself that you think is particularly attractive probably won't work I doubt if that work and if it doesn't work well then you can get all heartbroken and let it die and then maybe the next one you spin off will be a little more you know together and so that's how people progress they progress by dying and coming back to life at different levels say I mean maybe you're just making some little ratty mistake and so you can let it go and you're only ashamed momentarily and it's only a little pain when that circuit dies or maybe it's your whole damn personality that has to go you know and that happens to people when they encounter a catastrophe of one form or another so that might happen if someone Close to You dies or if you lose a limb or if you get an illness or you know any of the horrible things that plague people to very deep levels which might mean pretty much all of you has to go and maybe you'll actually die but if you don't well you can let go of what's holding you back and maybe that's your old self and then you can come back to life and I'll tell you it's a lot better to do that voluntarily before it's necessary than involuntarily in a moment of Crisis and I would say in some ways that's the lesson of Clinical Psychology confront the damn snakes first because it's really hard to get out of their bellies once they've eaten you so the shaman the shamanic initiations are death and rebirth initiations they formalize that they're often the the rituals themselves are often accompanied by the use of different classes of hallucinogens which for one reason or another seem to facilitate at least symbolically the process of transformation from life to death and back to life so they're dramatizations of the process by which people learn you learn something to really learn it some presupposition that you had before that has to crumble and then the new information comes in and you can build a new self around it but it's a painful process and that's partly why people stick to their ideas or their past selves you know when you could stick to your past self and that would be fine except that everything's changing around you all the time and so if you don't change then you just get more and more outdated you're more and more archaic none of your presuppositions work anymore and so you're like you're like this Rusty machine clanking around running into things all the time and your life is very miserable because you don't fit the environment anymore and so when I talk about personality and its Transformations something that you could ask yourself which is in some way the most fundamental question you can ask yourself is are you the thing that stays the same or are you the thing that changes and you know the thing that changes can live in a lot more places and so that's worth thinking about but the cost is well when you change you die a little bit and that's painful or maybe you die a lot and that's really painful so if you ever wonder why people don't change that's part of the reason then we the next section is on constructivism we're going to talk mostly about P he's actually a developmental psychologist um I like PJ a lot because PJ had an interesting question is which is it's not a genetic question or an environmental question and you know you might think those are the only two kinds of questions there are when you're thinking about the dev but it's not exactly that here here's why it's not clear to what degree you're specified by your genes so here's one possibility so let's say that encoded in your genetic structure are a whole variety of potential use like who knows how many all the potential use that the entire history of mankind has been able to weave into their genetic structure they're all sitting down there encoded in your genes and then that very complex structure that's r with potential pops out into a particular environment and then it interacts with that environment like a program interacts with a computer and gathers information of one form or another it takes that information and the material that it incorporates and builds the real you out of that and that's what P was studying he was trying to figure out how does a child go about taking itself from you know this thing that just lays there squats basically to something that's you know you go on YouTube and you see what people can do what human beings can do it's bloody unbelievable I mean we're so ridiculously versatile people can do things that are just impossible in in every Dimension you know intellectually physically spiritually they can even eat hot dogs at a rate that you can hardly imagine you know were very variable and P was very interested in trying to figure out how all of that embodied variability could come out of this little package of potential at the beginning of life it's very interesting so that's constructivism how does the individual construct him or herself from nothing in some ways from birth forward and so P especially his discussion of infant development sort of like the analysis of the unfolding of a human being because people do unfold too you know mean because babies when they're born they're all crunched up like this and so they have to stretch themselves out and you know get going and that was P's concern so so that's that's good and then we go from there to depth psychology you might think about that more as psychoanalysis now people have people aren't very happy generally speaking about analytic Theory especially if they're research oriented but there's a variety of reasons for that and one of them is they don't know anything about it that would be the first reason and people are often tempted to denigrate anything they don't understand and it's actually kind of hard to understand psychoanalytic thinking it's in fact it's very hard and the other thing about like scientists and research scientists who are engaged in psychological work is they're actually usually fairly mentally healthy you know at least they're healthy enough to to be scientists which you know you got to be pretty healthy to be a scientist you got to be disciplined you got to be able to get up and go to work every day you have to be able to think about complex things you have to be very orderly and persistent you know and so there's a lot of Demand on you if you're a scientific researcher so the problem with scientific researchers they hang around with other scientific researchers then they think that's what human beings are like and human beings are nothing like scientific researchers they're a tiny minority of the population and they're as bizarre as like albino buffalo and to to think of them as representative of human beings is insane first of all most of them have IQs in the 99th percentile so it's like why bother even thinking about them normal human beings are very weird especially the ones that don't function well and not functioning well is is a bottomless pit that that's why hell is a bottomless pit by because not functioning well is a bottomless pit and if you're dealing with people who aren't functioning well one of the most mysterious things is how they can take a situation that's God awful beyond your worst imaginings and then think up three or four creative ways to make it worse and if you're dealing with someone like that and you do if you're a clinician if you're dealing with someone like that good luck with your behavioral interventions man that's like throwing sticks at an elephant you're just not going to get anywhere and one of the ways I want to demonstrate this to you I'm going to show you a film called crumb crumb's a harsh film but it's the best documentary by the way of an underground comic named Robert Crum who's actually quite a genius even though he's perverse in precisely the Freudian ways that are interesting and his brothers are even worse so I'll walk you through that because I can't figure out any other way of giving you a taste of what Freudian Psychopathology is like it's not pretty and that's the other reason that sort of clean- minded research scientists don't like psychoanalytic thinking because it's really in many ways it deals with the most disgusting elements of human behavior and so it's not even that Pleasant to think about and then there's Yung who we'll talk about after Freud and Yung is so strange that he makes Freud look normal and Yung believed that as as I mentioned earlier believed that there is a universal grammar of ethics of morality it's not arbitrary it's not relative you know in the universities the theory has been at least since the 1960s that one person's ethics is as good as another person and there's no way of distinguishing reliably between them well I happen to think that's absolute nonsense it's also extremely dangerous nonsense and I also think there's no evidence for it whatsoever because we now know a lot about human universals which are aspects of human behavior that are constant across all cultures and there are a lot of them there are a lot of them and the other thing is there's just not that many ways that half mad primates can gather together in large groups and live productively it's not easy like you think of all the civilization work that went into allowing all you people from all these different cultures to sit here in peace and comfort it's mindboggling if you think there's a million ways to do that well think again maybe there's one way to do that you know and we do it well enough so here we are and no one's being knifed so so that's Yung and he's profound beyond belief really beyond belief so that's those guys all dealt with unconscious now it's it's kind of interesting to think about what the unconscious means and so I I can give you a bit of a hint it's it's partly the information that's coded in your behavior so for example there are a lot of things that you can do with your body that you don't know how you do like you don't know how you walk for example or how you ride a bike or how you talk you can talk but you don't know how you talk you just move your mouth I know but you get the point right you have no conscious apprehension whatsoever of the micro details that are necessary to allow you to move your mouth so there's a lot of information encoded in you that you don't have conscious access to and it's not only physiologically encoded it's also culturally encoded because you've been targeted and shaped by the interactions of all the people you've ever encountered and they in turn by all the people they've ever encountered including their ancestors so you're the product of this unbelievably complex multigenerational exchange of information that in some ways is all about how to make you acceptable to the public and there's only certain ways you can be acceptable to the public you know you have to be relatively clean for example at least in our society you can't be too boring or you won't have any friends you also can't be too exciting you know you can't be too violent you can't be too empty-headed unless you're associating with people who like to feel Superior you know there's there's we put a lot of Demands on each other in terms of what constitutes acceptability let alone ideal we're always telling each other about both of those what's acceptable what's ideal every interaction you have shapes you into an approximation of acceptable and ideal and that's all encoded in you too it's encoded in your behavior it's also encoded in your imagination and that's why you can go to a movie and you can instantly identify the hero and the villain which is of course the first thing you do when you go to a movie because otherwise it can't make sense out of it and so that encoding prior to articulation that's all the unconscious and that's what the psychoanalysts were interested in analyzing now the cognitive neuroscientists have kind of got there too but they're sort of diluted into thinking that what's in your head is information and then it's ideas and those are sort of cold and dead things and your head is not full of ideas and information it's full of devils and snakes and the psychoanalyst knew that and by that I mean you're alive and so are your subcomponents and all your little subpersonalities and not just ideas they see they think they hear they feel they have aims as you know for example when you get possessed by anger the aim can be entirely destructive I want to bring down the person I love half an hour later you think what the hell was I thinking about it's like yeah no kidding well you weren't thinking you're just possessed by a little subpersonality and that's what the psychoanalysts were interested in subpersonalities fantasies next we go to the humanists and the existentialists now they're interesting because they come at the problem of what's wrong with people from a kind of Universalist perspective now for Freud if you weren't sick you were healthy and that seems obvious because you we think you can make a clear distinction between sick and healthy but the existentialists they didn't want any of that their hypothesis was if you're [Music] human you're sick there's no way out of it and the reason you're sick in a sense and unlike any other animal is that life itself poses a paradoxical problem to you partly because you're so conscious and because you're self-conscious and actually a sequence of paradoxical problems a how do you live When You're vulnerable and Mortal that's a rough one because you might say well why should I bother it all or who's going to know anyways in a thousand years or a million years or why is there suffering or how do you go on in the face of Cruelty those are questions that grip at people's soul and crush it and they're not a consequence of mental illness it's like what how long should it take you to recover if your whole family is wiped out in a car accident what's healthy well we don't know the answer to that it's like should you ever recover maybe if you were halfways empathic it would just kill you you know a lot of times people can't recover from their grief because they're guilty they think how can I how can I live when all those people close to me died and they died unfairly well that's an existential problem and then so the there's one class which is vulnerability and mortality everyone's got that staring at them so how do you deal with that hard question second class of problems Well everybody's always evaluating you always and you're never good enough so what that means is that you're always in an insufficient relationship with society and history no matter how good you get it's not good enough and so history itself as well as culture always faces you as a judge and so that's the second category of existential problem then the third Pro problem is well what to do about you yourself you know there's nature you have to contend with and there's culture you have to contend with and then you've got yourself and your self-consciousness and your deep knowledge of all the things about you that could really use some repair and the thing about those problems is that everyone has them and they' always had them and as far as we know they always will and so they're built into the condition of Being Human and that's what existentialism is about it's like life is a paradoxical problem is there any possible solution to a paradoxical problem well that's that's that's in some ways the question of the meaning of life and one hint is that well what's the meaning of life and one answer to that is this is the hint is that that the meaning to life is the pattern of thought and action that you take that enables you to tolerate at least tolerate the conditions of life and then maybe you could move One Step Beyond that if you're feeling a little optimistic and say the meaning of life is the pattern of conception and action that enables you to welcome the conditions of life and then you might ask yourself well is there such a mode of being given the nature of the problem that you have to contend with is there actually a mode of being that would enable that you could say the vulnerability the Judgment the insufficiency it's worth it under these conditions and that's the other existential question and the people who posed those questions they weren't messing around you're going to read people like Frankle Victor Frankl and Alexander Sol niton and what those two people live through I mean it's unimaginably horrible and when they were wrestling with the questions that I just described they weren't academic they weren't academic issues they were embodied issues of life and culture and genocide and cruelty and so their examination of that had to be deep enough to be able to contend with questions like that and answers that are deep enough to contend with questions like that are frightening answers and we have reading week it'll be a relief the last part of the course this is when we switch over into the more scientific domain and so we're going to do two things as I said we're going to take a pretty deep look at how the brain functions as far as we know in our current state of unimaginable ignorance like we we really know so little about the brain or maybe we know a bit a bit about the brain but we certainly don't know anything yet about Consciousness and Consciousness seems to be a very well it's a relevant part of the brain right it's sort of the part that everybody cares about since Consciousness in some sense seems to be you even more than your brain is you I mean your brain it's just this thing inside your skull but your Consciousness you know that's your being we don't have a clue about Consciousness I our scientific we're not even able to conceptualize it in a scientific manner it's a real mystery so but having said that there's still plenty of things that are interesting to know about the brain and one of the things we're going to do and this is sort of associated with the Freudian idea of the ID you know the ID for Freud was the natural self and so that was your primordial you could think about them as drives or Temptations or or values values is probably the most accurate anger sexuality those are the top two Freudian concerns there's plenty others eating Freud didn't care about that we do now because everyone has an eating disorder or virtually everyone so for the victorians it was sexuality for us it's food sex doesn't seem to be a problem but we just can't eat anymore so we're going to take a look at the low level biological systems in the brain and those are systems God some of those systems are so old that even Crustaceans have them so for example this is so cool so if you give a lobster who's been defeated in a dominance fight because they fight for dominance and they might even know it if you give the lobster if you take a lobster who's been defeated in a dominance dispute he'll go back to his little lobster hole and pout and when when he's pouting he gets all collapsed and you can't even really get him out of his hole with a stick cuz he's going to sit in there and you know be upset about his dominance defeat and maybe he'll come out as kind of a new Lobster all ready to go again and maybe not if you take that same Lobster and you give him anti-depressants right after he fights he won't go back into his cave and hide and he'll fight right away again and so you think about that that means that the circuitry that underlies our defeat related depression is 300 million years old and even crustations have it so that's way down in your brain stem man cuz lobsters hardly even have brain in fact if the lobster is big and tough and he's been a dominant lobster for a long time and he gets defeated badly then when he goes off to pout he has to dissolve his whole brain because all it does is dominant stuff then he grows a new subordinate brain and he weasel around with that for a while so and that's useful to think about the next time you really get defeated because all that pain you're going through it's like you got some circuit repairs to make and if you've been badly defeated well maybe you should just let yourself collapse and and all that stuff clear away so that you could come back so that's lowlevel stuff brain stem stuff it's way down at the bottom of your being you know but we're going to talk about systems that are above that too but still low the hypothalamus for example it's a very cool brain area it's sort of responsible for all the basic drives hunger temperature regulation sexuality um defensive aggression predatory aggression looks like it's something different everyone has those systems you know so they're like these sub beings that live inside us but they're also preconditions for communication you know cuz you might say to your friend I'm angry today and your friend doesn't say well what do you mean angry he says well what happened to upset you because he knows what anger means and the reason he knows that is because he's already got it in his head he's like you he gets angry he gets sad gets afraid has the basic emotions but not only the basic emotions but the basic motivations and so we're going to look at the brain systems that underly the basic motivations and the basic emotions and in some sense those systems are equivalent to the physiological incarnation of the ID that Freud described at the end of the 19th century and so that's a nice way to look at it you'll go through the psychoanalytic thinking which which kind of puts Flesh on these systems because for the psycho analysts and this is why they're still relevant those weren't just systems they were living personal ities narrow oneeyed personalities they only want one thing but personalities nonetheless ancient gods that's another way of looking at them and things you have to contend with whether you believe in them or not we'll discuss all five traits as well extraversion as I said that's positive emotion neuroticism that's negative emotion people vary on those Dimensions agreeableness that seems to be associated with maternal behavior on one end and predatory hunting on another because human beings are hunters and mammals it's a weird combination right because if you're hunting mammal you have to figure out how not to kill and eat your children right and that happens in lots of mamalian species especially among the males so they have to be moved away but human beings have solved that more or less you know it gets complicated in mixed families because if you're the child of a stepparent you have 100 times the likelihood of being a abused so we'll talk about conscientiousness which is a great predictor of long-term life success but also associated with fascist political pre predispositions because it turns out that the way you vote has very little to do with what you think and very much to do with what your temperament is so even for high level cognitive functions like political belief these underlying systems play a determining role last two things we're going to talk about performance prediction and by that I mean well there's been in crewing evidence you might say what what what how do you have a happy life first of all I would say that's a stupid question but we'll go because happiness isn't it's not the right aim it's it's a way it's not a place to go it's a it's a manner of manifestation while you're journeying it's something like that leaving that aside what do you need to live a high quality life well we kind of know that already I mean it's it's kind of obvious you know you need friends you need Intimate Relationships you need meaningful work you know having more money than will pay your bills doesn't seem to help that much etc etc so it's like you know it's like intelligent moderation and discipline it's very boring it's exactly what you'd expect if you were pessimistic about excitement performance prediction we're going to look very carefully at the nature of the traits that make people successful in life and you know you might say well what do you mean by successful but you know one of the things I mean is not in too much pain and anxiety because that turns out to actually be more important to people than being happy you know if you say to people what do you want they say I want to be happy but if you analyze what they mean by happy they mostly mean not suffering and not terrified you get those two things under control like the worst that can happen to you is that you'll be bored so and then we'll wrap it up at the end okay so that's the course so um I'm glad to be teaching it it's good to see all of you here it looks like you kind of have a comfortable classroom so that's kind of nice um decide if you decide if you want to take the course because I don't want you to be disappointed at the end so I'm really I'm really telling you seriously you got to like ideas if you like this lecture you'll like the course and you got to do the reading and there's a fair bit of reading so we'll see you Thursday

today we're going to talk a little bit about I guess you could call them the underlying structures of perception I picked this image it's a very old image it's it's an it's an image that that portrays man being cast up on the beach by a whale it's Jonah biblical figure and in this in the story of Jonah Jonah was out on a rough ocean storm and he had been commanded by God to do something which he was ignoring and uh the storm was sufficiently rough so that he got cast overboard he was eaten by this giant this is a whale as far as the medieval medieval people were concerned it's obviously not what we would think of as a whale but they didn't know much about whales anyways he was swallowed up by whale and then cast back up on shore a number of days later it's a death and rebirth story and the reason I use it as an image is because it represents something of psychological import that you're all familiar with but that you might not know that you're familiar with symbols are often like that um a symbol often stands for something that you know but that you don't know that you know there's lots of things that you know know that you don't know that you know almost everything is like that in fact and it's rather obvious if you think about it because if you were transparent to yourself and you knew everything you knew you wouldn't have to study anything about psychology because you'd understand yourself completely and we understand ourselves poorly and so we have to study ourselves as individuals and then you know as as as phenomena in the world as as other people and and as mammals and as animals and as living things and as political actors and so on just to get some minor notion of what's actually going on and what that means in part is that you're more complicated than you can understand and when when you hear say psychoanalytic thinkers talking about ideas like the unconscious the unconscious is actually a representation in some ways of the fact that there's far more to you than you know about and that what that means also is that there are different kinds of unconscious and we certainly know that to be the case there different kinds of memory for example so a lot of your procedural knowledge is unconscious and so your procedural knowledge is what allows you to do things like ride a bike or walk for that matter because you don't really know how you walk you it's actually a controlled fall so you lean forward and then you use your legs to stop you from falling on the ground it's it's it's it's encoded in your architecture rather than something that's apprehensible to your conscious understanding now there are lot lots of there are lots of phenomena that are procedural and unconscious and then there are sort of borderline phenomena that you have some idea about that you can represent but you still don't completely understand so those sorts of representations tend to be more imagistic and those are the sorts of things maybe that pop up in your fantasies and your dreams and those are also the sorts of unconscious sources of knowledge that allow you to understand say complex work works of literature or art that draw their meaning from multiple sources simultaneously and attempt to inform you at a deep level about how things are connected and how they're different now this particular image is a journey to the underworld image and that's a very very old idea Journey to the underworld um it's it's maybe the oldest myth it's one of the oldest mythological ideas or one of the oldest archetypal ideas and the underworld is it's a difficult it's a difficult phenomena to grasp although you you certainly encountered the concept particularly in movies so for most of you how many of you have seen all the Harry Potter movies right so right of course and so in the second movie I believe it's the second movie where Potter encounters a basilisk underneath Hogwarts is that right is that the second one yeah well that story is a journey to the underworld story and the the the architectural setup of the of the of the movie my architectural setup I mean the relationship of Hogwarts the castle to the underground structures is a symbolic representation of the representation of Consciousness embedded in culture and so that would be poter and his friends embedded in the the the realm of magical knowledge so to speak that's outside of them and that's that's represented by the castle which is you know a a a it's a representation of knowledge cast in stone so that's a form of memory to cast something in stone and so Potter and his friends are being enculturated in this enclosed environment and this safe enclosed environment it's like a university it's like the university more on the other side of the campus than on this side for for various reasons now underneath the the well in the background of course in the Potter series there's a battle between good and evil going on and that's also an extremely old archetypal idea I mean that's an idea that's probably as old as human beings and that's partly because human beings are very strange creatures and they're capable of very uh what would you call profound acts of deception and one of the things that separates human beings from most other animals is our capacity to use deception and it's associated with our imaginativeness right because we can imagine a variety of alternative potential realities and move towards them that opens the door for us to deceive ourselves and others because we can replace our accurate vision of the world in so far as it's accurate with whatever vision and representation we wish to choose one of the things you find in childhood development for example is that the smarter the child the earlier they learn to lie and and it's an offshoot of the ability to use fantasy and so the the idea of good versus evil part comes out of that to some degree because if you're dealing with people you're always dealing with phenomena that can trick you in some way they can represent reality as other than it is and that that's a tremendous problem for human beings because it makes other people extremely difficult to figure out now if you're honest and straight forward then you're easy to figure out because you don't have to be figured out I can just take you at your word which means you'll tell me something and it'll be relatively straightforward I'll be able to understand it and then you'll go do it no problem I don't have to know anything about you on the other hand if you don't do things according to what you say you'll do then you're a bottomless pit of incomprehensibility and God only knows what you're going to be up to and so that that's an archetypal problem for human beings and that's the problem of having to deal with the latent deceptive capacity of other people and of course of ourselves so that's all going on in the background of the Potter series but underneath the castle for example there's remember what's under the castle in the second in the second film what is it it's it's a basilisk right yeah and what happens when you look at a basilisk Stone right and so what what might that mean if you're thinking about it intelligently say what what phenomena might that that represent what happens to prey animals when they encounter a predator freeze they freeze EX exactly yeah so it's a representation of the fact that there are certain classes of phenomena that will freeze you on sight and you freeze because there are parts of your brain that respond to phenomena in the external world as if you are prey and the reason for that is well per first you are and second from an evolutionary perspective your your ancestry going back say tens of millions of years is an ancestry that was composed of predecessors that were continually praying upon and we have entire systems in our brain that react to the class of potentially predatory events now for human beings that system has differentiated cognitively so that many of the things that we would experience as predatory threats in the modern world don't come in the shape of say crocodiles and and bears and you know giant cats and so forth the sorts of things that would necessarily prey on you in the night but they're analogous in that the outcome is the same you can be prayed upon by many things you can be prayed upon by you know a corrupt corporation and so it's perfectly reasonable to symbolize the actions of of a corrup corporation as a form of predation and also to categorize that even more deeply as a reflection of the underlying consequences of the fact that people can deceive each other and those sorts of representations get deep very very rapidly but they're they're Act active and living representations in that they still represent something that's profoundly true which is not so much what things are in and of themselves which is what science does but what things are in relationship to you which is more like what things mean and things generally have a motivational or emotional meaning and that meaning is generally quite tightly tied to the necessity that you have to survive and to thrive and to you know to find someone to be with and to reproduce and all the darwinian things that you're supposed to be up to so a lot of these more archaic categories are they're meaningful categories they're categories of meaning that's that's a that's a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it now in the Potter situation which is related to this image the one that's up here the the idea is that everything that's stable rests on something that's unstable and dangerous and that's underneath in the Potter series and then the other thing that happens continually in the series but particularly in the second episode particularly in the second episode is that Potter has to go down beneath things to encounter something that's terrifying and deadly that's that's actually praying on his friends and on the community so it's uh it's very much like for example The Hobbit having to go off and and and uh steal treasure from from smog I think the dragon's name is and except that in the in the Potter sequence the dragon which is the Basilisk they they equivalent it's the same thing as this um in the in The Hobbit the dragon Hoards gold whereas in the Potter representation what does the basilis guard what's it what has it captured it's the little redheaded girl Jenny right Jenny Jenny right and that's a very that's a very old story now now Potter's kind of in love with her right now I mean it's it's they're young and sort of platonic but you know you can see the relationship sort of burgeoning now he has to confront this thing that's terrifying that exists underneath everything in order to free this virginal figure from the clutches of something terrible in reptilian now it's a very very interesting story that and what it means a whole variety of things and what it means to some degree is that uh a male human being can't really become mature until he confronts the terrible things that lie underneath the Civilized veneer of society that's one thing means uh another thing it means is that it's the capacity it's the capacity of the male in that situation to do that that makes him attractive enough to wake up the females that he might be associated with so that's like a Sleeping Beauty Motif um it has e e e evolutionary Echoes because much of what we've battled with for the last 60 million years say because I think you can trace the development of our cognitive structures quite straightforwardly back 60 million years there's been an endless battle between human beings and predators and many of those Predators were reptilian and so you know were the result of a very very long battle between mammals and reptiles and in our case particularly it appears that part of the reason we evolved our tool using capacity and our great capacity for vision was because our ancestors were continually prayed upon by predatory snakes when they lived in trees and that's a long time ago and so these these symbolic representations are unbelievably archaic and they're kind of as archaic as the underlying biological systems in your brain that that provide you with motivation and emotion and those are extremely old you share those with well you share those with any animal that you have any hope whatsoever of understanding at all and that even means lizards you know my daughter had these lizards that were called I can't remember unfortunately they're a desert kind of lizard and they make a good initial pet but they're they're very F little creatures cuz they they you know they're very lizard likee being that they're lizards and they have points all over them and uh if you put them in water they puff themselves up which is quite fun and then they Zoom around on the water but more importantly they like to stack on top of each other they're very very social and they're friendly and which is not exactly something that you'd expect from a lizard but but my my point is that even something that's as distant as that from you in the evolutionary hierarchy shares enough commonality of biological structure with you so that you can understand a fair bit of its motivation so for example it's pretty easy to tell with when one of those lizards even though they're basically friendly gets angry because it'll puff up and hiss and you know right away you don't have to have a discussion with the rest of your family to figure out that that's an angry lizard right you it maps onto your body immediately and you know the same thing applies to snakes it even applies to insects and lots of insects have developed the kind of warning behavior that will immediately signal to you that you're about to be bitten or or it's usually bitten with insects so so this is all to say that there are levels of understanding that are underneath say your your your normative mundane day-to-day comprehension that inform everything that you do with deep levels of meaning and and lot a lot of the activities that you pursue that you might regard as entertaining actually draw on those representations and you find them entertaining because they're actually deeply meaningful now the idea that a man can be swallowed or a human being because there are myths like myth of prapan where the protagonist is clearly female where they the there's an underground journey and then a reemergence and and that's the journey to the underworld that's the journey that Harry Potter undertakes continually by the way throughout the Potter series um the underworld taking different forms um as the as the series progress um now that's also a death and rebirth idea and and that's that's a very old and profound idea it's actually one of the most profound ideas that human beings have and it's the idea that um you will spend time in your life underground now you might think what does that mean well it means what the Potter movie the second Potter movie was trying to represent which is that there will be times in your life where you are faced with things that will terrify you into paralysis and that will take you underneath your normal set of assumptions because when your normal set of assumptions are functioning you don't end up facing something that's terrifying enough to to freeze you when your normal set of assumptions are working the world stays happily predictable around you and most of the time that's where you are and that's the normal world but that's blown apart whenever something that you're attempting to do fails in in a dramatic or less dramatic way the more dramatic the way the deeper you go into the underworld and the underworld is in some sense the substructures of your presuppositions now you you know this already because I don't suppose there's a single person in here who hasn't spent some time in the Underworld so to speak because this is what happens when something terrible happens to you unpredictable and terrible and you know there's sort of classic categories of events that send you to the underworld you know um the death of someone you love a serious illness of some sort either for you or for someone you you love um the death of a dream of some sort you know so you've got some goal that you think is really important and all of a sudden you find out for one reason or another that there's just no way you're going to be able to pursue it um betrayal that's a really good one people that's a really rough one and that'll send you for that'll throw you for a loop for sure so they're all they're all elements of the part of the world that you can't control that in some sense always remains beyond your control that has in some sense a predatory relationship ship to you because it can devour you at least metaphysically and when that happens you go somewhere and the place that you go is very dangerous it's underneath everything and maybe you come back out and if you come back out what that means is that you've reconstructed your erroneous presupposition so that you can function once again in the world and but maybe you don't maybe you don't so people who have post-traumatic stress disorder for example they go into the underworld they just stay there you know and if you're if you're chronically depressed or if you can't get over your grief or if you're in a state of continual anxiety and upset or if you're nihilistic for that matter you exist essentially in an underworld domain because you can't master the perceptual apparatus the culturally informed perceptual apparatus that would help you um Orient yourself in the world so that the things that you want to have happen and that you need to have happen actually happen so that's what that picture means it also means at least in principle that you know people have the capacity to die and be reborn at different levels of analysis so you know there are minor disappointments that you encounter when you have to drop some presupposition that you have and let it die and then put a new one in its place and that's painful but it's nowhere near as painful as holding on to the things when they don't work because then you just end up wandering around as sort of a clattering collection of dead presuppositions and you know nothing that you ever want will happen under that circumstance because you're you're armed with tools that don't fit the world and you know when you try to apply them the world won't do what you want it to do and then that's endlessly anxiety-provoking and frustrating so part of pain is is part of the price that you pay in some ways for being updatable you know because the world transforms around you and as a consequence you have to be able to transform with it otherwise it runs ahead of you and you get left behind and you know that happens to people to some degree anyways as they age that's actually one of the evolutionary explanations for why people die CU it's a mystery right there are elements of you that are Immortal you know the the cells that that that that give give rise to you are Immortal they're you know the DNA that produced you is at least 3 and a half billion years old it might be older than that so structures can maintain themselves over unbelievably vast expanses of time so it's not self-evident why human beings have to die but we do and we die at about after you're done being a grandparent is kind of when you're when you're done and the the hypothesis is is that at that point in some sense it's too costly to keep you updated and you have to be replaced by a younger version which would of course be your grandchildren or whatever you know you've sort of exhausted your plasticity and flexibility and uh then it's cheaper just to replace you than to update you so that's kind of a drag but yeah all right so here's a funny question for you this is the question that scientists are always devoted towards answering what's the world made of well that's a complicated question I mean the simple answer is that it's made out of matter um and that matter is made out of atoms and that theory was originally formulated by democrati but democrati didn't exactly say that the world was made out of atoms he said the world was made out of atoms and space and that actually happens to matter because the way that atoms are arranged in space gives rise to another property which is information and so if you have Adams in space you also have information and you can think of the world as being made of information just as easily as you can think of it as being made of matter now in fact I think that and and you know I'm I'm not alone in this hypothesis that it's actually more useful to conceive of the ground of reality as being something like information rather than being something like matter but we don't have to discuss that at length at the moment what we'll say instead is that one one way of looking at the world is the materialistic perspective and the materialistic perspective is a very powerful perspective and it's basically been dominant for about since the time of G Galileo that's that's about when that perspective got thoroughly going and and for many reasons bacon and dayart as well were major players in the establishment of the materialistic framework and it came about because in many ways because people were suffering from their inability to understand objective reality and so and you know we still suffer from that because there are all sorts of diseases we don't know what to do with and we age and you know things don't work out exactly like they're supposed to and so we pay a big price for our ignorance and so we're motivated to overcome it and one way we have overcome it was by developing materialistic philosophy and that materialistic philosophy enabled us to specify the structure of certain elements of the world and then to learn to predict and control it at least to some degree now you know you learn to predict and control something and sometimes you generate more monsters doing that so that's problematic but all things considered I think it's a lot better to live now than it than to live 3 or 400 years ago so or maybe even 30 years ago for that matter so it looks like the whole materialistic thing has been doing a lot of good for us but there it also has some serious problems and the problems have to do with another fundamental problem that human beings have to solve which is what you should do about what is and because human beings are Dynamic and active creatures and so we do not only we're not Machines of representation we don't just care what the world is we care what you should do with the world and the reason we care for that well the fundamental reason if you're thinking about it from a scientific perspective is essentially darwinian and I think that you can you can imagine the conflict between the moral worldview and the materialistic worldview as a battle in some sense between Newton and Darwin so Newton was the was the author the fundamental author of The idea that the world was made out of material and that it operated like a machine you know which was a pretty powerful perspective um that perspective came about during the time of clocks you know when when when Europeans in particular were starting to build things that would function in a very predictable manner once they were set in motion and so Newton in some sense was influenced by that and assumed that the entire Cosmos could be understood as a deterministic machine um and that that it would be ultimately predictable and controllable and in in a famous statement and I I don't think this was Newton although I can't remember might have been decart um anyways the idea is that if you knew the position of every subatomic or every atomic particle in existence if you knew the position and the momentum of those particles that you could then predict the entire outcome of the future it was strictly deterministic and the only thing that stopped you from being able to describe everything in terms of Machinery was your ignorance it was there was nothing at the bottom of the cosmos so to speak that was fundamentally unknowable well that turned out to be wrong it wasn't really discovered to be wrong until you know the first couple of Decades of the 20th century but it definitely turned out to be wrong we now know that in under no conceivable conditions could we gather enough information to predict the outcome of what appears to be a relatively unpredictable Cosmos there are levels of resolution that remain relatively constant and that you can manipulate but our hope for toal knowledge is is is gone and that was mostly a consequence of the development of quantum mechanics and the quantum theories have never failed in experimental tests they're the most powerful theories that human beings have ever designed so in some ways they seem well they're probably not final but they're they're pretty final so now okay so so that's sort of the materialist end of things now now there's a darwinian end of things and and the reason I'm telling you about both of these things is because part of what we need to solve in order to progress properly with this course we need to solve the problem of exactly what constitutes truth now the first thing that I might say is that truth in some ways whether or not something is true is a question that's sort of like whether or not a tool that you have does the job that it has it's not so much a question about the ultimate nature of reality because you can't get a truth that completely informs you about the ultimate nature of reality so you're sort of stuck with partial truth and so then you might ask well how do you tell a useful partial truth from a nonuseful partial truth or maybe a partial truth from a lie or from fiction it's very complicated to do that but one way you can progress towards that is to start thinking about things in terms of their tool like capability and that's a pragmatic approach by the way from a philosophical perspective the pragmatists who were very influenced by Charles Darwin by the way came to the conclusion at the beginning of the 20 Century that truth was bounded by claims of practicality so if you're trying to determine whether a statement is true the implicit question that goes along with that is true in relationship to what end so and and the question then is sort of like is your tool that you're using to represent the world or to act on it good enough to do what you're trying to do with it and then if it's good enough then your claim is true enough now this is tightly tied to darwinian philosophy and the pragmatists recognized this right away the pragmatists were American group of philosophers who worked on the East Coast particularly in Boston and they were they immediately took darwinian the darwinian hypothesis to their to their to their heart so to speak because the darwinian hypothesis is also pragmatic the darwinian hypothesis says whatever reality is is and also becomes so it's something but it's something that's changing too and changes in a way that's actually not predictable it's it technically it's not predictable it's like the stock market in that way there are periods of time over which you can make predictions but if you wait long enough no matter what you think you're going to end up wrong especially given what knowledge is for a human being because your knowledge is bounded you know and so the way the darwinian process solves that is by death essentially things that aren't good enough to solve the problem that currently presents them presents itself to them either die or fail to reproduce and to the degree that organisms can come up with truth claims that are sufficient than they live long enough to reproduce and then the the Next Generation faces the same problem and that's always the way it is is that truth chases a reality that's fundamentally unpredictable and that's transforming constantly now the reason the reason I I want to tell you that it's an important thing to understand because I'm going to make a claim here that the ways of looking at at the world that are more mythological than material are also real ways of looking at the world and it's not what people generally think because you think about fiction as not real and underneath fiction is mythology and religious claims and that sort of thing that's the domain of fiction and mythology and we don't think about that as real but that's because we think about what's real from a Newtonian perspective and not from a darwinian perspective from a darwinian perspective and this is also a claim that nche made n said truth serves life but what Darwin would say is you can't Define truth in any other way than that which serves life that's it you're not going to get past that there isn't a truth past that the truth as far as a bounded living organism is concerned and that certainly means us is the the body of knowledge conceptual and embodied that best enables survival in the face of continual transformation and that's that there's nothing under it now as soon as you know that then what happens is that it turns out that the things that mean things to you are also real now science is a funny business right because what science attempted to do and and for good and for very useful reasons was to strip everything subjective and subjectively meaningful off the picture of the world right so if you're a scientist you want to be objective and part of the way you do that is by trying to suppress your own subjectivity in the search for the obje truth but also you do that by relying on other people's observations so we kind of make a deal and the deal is if I see it and can describe it and you see it and can describe it and then a bunch of other people do the same thing and we come to the same conclusion we're going to treat that as real and that's useful it's useful because it it's it's useful to specify things precisely and to put them in the appropriate categories and in a sense that's what science does is that it continually strives to differentiate differentiate things and put them in identifiable categories and that means that increasingly we're able to use what we categorize as knowledge to help us confront the world so you know it's a it's a great it's a great process it's a brilliant process and it's even more remarkable because relatively stupid people can do it because it's a it's algorithmization with the method and sooner or later you'll produce new information and and that's that's that's a great thing you know it's like a science is like a factory that produces knowledge so well so that's wonderful but what's not so wonderful about it arguably is that it's in some sense War our our concept of what constitutes reality and it's never really solved as far as I can tell this conflict between a Newtonian perspective on what's real and a darwinian perspective on what's real and as far as I can tell Darwin trumps Newton and that's true if you're a biologist for sure because there isn't anything that's more true that sits underneath biology than the theory of natural selection and that's partly a philosophical claim and the claim is because you can't represent all of external reality with ultimate accuracy you're going to fail and everything that's bounded or even everything that's not as complex as the thing that's trying to be represented is going to fail so how do you do with how do you deal with that you generate variations and it's some has to be somewhat random because you don't know what's coming you Generate random variations and then hopefully one of those variations will work in relationship to whatever is coming and so it's it's also a kind of Truth CLA that's an embodied truth claim right you carry the fundamental truth of your existence in the shape of your physiology so you know earlier claims of philosophical truth were mostly disembodied you know there was some implicit idea that the Consciousness or the soul was more real than the body and well it's nice to think about that in some ways because it opens the door to the idea of things like immortality but it doesn't seem to be very it's hard not to associate that with a dream all right so category systems when you encounter something that that frightens you your body categorizes it and it categorizes it as something that presents a danger or a threat to you and danger is the probability that something will damage you like it'll be too loud or too hot or too cold it'll damage your sensory systems or it'll directly pose a threat to your physiological or psychological integrity and so you're designed so to speak to protect yourself against that you feel pain for that reason and instead of pain you also feel anxiety which alerts you to the fact that you might feel pain and should do something about that you should freeze or you should run away and so for example what what that what emerges from that is the beginnings of a natural category system so you could say well here's one useful category that is the category of all things that you should freeze at or run away from and that's a deep C it's a biologically predicated category it's also category that has meaning right because the meaning is what you should do when something like that shows up it's not the meaning isn't stripped out of the category at all it's actually fundamental now it turns out that a lot of our perceptions when when people think about the way they perceive the world they think well out there are a bunch of objects and you look at them and once you look at them you see them and once you see them you figure out what they are and then you evaluate what you should do and you progress on that basis right it's so object perception cognition emotion action well the problem with that is it's wrong and the first reason it's wrong is because things don't exist out in the world as self-evidently separable entities partly because everything can be segregated into smaller entities and every entity can be aggregated together with larger entities and so the boundary that defines something as a self-evident entity is no by no means clear so part of the way that your body deals with that is by categorizing things with regards to their immediate impact for you and so when you look at something so let's say you're looking at this and you say well that's a bottle and so you might ask well what is your brain doing when you're looking at that and the answer is it's molding your body to prepare to pick that thing up and that's how it understands it so your eyes perceive a pattern that's constant across some duration it's not made of smoke it's made of something that lasts so there's a pattern there a bottle shaped pattern that lasts across time you you have some sense of what it is having interacted with these sorts of things before but also its shape obviously indicates that it's a grippable thing and so what that means is that when you look at it your eyes activate your motor cortex directly even before you see the object like before you form an image of it in your imagination your retina the the pattern on your retina activates your grip right-handed or left-handed whichever hand you happen to be and part of what you're seeing when you see that bottle is what you would do with it if you were interacting with it so you see the manner in which you would interact with things and that's the case for virtually everything that you see so for example when you look at a chair your body prepares to sit in the chair or maybe to stand on the chair if you're going to change a light bulb or we know when you look at your computer you see the keyboard because that's the thing you move your fingers up and down on and so your perception is tightly tied to the implication of objects for Action immediately now you might say well that's not real that's not the reality of it the reality of it is the objective thing but as I said already it depends on how you define reality you take a newon Newtonian t on it or a darwinian t on it and from the darwinian perspective the implication of something for Action is actually its primary meaning which is don't stand around and contemplate a tiger while it's trying to eat you because the fact that it's trying to eat you is more important than the fact that it's a tiger and if you don't figure that out quick then you're not around anymore and so much for your claims to truth that's just you're just gone that's an error right and whatever was in you that enabled you to make that error is not going to be transmitted to the Next Generation or at least hopefully not so there's a domain of categorization that has to do with the meaning of things now most of what the psychologists have dealt with who are clinical psychologists is actually the domain of categorization that has to do with the meaning of things and it's actually because as far as you're concerned in your life as a as a human being you live inside a network of meanings of things right so for for example when you look at your mother you're not looking at her at her as an object and then attributing all sorts of meanings to her you see the meaning of your mother right away and that meaning is multi-dimensional it has a very long history and it affects you directly at a physiological that maybe you hate her and so the sight of your mother makes your heart race and your and your brain produced cortisol because she's categorized as unpredictable and chronic threat that's a standard thian situ a yeah no one would laugh if there wasn't sometimes that was true so those are Freudian slips by the way when you discuss something like that and people laugh then that's an admission on their part like an deeply unconscious admission on their part that there is truth to the statement and it's also a truth that is somewhat painful to admit so you can tell that you can tell that when you're listening to comedians they do that all the time right to tell you something that's absolutely brutally evident that no one will admit and everyone laughs and that is a Freudian slip technically because Freud often listened to the sorts of things that would make his patients laugh or make an audience that he was speaking to laugh because that would give him some insights into what they were repressing so to speak and what they would allow to come to light so and and jokes are often about things that are taboo right I it's hard to make a joke about something that isn't tabooed so all right so I've kind of made a classification structure of these two different ways of looking at things there's a meaning centered way of looking at things and the meaning is then the implication of the thing for action on your part and there's a more materialistic centered thing which is sort of like the world as it exists if you weren't here right that's that's the fundamental hypothesis of science is that we're there's something around that would be here and look the way it does look now if none of you were around and you know it's possible that that's true and um and it's also possible that it's it's possible that it's true it's possible that it's not true but most possible is the fact that it's true in a way that we really don't understand because the existence of things the way we perceive them is clearly dependent on our existence as a perceiver and so what the nature of the world would be with there was no one around at all to perceive it if there was no such thing as Consciousness is like that is a completely unsolved problem so maybe it would be like a field of Quantum potential or something like that but but it isn't even possible to really understand what that means so so now having established that having established I I'll give you another example of it before we move on so I said for example that when you interact with objects around you you're not really interacting with objects it's more like you're interacting with tools because your primary concern is well what the what's the world in relationship to me what do I have to avoid you know if I want to get to where I'm going and what can I use to further my Pursuits and so you're like that deeply that's why human beings are tool using creatures right we have hands they manipulate the world and those hands are they're they're built into our cognitive architecture like it's not like our brain is separate from our hands far far it's it's it's it's very opposite to that we wouldn't have the brains we have if we didn't have the hands we have that's why things like octopuses by the way or octopi are very intelligent they are even though they're invertebrates they only live a couple of years so they can't learn that much but they're extraordinarily intelligent it's partly because they're tentacled and because they're tentacled they can grab things and manipulate them and so you know they've developed an intelligence that's identifiable to us because we have little tentacles on the ends of our hands and you know we're using them to fiddle around with the world all the time so now there's the perceptual reality which is that we know about already that when you look at something and we track the way that you're interacting with we know that one of the first things that happen happens is the the relationship between the perceived object and your body is established very rapidly okay because you want to map the object onto your body so you know what the hell to do how to orient yourself so that you're safe and productive at the same time there's a guy named visual what his name JJ Gibson Gibson who who was a a psychology psychologist of perception who operated in the late 70s people thought his theories were they weren't behavioral that's for sure they were of a different classification or category and Gibson also made the first sort of claim that what you saw in the world were things like tools he called them affordances and so for example when you approach what you would call from an objective perspective a cliff Gibson would say you don't see a cliff you see a falling off place and you might infer Cliff but you see falling off place and if you think about it again from a darwinian perspective of course you see falling off place that's why you know you you might shrink from from a precipice is your your whole being perceives that as a place that would instantly make you extinct it's not a secondary derivation from your analysis of a set of objective facts it's a primary perception and it has to be because you better move quick if you're too near a cliff you don't have any time to think the same thing occurs when maybe you're being you know potentially struck by a snake you have circuits in your brain that will see that snake and make you jump way before you know it's a snake because sitting around standing around waiting for the image of snake to form in your Consciousness means that you've been bitten five or six times already because you're just not fast enough to see and then move you see move and then perceive and that's what keeps you safe and so a lot of the a lot of what you perceive in the world are the meanings that you map onto your body so so then you can think what human beings have done in response to this bifurcated way of perceiving reality is we've developed two different systems of classification to deal with it now for most of human history we only had one and the one we had was basically the meaningful system it wasn't the scientific system right we didn't get around to figuring that out even the ancient Greeks and the Romans the Greeks in particular who were unbelievably intelligent really never got around to positing something like an objective reality and if certainly the Romans didn't there was no science science only evolved in Europe and only in you know the late 1500s very strange and it's very difficult to understand so we've been elaborating out this materialistic Viewpoint for only about 500 years it's not very long the other Viewpoint that's the natural habitat of humanity and that's the Viewpoint that's made up of all the stories that people have told about themselves in the world since the dawn of human consciousness and that's really those are the knowledge forms the stories that actually constitute the base of culture because culture is not so much about what the world is and how to perceive it as it is about how you should act in relationship to the world and so when you read fiction and when you talk to each other endlessly about what your friends are up to and what their friends are up to and what they're doing on Facebook and and when you go to movies and you watch actors act out roles and and you know when you do everything you do to examine other people around you you're embedding yourself in this ancient culture that's there to tell you how you should operate yourself in the world what you should do because that's a primary question you need to know what to do human beings need to know what to do because if you don't know what to do well that's a very unpleasant emotional state and that's partly because it indicates that you're not well adapted to your current circumstances you know if you just stand around long enough not knowing what to do you'll age and you'll die it's not an effective way of dealing with the world you have to be oriented towards something and the the job of culture in part is to tell you to what you should be oriented and that's where the rubber hits the road with regards to psychology because especially in its clinical variance and personality theory has to be an element of clinical personality theory has to be a subelement of clinical Theory what psychology has to contend with as I mentioned in the first lecture is not only what you are but what you should be and the reason for that is you when you're talking about a human being you can't separate out the bare facts that present you about the person from the ideal we do this all the time what's mental health well you could say well it's the absence of mental illness well you know really if someone tells you that you should just stop the conversation because all they've done is solve one problem with an equally large problem there's no progress there it's it's a kind of a smart aliy thing to do you know it it sort of means go away and don't bother me with your stupid question mental health if if you want to understand what mental health is it's because it's very difficult to get people to Define it you have to watch how they act when they're talking about such things as mental health because then you can derive some sense of what they actually understand about it or presume about it instead of what they just say about it right so if you look at how societies use the idea of mental health they partly do use it normatively and if it's used normatively then describing it as the absence of mental illness actually works you say well you're healthy to the degree that you're normal and so extremes outside of normality start to border on pathology but there's obvious limitations and problems with that approach right because we don't think the average person is the best looking person and we'd assume that attractiveness is a is an ideal towards which we might all at least Aspire and it turns out there's deep biological reasons for that because most of the things that men and women find attractive about each other are they find attractive for deep biological reasons like symmetry for example which is an indication of sort of optimal biological development um for men for women looking at men it's shoulder to waist ratio and for men looking at women it's waste to hip ratio which should be about 68 which is pretty damn precise and you know men are always Computing that when they're when they're looking around so so so um you can't talk about what constitutes Health by merely making a normative claim you also have to take into account something like deviation from an ideal and that's a weird thing because of course the ideal doesn't really exist that that's what makes it ideal but you can't get away from that problem if you're going to do anything serious about psychology because implicit in the idea not only of mental health but of Health itself is the is the question what constitutes an ideal human being and you might think well that's not so relevant you know why would that be relevant in the scientific Pursuit and I would say well as people we're not only ever engaged in a scientific Pursuit right we're engaged in the business of living and we might be scientists sort of as a subset of that but and then I would also say that if we're dealing in the realm of health and mental health we're not being scientists anyways we're being it's like philosophical Engineers because what we're doing is we're attempting to take our knowledge however it's been gathered GED including scientifically and to make things better not worse and when you're trying to make things better you're not being a scientist what a scientist is trying to do is to describe what things are as soon as that's transformed into like engineering say it's more it's instantly becomes a variation of Applied it's like applied philosophy it's a different domain and I think it's it's not right to just skip over that and pretend that what we're studying say in a personality class is something that can only be studied scientifically because it's not maybe you can study people's conceptions of what constitutes ideal scientifically but you're still faced with the problem that the question of what is the ideal lingers underneath all the phenomena that you're trying to understand and explain so Beauty that's a good example intelligence we tend to assume that more is better right we don't think the average is the right place to stop and in fact that's you know all of you people there's not a single person in here I suspect who has an average IQ you're probably minimally at the 85th percenti and most of you are at the 95th percentile so that's also remember I told you last last class that scientists are like you know albino elephants they're very rare and you guys are like that too you know you're not normal human beings so it's true you know and as you progress up the ladder of success you'll be in increasing contact with stranger and stranger variants of humanity because the successful people who are smart and highly conscientious say are smart and highly creative are a tiny minority of the human population and that's unfortunate seriously unfortunate but um you're the beneficiaries of the lottery that determined in part your genetic the genetic structure of your intelligence and so you could I suspect I've done some testing of UFT students and the average comes out at around 126 to to 30 that's two standard deviations above the mean so and you know it's probably actually higher than that because a lot of you have English as a second language and so that tends to suppress your your you know your performance on IQ tests if they're assessing verbal knowledge in English so all right let's see here so part of what I'm going to talk to you today about is the sorts of things that Carl Yung would have called archetypes and archetype is a illd defined term that's that's partly why it's very difficult to understand you it's also very difficult to transform the sorts of things that he had to say into very precise scientific formulations but but it that doesn't change the fact that it's extraordinarily useful from the perspective of General understanding which is useful thing to pursue and also from the perspective of practical utility to understand something about these archetypal categories and the reason for that is you're in their grip now one of the things that Yung said this is a brilliant thing it's terrifying the psychoanalysts are terrifying people Freud's bad now you know because Freud dug around in this pathology of the family and like families can be great but if you want real pathology a family is a good place to look so because a pathological family is so pathological that it's unbelievable and that's actually what Freud was interested in and it's it's it's again it's hard for normal sort of healthy people to appreciate that because if you're normal and healthy and your family's kind of you know not half bad you don't have all those Freudian problems but if you do have them that's all you have you never get out of it you're trapped in their like a like a fly in a spider web and in fact the fly in a spider's web is common symbolic representation of the classic Freudian situation so um okay so I'm going to I showed you this picture because I want to talk to you about a category system that will be useful in understanding what we're going to go through during this course so what I would like to do with all of you is to start from the bottom of things and that's what we were doing today when we're talking about definitions of Truth so I I asked you to consider for a moment that there's two ways of looking at truth one is your objective sort of Newtonian way which by the way is outdated but we still hold it because it's practically useful and the other is the darwinian perspective which is the world is Meaningful in relationship to you and those meanings are real in so for in so far as they have a bearing on whether or not you actually survive so and and and then you make the claim that there isn't anything more real than whether or not you survive you can't get under that that's where you start so so you could say I could say for example if the pursuit of the nutonian theory of reality culminated in the extinction of human beings say because our technological power got so great that would be perfect evidence for its lack of truth because there are things it just wasn't taken into account right because something that's true should take things into account and one of the things it should take into account is that we're living things that we can only exist under certain you know within certain parameters and that we're also oriented towards an ideal and if your theory doesn't take that into account well maybe not only is it incomplete it might be pathologically and and and genocid incomplete all right this is a representation from ancient Egypt um I'm going to tell you a little bit about what the representations mean so this person here is Horus and this person here is oseris and that person there is Isis and oseris is the god of tradition and that's why he's sort of standing there on that pillar and so the Egyptians thought of these three there's one other there's Seth and Seth is a bad guy so Seth is the evil villain that's always whispering in the king's ear you see that story repeated in all sorts of different forms so Seth is is a negative figure and he's not included in these particular images but we'll we'll get to him Seth is also by the way Osiris's brother so and that's because the Egyptians had figured out and this is like 3,000 years BC the Egyptians had already figured out that if you put a state together so the state would be represented by oseris and Osiris is sort of like the abstraction of the patriarchal force that stands behind a tradition so if you imagine that a tradition is a way of behaving that's what a tradition is to the degree that you share a tradition you're all manifesting the same pattern and the Egyptians would say the pattern that you're imitating that's a deity that's I mean they didn't think of it that way because they didn't think the way we think but for all intents and purposes the phenomena that they described as a God was the pattern that everyone was unconsciously imitating now you have to unconsciously imitate the same pattern or you can't get along right so in in in our society for example we have a body of laws and most of it's derived from English common law and English common law emerged as a consequence of the necessity to solve disputes between people so that all hell didn't break loose so English common law was produced when one person took another person to court to say we've got a serious problem we don't know how to organize or behavior in the same space you have to make a ruling and so then the judge would assess the situation and state who had the right to do what and then that became part of the law now in so far as you are law abiding citizens and so you abide by the body of law you actually manifest the body of law in your behavior and to the degree that you do that other people like you to the degree that you don't do that you're either poorly trained poorly socialized antisocial or or downright dangerous in which case other people will put you somewhere where you're of less harm than you might be so like it or not you're a mimicker and what you mimic is the central pattern of cultural behavior that has evolved over who knows how long forever forever in so far as some of its associated say with dominant hierarchy Behavior which is unbelievably old that's Osirus that's Osirus that's God the father so to speak and it's part of the it's part of the category of culture now the Egyptians also knew that culture was not only necessarily a good thing as of course all of you know because no doubt sometimes you note that you're the beneficiary of your culture but sometimes no doubt you also feel that you're like crushed and and mistreated and molded and baned out of shape by the culture because the culture says you better act like everybody else expects you to and of course that's necessary but you're not exactly like everybody else so you kind of get mangled and crunched and you know male formed as you're socialized even though you also learn to speak and you learn to read and you learn all those things that culture can provide with you now the Egyptians knew even 3,000 years ago that although culture was necessary and it was an element of existence that human beings were always eded in that that's why it's a permanent category there's no non-cultural people you can't be a human being without a culture it's it's not possible we're we're evolved our our physiological form presumes that we're going to emerge into the world in a culture and that will inform us as we develop that's why we have such a long developmental period right we're we're born unformed and the only reason that works is because the the the lack of form has been consistently manifested in an environment that would form it so culture isn't just culture it's the environment that we inhabit because culture has been around for so long and I'll give you one example of that so a big part of every culture is dominance hierarchy right and a dominance hierarchy says who has what access to what at what given time and pretty much every creature is in a dominance Ary chickens are in dominance hieres that's the pecking order right members of wolves packs are in dominance hieres me member of members of chimpanzee troops are in dominance hieres songbirds are in dominance hierarchies you know you hear them sing in the spring it's all pretty it's not little little bird is sitting out there saying I'm healthy and loud and if you come over here I'll Peck you to death because this is my tree and so and so the song birds distribute themselves around the neighborhood by dominance and the more dominant birds get the better nesting spaces and better means they don't get rained on or at least not as much they their nests don't get blown out of trees there's not so many cats around and they're close to a good food source and so that makes them attractive to potential mating Partners but it also increases the probability that their chicks will survive and so and and here's here's a nasty bit of truth that goes along with that so let's say there's a bunch of birds in the neighborhood and some kind of bird flu that's specific to birds comes wafting through and it's killing birds well the birds die from the bottom of the dominance hierarchy up and the reason for that is the bottom birds are all stressed out because their life is hard and when they're stressed their immune system gets suppressed and you know they're all frazzled from you know being chased by cats and so on and then they die and so the top birds live the same thing happens in human populations when a plague sweeps through people die from the bottom of the dominance Hier up and so dominance hierarchies matter and so birds have them and lizards have them and fish have them so in a school of fish the dominant fish when the fish ball up they do that to make it hard for predators to eat them the big dominant fish are in the middle of that ball the little sucker useless fish are on the outside and that's who gets eaten up when the Predators come along so and we know that dominant s stretch back a very long time so we know for example that lobsters live in dominance Ares I told you a little bit about that and they're about 300 million years old so what that means is that we've been existing inside a cultural structure because the culture is predicated on a dominance hierarchy right that's the patriarchy if you want to use you know a politically correct term that's been around for 300 million years so to think about it as a permanent constituent element of reality is extremely useful because again here here's another question for you even if you don't buy the sort of meaning argument with regards to categorization there's another way you can look at it you might say to yourself what's most real that's that's a tough one because you know we we kind of accept gradations of real like rocks seem pretty real trees seem pretty real um the environment is that real that's a harder one right because it's an abstraction how about numbers are they real you can certainly do real things with them once you once you get numbers especially zero which seems not to exist at all as soon as you get zero there's all sorts of magical things you can do so anyways my point is it's not all that obvious to figure out what constitutes real but here's here's a hint the longer something has been around the more real it is okay dominance hierarchies have been around longer than trees they're real they're really really real and you live in one and not only do you live in one you're really motivated to get to the top of that one or to create one that you can be at the top of because human beings are sneaky and because if we're not doing so well in the dominance hierarchy we might think well the hell with this dominance Hy we'll just make a new one and that's what creativity is so if you're really creative you can make your own dominance Hier and you can sit right at the top of it and so that that's worked out very well for human beings you know in fact one of the fundamental traits of human beings is openness and openness is actually a trait that basically assesses the degree to which you're capable of playing around with the rules so you can come up with your own dominance heart and that's what you do if you're creative because you make a new set of rules that's what a creative person does it's very sneaky so it's very important to be up near the top of the dominance hierarchy because it means you live that's good you live without so much stress that's also good and your probability of successfully reproducing or say of having many mating opportunities goes up especially in the case of men it's it's like an e it's like an exponential Improvement so if you ever wonder why men are so competitive that's the reason it's because the loser men get nothing really that's exactly how it works and the winter men they get everything and there's actually a law that goes behind that an economic law you can look it up it's called the Pito distribution you look up the Pito distribution it's the law that describes income inequality it'll tell you something important about how the world works and pedo distribution which is almost everyone gets nothing and almost no one gets everything that's a prito dist distribution it covers the production of everything that's created money inventions art like music paintings you name it if people creatively produce it hardly anyone does all of it and almost everyone does none of it so it's a really winter take all situation and dominance Hier is set up really as a reflection of that fact we also know for example just to hammer the point home is that if you make dominance hierarchy steep like a steep one is hard to climb there's a lot of difference between top and bottom the steeper the dominance hierarchy in every any given geographical local the higher the murder rate among men because they start to kill each other and the reason they start to kill each other is because that's a good way of attaining dominance if you haven't got any other roots and so that's the relationship between in income inequality and the destabilization of society that's an extraordinarily powerful relationship so for example you can describe the steepness of a dominance hierarchy using a statistic called the Genny coefficient and the correlation between the Genny coefficient and the male homicide rate in North America is about 8 and 08 is like okay you're done you don't have to figure anything else out you know why it happens it just covers it you never see it you never see an explanation not complete in Psychology it's like the most powerful effect ever discovered so dominance haries this person he's King of the dominance haries so you can think about him as the person who who created it that's one way of looking at it and you can sort of think of him as the embodiment of it so and he's a symbol that's another way of looking at it because this this this King because he's a king ohus he's also a God he was also the Egyptian pharaoh because the Egyptians presumed that their Pharaoh was Osiris and he had to take on the being of Osiris when he became King when he was coronated it's like you're not a person anymore you're the embodiment of the state and that happens to people when they're when they turn into the president of the United States for example they're not whoever they were they're hardly them at all they're now this and that's the thing that's at the top of the dominance are and it's the thing that represents culture now the Egyptians knew that it could go astray could become tyrannical and rigid and that's why Osiris had an evil brother's set but we won't talk about them for a moment now he's the upper world this is Isis Isis is his wife and Isis is Queen of the underworld and she's the reason she's feminine as far as as far as we can tell is because from a symbolic perspective femininity represents more like possibility rather than actuality and the reason for that is that the defining characteristic of the feminine is the capacity to bring forth new forms and so if you're going to use the feminine as a symbolic representation you're going to use it to represent the domain from which new forms come emerge the domain from which new forms emerge and that's sort of the domain of the unknown known or the domain of nature which is why it's mother nature and Isis is Mother Nature but she's also Queen of the underworld and she had Isis had an immense following in the ancient world and variance of Isis they like her as a as a goddess of worship her her span of existence was thousands and thousands of years I mean even a lot of the the attention that's paid towards Mary in Catholicism is a variation of the veneration that was shown to Isis that's the often on top of her head there that's that's usually a variant of the present Moon although I think in this particular situation that's actually those are actually cow horns okay so Sirus and Isis and they are team so they're wedded together Order and Chaos they're wedded together and Order that's culture and Chaos that's nature those are the two most fundamental constituent elements of the world from the mythological or symbol perspective and what that means is there's always been culture at least always as first any of us need to bother with it there's always been an interpretive framework through which conscious creatures viewed the world you you can't be without having a structure and that structure is inculcated inside you and a lot of it's culturally transmitted not all of it a lot of it so it's it's a precondition for existence that you're a structured thing and that structure is ordered and then the other element of existence is that there are things that are outside of that order always that you can't cope with because you're a finite thing and your culture is a finite and bounded thing and outside of that there's mystery there's mystery like an outside is a funny place because it's not outside in the in the way that you think about being outside a building although it is that in so far as it's cold and dangerous out there but there's outsides everywhere so for example if you're if you know someone maybe you're in a relationship with them and you know you're kind of comfortable with them and then one day you're having a conversation with them and they tell you something shocking like maybe you you're in an intimate relationship with them and they tell you that maybe it's the day they tell you that they are having an affair or maybe that they had five and that they're still going on who knows and then all of a sudden one second you were inside a close and isolated and comfortable cultural space and the next second you're outside and that's because no matter where you are the boundaries of your knowledge only extend so far and the fact that you're very limited in what you apprehend can be made manifest to you at any moment any of your presuppositions can fail especially in relationship to other people or yourself you know because if you're all of a sudden informed by a long-term partner that they have been having an affair like that certainly says something about them but it certainly also says something about you it's like how dumb can you get right how did you not notice how are you so naive now you might think it's cruel to blame the victim and no doubt it is but it's irrelevant in this case because that's what you're going to think in any case right you know because you're wandering around thinking you're reasonably perceptive and well adapted creature and all of a sudden poof someone pulls the rug out from underneath you it's like you might doubt them and certainly you will and maybe relationships for a long time but you can also be sure you're going to doubt yourself and your past which is weird cuz you think it was already done with and your present and your future it's like all of a sudden bang you're not in culture anymore poof you're in the Underworld Order and Chaos now Order and Chaos masculine feminine that's yin and yang as well they can unite to produce some third thing and that's often the sun it can be the Sun as in the thing that shines but also in terms of the biological Sun there are complicated reasons that those two two things are interrelated this is Horus and he's The Offspring the child of Isis and Osirus now I won't tell you the entire story but I'll I'll tell you a couple of things about Horus that are worth knowing you've all seen the Egyptian eye right the eye with the way the eyebrow everyone's seen that it's kind of weird because it's really old but you all know it okay that's Horus and if you look at the Egyptian eye the eye is really open so that's an element of what Horus is Horus is in fact the open eye so Horus you could think of as the god of attention it's not the god of intellect there's a very there's a very important difference it's Horus is the god of attention and that's also why in this representation you see he's got the head of a bird it's not any old bird it's a falcon and the reason the Egyptians put the head of a falcon on Horus is because Falcons can really see they're like super observant so they fly above everything so they can see everywhere they're above everything they're even above the dominance haries they're way up there in the sky and from that position in the sky they can see everything and that makes them powerful and so the Egyptian idea was that the proper balance between Order and Chaos made you alert with your eyes open and that was what made you that's that that was an element of human Divinity so to speak that was that was the deepest expression of your soul here's the way of thinking about that so what happens to you if you're somewhere where everything is entirely predictable and comfortable what do you do lazy you get lazy you get bored what what else happens stop pay attention Well you certainly you don't have to pay attention right so what happens when you really stop paying attention you fall asleep right because you know you're by the fire you just had a nice meal you know that like nothing's going to come rampaging through your front door and so what the hell do you have to be awake for before poof asleep so now that's good you know sometimes you have to sleep but as a lifestyle it's somewhat limiting so if you're just sitting around hyper comfortable all the time it's like you get all doughy and useless and it's not helpful that's the sort of couch potato thing right it's not helpful because if anything does come along you're in trouble and plus you're nothing like you could be and so you might think well the more order the better which is exactly what fascists think by the way but the problem with too much order is that there's no utility in you even being there because everything's perfect and it's already done you might as well just be asleep there's no need for Consciousness so you want to have a little chaos around and then you might ask well how much chaos and the answer would be well how about not enough to paralyze you cuz that's too much then you're just praying and you might be awake but it's like it's terror is a form of Consciousness I suppose but we we might as well not presume that it's the optimal form it's also rather self-limiting because if you're terrified long enough you'll just die so it's not an optimal State it's also one you'll strive generally to avoid so let's say well how much chaos should you have around how much of what's unpredictable should you have around and we can say just enough to make you optimally awake right so you should be pushing yourself hard enough at each point you want to be have one foot in order yes so you're secure and stable and you have one foot in chaos so that you're not exactly sure what's going to happen next so that you're pushed to transform and change and grow at develop and you can tell when you're there because then you're alert and you're paying attention and so at that point the Egyptians would say well then you're optimally embodying Horus who's the third element of experience one order two chaos three the thing that mediates between Order and Chaos and if you're doing that optimally then you know the and yang symbol I think I've got it here actually maybe yes those are two serpents by the way the black serpent that's chaos and it's an interesting symbol because there's a white circle in the middle of it right and that means that things might be pretty gloomy and dark because it's all chaotic but at any point order can arise out of that and you know how that is you know you go through a terrible period of transformation and everything's unsteady and shaky and like it passes and maybe you're even better off than you were before it and maybe not but at least sometimes it happens and then the white serpent has a black eye and that's because well you know just when you think you're safe the rug gets pulled out from underneath you and so there's a dynamic this is what the dsts believe and what they State explicitly the world is a dynamic between Chaos and Order the the world of experience the world that human beings exist in is a dynamic between Chaos and Order and the function of a human being is to juggle those and keep them balanced and you can tell when you're doing that because you're awake and you're paying attention and not only are you healthy in who and what you are but you're moving towards something better and when that happens to you then you're possessed by a deep intimation of meaning because meaning signifies something and what it signifies is that you're in the right place at the right time and so you can learn to stay there by paying attention to the balance of Chaos and Order in your life and the the better you get at staying there this is the kickoff from the Egyptian perspective the better you get it staying there the more imper impermeable you are to Chaos and Order because you can learn to handle it so you might say well life presents you with a challenge with regards to its ultimate significance right you might say well what's the use of human striving in the face of everything that's terrible in the world including our own vulnerability as well you're not going to eliminate that but it's possible that if you balance things properly that you can learn to live with it and maybe you can even learn to understand that those two the dynamism between those two things is actually a precondition for being and that without it there wouldn't be any being because part of you is limited and part of you isn't and if that wasn't the case there wouldn't be you so the question arises it's an existential question what do you do with that set of facts and it looks like your nervous system in a sense has already set up to answer that pay attention put yourself in a situation where you're paying attention if you pay enough attention you're right in the place that you should be and that will be at least sufficient and maybe it'll be more than that maybe you'll say it's okay terrible preconditions of existence are Justified by the manner in which it manifests itself and that's a definition of mental health and that's implicit in all the clinical theories that we're going to investigate throughout the duration of the course

"I'm actually supposed to be talking to you about constructivism today but I'm not going to I'm goin(...TRUNCATED)

"talk about constructivism and I'm going to primarily discuss Jean P although the readings extend to(...TRUNCATED)

"psychoanalytic thought today it's depth psychology that's a better way to think about it the psycho(...TRUNCATED)

"have to ask me some questions about the exam there's not much to say most of the descriptions liste(...TRUNCATED)

"so we're going to continue with our discussion of clinical personality theories today moving away f(...TRUNCATED)

"we talked about phenomenology last time and I tried to make the case that phenomenology at least in(...TRUNCATED)

"we're going to talk some more about existentialism today and I'm going to talk to you about a coupl(...TRUNCATED)

"it's possible that you guys have been following this political and economic news from the Ukraine s(...TRUNCATED)