This Is My Vision Of "Life" (Video/Transcript)

 A Conversation With Richard Dawkins 

Introduction by:John Brockman

Source:Edge

 

THIS IS MY VISION OF "LIFE"

Natural selection is about the differential survival of coded information which has power to influence its probability of being replicated, which pretty much means genes. Coded information, which has the power to make copies of itself—“replicator”—whenever that comes into existence in the universe, it potentially could be the basis for some kind of Darwinian selection. And when that happens, you then have the opportunity for this extraordinary phenomenon which we call "life".

My conjecture is that if there is life elsewhere in the universe, it will be Darwinian life. I think there's only one way for this hyper complex phenomenon which we call "life" to arise from the laws of physics. The laws of physics—if you throw a stone up in the air, it describes a parabola, and that's it. But biology, without ever violating the laws of physics, does the most extraordinary things; it produces machines which can run, and walk, and fly, and dig, and swing through the trees, and think, and produce the whole of human technology, human art, human music. This all comes about because at some point in history, about 4 billion years ago, a replicating entity arose, not a gene as we would now see it, but something functionally equivalent to a gene, which because it had the power to replicate and the power to influence its own probability of replicating, and replicated with slight errors, gave rise to the whole of life.

If you ask me what my ambition would be, it would be that everybody would understand what an extraordinary, remarkable thing it is that they exist, in a world which would otherwise just be plain physics. The key to the process is self-replication. The key to the process is that ... let's call them "genes" because nowadays they pretty much all are genes. Genes have different probabilities of surviving. The ones that survive, because they have such high fidelity replication, are the ones which we see in the world, the ones which dominate gene pools in the world. So for me, the replicator, the gene, DNA, is absolutely key to the whole process of Darwinian natural selection. So when you ask the question, what about group selection, what about higher levels of selection, what about different levels of selection, everything comes down to gene selection. Gene selection is fundamentally what is really going on.

Originally these replicating entities would have been floating free and just replicating in the primeval soup, whatever that was. But they “discovered” a technique of ganging together into huge robot vehicles, which we call individual organisms. An individual organism is a unit of selection in a different sense from the replicator being a unit of selection. The replicator is the unit of selection which strictly is the thing that becomes either more numerous or less numerous in the world. Nowadays we say more numerous or less numerous in the gene pool, and that's modern post-Darwin language.

But because the individual organism is such a salient unit in which these replicators, these genes, have ganged up together, we as biologists tend to see the individual organism as the unit of action. The individual organism is the thing that has legs or wings, it has eyes, it has teeth, it has instincts. It's the thing that actually does something. And so it's natural for biologists to phrase their questions of purpose, of pseudo-purpose at the level of the organism. They see the organism as striving for something, working for something, struggling to achieve something.

What's it struggling to achieve? Well, for Darwin it was struggling to achieve survival and reproduction. Nowadays we would say it's struggling to achieve replication of the genes inside it. And this all comes about because, well, one way of putting it, and I've often put it like this, is to say look backwards at the ancestors of all modern animals, any animals, any time, and you can that the individual is descended from an unbroken line of successful ancestors, an unbroken line of individuals which succeeded in surviving and reproducing. What that really means is they succeeded in passing on the genes that built them. So we are conduits for the genes that pass through us. We are temporary survival machines. Everything about biology can be understood in this way. Everything about biology can be understood if you say that what's really going on is differential replicator survival—gene survival in gene pools—and the way in which they do it is by controlling phenotypes. And those phenotypes in practice are nearly all bundled up into these discrete bodies, individual organisms.
If ever there is a bundle of replicators, a bundle of genes, which passes on its genes to the next generation in a single propagule (we do that: we pass on our genes in sperms or eggs) that means that all the genes in a body, in a mammal body, in a vertebrate body, in an animal body, a normal animal with sexual reproduction. Because all the genes in that body have the identical expectation of getting into future generations, namely leaving the present body in a sperm or an egg, that means that all the genes in a body are pulling for the same end. They all have the same goal.

If they didn't (and some of them might not: viruses, for example, have a different goal of being sneezed out, or being spat out, or whatever it might be) they, of course, are quite different, and they do not cooperate with the rest of the genes in the body. But all the genes that have the same expectation of the future, the same expectation of leaving the present body and getting into the next body, they cooperate. They work together. That's why bodies are such coherent wholes. That's why all the limbs and all the sense organs work together. It's simply because all the genes that built them have the same exit route to the next generation. The minority that don't, things like viruses, they have a different exit route, and they don't cooperate, and they may kill you.

Although it's true that the great majority of survival machines are actually discrete organisms, that doesn't necessarily have to be the case, and if genes can influence phenotypes that are outside the body, then they will do so. This is the extended phenotype. The simplest sort of extended phenotype would be an artifact like a bird's nest. So a bird's nest is an organ, it's an organ in just the same sense as a heart or a kidney is an organ, but it just happens to be outside the body and it happens to be made of grass and sticks rather than being made of the cells that contain the genes. But nevertheless, it's a phenotype, which is produced by the animal's nervous system, working through nest-building behavior. And it does exactly the same kind of thing, namely preserve the genes in the form of eggs and chicks, as organs of the body, like kidneys and livers and muscles.

The next kind of extended phenotype that I talk about is hosts of parasites, because there are these spectacular examples, which Dan Dennett is fond of quoting. For example, of parasites which influence their hosts in order to get into the next host. A host body to a parasite gene is like a bird's nest. It's influenced by the genes. We don't normally put it that way. We normally say that the parasite, the fluke, or whatever it is, the whole fluke influences the whole snail to get itself passed on.

But, in fact, if you think at the genetic level, the genes are influencing the fluke's phenotype, which, in turn, influences the snail's phenotype to enhance the propagation of the fluke's genes into the next generation. So there's no reason to draw a line around the fluke's body and say, well, outside that is no longer proper phenotype. It is proper phenotype, it's just that you have to think outside the box ... in this case outside the fluke ... in order to get the true relationship between genes and phenotypes.

And then generalizing further, a cuckoo in a nest influences the behavior of its host by various stimuli, by having a bright red beak, and squawking in the right way and so on. And once again, just as the fluke influences the snail to get itself passed on to the next generation, the cuckoo influences the reed warbler to get itself, to get its genes passed on to the next generation. And the change in reed warbler behavior can properly be regarded as phenotypic expression of cuckoo genes.

My vision of life is that everything extends from replicators, which are in practice DNA molecules on this planet. The replicators reach out into the world to influence their own probability of being passed on. Mostly they don't reach further than the individual body in which they sit, but that's a matter of practice, not a matter of principle. The individual organism can be defined as that set of phenotypic products which have a single route of exit of the genes into the future. That's not true of the cuckoo/reed warbler case, but it is true of ordinary animal bodies. So the organism, the individual organism, is a deeply salient unit. It's a unit of selection in the sense that I call a "vehicle".

There are two kinds of unit of selection. The difference is a semantic one. They're both units of selection, but one is the replicator, and what it does is get itself copied. So more and more copies of itself go into the world. The other kind of unit is the vehicle. It doesn't get itself copied. What it does is work to copy the replicators which have come down to it through the generations, and which it's going to pass on to future generations. So we have this individual / replicator dichotomy. They're both units of selection, but in different senses. It's important to understand that they are different senses. 

Now, because the individual organism is such a salient unit, biologists after Darwin got into the habit of seeing the organism as the unit of action, and therefore they asked the question, what is the organism maximizing? What mathematical function is the organism maximizing? Fitness is the answer. So fitness was coined as a mathematical expression of that which the organism is maximizing. Of course, what fitness really is, or what it ought to be if we understand it properly, is gene survival. For a long time fitness was equated in people's minds with reproduction, with having a large number of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. Bill Hamilton and others, but mostly Bill Hamilton, realized that you had to generalize that because, if what's really going on is working to pass on genes, offspring, grandchildren, et cetera, are not the only ways of passing on genes. An organism can work to enhance the survival and reproduction of its siblings, its nephews, its nieces, its cousins and so on. Hamilton worked out the mathematics of that.

I think it was unfortunate that Hamilton, having realized this very important insight, chose to stick with the individual organism as the entity of action. He therefore coined the phrase "inclusive fitness", as the mathematical function which an individual organism will maximize if what it's really doing is maximizing its gene survival. It's a rather complicated thing to calculate. It's difficult to calculate in practice and this has led to a certain amount of, not hostility, but a certain amount of skepticism about inclusive fitness as a measure, skepticism which I share. But for me the remedy of that skepticism is to say, well, forget about the organism and concentrate on the gene itself. Ask yourself (as Hamilton also did) ask yourself, if I were a gene, what would I do to maximize my propagation into the future? Hamilton did that, but he also, I think, later took a sort of false trail (it's strictly correct but not helpful) by saying if I'm an individual, what would I do to maximize my gene survival? Both ways of phrasing it are correct, they're both correct if you can get the calculation right, but one of them is rather harder to do. If you're trying to do intuitive Darwinism, if you're trying to work out what would you expect to happen in the world, I think it's better to ask the question, what would I do if I were a gene, rather than what would I do if I were an elephant?

In both cases this is a personification. Nobody really thinks that either genes or elephants scratch their heads and think, what would I do; but it's a useful trick, a useful dodge when you're trying to get the right answer as a field biologist in the Serengeti. It's a useful trick to say what would I do if I was a ... and you could fill in the end of that sentence by saying either if I was a gene or if I was an elephant. And you'll get the right answer if in the gene case you concentrate on self-replication and if in the elephant case, you concentrate on passing on genes. So we have these two logically equivalent ways of expressing what's going on in Darwinism. Both of them Hamilton used. There is the what-would-I-do-if-I-was-the-gene way of doing it, and there's the what-would-I-do-if-I-was-an-elephant-or-an-aardvark way of doing it and they're both correct. I think some of the opposition to Hamilton, which has recently surfaced, is because people have realized that inclusive fitness is not a very practical way of doing things. It's a difficult thing to calculate. And my suggestion would be (and I actually said this to Hamilton) my suggestion would be to abandon inclusive fitness and to concentrate instead on personification of the gene and then you'll get the right answer.

George C. Williams in 1966 wrote a brilliant book, Adaptation and Natural Selection, roughly at the same time as Hamilton was working, and they both tumbled to the same truth, which is that what's really going on in natural selection is survival of genes. Williams was eloquent on this. Williams said things like, Socrates may have had any number of children, we don't know that, but what Socrates really passed on, if he passed on anything, was genes. It's genes that pass through the generations. And so whenever you're talking about teleonomy, whenever you're talking about the pseudo-purpose, which is what we see in life, what's it for, what's the adaptation for, who benefits, cui bono, whenever you ask that question you should be looking at the level of the gene. Williams realized that, Hamilton realized that.

In The Blind Watchmaker, I wanted to get across the idea that cumulative selection can give rise to immense complexity and dramatic changes. So I wrote a computer program for the Macintosh, which presented on the screen a range of phenotypes which were built by an algorithm which I called its embryology, which was actually a tree-growing algorithm. And the shape of the tree was governed by genes. There were nine genes I think in the first version, and so what the user saw on the screen was a "parent", as I called them, in the middle, and eight [actually fourteen, misremembered as eight in the interview] other biomorphs around it were the offspring. They were built by genes which were nine numbers. The genes could mutate by either having a small amount added to their value or a small amount subtracted from their value. So all the nine biomorphs looked a bit different, were obviously descended from the same parent, but they were a little bit different. And you could choose with a mouse which one to breed from, it glided to the center of the screen, produced fourteen offspring and so on. It went on and on through generation after generation. You could breed anything you like. It was a most extraordinary experience to breed massively different shapes from the original by gradual degrees, and they came out looking like insects, and flowers and all sorts of things.

I'm pleased to note that although I’d thought I’d lost these biomorphs, because modern Macs don’t run the software that old Macs do ... a wonderful man called Alan Canon in Kentucky wrote to me and said he wanted to revive them. So I sent him all my old Pascal code, which would no longer run, and he’s now hard at work producing phoenix from the ashes—my old programs—and I’m simply delighted by this.

I then went to the Artificial Life Conference, organized by Chris Langton, and I gave a talk called "The Evolution of Evolvability", which I think was the first time the phrase had ever been used, and it's being used quite a lot.

The original biomorph program had nine genes. I then later enlarged it to 16 genes. I added genes that did things like segmentation, that had biomorphs that were arranged serially along the body like a centipede which has lots of different segments, or like a lobster which has lots of segments, but each segment can be a little bit different. I had genes that had symmetries of various kinds. So I increased the number of genes from nine to sixteen and the repertoire of biomorphs that became possible to breed then dramatically increased. It was still limited, but nevertheless it increased. And it occurred to me that this was a good metaphor for radical changes in embryology that happened at certain important times in evolution. For example, I just mentioned segmentation. The very first segmented animal had some kind of major mutation, which gave it two segments instead of one, I'm guessing. It may have been three. It can't have had just one and a half segments. There must have been at least two. It duplicated everything about the body. If you look at the body of an earthworm or a centipede, it's like a train, like a truck. Each truck is similar to the neighboring trucks and may be identical.

Before the origin of segmentation in the ancestors of earthworms, or the ancestors of centipedes, the ancestors of vertebrates, animals must have evolved as just one single segment, and they would have evolved in the same sort of way as my biomorphs did when they had only nine genes. Then the first segmented animal was born. It must have been radically different from its parents. This must have been a major mutation. And as soon as the first segmented animal was born with two segments, the same as each other, probably ... it wasn't a difficult thing to do in one sense because all the embryological machinery to make one segment was already there. And so to double it would have been obviously a major step. Nevertheless, all the machinery is there. It's not like inventing a whole new organ, like an eye. That cannot happen. It's got to happen by gradual cumulative selection, which is the main message of The Blind Watchmaker. But once you've got the machinery to make an eye, or to make a vertebra, or to make a heart or anything like that, you could make two because the machinery is already there. That's what segmentation is.

And so when segmentation was invented by some kind of macro mutation, a whole new flowering of evolution became possible and vertebrates, arthropods, annelids, all exploit this new embryological trick of segmentation. And I illustrated this with my biomorphs because when I added the segmentation gene for the macro mutation, which I actually had to program in, when I added it, it meant that a whole new flowering of morphology could appear on the screen. You could evolve much more exciting animals because segmentation was there. Similarly with the genes for symmetry. I had genes doing kind of mirror image morphology in two different planes. And immediately I started being able to breed things like flowers, butterflies, beautiful creatures.

The evolution of evolvability, then, is an evolutionary change which makes a radical alteration in embryology, and that opens up floodgates of further evolution which were not possible before. Segmentation is one example, sex may be another one. Torsion in mollusks may be another one. These are major changes, which I think are rare. They may happen once every 100 million years, but there's kind of normal evolution which goes on by the normal cumulative, slow, gradual process that we mostly teach about. But every now and again I suspect there's a major jump, a macro mutation which opens up new floodgates, and segmentation would be the best example. I was really led to think about this by the addition of seven more genes to my original nine gene biomorph, and that's what I talked about at Chris Langton's Artificial Life Conference, and I called it "The Evolution of Evolvability".

I incorporated these ideas of evolution evolvability in Climbing Mount Improbable, which is a bit similar to The Blind Watchmaker, but has a lot more in it. And by then I'd added a whole lot more genes, in this case introducing colors, and we now have color biomorphs. And perhaps rather more interestingly, I teamed up with Ted Kaehler. He was one of Apple's star programmers. I met him at the Artificial Life Conference. And after that we collaborated on a new project which I called "Arthromorphs", which was somewhat similar to biomorphs, but with a totally different kind of embryology, and much more based upon segmentation, and much more based upon especially arthropod segmentation. And the arthromorph program didn't require the programmer, namely me, to introduce the new watershed changes, the new macro mutations which led to new flowerings of evolution. It happened internally, it happened in the computer. They really were macro mutations. That was a big step in my use of computers in both understanding and teaching about evolution.

~~

One of the things that I've always done is not make a clear separation between books that are aimed at popularizing, books that are aimed at explaining things to other people, and books that explain things to myself, or explain things to my scientific colleagues. I think the separation between doing science and popularizing science has been overdone. And I have found that the exercise of explaining to other people, which I suppose I've been fairly successful at, is greatly helped by the fact that I first have to explain it to myself. And explaining it to myself ... the biomorph program, which I originally wrote to explain to students, and I used them in student practicals ... led me to think anew for myself, stimulated me to understand much better about evolution, stimulated me to understand about the evolution of evolvability in a way that I haven't before.

~~

Nobody knows whether there's life elsewhere in the universe. I think there probably is. The number of stars in the universe is something like 10²², and most of them have probably got planets. It would be pretty astonishing if we were unique. It would go against the lessons of history, you know, we're not the center of the universe, et cetera. Science fiction writers try to speculate about what life elsewhere might be like. I have one contribution to make, which is that I think however weird, and alien, and strange, and different life elsewhere might be, we can say one thing about it, which is that it will be, if we discover it, it will turn out to be Darwinian life.

I think there's only one way for the lead of pure physics to be transmuted into the gold of complex life, and that is differential replicator survival, which is Darwinism in its most general sense. So I would stick my neck out and say that when and if we ever discover life elsewhere in the universe, it will be Darwinian, it will be based upon something like DNA, probably not DNA, but something like DNA in the sense of an ultra-high fidelity, self-replicating coding system with the capability of producing great variety, which is what DNA does. So what I call universal Darwinism is the doctrine, almost, the one thing we know about life everywhere, is that it's Darwinian life.

I gave a talk called "Universal Darwinism" at one of the Darwin Centenary Conferences, the one in Cambridge, and I based it upon looking at all the alternatives that someone might have suggested like Lamarckism, inheritance of acquired characteristics, the principle of use and disuse. The point I tried to make is that contrary to what most biologists have said, the thing that's wrong with Lamarckism is not just that it doesn't work in practice, that acquired characteristics are not as a matter of fact inherited. There are biologists, including Ernst Mayr who have said Lamarck's theory is a fine theory, but unfortunately acquired characteristics are not inherited. The point I made was that even if they were inherited, the Lamarckian theory is nothing like a big enough theory to do the job of producing complex adaptations. Lamarckian theory depends upon use and disuse. The more we use our muscles, the bigger they get. That's fine, that happens, and then inheritance of acquired characteristics, you pass on your bigger muscles to your children. Ernst Mayr said that's a perfectly good theory. The only trouble is it doesn't work because acquired characteristics are not inherited, which of course, is true.

But the point I was making was that even if it was true, the principle wouldn't work to produce real interesting biological evolution. Muscles are fine, that's one thing that does grow bigger when you use them. But something like an eye, the delicate focusing mechanism of the eye, the transparency of the eye, the huge number of light-sensitive cells, three different color coding and so on, that doesn't come about by use and disuse. The more you use your eyes, they don't become more (the lens doesn't become more transparent as photons wash through it. The eyes become better because every single tiny mutation that improves the eye. As Darwin said, nature is daily and hourly scrutinizing. So every little tiny change, no matter how deeply buried in internal cellular biochemistry it is, if it has any effect whatever on survival and reproduction, natural selection will pick it up. The Lamarckian principle will work only for very, very crude growth, things like muscles getting bigger when you use them.

As we look around the world in which we live, what we see is stupefyingly complicated manmade machines like this camera that you're filming with, this recording machine, this computer, cars, ships, planes. These are not produced directly by natural selection, these are produced by human ingenuity, by human brains working together. No one human can make a Boeing 747. I mean, this is a cooperative enterprise involving lots of humans, involving lots of computers. It's a fantastic extension of the Darwinian substrate. So the principles that give rise to the very strong design of a plane, or a car, or a computer, these all come from human brains. But that's not the ultimate explanation. The human brains themselves have to come from Darwinian natural selection. So if we go to other planets and discover extremely complicated technology, that technology itself will be the direct product of Darwinian selection, but it will be the product, ultimately, of Darwinian selection of the brains ... whatever they call them on that planet. It's arguable that something ... this is a different kind of argument now ... it's arguable that something like Darwinism does go on in human technology: that when a human designer is designing on the drawing board, he designs something, doesn't like it, tosses it in the bin, gets a fresh bit of paper, designs a slight variation of it and so on. There might be a Darwinian element to that. That's not what I'm saying.

I'm saying that a wholly new, at least partly new, kind of design came into the world when human brains started to exercise ingenuity, especially social ingenuity, cultural ingenuity. But the ultimate source of that is evolved brains, and the evolved brains have to come about by some version of Darwinian selection, which on other planets might be very different, but it will still be, I conjecture, I bet my shirt on it being Darwinian.

Death Is Optional (Video/Transcript)

 Source: Edge

• Yuval Noah Harari

Professor, Department of History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Author, Sapiens

• Daniel Kahneman

Recipient, Nobel Prize in Economics, 2002; Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus, Princetin; Author, Thinking Fast and Slow

 

DANIEL KAHNEMAN: Before asking you what are the questions you are asking yourself, I want to say that I've now read your book Sapiens twice and in that book you do something that I found pretty extraordinary. You cover the history of mankind. It seems to be like an invitation for people to dismiss it as superficial, so I read it, and I read it again, because in fact, I found so many ideas that were enriching. I want to talk about just one or two of them as examples.

Your chapter on science is one of my favorites and so is the title of that chapter, "The Discovery of Ignorance". It presents the idea that science began when people discovered that there was ignorance, and that they could do something about it, that this was really the beginning of science. I love that phrase.

And in fact, I loved that phrase so much that I went and looked it up. Because I thought, where did he get it? My search of the phrase showed that all the references were to you. And there are many other things like that in the book.

How did you transition from that book to what you're doing now?

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: It came naturally. My big question at present is what is the human agenda for the 21st century. And this is a direct continuation from covering the history of humankind, from the appearance of Homo Sapiens until today, so when you finish that, immediately, you think, okay, what next? I'm not trying to predict the future, which is impossible, now more than ever. Nobody has a clue how the world will look like in, say, 40, 50 years. We may know some of the basic variables but, if you really understand what's going on in the world, you know that it's impossible to have any good prediction for the coming decades. This is the first time in history that we're in this situation.

I'm trying to do something that is the opposite of predicting the future. I'm trying to identify what are the possibilities, what is the horizon of possibilities that we are facing? And what will happen from among these possibilities? We still have a lot of choice in this regard.

KAHNEMAN: Could you elaborate on these possibilities? I mean, what's the distinction between predicting and setting up a range of possibilities?

HARARI: I think about it in visual terms, whether you try to narrow your field of vision, or to broaden it. For example, when you try to predict the weather for tomorrow, there are a lot of possibilities to begin with. It might rain, it might snow, there might be sunshine. And a good meteorologist, according to one view of science, is a meteorologist that takes this horizon of possibilities and narrows it down to a single possibility or just two possibilities. It will certainly rain, maybe hard, maybe less so. That's it.

And after you finish reading the book or taking the course or whatever, your view of the world in this sense is narrower, because you have fewer possibilities to consider. You know it's going to rain. The same thing in economics, in medicine, and also in history. People ask what will happen next? You have all these possibilities, and I'm telling you, China is going to be the superpower, end of story. You narrow down the range.

There is room of course for that. When I go to the doctor to get a medicine, I want him to narrow down the possibilities, not just to enumerate all the options. But I personally like the kind of science that broadens the horizons. I often tell my students at the University that my aim is that after three years, you basically know less than when you first got here. When you first got here, you thought you knew what the world is like and what is war and what is a state, and so forth. After three years, my hope is that you will understand that you actually know far, far less, and you come out with a much broader view of the present and of the future.

KAHNEMAN: But do you get to a broader view by becoming more differentiated, that is, by having more detailed views? Or is it just that you get people to consider a possibility that wouldn't occur to them?

HARARI: Mainly, the second way. The main thing, and my main task as a historian is to get people to consider the possibilities which usually are outside their field of vision, because our present field of vision has been shaped by history and has been narrowed down by history, and if you understand how history has narrowed down our field of vision, this is what enables you to start broadening it.

Let me give you an example that I'm thinking about a lot today, concerning the future of humankind in the field of medicine. At least to the best of my understanding, we're in the middle of a revolution in medicine. After medicine in the 20th century focused on healing the sick, now it is more and more focused on upgrading the healthy, which is a completely different project. And it's a fundamentally different project in social and political terms, because whereas healing the sick is an egalitarian project ... you assume there is a norm of health, anybody that falls below the norm, you try to give them a push to come back to the norm, upgrading is by definition an elitist project. There is no norm that can be applicable to everybody.

And this opens the possibility of creating huge gaps between the rich and the poor, bigger than ever existed before in history. And many people say no, it will not happen, because we have the experience of the 20th century, that we had many medical advances, beginning with the rich or with the most advanced countries, and gradually they trickled down to everybody, and now everybody enjoys antibiotics or vaccinations or whatever, so this will happen again.

And as a historian, my main task is to say no, there were peculiar reasons why medicine in the 20th century was egalitarian, why the discoveries trickled down to everybody. These unique conditions may not repeat themselves in the 21st century, so you should broaden your thinking, and you should take into consideration the possibility that medicine in the 21st century will be elitist, and that you will see growing gaps because of that, biological gaps between rich and poor and between different countries. And you cannot just trust a process of trickling down to solve this problem.

There are fundamental reasons why we should take this very seriously, because generally speaking, when you look at the 20th century, it's the era of the masses, mass politics, mass economics. Every human being has value, has political, economic, and military value, simply because he or she is a human being, and this goes back to the structures of the military and of the economy, where every human being is valuable as a soldier in the trenches and as a worker in the factory.

But in the 21st century, there is a good chance that most humans will lose, they are losing, their military and economic value. This is true for the military, it's done, it's over. The age of the masses is over. We are no longer in the First World War, where you take millions of soldiers, give each one a rifle and have them run forward. And the same thing perhaps is happening in the economy. Maybe the biggest question of 21st century economics is what will be the need in the economy for most people in the year 2050.

And once most people are no longer really necessary, for the military and for the economy, the idea that you will continue to have mass medicine is not so certain. Could be. It's not a prophecy, but you should take very seriously the option that people will lose their military and economic value, and medicine will follow.

KAHNEMAN: You seem to be describing this as something that is already happening. Are you referring to developments such as the plans to do away with death? That absolutely would not be a mass project. But could you elaborate on that?

HARARI: Yes, the attitude now towards disease and old age and death is that they are basically technical problems. It is a huge revolution in human thinking. Throughout history, old age and death were always treated as metaphysical problems, as something that the gods decreed, as something fundamental to what defines humans, what defines the human condition and reality.
Even a few years ago, very few doctors or scientists would seriously say that they are trying to overcome old age and death. They would say no, I am trying to overcome this particular disease, whether it's tuberculosis or cancer or Alzheimers. Defeating disease and death, this is nonsense, this is science fiction.

But, the new attitude is to treat old age and death as technical problems, no different in essence than any other disease. It's like cancer, it's like Alzheimers, it's like tuberculosis. Maybe we still don't know all the mechanisms and all the remedies, but in principle, people always die due to technical reasons, not metaphysical reasons. In the middle ages, you had an image of how does a person die? Suddenly, the Angel of Death appears, and touches you on the shoulder and says, "Come. Your time has come." And you say, "No, no, no. Give me some more time." And Death said, "No, you have to come." And that's it, that is how you die.

We don't think like that today. People never die because the Angel of Death comes, they die because their heart stops pumping, or because an artery is clogged, or because cancerous cells are spreading in the liver or somewhere.
These are all technical problems, and in essence, they should have some technical solution. And this way of thinking is now becoming very dominant in scientific circles, and also among the ultra-rich who have come to understand that, wait a minute, something is happening here. For the first time in history, if I'm rich enough, maybe I don't have to die.

KAHNEMAN: Death is optional.

HARARI: Death is optional. And if you think about it from the viewpoint of the poor, it looks terrible, because throughout history, death was the great equalizer. The big consolation of the poor throughout history was that okay, these rich people, they have it good, but they're going to die just like me. But think about the world, say, in 50 years, 100 years, where the poor people continue to die, but the rich people, in addition to all the other things they get, also get an exemption from death. That's going to bring a lot of anger.

KAHNEMAN: Yes. I really like that phrase of "people not being necessary," can you elaborate on this dystopia? It's a new phrase for me. Such things, by the way, are developing very, very slowly. I was worrying about what computers would do in displacing people. I was worried about this when I was a graduate student, and that was more than 50 years ago, and I thought that's a very serious, immediate problem. It wasn't a serious immediate problem then, but a serious ... not immediate, but it may be a serious problem now. You have thought about it deeply, can you tell us about people becoming unnecessary, economically, and unnecessary militarily? What will that do?

HARARI: The basic process is the decoupling of intelligence from consciousness. Throughout history, you always had the two together. If you wanted something intelligent, this something had to have consciousness at its basis. People were not familiar with anything not human, that didn't have consciousness, that could be intelligent, that could solve problems like playing chess or driving a car or diagnosing disease.

Now, what we're talking about today is not that computers will be like humans. I think that many of these science fiction scenarios, that computers will be like humans, are wrong. Computers are very, very, very far from being like humans, especially when it comes to consciousness. The problem is different, that the system, the military and economic and political system doesn't really need consciousness.

KAHNEMAN: It needs intelligence.

HARARI: It needs intelligence. And intelligence is a far easier thing than consciousness. And the problem is, computers may not become conscious, I don't know, ever ... I would say 500 years ... but they could be as intelligent or more intelligent than humans in particular tasks very quickly. And if you think, for example, about this self-driving car of Google, and you compare the self-driving car to a taxi driver, a taxi driver is immensely more complex than the self-driving car.

There are a zillion things that the taxi driver can do and the self-driving car cannot. But the problem is that from a purely economic perspective, we don't need all the zillion things that the taxi driver can do. I only need him to take me from point A to point B as quickly and as cheaply as possible. And this is something a self-driving car can do better, or will be able to do better very quickly.

And when you look at it more and more, for most of the tasks that humans are needed for, what is required is just intelligence, and a very particular type of intelligence, because we are undergoing, for thousands of years, a process of specialization, which makes it easier to replace us. To build a robot that could function effectively as a hunter-gatherer is extremely complex. You need to know so many different things. But to build a self-driving car, or to build a "Watson-bot" that can diagnose disease better than my doctor, this is relatively easy.

And this is where we have to take seriously, the possibility that even though computers will still be far behind humans in many different things, as far as the tasks that the system needs from us are concerned, most of the time computers will be able to do better than us. And again, I don't want to give a prediction, 20 years, 50 years, 100 years, but what you do see is it's a bit like the boy who cried wolf, that, yes, you cry wolf once, twice, three times, and maybe people say yes, 50 years ago, they already predicted that computers will replace humans, and it didn't happen. But the thing is that with every generation, it is becoming closer, and predictions such as these fuel the process.

The same thing will happen with these promises to overcome death. My guess, which is only a guess, is that the people who live today, and who count on the ability to live forever, or to overcome death in 50 years, 60 years, are going to be hugely disappointed. It's one thing to accept that I'm going to die. It's another thing to think that you can cheat death and then die eventually. It's much harder.

While they are in for a very big disappointment, in their efforts to defeat death, they will achieve great things. They will make it easier for the next generation to do it, and somewhere along the line, it will turn from science fiction to science, and the wolf will come.

KAHNEMAN: What you are doing here, in terms of prediction, is about trends. The trend is clear, what progress means is clear, but when you describe people as superfluous, you are presenting the background for a huge problem. Who decides what to do with the superfluous people. Especially, what are the social implications that you see, the technical or technological development that you foresee?

HARARI: Well, again, I am an historian, I am not a biologist, I'm not a computer scientist, I am not in a position to say whether all these ideas are realizable or not. I can just look from the view of the historian and say what it looks from there. So the social and philosophical and political implications are the things that interest me most. Basically, if any of these trends are going to actually be fulfilled, then the best I can do is quote Marx and say that everything solid melts into air.

Once you really solve a problem like direct brain-computer interface ... when brains and computers can interact directly, to take just one example, that's it, that's the end of history, that's the end of biology as we know it. Nobody has a clue what will happen once you solve this. If life can basically break out of the organic realm into the vastness of the inorganic realm, you cannot even begin to imagine what the consequences will be, because your imagination at present is organic. So if there is a point of Singularity, as it's often referred to, by definition, we have no way of even starting to imagine what's happening beyond that.

Looking before the point of Singularity, just as the trend is gathering pace, one thing we can say is there may be a repeat of what happened in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution, of the opening of huge gaps between different classes and different countries. Generally speaking, the 20th century was a century of closing gaps, fewer gaps between classes, between genders, between ethnic groups, between countries. So maybe we are starting to see the reopening of these gaps with a vengeance, gaps that will be far greater then were between the industrialized and the non-industrialized part of the world, 150 or 200 years ago.

In the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, what humanity basically learned to produce was all kinds of stuff, like textiles and shoes and weapons and vehicles, and this was enough for the very few countries that underwent the revolution to subjugate everybody else. What we're talking about now is like a second Industrial Revolution, but the product this time will not be textiles or machines or vehicles, or even weapons. The product this time will be humans themselves.

We're basically learning to produce bodies and minds. Bodies and minds are going to be the two main products of the next wave of all these changes. And if there is a gap between those that know how to produce bodies and minds and those that do not, then this is far greater than anything we saw before in history.

And this time, if you're not fast enough to become part of the revolution, then you'll probably become extinct. Countries like China, missed the train for the Industrial Revolution, but 150 years later, they somehow have managed to catch up, largely, speaking in economic terms, thanks to the power of cheap labor.

Now, those who miss the train will never get a second chance. If a country, if a people, today are left behind, they will never get a second chance, especially because cheap labor will count for nothing. Once you know how to produce bodies and brains and minds, cheap labor in Africa or South Asia or wherever, it simply counts for nothing. So in geopolitical terms, we might see a repeat of the 19th century, but in a much larger scale.

KAHNEMAN: What I find difficult to imagine is that as people are becoming unnecessary, the translation of that into sort of 20th-century terms is mass unemployment. Mass unemployment means social unrest. And it means there are things going to happen, processes going to happen in society, as a result of people becoming superfluous, and that is a gradual process, people becoming superfluous.

We may be seeing that in the growing inequality now, we may be seeing the beginning of what you're talking about. But have you thought, in the same way as you're thinking in interesting and novel ways about technology, have you thought about the social side?

HARARI: Yes, the social side is the more important and more difficult one. I don't have a solution, and the biggest question maybe in economics and politics of the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people. I don't think we have an economic model for that. My best guess, which is just a guess, is that food will not be a problem. With that kind of technology, you will be able to produce food to feed everybody. The problem is more boredom, and what to do with people, and how will they find some sense of meaning in life when they are basically meaningless, worthless.

My best guess at present is a combination of drugs and computer games as a solution for most ... it's already happening. Under different titles, different headings, you see more and more people spending more and more time, or solving their inner problems with drugs and computer games, both legal drugs and illegal drugs. But this is just a wild guess.

What I can say is that maybe we are again in analogous position to the world in 1800. When the Industrial Revolution begins, you see the emergence of new classes of people. You see the emergence of a new class of the urban proletariat, which is a new social and political phenomenon. Nobody knows what to do with it. There are immense problems. And it took a century and more of revolutions and wars for people to even start coming up with ideas what to do with the new classes of people.

What is certain is that the old answers were irrelevant. Today, everybody is talking about ISIS, and the Islamic fundamentalism, and the Christian revival, and things like that. There are new problems, and people go back to the ancient texts, and think that there is an answer in the Sharia, in the Qur'an, in the Bible. We also had the same thing in the 19th century. You had the Industrial Revolution. You had huge sociopolitical problems all over the world, as a result of industrialization, of modernization. You got lots of people thinking that the answer is in the Bible or in the Qur'an. You had religious movements all over the world.

In the Sudan, for example, you have the Mahdi establishing Muslim theocracy according to the Sharia. An Anglo-Egyptian army comes to suppress the rebellion, and they are defeated. They behead General Charles Gordon.
Basically, this is the same thing that you're now seeing with ISIS. Nobody remembers the Mahdi today because the answers that he found in the Qur'an and the Sharia to the problem of industrialization didn't work.

In China, the biggest war of the 19th century is not the Napoleonic war, it's not the American Civil War, it's the Taiping Rebellion in China, which started in 1850, when a failed scholar named Hong Xuiquan, if I remember correctly, had a vision from God that he, Hong, is the younger brother of Jesus Christ, and that he had a divine mission to establish the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace on Earth, and to solve all the problems China had due to the coming of the British and of modern industry. He started the rebellion, and millions followed him. According to the most moderate estimates, 20 million people were killed in the Taiping Rebellion, and it was 14 years before they suppressed it. He didn't establish a Kingdom of Heavenly Peace, and he didn't solve the problems of industrialization.

Eventually, people came up with new ideas, not from the Sharia, and not from the Bible, and not from some vision. People studied industry, they studied coalmines, they studied electricity, they studied steam engines, railroads, they looked at how these developments transformed the economy and society, and they came up with some new ideas. Not necessarily everybody liked the new ideas, but it was something at least to argue against.

And looking from the perspective of 2015, I don't think we now have the knowledge to solve the social problems of 2050, or the problems that will emerge as a result of all these new developments. We should be looking for new knowledge and new solutions, and starting with the realization that in all probability, nothing that exists at present offers a solution to these problems.

KAHNEMAN: What is very interesting and frightening about this scenario is that it is true, as you point out, that people have lived to work, or worked to live, and that what you are describing is a scenario in which work is unnecessary for most people.

There is a class of people who work because they enjoy it, and are able to do it, and then there is most of humanity, for which work no longer exists. That mass of people cannot work, but they can still kill people. How do you see the possibility of strife and conflict, between the superfluous people and those who are not?

HARARI: Once you are superfluous, you don't have power. Again, we are used to the age of the masses, of the 19th and 20th century, where you saw all these successful massive uprisings, revolutions, revolts, so we are used to thinking about the masses as powerful, but this is basically a 19th century and 20th century phenomenon.

If you go back in most periods in history, say to the middle ages, you do see peasant uprisings. They all failed, because the masses were not powerful. And once you become superfluous, militarily and economically, you can still cause trouble, of course, but you don't have the power to really change things.

Once you have the revolution we are undergoing in the military in which the number of soldiers simply becomes irrelevant in comparison with factors like technology, you still need people, but you don't need the millions of soldiers, each with a rifle. You need much smaller numbers of experts, who know how to produce and how to use the new technologies. Against such military powers, the masses, even if they somehow organize themselves, don't stand much of a chance. We are not in Russia of 1917, or in 19th century Europe.

And so again, it's not a prophecy. Maybe it will turn out differently. But as a historian, the most important thing to realize is that the power of the masses, that we are so used to, is rooted in particular historical conditions, economic, military, political, which characterized the 19th and 20th centuries. These conditions are now changing, and there is no reason to be certain that the masses will retain their power.

KAHNEMAN: What you're describing, the scenario that you're pointing to, is one of fairly rapid technological progress, and it really doesn't matter whether we're talking about 50 years or 150 years. There is a social arrangement that has been around for a long time, for decades and centuries. And they change relatively slowly. So what you bring to my mind, as I hear you, is a major disconnect between rapid technological change and quite rigid cultural and social arrangements that will not actually keep up.

HARARI: Yes, this is one of the big dangers, one of the big problems with technology. It develops much faster than human society and human morality, and this creates a lot of tension. But, again, we can try and learn something from our previous experience with the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, that actually, you saw very rapid changes in society, not as fast as the changes in technology, but still, amazingly fast.

The most obvious example is the collapse of the family and of the intimate community, and their replacement by the state and the market. Basically, for the entirety of history, humans lived as part of these small and very important units, the family and the intimate community, say 200 people, who are your village, your tribe, your neighborhood. You know everybody; they know you. You may not like them, but your life depends on them. They provide you with almost everything you need in order to survive. They are your healthcare. There is no pension fund; you have children, they are your pension fund. They are your bank, your school, your police, everything. If you lose your family and the intimate community, you're dead, or you have to find a replacement family.

And this was the situation for hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Even once history started, say 70,000 years ago, and you see all the changes and agriculture and cities and empires and religions, you don't see any significant change on that level. Even in the year, say, 1700, most people in the world still live as part of families and intimate communities, which provide them with most of what they need in order to survive. And you could have easily imagined, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, that this will continue to be the situation.
If you were, say, an evolutionary psychologist back in 1800, and you saw the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, you could have very confidently said all these changes in technology are well and good, but they won't change the basic structure of human society. Human society is built from these small building blocks, the family and intimate community, because this is kind of an evolutionary given. Humans must have this. They cannot live in any other way.

And you look at the last 200 years, and you see them collapse after millions of years of evolution. Suddenly, within 200 years, the family and the intimate community break, they collapse. Most of the roles filled by the family and by the intimate community for thousands and tens of thousands of years, are transferred very quickly to new networks provided by the state and the market. You don't need children, you can have a pension fund. You don't need somebody to take care of you. You don't need neighbors and sisters or brothers to take care of you when you're sick. The state takes care of you. The state provides you with police, with education, with health, with everything.

And you can say that maybe life today is in some ways worse than in 1700, because we have lost much of the connection to the community around us ... it's a big argument ... but it happened. People today actually manage to live, many people, as isolated, alienated individuals. In the most advanced societies, people live as alienated individuals, with no community to speak about, with a very small family. It's no longer the big extended family. It's now a very small family, maybe just a spouse, maybe one or two children, and even they, they might live in a different city, in a different country, and you see them maybe once in every few months, and that's it. And the amazing thing is that people live with that. And that's just 200 years.

What might happen in the next hundred years on that level of daily life, of intimate relationships? Anything is possible. You look at Japan today, and Japan is maybe 20 years ahead of the world in everything. And you see these new social phenomena of people having relationships with virtual spouses. And you have people who never leave the house and just live through computers. And I don't know, maybe it's the future, maybe it isn't, but for me, the amazing thing is that you'd have thought, given the biological background of humankind, that this is impossible, yet we see that it is possible. Apparently, Homo Sapiens is even more malleable than we tend to think.

We can also learn something from the Agricultural Revolution. Some experts think that agriculture was the biggest mistake in human history, in terms of what it did to the individual. It's obvious that on the collective level, agriculture enhanced the power of humankind in an amazing way. Without agriculture, you could not have cities and kingdoms and empires and so forth, but if you look at it from the viewpoint of the individual, then for many individuals, life was probably much worse as peasants in ancient Egypt then as hunter gatherers 20,000, 30,000 years earlier. You had to work much harder. The body and mind of Homo Sapiens evolved for millions of years in adaptation to climbing trees and picking fruits and to running after gazelles and looking for mushrooms. And suddenly you start all day digging canals and carrying water buckets from the river and harvesting the corn, and grinding the corn, this is much more difficult for the body, and also much more boring to the mind.

In exchange for all this hard work, most peasants got a far worse diet than hunter-gatherers, because hunter-gatherers relied on dozens of species of animals and plants and mushrooms and whatever, that provided them with all the nutrients and vitamins they needed, whereas peasants relied on usually just a single crop, like wheat or rice or potatoes. And on top of that, you had all the new social hierarchies and the beginning of mass exploitation, where you have small elites exploiting everybody else. Putting all this together, there is a good case to be said for the idea that for the individual, agriculture was perhaps the biggest mistake in history.

This may provide us with a lesson, or at least something to think about with regard to the new technological revolution. Nobody would doubt that all the new technologies will enhance again the collective power of humankind, but the question we should be asking ourselves is what's happening on the individual level. We have enough evidence from history that you can have a very big step forward, in terms of collective power, coupled with a step backwards in terms of individual happiness, individual suffering. We need to ask ourselves about the new technologies emerging at present, not only how are they going to impact the collective power of humankind, but also how are they going to impact the daily life of individuals.

In terms of history, the events in Middle East, of ISIS and all of that, is just a speed bump on history's highway. The Middle East is not very important. Silicon Valley is much more important. It's the world of the 21st century ... I'm not speaking only about technology.

In terms of ideas, in terms of religions, the most interesting place today in the world is Silicon Valley, not the Middle East. This is where people like Ray Kurzweil, are creating new religions. These are the religions that will take over the world, not the ones coming out of Syria and Iraq and Nigeria.

LATITUDES OF ACCEPTANCE (Video/Transcript)

Matthew D. Lieberman

Professor of psychology, UCLA

Source: Edge

 

When people ask me what I’m interested in studying, the first thing I tell them is that I have Attention Deficit Disorder when it comes to science. They start out thinking that I have Attention Deficit Disorder, which I don't, but I do when it comes to science. So I tend to have ideas that range all over the place, and even though I was told early in graduate school to study one thing and study it very, very deeply, that never really worked for me, and I was lucky enough that I didn't have to.

My ideas tend to all focus on what we call loosely the "social brain." How is it that our brain evolved to make us social? How does it successfully make us social? What are its limitations? How does it lead to a context where we think we understand what's going on, but we're mistaken? That can lead to all sorts of interpersonal issues.

My research goes all over the place. My research stems from work that I've done with my wife, Naomi Eisenberger, on how we experience social pain, and I did that for several years. Now I a lot more of my questions focus on social thinking—how we understand other people and ourselves, and how our brain seems to be strongly predisposed to get us into the mindset for thinking about other people. It's not just one of many different programs we can call up. We can do that, too—I'm going to think about algebra now, I'm going to think about history—but one of the things that's really intriguing to me is that it seems like the brain, of all the things it could choose, seems to choose by default bringing up a way of thinking about the world socially, and perhaps getting us ready to walk into the next moment of our lives to think socially. That's pretty surprising, and it's something I don't think we would have known without looking at the brain. There's an argument to be made that we don't actually know that yet, but there's some really intriguing hints to suggest that that's what the brain is doing.

There's a whole line of work looking at how there's a specific set of machinery that is designed for thinking about the minds of other people. If you're playing poker with someone and you're trying to figure out if they're bluffing or not, what you're really trying to do is peer inside their mind and figure out, despite what they're showing on their face, despite what they've bet, what they really think, what they really believe. And we do it there. We do it when we're trying to empathize with a child who's suffering, or someone halfway around the world who's suffering that we see on TV, we're trying to mentally travel into their world and understand the world as they see and experience it.

We have lots of machinery that seems to be dedicated for that, suggesting it's really important. It helps us in enumerable ways in our daily lives, but it seems to have this tendency to come on and have a certain kind of primacy over other kinds of thinking. That's really interesting and that's one of the major thrusts of the work we do, and we have various different explorations there.

The other major thing that we are focusing on these days is thinking about how messages spread, and that could be in various different ways. That can be in the old notion of persuasion—showing you advertisements, what makes an advertisement sticky, what makes an ad that you see on TV make you change your behavior. We're bombarded with constant advertisements from people trying to get us to go see this movie, or buy this beer. In the case of the work we do—it's usually public health—getting people in Los Angeles to use sunscreen, helping people to quit smoking. People who are overweight and at risk for diabetes and cancer, how do you increase their daily activity levels? And so we're really interested in that.

You might think that the things that get people to change their behavior are things that are memorable, that they can use their analytical brain to set down a long-term trace, or even just emotional, but surprisingly what we see is the brain regions that seem to be involved in successful persuasion. We can predict who will use more sunscreen next week based on how their brain responds to an ad today. The brain regions that seem to be critical to that are brain regions involved in social thinking, in thinking about yourself and thinking about other people. So this seems to be more about our identity and the identities that we're capable of trying on. If I can't try on the identity that you're suggesting to me—being a sunscreen-using person, or a nonsmoker, or something like that—the ad is much less likely to stick. At least that's what we think is going on there. So we're interested in that straight-up kind of persuasion.

In the modern world, often what you're really more interested in is making messages spread, go viral, what's sticky, what has buzz. There again, we don't see the parts of the brain that are involved in analytical thinking or memory, we see the parts of the brain that are involved in thinking about other people's minds—the social brain. If I want to persuade you of something, what I need to be thinking about is not the merits of the thing itself that I'm trying to persuade you of, but rather how are you going to experience whatever I say to you? What am I going to say to you that makes you think it will be cool for you to be the guy to tell the next person, and so on, in the game of telephone that we play with new jokes, or new stories, or old stories. We've seen this work, suggesting that it's the more social parts of the brain that seem to be involved in helping to spread information virally. We can predict which messages, which advertisements will spread and get people to go on Facebook and tell their friends about a movie trailer that they just saw. We can predict that reasonably well from looking at their brains when they don't realize it.

You can also think about it from the context of increasing education. Education is all about the spread of messages, and we're very interested in that as well. How do we use what we're learning about the social brain and the fact that it helps people make messages more sticky? How can we use that to enhance education in, say, eighth grade? This, to me, is a national crisis. That's when we lose kids. I have a seven year old. All of his friends love school. Then they hit puberty and they have no interest in school any more. They tune out. They're interested in their friends. The teacher becomes the enemy. I think part of it is that we're not necessarily tapping into what are some more evolved historical ways to get people to learn better. Historical learning was all about story telling, and not just story telling, but knowing that you yourself would be responsible for telling that story to others. There's old behavioral work, and work that we're doing that looks at the ways in which we can get someone to think of themselves as a storyteller, to actually learn science and math better than if they think of themselves as an end receiver, who will never have to do anything other than take a test.

This is an opportunity, among many others, to really change the way certain kinds of education may be done. Obviously, the nation is very worried about having more well-trained scientists, and mathematicians, and engineers, and so on.

Those are some of the big questions that we can answer with data. There're always the questions that I have trouble thinking about how to answer with data. That's why I became a psychologist and not a philosopher, which was my original path in life. I think there're questions that we don't do a good job of answering with data because we don't know how to get close to the question. So those questions are still on my mind 35 years after I first was exposed to them from various philosophers, but I don't know that we're any closer to answers.
There's a huge problem in our society with educational interests and attainment dropping off. In every metric that comes out we're falling behind lots of the other industrialized countries of the world. They're either catching up faster than we're moving, or they've already moved past us in math, science, and reading. I think some of these things are predictable.

We are a much more comfortable country than we were 50 years ago. When you're multiple generations into immigrants in a country that the kids are more comfortable than the parents, who are more comfortable than their parents, there is an easing off. Perhaps maybe you start to emphasize personal happiness or your children's personal happiness more than you emphasize more societally mandated metrics of success, which usually benefits society more than the individual, in my opinion a lot of the time. There're a lot of doctors who do a lot of good for other people, and who aren't very happy being doctors, and I think that's part of what the social contract really is. You agree to do stuff that's going to help us, and you'll be compensated, but you might have made a different choice if you knew how all this was going to play out.

In a place like all the BRIC countries, and China, in particular, there's so much aspiration, there's so much expectancy that the next generation is going to take China to even greater heights than they already seem to be reaching. I don't think we expect that of our children, and I don't know that we should. I'm not sure that almost young adult adolescent phase of nationhood is necessarily the greatest thing. It does lead to, in America's case, inventions and inventiveness. It doesn't seem to be that way in China so much. It leads to a lot of activity, but it also leads to a lot of unhappiness. It leads to a lot of midlife crises and so on, and I'm not sure that's the ultimate goal, to get the country to be the most productive. I'm not really interested in gross domestic product as a real indicator of how my family is doing.
I was raised in the shadow of both my parents being young hippies in the sixties and early seventies, and so a lot of my life is either a continuation or a reaction. What they were doing was a response to growing up in the early fifties, and so on. I just think you can see those things recapitulated either in new immigrant groups coming to America or in other countries.
In terms of raising my child I do think about it quite seriously, and I'm a bit more authoritarian than I might have guessed. The data suggests that young children do need sort of authoritative guidance. I'm always happy to admit that I know a small, small portion of what can be known, and that he already knows things I don't know and will ultimately possibly know far more than me. I don't try to portray myself in any way as flawless, but I do say this is the rule, and you have to do this because you have to do it, and that's part of my job.

I spent a lot of time visiting drug rehab family group meetings at an earlier point in time in my life and it was fascinating to watch the guy who ran those, and to watch the kids. It was all boys. The boys who came in, you would think these were kids who had grown up on the wrong side of the tracks, and there were some, but many of the kids were the kids who had grown up on the right side of the tracks and had never been told no their entire childhood. So now, as young adults, they didn't know what to do with themselves. They had no direction, they had no incentive, and they had no self-control. So they got into drugs, and they were fooling their parents.

The guy who ran this facility was authoritative. He was authoritarian, and he basically said, "I care for you more than you understand, but doing that means not doing what's best for you today, it's about figuring out how to get you to be someone who can go live for the next 50 years."

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The world of psychology these days is a strange one. When I got into psychology, and, of course, as a graduate student you probably just don't know some of the things that are going on, but when I got into psychology the internet didn't really exist yet. It just seemed like there were a lot of people turning the final screws on what their advisors had done, and their advisor's advisors. I work in social psychology, where technically that's about understanding other people and how they function, but a whole lot of social psychology is really just about understanding our own everyday experiences.
Clinical psychology studies maladaptive experiences—when you're too anxious or too depressed. Cognitive psychology studies isolated parts of mental processing—memory, reasoning. Social psychologists, for whatever reason, tend to be the folks who want to understand how we get along in everyday life. It's not always about social stuff, you can still be a social psychologist and study things that aren't social at all. For instance, how do you change your own attitudes? That's a social psychological thing. It should be a cognitive thing, but it's not. It's social. There are these tribes, and whatever members of the tribe do, that's still part of social psychology.

When I got into the field it didn't seem like there were any career-threatening giant debates going on, and now it just seems to be all over the place. Every 20 to 30 years my field of social psychology seems to go through another crisis. There was a crisis in the fifties, where somebody published a paper and it killed the most exciting area of research in social psychology for 20 years.

Then in the seventies there was something actually called "the crisis of social psychology". Now there's "the replication crisis", which is a replication crisis in science, if it's even a crisis. It's just that we need to be reminded sometimes that when you see the first flashy study published in science or psych science, it's just an anecdote. It's a scientific anecdote, and we should go collect some more. It can be a really exciting one that you want to tell all your friends about, but it's one little tiny piece of data. We've perhaps taken to assuming those things were facts, and then we're shocked when those things don't replicate in study number two.

There's a lot of stuff going on where there's now people making their careers out of trying to take down other people's careers. The replication isn't necessarily an unbiased process, as it's presented. There are camps, and suddenly now failing to replicate someone else is really seen as an indictment, in many people's eyes, of the person who did the original research, rather than saying there's expectancy effects. If I expect not to replicate someone's work, that's going to influence how I design my study, the measures I look at, it's going to influence how I interact with my participants. I've heard stories about participants saying that they've been told, "Oh, you're just in a replication effort, so it doesn't matter if you know more than you should." There are things going on, and it is troubling to me.

I haven't been targeted in those, but watching John Bargh, whose work I've admired for 20 years, be attacked in that way is hard to watch, and other folks in that camp as well.
These days the person who I think has most been in the crosshairs of the whole replication world that's bubbling up in social psychology is Simone Schnall. She's a professor at Cambridge. She's done work on what's called "embodied cognition," which is getting at the idea that certain kinds of concepts that we have might be linked to other representations that we might not expect. So the idea of being morally dirty may somehow be linked to our concepts for being dirty in the literal sense.

There are studies suggesting that washing your hands can affect your sense of being moral or immoral, and so on. These studies are very interesting. They're very counterintuitive, which I think leads lots of people to wonder whether or not they're legitimate, and that's a reasonable thing to wonder about whenever you see something that sort of confounds intuition. That's the way science works. I've never run studies in that area, so I don't really have a real horse in that race other than it's really interesting stuff. When it's really interesting I kind of always hope it turns out to be true, because that's more interesting, but we don't know. She's done work that seems to me to be a very good. Other labs around the world, not just she herself, but other labs have replicated versions of the work that she's done. That seems reasonably compelling to me, and then there's this ongoing replication effort. I do have some issues with the process of selecting who's going to do the replications—what their qualifications are for doing those things, have they done successful work in that area previously—because if they haven't shown that they can successfully get other priming effects, or other embodied cognition effects, how do I know that they can do this? I wouldn't go and try to do chemistry. I don't know anything about doing chemistry. There are issues like that.
There are issues with screening out people who have expectations that run against the original hypotheses, because we've known for 60 years that those expectations are going to guide results, and that needs to be taken into account. Be that as it may, her study was replicated in this effort, and it was unsuccessful; it didn't replicate her results. Some of what was done seemed very good. They got in touch with her. They tried to work with her to make sure that they were replicating her methods, and I think that the early steps in the process seemed great. Then at a certain point they seemed to have said you're out of the process, and the journal that was publishing all this work had pre-accepted all the paper. They didn't go through peer review, and that is very troubling. It's very troubling when the people who have the power to damn the original research aren't getting peer reviewed. I don't think they should have been reviewed by Simone. I'm a journal editor; I can always get someone else who's impartial and doesn't care which way the results come out to review these things, but it needs to be reviewed.

Had it been reviewed maybe it would have come out just the way it was, but with something this sensitive it's important to get the process right, and I think there's some recognition that the process wasn't right. What happened was that this all blew up on Twitter, something that couldn't have happened 30 years ago in one of these scientific crises. It spreads out into the world, the neuro-skeptics and can grab a hold of this and spread it, and it can spread in an uninformed way, and it can get nasty. People say things that they wouldn't say if they were in the room with each other, necessarily. Maybe they would, and they act as if they don't realize they're being watched, but they are, and so both sides have said things that maybe shouldn't have been said. And now there's this deeper motivational division, and there are people taking sides.

My first impulse—because I've been attacked before by folks who didn't understand the way we do our neuro-imaging work, and they didn't really take the time to get to know what we were doing—was to be very defensive for anyone whose work was unsuccessfully replicated, because I saw some of the personal ambition come in on the other side of trying to create a career out of a failure to replicate someone. Not create a career, enhance a career. And that concerns me. It will be interesting to see how this goes forward. Anyone who says that replication isn't absolutely essential to the success of science is pretty crazy on that issue, as far as I'm concerned. Making a public process of replication, and a group deciding who replicates what they replicate, only replicating the most counterintuitive findings, only replicating things that tend to be cheap and easy to replicate, tends to put a target on certain people's heads and not others. I don't think that's very good science that we, as a group, should sanction.

If we're going to do it as a group, we should perhaps have a set of nominated studies every year that should be replicated. Those studies should be assigned to labs that say, "I'll take whatever study you assign to me, and here are my qualifications," and we assign them to the qualified labs. We get them to give their predictions before they're assigned anything so we know what their predictions are, we know what their expectancy effects might be, and then maybe we do it that way.

Or maybe we do it the old-fashioned way, which is when studies are interesting people go replicate them, because they want to go build on them. If they don't work, then that brings attention to them not working.
When it's come to the replication crisis, as it were, in social psychology, what's made it distinctive from past issues in social psychology is the way that it's being played out on social media. Everyone quickly goes to these sound bites, and the sound bites are all exclamations. They're rarely genuine questions. They're rarely really thoughtful. This leads to an escalation on both sides very quickly. I said things that I probably shouldn't have said, things that I certainly wish I hadn't said, even just on Facebook, thinking that only my friends and colleagues would see those things and then suddenly it turned out that one person passed that on to the other camp, and suddenly I'm in the crosshairs when I didn't imagine that I'd possibly would be. It's a very leaky, fast-moving process.

Then there is this tendency for each of us to take to our blogs. I have a blog, lots of my colleagues have blogs, and they are unfiltered, they're unedited. When John Bargh was first criticized because a paper had come out not replicating his most famous priming study, I wrote a blog about it and it got a fair bit of attention. It is rewarding in a way that writing a book isn't … the fast and easy high versus the slow, perhaps long high. Writing a blog and getting attention, and even getting the other side riled up, is a way to \get that quick, fast burst that is, and can be, somewhat addictive, and bad for everyone involved.

On the other hand, blogging is a way to try to share science in a way that makes it interesting to a much broader audience, without having to wait for a book to come along to synthesize 200 different studies. Like everything—every weapon and every technology that's ever been developed—there's good and there's bad, but in the replication effort issue we've all, myself included, been responsible for some of the bad outcomes.

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At this point we haven't done any studies on social media addiction or the high that comes from engaging in social media processes. We're looking to get a full-sized typing keyboard that you can take into the MR scanning environment, and at that point you can have touch typists who can't see their fingers, but could still fully engage with a Twitter feed or Facebook, and so on. We're very, very interested in seeing what happens when we see different kinds of people re-Tweeting something that we've re-Tweeted, or their responses to our Tweets.

For anyone who's engaged this is something that can take on a real big part of your life, and be very, very rewarding. There's a new thing that just came out in some biological journal called the Kardashian Index, in which you plot the number of times your scientific papers have been cited against the number of Twitter followers you have, and if you are an outlier on the Y Index, it may mean you have too many Twitter followers relative to the amount of science you're producing. So if Danny Kahneman has a whole lot of Twitter followers, that's okay, because he's been cited more than anyone else, but if you're a graduate student it's not okay, because you should be producing more science and not talking about it.

I don't buy that, but it sort of speaks to this idea that there is appeal to being famous for being famous, that the Kardashians seem to have. On Twitter you can become that, both because you're the right kind of DJ for the information and really do a good job of spreading certain kinds of ideas, but also because you can have a lot of fun going after people. There are a lot of people out there who love seeing anyone go after and take down anyone else in science. We're in a phase right now where there's a lot of taking down, and I don't think that's as useful as the constructive idea generation, which almost never comes out of such fights.

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When I think about the next five years and what I want to accomplish, there's two different goals. The one goal is to try to develop more basic science in areas that are underdeveloped. For instance, here is a relatively radical area: If you look at the brain while it's dreaming, the regions of the brain that are most likely to be active are the social regions of the brain. We're learning some things that suggest that the social regions of the brain may be involved in developing and putting into memory new social information. Perhaps a big part of what sleep is about is making us more socially at ease with the social world that we live in during the day. No one has looked at this in any way.

That's something that we would like to go look at, and that would just be very, very basic science in a new area that hasn't been looked at. On the other hand, I am very, very interested in how we take the work that we and others have already done and figure out a way to go do something that's useful now or in the near term that can change the way we do education with kids, change the way that people in the military get training about other cultures, or get training about just the basic procedures of doing things so that anyone can learn to do their job better.
I'll tell you about my new favorite idea, which like all new favorite ideas, is really an old idea. This one, from the 1960s, was used only in a couple of studies. It's called "latitude of acceptance". If I want to persuade you, what I need to do is pitch my arguments so that they're in the range of a bubble around your current belief; it's not too far from your current belief, but it's within this bubble. If your belief is that you're really, really anti-guns, let's say, and I want to move you a bit, if I come along and say, "here's the pro-gun position," you're actually going to move further away. Okay? It's outside the bubble of things that I can consider as reasonable.

We all have these latitudes around our beliefs, our values, our attitudes, which teams are ok to root for, and so on, and these bubbles move. They flex. When you're drunk, or when you've had a good meal, or when you're with people you care about versus strangers, these bubbles flex and move in different ways. Getting two groups to work together is about trying to get them to a place where their bubbles overlap, not their ideas, not their beliefs, but the bubbles that surround their ideas. Once you do that, you don't try to get them to go to the other position, you try to get them to see there's some common ground that you don't share, but that you think would not be a crazy position to hold.

There's the old Carlin bit about when you drive on the road: anyone going faster than me is a maniac and anyone going slower than me is a jerk. That that's the way we live our lives. We're always going the right speed, and everybody else is missing the boat. We don't take into account that I’m going fast today because I've got to get to the hospital, or I'm going slow today because I know I had something to drink, and I shouldn't have, so I'm going to drive real slow. We don't take those things into account. We just think whatever I'm doing is the right thing, and we have to recognize there's this space around those, and if we can find that overlap we can get some movement. And so that's not a nudge idea, per se. It's really about finding when people are in a mental space where they're more open to other ideas, and what is often going on there is you're trying on identities.

William James said long ago that we have as many identities as people that we know, and probably more than that. We are different with different people. I'm different with my son than I am with you. We have these different identities that we try on, and they surround us. With some friends I can be more of a centrist, and with other friends I might be more of a liberal, depending on what feels like it would work in that moment, and they can all be authentic positions that I really believe at different points in time. I'm really interested in looking at that as a mechanism of persuasion when it comes to regular old persuasion, when it comes to education, when it comes to public health, and when it comes to international issues as well. It's finding that latitude of acceptance and finding out how to use it successfully.

The Way We Live Our Lives in Stories

A Conversation with

Jonathan Gottschall
Source: Edge 

We think of stories as a wildly creative art form but within that creativity and that diversity there is a lot of conformity. Stories are very predictable. No matter where you go in the world, no matter how different people seem, no matter how hard their lives are, people tell stories, universally, and universally the stories are more or less like ours: the same basic human obsessions, and the same basic structure. The structure comes down to: stories have a character, the character has a predicament or a problem—they're always problem-focused—and the character tries to solve the problem. In its most basic terms, that's what a story is—a problem solution narrative. 

JONATHAN GOTTSCHALL is a Distinguished Research Fellow in the English Department at Washington & Jefferson College. He is the author or editor of six books, including The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (a New York Times Editor’s Choice Selection and a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize). 

THE WAY WE LIVE OUR LIVES IN STORIES
There's a big question about what it is that makes people people. What is it that most sets our species apart from every other species? That's the debate that I've been involved in lately.
When we call the species homo sapiens that's an argument in the debate. It's an argument that it is our sapience, our wisdom, our intelligence, or our big brains that most sets our species apart. Other scientists, other philosophers have pointed out that, no, a lot of the time we're really not behaving all that rationally and reasonably. It's our upright posture that sets us apart, or it's our opposable thumb that allows us to do this incredible tool use, or it's our cultural sophistication, or it's the sophistication of language, and so on and so forth. I'm not arguing against any of those things, I’m just arguing that one thing of equal stature has typically been left off of this list, and that’s the way that people live their lives inside stories.
 

We live in stories all day long—fiction stories, novels, TV shows, films, interactive video games. We daydream in stories all day long. Estimates suggest we just do this for hours and hours per day—making up these little fantasies in our heads, these little fictions in our heads. We go to sleep at night to rest; the body rests, but not the brain. The brain stays up at night. What is it doing? It's telling itself stories for about two hours per night. It's eight or ten years out of our lifetime composing these little vivid stories in the theaters of our minds.

I'm not here to downplay any of those other entries into the "what makes us special" sweepstakes. I'm just here to say that one thing that has been left off the list is storytelling. We live our lives in stories, and it's sort of mysterious that we do this. We're not really sure why we do this. It's one of these questions
—storytelling—that falls in the gap between the sciences and the humanities. If you have this division into two cultures: you have the science people over here in their buildings, and the humanities people over here in their buildings. They're writing in their own journals, and publishing their own book series, and the scientists are doing the same thing.

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You have this division, and you have all this area in between the sciences and the humanities that no one is colonizing. There are all these questions in the borderlands between these disciplines that are rich and relatively unexplored. One of them is storytelling and it's one of these questions that humanities people aren't going to be able to figure out on their own because they don't have a scientific toolkit that will help them gradually, painstakingly narrow down the field of competing ideas. The science people don't really see these questions about storytelling as in their jurisdiction: "This belongs to someone else, this is the humanities' territory, we don't know anything about it."

What is needed is fusion—people bringing together methods, ideas, approaches from scholarship and from the sciences to try to answer some of these questions about storytelling. Humans are addicted to stories, and they play an enormous role in human life and yet we know very, very little about this subject. There's an important growth area here for new understanding.

Storytelling is great, we all love stories, but do we need empiricism, too, or can we let stories run away from us and lose track of empirical reality? That's certainly a danger.

One of the major problems that I dealt with in my academic career coming out of the humanities was a tremendous frustration, to the point of almost paralysis, with the lack of an empirical foundation for any of the work that gets done in the humanities.

There are all kinds of storytelling. You have a question about X, Y or Z, and it's very easy for a talented PhD-wielding, high IQ person to tell a wonderful and engaging story about it. The story is often very credible, and very plausible, and very good, but the problem is that scholar B and scholar C have their own very plausible excellent stories as well.

A great deal of my work, especially earlier on in my career, was about going into the sciences and ransacking them, and trying to hijack the methodologies that are used to help scientists choose between competing stories. Scientists are telling stories, too. That's what a hypothesis is. You have the question, and you make up a story about how to account for the phenomenon. The advantage that sciences have over the humanities (one of them) is that science has methods for helping winnow down the field of competing hypotheses.

The argument has always been that none of those methods work in the humanities. That idea is bunk. It's like saying before people went to the moon, "You can't get to the moon because no one has ever been there." But no one had ever tried really before. It's not like people had tried desperately to make empirical methods work in the humanities, and then failed, and then moved on to something easy like string theory. They didn't put their shoulder into it and give up. We just have a thought habit that this is a field where it's strictly qualitative, and quantitative methods can't work, but that's false. You can find a lot of proof of concept studies that have been done. There's empirical work in the humanities that's quite good.

The main fear people have about importing empirical methods, scientific methods into the humanities is that somehow what's special about the humanities would be vaporized. It would become just like robotic, literary scholars would come to work in lab coats or something and the field would be sterilized. But it's really easy for the two things to co-exist. You need good scholarship, you absolutely do. You need good historians, and good literary theorists, and good literary critics, and none of that work is at odds with work that is methodologically scientific. There will be certain questions that can be addressed in a fairly rigorous scientific manner, and some questions that really can't.

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I got to this place—this place between the sciences and the humanities—close to 20 years ago when I just started out in graduate school. I went to graduate school in literary studies, English. I wanted to be a scholar when I grew up, and a scholar I thought was someone who discovered things, or made some sort of small contribution to human self-understanding. Then I got into graduate school, and at the time the academic humanities were still quite firmly in the grip of postmodernism.
I would go to work as a graduate student every day, and I was told by my professors that, okay, we'll read, we'll write, but it's all kind of hopeless. The odds of us ever understanding anything are vanishingly small. It's a dog chasing its tail forever. I was frustrated by that; I wanted to try to find something like more reliable and more durable answers to the questions that I was addressing because I thought they were important questions.

I started looking around and thinking about, how do we do this? What's a good model for generating more reliable knowledge? I didn't have to think about it very hard. I said, "Well, the sciences seem to do this. The sciences seem to do a nice job. They have their mistakes, they backslide, they go in circles now and then, but most people allow that over time there's a gradual improvement in our understanding of the universe that wasn't there before." The humanities, in large part, have trouble making the same claim.

My career, especially in the early part, was about seeing how far I could get applying a more scientific model to the sorts of questions that I wanted to ask about art, those questions about literature in particular.

When I was in graduate school I saw several problems with the business model in academic literary studies: bad theory, bad method, bad attitude, bad ideology.
On the bad-theory front, what we had was a domination by Freudian theories, psychoanalytic theory, and very rigid versions of social constructivism, this idea that everything is pure nurture and no nature. I knew those models were out of date, so part of what my work was about was updating the model—the theory—to make it consistent with the best thinking in the sciences of the mind.

The other problem was a problem that I discussed a little earlier, this idea of, okay, so you have better theory to guide your research, and you will come up with ideas, but how do you know if your idea is true? I wanted to see if there were ways of quantifying some of the questions that you approach in the humanities, and submitting them to statistical analysis, and scientific testing, and falsification, and all of that stuff.

In the early days—the late ‘90s, early 2000s—I was doing things like having teams of readers, students, and together we would content-analyze folktales from all around the world. We would get a corpus of folktales from maybe 100 different cultures, hundreds of tales from every culture. This would be much easier to do now because you would have the computer tools to automate a great deal of it. We had to go out in the libraries, get the collections, scan them laboriously, and we'd ask questions that were very, very simple, and very, very basic.

For example, a question: Are female characters underrepresented in literature? Are there fewer female characters in literature? At first glance, just from your normal reading, you say, "Yes, it seems that way." And then you would say, "Well, what about in, I don't know, Elizabethan plays, and what about in folktales? What about on TV? What about in films? What about in other cultures? What about in other centuries?"

The argument had always been, yes, female characters are underrepresented because of sexism in the West. We said, "How do we find out if that idea is true?" What we did is we got this big body of folktales, and we'd look to see if we'd find the same relationship. We had a couple different ways of looking to see whether or not females were underrepresented in those samples. One thing you could do, is to read tales, and have the coders literally code: Who is the main character? How many characters are there? How many males? How many females? We also had the computer count pronouns: he/him versus her/she et cetera. We found very, very little evidence for the sort of Western patriarchy argument because what we found basically all around the world was that female characters were underrepresented across the board. We did not find cultures where you had parity. We did not find cultures where you had more leading female characters than leading male characters.

~~~

Often times, with a very simple question like this, the response will be this is the humanities, this is about books, this is about words, and there is no way of ever knowing the answers to these questions for sure, so all we can do is argue about it forever. But this study showed that with a little bit of elbow grease and a little bit of ingenuity, there's a way to go out and get something like an answer to this question.

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The tension between the humanities and the sciences is old, and it's ongoing. So you have the "two cultures" clash that has been ameliorated in some areas, and people on the sciences side and the humanities side have all been trained to say the right things now, but the tension is still there. I'm in a somewhat interesting position to evaluate the arguments on both sides. People in the sciences are frustrated, and they think the people in the humanities are sort of thick skulled, and recalcitrant. People in the humanities think that the sciences are cocksure, and hubristic and intent on colonizing everything. They are afraid that what the sciences really want is to take over the whole shebang. They want their science building and they want the humanities building as well.

I do think that the people in the sciences, people in my camp even, could do a better job of talking about things, and dealing with some of the concerns. The humanities people are concerned with a feeling of evaporation—what science really does is it explains away magic. The humanities, and art, especially, can be viewed as the last bastion of magic, this unexplainable thing, this truly mysterious thing. We don't know how it works, we don't know why it works, we just know it works. Part of the reason humanities people haven't wanted science involved in this effort to understand art is this feeling that it would be explained, and if it's explained, it would be explained away.

Then there's a lot of misunderstanding, and it's basically an either/or mentality. You can either have scientific tools, approaches and methods, or you can have traditional scholarship where, of course, what's needed is a toolkit that has both things. You would have certain problems that would yield to this set of tools, and you had other problems that would be more appropriate for that sort of tool.

Another major concern in the humanities has to do with determinism and reductionism, the sense of reductionism, the idea, again, that something like Shakespeare would be dismissed as a drama of selfish genes, just boiled down to selfish genes. What's the answer to Shakespeare? "Oh, selfish genes". Part of what's going on there is a confusion about what the word "reductionism" means. The word has that sense of reducing—grandeur or greatness would be reduced—where that's not really what scientists mean by that. "Reduction" means explanation. It's not really such a scary concept. But I do think that there's been an effort from the science side possibly to conquer the opposition. And it hasn't gone very well. Probably a stronger diplomatic push is called for.

I was certainly in the warrior camp earlier on in my career. I wrote some angry things, "angry-young-man" type books, manifestos, and while I don't take anything back it was not a good strategy. People got their hackles up, and they got their claws out, too, and nothing really happened.

Was I too pugnacious in my earlier work? To some extent, yes, I was. The question is what do you hope to achieve? In my case what I hoped to achieve was a sea change. In the manifesto-type book that I wrote around 2008 I said that what I was aiming for was "totally disciplinary upheaval." I was going for a revolution. I argued the case just that boldly the whole way through, and with quite a lot of polemical strength. It was a very tough polemic. I'm proud of that book, but it didn't achieve much. It did not produce total disciplinary upheaval. What it did was strongly marginalize me within the field.

A few years later I wrote another book—my most recent book—about the same questions about the relationship between science and art and I just wasn't as aggressive as I was before. And it was fine. I got to make the same points, but people didn't see me as scary, people didn't see me as off-putting. I didn't sound like the type of guy that you maybe wouldn't want to have in your department because he was too aggressive. That book will do a lot more to push the sort of agenda that I'm interested in. Playing nice in that case seemed to have been a better strategy for getting what I wanted.

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If I were to build my own English department from scratch, what would that department be like?

A lot of it would be very similar to how it is now. You would still read the great authors, and the new authors, and you would still have literary criticism, literary theory. But you would also have courses in human psychology. You would have courses that would address this big question: Why do we even have literature at all? Why do we have stories at all? Why do we care so much about fiction? These are the kind of things that are so big and basic, and so obvious that most people in literary studies don't even think about them. Or if they do think about them, it's in a vague sort of way.

I would have courses that were cross-listed with the math department: basic classes on statistics, basic classes on research methods for the social sciences. A lot of the questions that literary scholars are addressing are very basic psychology questions that can be addressed in a lab.

Just to give one more example, my colleagues and I, including Joseph Carroll and a couple psychologists, were interested in some questions about how people respond to literature. There's a whole field of literary studies called reader response literary studies. Reader response is what it sounds like. It's basically how do people respond to literature? What happens? What's going on in their heads? What's going on with them emotionally? The way that work has typically been done is by a scholar sitting in an armchair and telling you the answer. This is how people respond. But it's an empirical question, it's a lab question.

What we did was we asked people. In concert with this team of psychologists, we got people, avid readers, to tell us how they responded to these literary works. We were able to get a whole bunch of data, and answer a whole bunch of questions about this basic question, what is going on with people as they read and respond to literature?

One of the big questions revolves around the question I suppose of whether or not the author is dead. This is this famous mantra, this idea that the author is dead. One thing that the mantra suggests is that the author doesn't have very much power, that power resides with the reader. In most literary theory courses you learn that response to literature is highly idiosyncratic. It's going to strongly reflect your biases, whether you're a man or a woman, how old you are, what your background is, and so on and so forth. There's a lot of truth in that. And we did find that.

But for the most part what we found in a survey of maybe 600 people, was that the main story is by far uniformity. People agree on what's going on in a story, and they agree on what a story means. They have the same sort of emotional reactions to the characters, and they hate the same characters, they like the same characters.

If you have a big group of people all reading the same book, what you're seeing is not a diversity of response, a great deal of idiosyncratic response, what you're seeing is a mental and emotional attunement among those readers.
Now, from a common sense point of view I can see a lot of people listening to this and saying, "Well, of course, I knew this already." But we didn't know it already. This was a question that was very much in dispute, and most people in the academic humanities would have voted the other way, more towards idiosyncratic response. That would be one example.

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The question, "why fiction?" has very much been on my mind lately, and it's one of these things that, again, is so big, and so obvious that most people just don't think about it. It seems obvious to people that human beings love stories. But if you think about it, it's not at all obvious that human beings should love stories, especially fictional stories. If you imagine us, as hunter-gatherers out on the savannah, life is very hard, narrow margins, and you would think that you're better off going without story. It's a lot of time and a lot of energy spent on story.
What might the benefit be to outbalance the costs? There are a whole bunch of different competing theories for this idea, and not a lot of data yet to help us decide between them. The main thing about these different theories for why we have fiction is that they are largely compatible with each other, it's not an either/or situation. If you ask yourself, "What's my hand for?" You would say, "My hand is a tool I use to grab stuff; it's a tool I use to communicate; it's a tool I use to reach out and caress people; it's a tool I use to reach out and punch people. It's a multipurpose tool; it does a whole bunch of different things." The same is probably true of story. Story has probably been shaped by different evolutionary pressures to do different things.

One of the ideas that I've been thinking about a lot is whether you can develop a hypothesis about one likely function of fiction by focusing on the form of fiction. What is fiction like formally? One of the most interesting things to me about stories is that we think of stories as a wildly creative art form, but within that creativity and that diversity there is a lot of conformity Stories are very predictable. No matter where you go in the world, no matter how different people seem, no matter how hard their lives are, people tell stories, universally, and universally the stories are more or less like ours: the same basic human obsessions, and the same basic structure. The structure comes down to: stories have a character, the character has a predicament or a problem—they're always problem-focused—and the character tries to solve the problem. In its most basic terms, that's what a story is—a problem solution narrative.

Why are stories that way? On one hand, it may be obvious to you that stories are that way, that they're problem focused. That's the first thing you would learn in your first day of creative writing class. You get there, your teacher would say, "Hey, your story has to have a problem, a crisis, a dilemma, otherwise no one's interested." But if you think about it, it's not at all obvious that stories should be that way. You might really expect to find stories that really did function as portals into hedonistic paradise. Paradises where there were no problems and pleasure was infinite. But you never, ever find that.

Why are stories so trouble-focused? You have quite a bit of convergence among scholars and scientists who are looking at this from an evolutionary point of view, and what they're saying is that stories may function as kind of virtual reality simulators, where you go and you simulate the big problems of human life, and you enjoy it, but you're having a mental training session at the same time. There's some kind of interesting evidence for this, that these simulations might help people perform better on certain tasks.

So in the same way that children's make believe helps them hone their social skills, it seems to be true of adult make believe, too. If adult make believe is novels and films, it seems they're entering into those fictional worlds and working through those fictional social dilemmas actually does, as hard as it may be to believe, enhance our social skills, our emotional intelligence, our empathy. That's kind of a neat finding. Maybe stories have a function as a simulation of the big problems of life that helps us cope better with those problems when we do experience them.

What about stories that are an exception to this rule? You will find them, but you will have to scrape your brain to find them, to find examples, and they will be very much exceptions that prove the rule. They will be extreme statistical outliers. You will find stories that don't have that structure, that character facing a problem and attempting to solve it.

You will note, though, that most of those examples, the things that will spring readily to mind are not the things that most people consume. Stories that depart from that basic structure have a tremendous amount of difficulty finding audience. They typically find an elite academic-style audience. For instance, Joyce's Finnegans Wake or something, it explodes the structure of story. But Joyce, of course, was setting out on purpose to explode the structure of story. A lot of 20th century writers realized, "Holy cow, I'm working inside a prison, I'm working inside the prison of this structure, and I'm going to blow it up, and I'm going to make everything new." These were interesting as artistic experiments, and I adore some of them, but they're exceptional, and importantly, they do not do a very good job of seizing human attention and riveting human attention. People read them when their professors force them to read them.

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I have two daughters, and the question is what would I advise them if they wanted to pursue study in the humanities? I would be for it. The more interesting question for me is, and I get this question in my e-mail box a couple times a week, from some student out there who asks, "I like your work, I'm impressed by your work and I want to do the same thing. I want to tie together humanities work and scientific work. I have these questions about literature, or about painting, or about music that I'd like to pursue from a scientific point of view. Where do I go? Where do I go for a good undergraduate degree? Who can advise me in a PhD program?"

Those are sort of heartbreaking letters to get because there's not many very good places to send them. Typically I have to say with regrets that there's a couple people I can mention, but after that, I have to say that if you are in between the humanities and the sciences, the best way to go is to go to the sciences because you will not get pushback on this path of inquiry from people in cognitive science, or people from neuroscience, or people from psychology. But you will face quite a bit of resistance probably if you try to go at this from an academic humanities program.