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Piaget's Genetic Epistemology
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0:12
this one's particularly complicated so because with Piaget you enter a whole new domain of of axiomatic thinking that's the right way to think about it say each of these people that were discussing each of these theories comes out the construction of the world from a different perspective and it's it's really fundamentally different it's different way deep down at the level of fundamental assumptions and so Piaget who's a who's probably the world's most
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famous developmental psychologist but although he didn't consider himself a developmental psychologist he considered himself a genetic epistemology and what that meant was that he was interested in Paestum ology which is how knowledge structures work and genetic means formulation of and so he was interested in how children formulate their knowledge structures in the world and he was a constructivist because he believed that human beings construct the they
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don't only construct the representations of the world and it's deeper than that it's more like they construct the world itself now it depends to some degree on what you think of as the world and of course that's so there's a reality definition issue that's nested at the bottom of this and it's a very complex one and so I'm going to have to walk you through it piece by piece now Piaget was a genius he was he wrote a paper I believe on mollusks when he was ten and
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had it published in a scientific journal and he was offered the curatorship of a museum as a consequence of that and his parents had to write the museum directors and tell them that he couldn't curate the museum because he was only ten and so that gives you some idea about Piaget and he's published many many many books and many of them haven't been translated into English yet and so he was quite the he was quite the you know large intelligence creature and he
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studied all sorts of things so I'm gonna tell you a little bit about constructivism I'm gonna start with a quote from Piaget and it's uh it's he's some book some of his books I found quite straightforward and some of them very difficult and I think it's often because of the quality of the translation this happens to be a relatively difficult section I don't think it's translated that well but whatever we're going to go through it
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I'll explain it to you a little bit so Piaget said the common postulate that's assumption of various traditional epistemology theories of valid knowledge is that knowledge itself is a fact and not a process and then if our various forms of knowledge are always incomplete and our various science is still imperfect that which is acquired is still acquired and can therefore be studied statically hence the absolute position of the problems what is knowledge or how are the various types
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of knowledge possible under the converging influence of a series of factors we're tending more and more today to regard knowledge as a process more than a state any being or object that Sciences attempts to hold fast dissolves once again in the current of development it is the last analysis of this development and of it alone that we have the right to state it is a fact what we can and should then seek is the law of this process quotes we are well
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aware on the other hand of the fine book by kuhn on scientific revolutions now there is an awful lot of information in that paragraph so we'll unpack it a little bit before we go on now one way of looking at science is that it's a collection of facts right that's that's what Piaget is stating to begin with and that we assume that the facts that science has gathered are facts and Static but if you observe them across time what you find is that scientific
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facts tend to shift and transform because scientific theories that are applicable in one century let's say turn out to be less applicable in the next now there's been a lot of argument and discussion about this because the fact that facts change seems to indicate that they're not so self-evidently fact and there are people and perhaps Kuhn would be among them who believe that science consisted of the juxtaposition of paradigms so those are sets of axioms
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within which something operates and the paradigms he considered them often in commensurate you couldn't move from one to another because the axioms were different there was no necessary no what what might you say there was no necessary means of communication between them but and and and Piaget knew of Thomas Kuhns work that's the scientists structure of scientific revolutions which was published in 1962 it's a classic text in the philosophy of
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science and and what Piaget soon more was more like a I would say more like a classic view of science where so for example when Newton came up with Newtonian physics there was a set of propositions upon which Newtonian physics was based and then when Einstein transformed those propositions what happened was that Newtonian physics became a subset of Einsteinian physics and so the way that Piaget looked at the development of factual ideas at least in
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part was that you'd come up with a set of ideas that were facts and then that would be superseded by a different theory within that within which that original theory would be nested and so that what happens that each theory in some sense although it transforms it becomes more complete as the scientific progression continues now Kuhn didn't precisely believe that although exactly what Kuhn meant by a paradigm shift because Kuhn originated that term isn't
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clear but he didn't seem to actually believe that science had this capacity to present a series of facts and then alter the underlying presuppositions and then to nest that within a broader series of facts like you would assume if you were thinking about the relationship between Newton and Einstein so Newtonian physics is a subset of einsteinium physics so now that's kind of how Piaget thought about how human beings developed knowledge he believed
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that we came up with well let's say you wanted to chop down a tree that might be a good example I mean you could use a dull axe made of bronze and it's like well that would chop down the tree it'd be a lot of work though and then maybe you replace that with a sharp steel axe that's designed like a wedge so that you can really hack down a tree with it or maybe you replace it with a saw and so the it's not like the bronze axe could chop down the tree but the steel axe can
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do a better job in the saw can do even a better job and so the way that Piaget thought about the transformation of human knowledge structures from from infancy onward essentially was that infants would produce a representation of the world that was sort of low resolution but quite tool like it would work in the world but then as they progressed the nature of those tools would become refined that sometimes transform completely so some sometimes
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imagine that a child would use in a sense a low resolution picture of something and then they would increase its resolution as they filled in the details that would be assimilation that's the page idea notion of assimilation you're using the same basic theory but filling in the details and then now and then you'd have to switch to another picture entirely and that would be more like accommodation that's where you'd have to transform your internal structures completely in order to properly
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represent an act within the world and so that's the basic difference between accommodation and assimilation so assimilation is like micro alterations and accommodation is transformation of the knowledge structure itself and so that's part of so what khun pointed out was that there'd be a set of facts and then there'd be an anomaly arise of some sort so like at the end of the 19th century the only remaining anomaly was at least one of the remaining anomalies
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was that no matter which direction you shine a light beam in and no matter how fast the platform on which you're standing is moving the light beam has exactly the same velocity which seems impossible so you know if the earth is moving this way around the Sun and you shine a light off the earth you'd expect the speed of light to be the speed of light plus the speed of the earth and then if you shone it the other way then you'd expect the speed of light to be
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the speed of light - the earth speed but that isn't what happens no matter how fast the platform on which the person shining the light is standing the speed of light is always the same to every observer so and people kind of thought of that as that wasn't the only anomaly but that was one of them thought of that is the only anomaly left in physics at the end of the 19th century and turned out that was a bad one how long there was some other ones
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as well like the fact that light tends to behave as a wave and a particle more or less at the same time which doesn't seem possible so there's a couple of things left over in Newtonian physics that the Newtonian physics couldn't explain but by the end of the 19th century there were famous scientists saying yeah well we got this all wrapped up there's really nothing left to discover and then Along Came quantum mechanics and Einstein Yin relativity
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and bang the whole world was like really different and quantum mechanics is much more comprehensive theory of the world then Newtonian physics all of the electronics you used wouldn't work if quantum physics wasn't correct roughly speaking and so that little tiny anomaly blew into something that knocked the slats out underneath from underneath the entire axiomatic structure of Newtonian physics it showed it was wrong at its fundamental levels
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even though it turned out to be a subset a correct subset of something that was much broader and so you can kind of think of that as that's what kids are doing as they progress they develop a theory that accounts for a certain set of you could say fact but this is another place it gets tricky and then they modify those and make them more and more refined but now and then they have to under grow quite a transformation not be a stage transition in Piaget and
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thought that that's the stage transition idea and that would be akin in some sense to a kuhnian scientific revolution now what Piaget is trying to state here is that because you there's this weird problem with facts which is that they tend to transform across time you know like if you go take a biology course right now in 20 years pretty much everything you read you learned or very much of what you learned will turn out to have been wrong and that's kind of
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weird because it isn't wrong right now and you think well how can it be wrong in 20 years and that that's a really complicated problem and in order to solve that you kind of have to think about facts like tools instead of them as thinking about them as objective independent realities because a bad tool can still work as a tool whereas a bad fact just kills you stone dead and so there's any ways in any case that seems to be a completely unnecessary phenomena
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Oh God there's no reason for that that's just sheer spite as far as I can tell mm-hmm okay so so here's one of psays propositions and and it is that because facts flux in some sense across time you're looking for something that doesn't change across time to call it a real fact and so what Piaget is trying to point out in this let's call it introductory paragraph is that the one thing that doesn't change is the manner in which people generate facts rather than the facts themselves so the
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ultimate fact is a fact about the way people generate facts all right and so psays theory in part is a is a theory about how knowledge is acquired and transformed and so it's not that no it's not a study of the knowledge itself it's a study of the process by which the knowledge is generated and he believed that that process was unchanging at least with regards to human beings and so you could think of the Piaget alien genetic epistemological mystery as being
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how is it that people form and transform representations of the world and one of his conclusions about that is that there's a standard process and then the reason that I'm telling you about Piaget right now is because as far as I can tell the standard Piaget daeun description of the manner in which knowledge is acquired and transformed is the same thing that's represented in the mythology of the shamanic transformation which is that there's a state of being
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and then it's derp up disrupted by something chaotic and there's a disintegration period and that's the space between the stage transitions for for children in which time they're often upset because their little theory about the world isn't learning it isn't working anymore and then in that chaotic period they adjust themselves to new anomalies and anomalies or what occur when you act in the world and what you want to happen
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doesn't happen right because that means there's something wrong with your knowledge structure if you act and then something happens you don't want to happen something's wrong with the way you're representing the world or you could say something's wrong with the world but good luck with that although you know people can modify the world as well as modifying their belief structures and people do that a lot but so this the piagetian stage transition
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as far as I can tell is a micro case of the broader idea of the the existence an orderly state its dissolution into a chaotic state because something unexpected has occurred and then it's retransfer Meishan into a more integrated state now Piaget would say well the initial state and the chaotic state and the final state aren't the ultimate realities the ultimate reality is the process of moving through those stages and that's how people acquire
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knowledge and that's you could say that's the central element of human beings and I would say that's a that's another reason Tatian of the hero myth because the hero is the person who notes uh normally notes something that's changed that's outside of explored territory encounters it defeats it let's say or get something of value from it and then recasts it into the world shares it with the community restructures of the world and so that's
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the central story it's it's not the central story of human beings but it's it's close enough for for our purposes at the moment so okay so that's what Piaget is about how do human beings encounter the world and and what happens when they do that now the thing about the world for Piaget is it's also a complicated place it's not exactly the set of it's not the set of all objective facts that remain to be discovered because Piaget
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is a constructivist and he's more of a pragmatist than he is precisely a scientific realist and so that's a complicated thing very very complicated thing I don't know if any of you and maybe this is completely irrelevant I don't know if any of you listened to my argument with Sam Harris but Sam Harris is a scientific realist and I was trying to make at least in part at Piaget Ian's point but he was having none of that that's for sure but but Piaget makes the
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point and so you know I'm going to let him speak in some sense as we proceed through this and and well you'll see why he does what he does so if all knowledge is always in the state of development and consists in proceeding from one state to a more complete and efficient one so that that implies a hierarchy of states right that you move from one knowledge structure to the next one which includes the previous one and is better and it's better because it covers
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more territory that's how you know it's better it does the same thing the old tool does plus some additional things so it's a definition of better it's a good thing to have a definition of better and worse all knowledge is always in the state of development and consists in proceeding for one state to a more complete deficient one evidently it is a question of knowing this development and analyzing it with the greatest possible
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accuracy which is something I happen to agree with but that's partly because I read Piaget and and I think I understand what he meant and he's quite the thinker and so I'm gonna see if I can like clue you in a little bit about this because it's it's well it's exceedingly complex you know and most of the time when people talk about Piaget they just talk about his surface experiments they don't talk about what he was actually up to and what he was up to was well he was
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trying to figure out how people represent the world and learned and that's not only it's not only that you know this is another thing people don't know about Piaget is that he was trying to reconcile the chasm between science and values that's what drove him through his entire intellectual life he was attempting to bridge the gap between science and religion that's another way of thinking about it and and that was explicit he knew that that's why he did
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everything he did and so the thing that's so cool about Piaget I think is that he actually started to provide what you might think about as a rational basis for morality it's not exactly rational that's the thing because it's rational rational belief like scientific realism has a certain set of presuppositions at its core and Piaget doesn't use those presuppositions to solve the problem get a problem so deep the gap between what is and what ought
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to be that's the David Humes problem you can't derive a naught from it is just because you know a bunch of things doesn't give you an unerring guide to know what to do about those things there's a gap there and Harris and people like him say that gap is illusory but most philosophers including David Hume including Piaget these are heavy-duty people including Heidegger would would disagree with that they don't believe that that that that gap is
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non-existent and and and Harris believes that you can nest values within science and and that's the proposition that he continually puts forward like most of the so-called new atheists but it's a hell of a lot more difficult to do than you think that's for sure and so anyway so how is Piaget purporting to manage this well one thing he does is he for Piaget it's really important that you have a body and that's one of the things that's four
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cool about his thinking so you could think about him as an early exponent of embodied cognition it's like he's not exactly a Cartesian a follower of Descartes he doesn't really believe that you have a spirit or say a rational mind that is in some sense separate from your body which is an implicit presupposition of a lot of a lot of of philosophical claims Piaget really sticks you in your body and the other thing that Piaget claims is that your abstract knowledge
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is actually determined by the structure of your body and that it unfolds from your body up into abstraction and that's what happens as infants transform into adults first of all almost all their knowledge is embodied and what that means is that it's not look there's a couple of different kinds of memory like the most the most fundamental distinction you might think of is between procedural representation procedural memory and and
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representational memory so when you remember your past that little movie or that runs in your head or maybe the facts that you can recite about your past that's episodic memory that's representational but procedural memory is different procedural memories how you walk you don't know how you walk that's how you ride a bike it's how you play the piano it's how you type so it's it's automatic right it's built into your nervous system it's built into the nerves that innervate your musculature
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and there's completely separate memory systems now one can represent the other which is interesting the representational system can represent the output of the body which is basically what you happen what happens when someone tells a story even when you tell a story about your own life but the contents of procedural memory precede the contents of representational memory and they're shaped in different ways so for example part of the wisdom that's
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encoded in your body is there because of things you've practiced but it's also there because you've practiced things in a social environment and so while you practice those things the effect of the social environment shaped the way you learned it and that's encoded right in your neurons it's not representational it's encoded in the way you do things it's encoded in the way you smile when you look at someone or frown or when you do that and
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that's all implicit it's not under your conscious control it's not even in that system and so Piaget figured this out and so one of the things he said was that you start as an infant by building your cedral memory not your representational memory that's partly perhaps why you can't remember your infancy you know I actually don't have that kind of representational memory there what you do is you act you learn to act you build
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your body so that it can move and you do that partly by experimenting with your own body but you also do that by experimenting with your body in a context that's shaped from the beginning by the presence of other people so for example you know what child learns how to breastfeed its mouth is pretty wired up right at birth hey and and the rest of its body isn't wired up very much at all but its mouth is and you might think well that's just a reflex and that
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Piaget would agree with that it's a built in it's something built in that that a baby can do right at birth but even in the act of breastfeeding the baby has to learn how to modify that reflex so that it gets along with its mother so even at the very beginning with the most you might think the most primordial acts there's a sociological and influence and there's a mutual dynamic going on that's really really important it's really important and so
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in some sense for Piaget the structure of society is implicitly built into the structure of the procedural memory system and so one of the things you might think about that and Piaget makes much of this because he looks at the relationship between play and dreams and imitation so he's kind of a quasi psychoanalyst one of the things that means is that coded in your behavior coded in your behavior is is this is the social structure in which you emerged
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and it's coded in a way that you don't actually understand you just know how to act and then you can figure out how you're acting and you can extract out of that some of the social rules but you don't you don't that doesn't mean that you know the rules it meant that the rules were built into you here's the way of thinking about it like a wolf pack wolf pack knows how to operate together it knows how to hunt right and each wolf knows where every other wolf is in the
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dominance hierarchy but they don't know they know that they don't have rules right they don't have a code they don't have laws what they have is behavioral regularities patterned behavioral regularities and those are like a morality they're very very in fact that's exactly what they are a dominance hierarchy of animal that aren't representational you know that don't have language at least they don't have language the dominance
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hierarchy is a kind of morality it's a way of it's a way of setting up individual behavior within a social context to maximize cooperation and minimize competition and so well so Piaget would say that you know the origin of more and and Fran's de Waal who's a great primatologist by the way Fran's fr ansd de w AAL he's written a lot of books about the emergence of morality and chimpanzees in particular and you know he follows the same line of
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logic it's that the morality emerges out of the interaction between the chimpanzees and it's bounded by the necessity that the actions take certain forms so for example if the chimpanzees act in a way that each of them kills everyone else it's like that's the end of it it's the end of the game so that's not a very functional morality it's it doesn't produce survival of the individuals it doesn't produce flourishing of the individuals certainly it produces extinction of the individuals and the
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death of the group so as far as do all would concerned from an evolutionary perspective that sort of mode of interacting is a dead end and so one of Pia Jays claims implicit claims is that and this is one of the things that's so brilliant about Piaget is that the interactions between people the social interactions between people necessarily emerge within a kind of bounded space and the space is the space of the game so we're always playing games always and
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a game you might think about a game as a microcosm of the world and a small child's game is a tiny fractional microcosm of the world but then you get up into adult games and you could think about those maybe as multiplayer online games that's one good representation but even more sophisticated things like being a lawyer say are like working at McDonald's or any of those things those are also forms of game and and that P and people negotiate the rules and that
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game is nested inside sets of broader games and so for Piaget that the game that killed the games the children play kind of transform inexorably and and and what incrementally into the games that adults play and and a a game that's playable as an adult is a functional game it's it's an acceptable game and one of PJ's claims is that not only do people start playing games unconsciously in a sense and implicitly then they start to play games more
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consciously they actually they actually represent the games to some degree at least in their actions then they start to learn the explicit rules of the game but only later after they know how to play it and then at the highest stage of moral development they start to realize that not only are they players of games and followers of a rules but they're also producers of rules so it starts you start out not being able to play a game at all then you can play a game with
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yourself then you can play a game with a few other people then you can play rule-governed games with lots of people and then you realize that you make the rules and you can make new games and that's the highest level of moral development according to Piaget it's varrick's brilliant it's it's bloody brilliant he's the first person that I ever really encountered who was able to put the notion of an emergent morality on something you know broadly
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commensurate with a scientific perspective but you have to understand that in order to do that he had to sacrifice a little bit of his notions of scientific realism and that's what makes him a constructivist and so and so we're going back to constructivism so he says at the beginning and this is the beginning of the development of knowledge does not unfold itself as a matter of chance but forms a development so he said there's not only do knowledge
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structures change across time and they're embedded in the social world but the manner in which they change across time actually has a bit of a structure and so that would be the Piaget lien stages of development just so you know now people have debated ever since Piaget proposed this if those developmental stages are fixed and necessary and if he identified them properly and even and as well whether or not they could be sped up which he
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always called the American problem could you speed up these stages of development and there's a lot of argument about whether those stages exist in the manner that Piaget described there and whether they're fixed at all of that but that's still the fundamental elements of his the fundamental element of his theory so and in since the cognitive domain has an absolute beginning which means you were you're here now but at one point you weren't so there was an absolute
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beginning to to you as a phenomena it's to be studied at the very stages nor known as formation that's his rationalization for being a genetic epistemology right someone who studies the formation of knowledge structures across time like an embryologist someone like that right who developmental embryologist the first aim of genetic epistemology is therefore if one can say so to take psychology seriously and to furnish verifications to any question
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which each epistemology necessarily raises yet replacing the generally unsatisfying speculative or implicit psychology with controllable analysis and so basically what he's saying there is that you can guess in a sense like Freud did about developmental psychology Freud kind of projected backwards from his patients into the dim mists of childhood and came up with like a what would a hypothetical developmental sequence and Piaget said well we're not
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going to do that we're going to go run experiments on kids often individuals but sometimes multiple individuals we're gonna we're going to observe exactly what they're doing he watched his kids in their cribs for example unbelievably intently and with great he was like an ethologist which is a person who studies animal behavior observational II like Fran's de Waal he was like an ethologist of children not exactly an experimental psychologist although also an
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experimental psychologist and he more or less established the field of developmental psychology so he said well let's empirically analyze how children learn and then maybe we can figure out how this knowledge process unfolds and we don't have to guess about it we can we can use controllable analysis and so you could say he introduced scientific methodology even though he wasn't a scientific realist he introduced scientific methodology into the study of
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child development but more importantly into the study of how knowledge structures unfold across time so he was a philosopher as well but a strange type of philosopher because he was interested in how philosophy itself emerges in the mind of the child and so that's what Piaget was up to and so quite quite remarkable and he had incredibly wide range of interests befitting someone who probably had an IQ of like 190 I mean he was seriously smart guy like way way
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outside of the normal range and so this is the sort of questions he was trying to answer well how do you on what do you base your judgments cuz you make judgments about things better or worse well how how do you come up with that ability how does that emerge and on what basis do you make the judgments there's a famous ruling on pornography that I believe the Supreme Court of the United States laid down and one of the justices wrote something that's become
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infamous or famous depending on how you look at he said well I can't define pornography but I know it when I see it and and that's and that's a notion of the incomplete ability of the representational system to represent the contents of implicit perception or the procedural system you can know that you know something but you that doesn't mean you can describe why it doesn't mean you can describe how you know it and you don't how do you focus your eyes like
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you don't know how you focus your eyes you just focus them you know how do you smile like this well maybe less ugly but you know you you can't describe how you do it you can't describe the musculature you can represent the output of the act and you can do it but you can't represent it and you're just stuffed full of skills like that which is another example of the way that you're way more complicated than your understanding of you you know one of the
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things people often ask is how can we use the rat as a model of a person because like you know a rats not much of a person depending of course on the person but the the real answer to that is well compared to what like compared to your understanding of a person a rat is an excellent model of a person so it's not as good a model of a person as a person is but compared to imagination let's say it's incomparably better and you know that's because we share like I
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don't know what 98% of our genes or some damn thing with rats it's like it's really up I think we share 90% of our genes with yeast for God's sake you know and so we're a lot more rat-like than yeast like so and I think with chimps it's over 99% you know so it's not a bad model obviously it's not perfect but it always depends on what you compare it to you know and you hear animal rights activists say things like well we can replace that with computer simulations
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it's like no we can't because you can't simulate what you don't know or at least not very well so that's a silly idea you know even though they have a point it's not so great to torture animals to death and all but what are his norms well that's a good question where do norms for behavior come from you have norms when they're violated it annoys you doesn't mean you know what your norms are but you do kind of get a sense of what they
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are when they get violated that really upset me well what does that mean well you don't really know you might have to think about that for like six months why you got so upset about that but you can notice that you got upset and that means that you do have expectations and norms let's say but you don't know where they came from now obviously in part they came from your intrinsic structure but also a core they're a consequence of your learning
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but even more importantly they're our consequence of your learning in a social environment so all of those phenomena which exceed your comprehension determine the nature of your norms and often you only detect them when they're violated so because why bother paying attention to something that works you just don't know one does they take it for granted it's almost the definition of something working it's like you know you think I'm driving my
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car to school and you think you're in a car but you're really not in a car you're in a thing that gets you from home to school and you can pretend that that is so annoying you can pretend that so you might think well the thing that I'm I'm in is it's kind of a weird example is it is this object with objective qualities that you call a car but but that isn't exactly how you actually perceive or act towards it what happens is is that as long as it's doing what it's supposed to do which means
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that its function is intact not what it is but its function then you can use a really low resolution representation of the thing the car is just what gets you from point A to point B right and so the fact that you don't understand the damn thing at all is completely invisible to you but it isn't when it quits as soon as it quits it becomes a car it's like bang car oh my god I don't understand this thing at all now what do I do well you panic a little bit right
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because well what do you know about your car nothing nothing nothing at all and worse than that now the car has become an intersection between you and whoever's going to fix your card so that introduces a whole bunch of human elements into it like are they going to figure out what's wrong with it are they going to rip you off is your car ever going to work again are you going to get to work what's going to happen tonight so all of a sudden that thing that you
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were in that was a car turns into this massive complex unbelievably complicated thing and that's actually what it is your initial representation of it it's like it's really low resolution it's like one bit and then bang it breaks down and poof complexity complexity complexity everywhere and that complexity that's what the world's made out if you remember we talked about William James and that crazy nitrous oxide induced pseudo hippie poetry that
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he was writing in the 1890s when he was talking about chaos well that chaos that he was talking about out of which him order emerges that's the same thing as that complexity that's hovering in the background and children have to operate in a world that's actually that complex but they're not smart enough and neither are you so they build partial representations that sort of work and the parents scaffold them so the way children manage that's
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like children they don't know anything but stay they're still alive so what's up with that you know part of it is the child is laying out one of its procedures in the world in accordance with its understanding and something goes wrong what does the child do cry right it defaults it defaults to this distress cry and what happens is the adults move in with their superior skills and their enhanced understanding and they mediate between the partial knowledge of the child in the actual
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complex world and without the child that's why if you take your child to the mall and just leave you know it doesn't take very long for them to get really really really really upset you know depending on the child some of them almost instantaneously you know one day I was in the Boston Airport with my daughter she was about three and three and a half maybe and my son he was about two and we were there to pick someone I was just packed and so I had them by the
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hand you know and I were told my daughter a bunch if she ever got separated from me in a crowd just to sit down immediately wherever she was or as close there by it I would find her don't move well somehow I got separated from them and I looked behind them and they weren't there and I found out later she followed someone else who looked like me from behind and she I found her in about three minutes you know which is a long time man if you're three years old at
35:38
that Airport she was sitting there like paralyzed you know but her brother was with her he didn't care at all and the reason he didn't care is because as far as he was concerned she was an adult but as far as she was concerned she was an abandoned kid in an airport you know it was very hard on her and it's because the you know she was protected from the complexity by her primordial representations and my presence but as soon as my presence disappeared the
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complexity came flooding back and just overwhelmed her that's chaos and uncertainty and then she'd cry and the cry says help I'm out of my league I'm drowning I'm drowning you know intervened and so that's how kids in part can get along in the world with their incomplete knowledge representations always huh also how you get along in the world because you're incomplete beyond belief but you got all these other people around you in the
36:26
whole damn society filling in the gaps and so you walk around like you know what you're doing but you don't you know you just hardly know at all you know if you can fit into that system great you've got it on your side and you can use it to fill the gaps that's also partly why people are so concerned with maintaining their social identity like the real identity on talking about some surface identity but you see because you have set up a set of
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expectations and desires about how you want the world to unfold and you do that within a social context and as long as your desires and the actions of the community match which means you're at home roughly speaking as long as they match you stay emotionally regulated you like that that's why you can stay calm in here it's like your desires are being played out by everyone else because one of your desires is that none of these crazy primate starts brandishing a knife
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for example or even twitching or any of that sort of thing you don't want any of that and if it starts happening it's like you get weary very quickly and maybe you look and maybe you won't and maybe you'll freeze maybe you'll get the hell out of there or maybe you'll get aggressive but that match has to maintain itself intact or your entire nervous system gets dysregulated and the reason for that is that as soon as that match is disrupted the underlying
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complexity and chaos of the world reveals itself and so does your inadequacy and then your body defaults into predator mode and and the fact that you don't know anything and that everything is really complicated becomes very evident to you very quickly and people hate that it's the worst thing that can happen to them the bottom falling out of their world and so that happens more when your fundamental presumptions about things are are
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challenged and then you have to solve the problem of what constitutes a fundamental presupposition you know how do you know which presupposition is peripheral in which one central and you can tell in part because the more upset you get about something the more central it is that that things about to your entire structure of belief and that's one way of getting into that unconscious structure of belief from a psychoanalytic perspective so what are
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the things that happens to me for example as a therapist is I'll be talking to my clients and they'll be talking about something difficult and all of a sudden they'll cry and they often don't know why so I stopped them right there it's like something went through your mind something happened and the cry indicates that you've moved beyond your domain of competence out into the unknown world all of a sudden into chaos what's that chaos what
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exactly happened and people you know they're usually embarrassed that they cry but often make remember what flitted through their mind and it's a represent it's a it's some encounter with the chaos beyond their conceptual systems that produces that emotional response and then we can dig into that find out oh that's a trauma especially if it's more than a year - how fold and those can be of various depths and profundity you know sometimes
39:18
they're so bad that the person just breaks down completely and they never put themselves together you know that's when something's just walloped you it's hit you right at the bottom of your axiomatic structures so to speak right at the trunk but when you're doing therapy with people and you watch how they respond emotionally you look for those tiny eruptions of negative emotion and those are like holes in their conceptual structure and those have to
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be sewed up by their man you in the process of dialogue you figure out okay there was a bit of unexplored territory there that manifested itself it produced an emotional response in you that indicates that you've reverted in some sense to childhood that would be the Freudian interpretation now we have to figure out what it was that that's in that hole what caused that tear and then we have to go back and articulate it and analyze and study it until we can sew it
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up and then and art and and get to the gist of it to make it into a adaptive story and then you can leave it behind and it actually produces neurological transformation as you do that the memories in some sense actually move their psychophysiological location you could say their location in your psyche but you can also note that the brain systems that are handling the memories aren't the same so they're much more limbic they're way
40:30
lower and closer to the emotional centers when it's still raw trauma and by the time it's fully articulated it's more represented in an articulated story a causal story and that's partly why writing about emotional events actually helps you overcome them so and it's possible that writing about how it is that you overcome emotional events in general is actually the best kind of therapy right not how do you solve a particular problem but how is it that
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you orient yourself in the world so that you solve the class of the fact that there are problems right that's that's the ultimate story and I think that's the hero myth and I also think that that's the knowledge generating process that Piaget is talking about you that's because you have you're constantly overcoming problems in the world and the problems are that you don't know enough to get what you want from the world and so you get that mismatch mismatch there's you've got whole brain systems
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that are designed to do nothing but detect that mismatch like crucial central brain structures and we'll talk about that a lot when we get into the into the physiology so all right how does on what does an individual basis judgments water is norms how are they validated how do you know if you're right about your norms what's the interest of such norms for the philosophy of science in general that's a really tough one it's like well you
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have norms and expectations as a human being and because of that they they have a determining influence on the manner in which you conduct science so for example here's one of the problems with a straight realist view so we could be having a discussion and I could say well you know that tile is to the right of that tile and then I could say well this brick is smaller than that brick and then I could say you know the roof is white really quite white there and start
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back there and like after about 20 statements like that you're just going to want to slap me and the reason for that is that well those statements are perfectly valid representations of fact but there's an infinite number of facts and most of them are irrelevant and that's the thing that's the thing the facts have to be relevant like if you come to a lecture and all the person does is tell you irrelevant facts what happens you've been in lots of lectures
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like that what happens when you start fantasizing about something that might be more worthwhile you know or you go to sleep because your brain is a lot smarter than you are it figures hell if all we're gonna get exposed to here is an infinite infinite number of irrelevant facts we might as well have a nap until something important happens so it's true it's exactly how it works now this is gonna get big isn't that what happens next
43:05
No so okay so and then how does the fact that the child children think differently affect our presumption of fact itself children live in the world they think differently about the world but yet they survive and so well I already mentioned a partial solution to that adults intercede you know around the edges around the borders children do this all the time a so it's called referencing and they do it two ways so for example if you're in a room with
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your child maybe to wait and mouse runs across the child will orient to it watch it track it that's pretty much unconscious and the mother let's say will do that too and then the child looks at the mouse and then looks at the mother and the reason is is because the child doesn't know what the mouse is and so then it looks at the mother to read from the mothers face which is a projection screen of emotions how to classify the mouse in terms of import
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and if the mother is like all calm about it and gives the kid a pad it's like you know okay whatever you know not a danger that's what the mouse is first danger not danger it's way after that that it's a mouse you think no it's a mouse to begin with it's like these things are not so straightforward they are not so straightforward so anyways if the mother climbs up on the table it has a screaming fit then the child's already
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prepared because of this anomaly to be emotionally responsive the child looks at the mothers face it's got terror on at the mouse child takes small danger big danger it's like phobia phobia phobia now all kids that won't happen to you because some are very emotionally robust but if they're very Charles very high in neuroticism trait neuroticism the probability that they'll develop a permanent semi-permanent fear of the mouse is extraordinarily high and that's
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what should happen because the mother tells you what the mouse is and in the face does it's a mouse it says safety danger and that's the first thing you want to know about something is it safer is it dangerous and that's a tricky one eh because whether something is safe for dangerous is not exactly an objective fact there's a guy named JJ Gibson who wrote a book called NACA logical approach to visual perception which I
45:12
would highly recommend and his claim in that book it's a real work of genius I believe is that when you see when you walk towards a cliff you don't see a cliff you don't see a cliff and infer danger what you see is a falling off place and you infer cliff and you can tell that some of you have vertigo you go up on the 26th floor out into balcony and it's like you don't want to go near the edge maybe you feel like you're gonna throw yourself over because people
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have that kind of what if what if I fell or what if I jumped over it's like stay away from that it's like that perception of the danger precedes your perception of the balcony and the object now you know that's how your brain is wired the dangers first object second so in people with blind sight who I've talked about before who think they're blind they can't see then they tell you that they could still detect fearful faces and you could detect their detection by
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measuring their skin conductance and so their eyes are mapping right on to their fear and reflex systems without any intermediary of objective perception whatsoever so don't be thinking that what you see in the world is the objective world and then infer its meaning it could easily be exactly backwards and it looks like if you look at how the brain is set up that it is in fact actually backwards or at least parallel but but the but the danger not
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danger perception has to be very very very very fast and so it precedes the more elaborate cognitive interpretations even the perceptions because it actually takes a while to see something because it's really complicated to see something and so you can't just wait around to see the damn thing before you act you just not fast enough so they say if you're a pro tennis player the time it takes the ball to leave your opponent's racket to get to you is not long enough for you to
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plan any motor act so what you're doing is you've got them what you dis inhibit the motor act by looking at the stance of your opponent and watching and by the time they hit it you're already prepared for the response because you just not it's coming at 120 miles an hour it's like it's going fifty feet you don't have the reflexes for it so your your your eyes are making body ready without in some sense without your conscious perception you become
47:17
conscious if you make a mistake right in fact that's kind of what consciousness is for it's like detect error fix detect error fix that's consciousness it's not plan what you're going to do next although it's not that simple either other problems that Piaget was trying to address well what water numbers what does it mean for there to be space what what do we mean when we when we talk about time how do we how did we come up with that concept
47:42
what does speed mean how do we know an object is permanent how do we know that an object stays the same across sets of transformation so that's a very classic piagetian problem so let's say you give a kid a bowl of clay and then you crush it so it's now a cylinder is like is that the same thing or is it a different thing and the answer is well it's the same thing and it's a different thing but there's something about it that remained constant across the
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transformations and so one of the things that Piaget is trying to figure out is what remains constant across transformations because you might think about that is a real fact protons are like that right they remain constant across transformations and so we assume that they're pretty damn real and they last I don't know how long protons last it's like I don't know what it is it's some tens of billions of so don't worry your protons are going to just sit right
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there and behave you know so they last for a very very very long time across sets of transformation so we can regard them as real he was interested in why children play and why there are patterns in play and how that's related to dreams and he was really interested in the fact that we imitate other people and this is another part of Piaget staggering genius in my estimation because he was one of the early developmental thinkers who understood that our capacity for
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learning was not so much mediated by language as it was mediated by our capacity to use our bodies to represent the bodies of other people and that's mind-boggling it's a mind-boggling idea so you know you hear monkey-see monkey-do but it's actually not true they're not very good at imitating octopuses or octopi they can imitate actually so if you give a octopus a bottle with a cork in it and there's a crab in the cork it can figure out how
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to get out the cork and sneak out the crab but if you get an octopus to watch it our octopus do that it'll learn to do it faster those things are smart and that's partly that's because they're all tentacley right and so they actually have something they can do something with like our hands there's our tentacles you know an octopus I can operate in the world because they have tentacles and and you know you hear about the superhuman intelligence of things like dolphins and whales it's
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like ya know they're basically test tubes you know what what are we gonna do now tap a city it's like no they're not gonna do that they can't manipulate the world so whatever their intelligence is it's way different than ours okay imitation so partly what you're doing all the time is imitating other people all of you are imitating each other right now you can tell because look around you're all doing exactly the same thing so it's
50:13
it's mass imitation and that's really a huge part of social structure is that we're constantly imitating each other and so that means that your body and her body are very much matched physiologically right now you're in the same state and you can tell because you basically have the same expression and as long as all you crazy primates violent primates have the same expression on you can pretty much be sure that all of you are thinking and
50:38
about to do approximately the same thing and so you can keep that match between your desire slash expectation and reality happening and that's why we have a face it's so that other people know what the hell we're up to and that's why you're always watching people's faces because you want to see what they're up to and that's why you have white surround your iris gorillas don't and so that's because I can see exactly where your eyes are pointing because they're
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highlighted by that white and I'm unbelievably good at detecting the precise direction of your gaze and so if you stand on the corner and look up the buildings other people will stand beside you and look up because they think well that guy would be standing there pointing his eyes into the sky unless there was something of interest to a primate like me and so this classic social psychology experiment you'll get people gathered around trying to figure
51:24
out what the hell it is that you're pointing your eyes at right because that indicates intense interest interest in something valuable that I might be able to share partake in if I can figure out what it is that you're up to and so all your ancestors who didn't have nicely defined eyes they all got killed or they didn't mate and that's why you have these beautiful white eyes with this like colorful iris in the middle it's so that people
51:47
can tell what the hell you're up to and they're more likely to cooperate with you more likely to mate with you and less likely to kill you which is you know probably a good thing all things considered and so you know if you look at the same thing that someone else is looking at you're imitating them and one of the things that's interesting is that if you're looking at the same thing that someone else is looking at and you would have at the same value structure then
52:10
your emotional responses are going to be very much akin to one another and you can tell that when you go to a movie and you watch the hero and you embody the hero while you're doing so and the emotions that you produce inside of you by imitating the hero on the screen enable you to figure out what the hero is going through and you can learn from that and so that's a very complex form of imitation and we do that when we tell stories or we watch stories and those
52:34
stories are really complicated because as we already outline they're not just factual representations of someone's action during a day their representations of the important things that the person did the meaningful things and so when you go see a movie all you're doing is watching meaningful things if the movies any good and you know that because well if the movie isn't meaningful well then you leave your board right it's and the fact that
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it's meaningful is what keeps you in the seat and you don't necessarily know why in fact you often have no idea why it's meaningful it's like watching Pinocchio rescue is farther from a whale it's like what the hell you know how I is that meaningful well you don't know but it is so moral concerns well we already talked about Piaget is concerned about morality oh boy this is really not good okay here's a proposition constructivist proposition knowledge does not begin in
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the eye by by which he means they're kind of two ways of looking at the world there's more but we'll start with that one is is that all of your knowledge comes from outside sense data okay and now that's kind of a behaviorist claim and before that it's a it's an empiricist claim and then the other ideas no that can't be right because you have internal structures that enable you to look at the world and interpret it and so and and some of those might be
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implicit axiomatic like the fact that you have two eyes and you look at the outward into the world and that you can hear and that you can touch it's like the fact of those senses isn't dependent on the empirical reality for those senses to manifest themselves they're already built into you and people like Kant for example made the proposition that we had a priori knowledge structures and that we use them to interpret the world and so it's
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different than him it's different than empiricism and so what Piaget is saying well it's neither of those are right exactly it's not like you will learn everything from the world through your senses and it's not as if you project everything onto the world as interpretation it's something in-between and it's a dynamic it's a dynamic and so and it's like bootstrapping that's the right way to think about it you know when your computer boots up
55:00
that means bootstrapping its off and then a bunch of simple processes occur and then out of those simple processes some more complex processes emerge and then out of those some more complex processes emerge and all of a sudden your computer is there well that's kind of what Piaget thinks happens to you you bootstrap yourself and so you have got a couple of reflexes to begin with like the sucking reflex for example and you've got some
55:23
proclivities like maybe you can sort of flip your hand or or you develop that and you have reflexes so you know if you blow on a baby for example a baby you'll go like this it's built into it it's like an it's a it's a startle reflex essentially so that startle reflex is there right from the beginning so whole body reflex and you know if you stroke the bottom of their feet their feet will sort of curl up and if you put your finger in their hands even a newborn if
55:48
you put your finger in their hands you can lift them right up and it's sort of well clinging ape you know because chimpanzee infants cling to their mother for like five years and so without reflux is still there so the kid comes into the world born with these simplistic low resolution procedures that enable it to get a foothold on the world and then out of that the child emerges and that's so the constructivist idea is that well it
56:16
isn't like you have your heads full of fully developed axiomatic structures and it isn't that you get all your knowledge from the world it's that you have a bit of structure there to begin with that gives you a toehold on the world and then you act in the world and as you act you generate information and out of that information you make the structures inside of you and you make the world that's a constructivist idea is that you take whatever's there this tremendous
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complexity and you sort it into you and the world and so and so that that goes back to that William James idea about that initial chaos and it's a hard conflict it's a hard hard concept to grasp because that isn't really how we think you know we think that there's an objective world and there's a subjective world and that the objective world is just there and the subjective world is maybe a subset of that but that is not piagetian presupposition it's not a
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presupposition of phenomenologist sin general who we'll talk about later but so here's one example of how to think about this in a sense it's like you know you think as Piaget said you kind of think that your representations of the world are fixed so we'll go back to the you're in a long-term relationship and the person betrays you a scenario right so you've been with this person 10 years you assume fidelity and faithfulness and honesty and all of
57:34
that you you weave a shared narrative you both inhabit that it structures your existence and regulates your emotion then you find out that the person has not only betrayed you once but multiple times it's like okay what you thought isn't what happened but here's the weird thing you see because you interpreted the world obviously within the confines of that relationship and you hadn't you know obviously you had an interpretation but there was also a world that's the
58:03
world you thought you lived in it's like those were facts well all of a sudden those aren't facts they're not at all facts and so what happens that's that descent into the underworld it's like all of a sudden what happens is that past that you thought was fixed now becomes this weird mixture of fantasy because you're wondering what what what what is it that happened then and you're gonna run through all sorts of fantasies some of them are gonna be really dark
58:30
you know really dark about what happened in the state of the world and all that and those are unconscious fantasies and that's mingled inextricably with the world right because you don't know the facts anymore which kind of suggests that maybe you never did know them and that's pretty strange thing because you know you're operating as if you've got this factual representation of the world but it can be upended like that and so that makes you think well what about
58:53
these facts like they're kind of they're kind of hard to get a handle on you know and you see this a lot in court room in courtroom situations because of course what the court decides is what happened and the answer is we don't exactly know because you can keep making the context of interpretation wider and wider so you know maybe you bring your partner to court because they've betrayed you let's say and you're trying to get a divorce settlement predicated on that but then
59:21
they tell a bunch of stories about how you were just as miserable as you could possibly be and that anybody with any sense would have betrayed you and never told you about it because you know that's just what a normal sensible person would do and so then the question is well were you actually betrayed and if you were well who was it that betrayed you was that your partner was it you or is it your bloody mother or your father who taught you act that way
59:43
or who didn't teach you it's like it's a hell of a thing because you can just keep altering the interpretive context and within it the facts shift around and then you might say well they're not facts it's like yeah yeah you can say that but it's it's more complicated than that by a large margin anyways so PJ's notion is essentially that well this is how I interpret it this is sort of this is my thinking in some sense but I'm offering it to you as
1:00:12
a scheme for helping you understand Piaget it's like junior Rome Bruner famous famous cognitive psychologist said we seem to have no other way of describing live time SEP except in the form of a narrative and a narrative as far as I could tell I think this is the same thing as one of PS J's knowledge representations as far as I can tell there's a representation of you and there's a representation of the future and there's behaviors that you
1:00:40
use to transform one into the other and so when Piaget talks about so this is kind of where the mind meets the body that that's how it looks to me it's like you have a conception of you and you have something you're aiming at you want to have happen those are both representations but when you act in the world those aren't representations anymore those are actually actions and some of mine transforms into body when you act out
1:01:03
your notion and that's that's sort of how the mind is linked to the body as far as I can tell and so what Piaget says is that the behaviors are built before the representation and so we're going to take a look at that so here's here's a Piaget a notion of assimilation and accommodation whereas other animals cannot alter themselves except by changing their species so that's through Darwinian means right so what happens is a bear is a kind of
1:01:32
solution to a set of problems and they're the problems that the bear's environment presents and the bear is just a bear so it's sort of like bears were ten thousand years ago and the only way the bear can solve a new problem basically is by generating new random bears which is what it does wouldn't reproduce us and hoping that one of those more random bears is a better fit for whatever random change might occur in the environment that's the whole
1:01:53
Darwinian issue right you can't predict which way the environment is going to go and so what you do is you take your structure and you vary it and you throw those out into the world and some animals do that expensively so they have infants that they have to program to that specific environment but it takes a lot of investment and some creatures do that cheaply like mosquitoes it's like they don't care for their kids but they have a million of them so like who cares
1:02:17
if nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine hundred ninety eight die there's still twice as many of you as there were so those are two different reproductive strategies and you could think about all those mosquito offspring as new mosquito ideas in embodied form and most of them are bad ideas and so the environment just wipes them out Opia Jays point is we do the same thing with our cognitive structures and that's the thing that's so interesting about
1:02:40
people in some sense that we've internalized the Darwinian problem and so when you think about the future what you're doing is generating a multiplicity of potential environments and then you're generating a sequence of avatars of yourself to live in those fictional futures and then you watch what happens as that Avatar lives in each of those those fictional futures and if the Avatar fails you don't act that out it's bloody brilliant it's brilliant that's what our brain does it's like it
1:03:09
hypothesizes potential futures it runs simulations and it kills them and that can be really painful but it beats the hell out of dying yourself or maybe sometimes you won't think so because it really can be painful but it's it's it's something that as far as we know only human beings can really do right we invent possible futures and invent possible future selves and kill them off in our imagination and that's what you're doing in an argument that's what
1:03:34
an argument is it's like well here's an avatar a representational avatar you know that's based on certain axioms and all articulated and you articulate yours and we'll have them have a fight in which everyone survives we'll accept as true and we'll move forward and act that out and you know arguments can be pretty damn intense but hypothetically they're not as intense as acting out a stupid idea that's the thing right better to have some conflict and reach resolution
1:04:01
in an abstract sense than to embody your stupidity and die and so you know it's sort of a trade-off between anxiety and and an annihilation or pain whereas other animals cannot alter themselves except by changing your species man can transform himself by transforming the world and construct himself by constructing structures and these structures are his own they're not eternally predestined either from within or from without also Piaget you know
1:04:43
he's well he's a constructivist he believes that there's something that your biology brings to the table and and and sets up the parameters let's say within which you can play games but within those parameters there's a very wide range of games that you could play and so it's not a biological determinism even though it's a biological framing and you can think about it like a chess game you know let's let's assume that the rules of chess are biologically
1:05:05
determined just for the sake of argument you can still play a near infinite number of chess games and so it's the same with you you come into the world with a set of built-in axioms that's sort of your body and your nervous system but you can play a very large number of games within that set of frames and one of the things that's very interesting about that something that's very mysterious to me is this is a game that I played before with students so
1:05:29
I'm gonna play it with you if you don't mind so we're gonna play a game you ready okay you move first right exactly you don't know what to do right and that's well that's so interesting because I basically made the presupposition that you could do anything you're completely free and what do you do you throw up your hands it's like you don't know what to do I'm so free it's like free to do what well that's not freedom it's it's just
1:05:52
nothing but if I said well look what we're gonna do instead is when I move my arm right you're gonna move your arm right so let's do that okay so I'm gonna go like that you're gonna good and then I'll go like that and then we'll have a little dance yeah yeah so you can play a game like that with it with a kid instantly and they like that they've got that man and so I've got so I've got some pictures of that I'll show you that in a bit but even a newborn baby you
1:06:18
stick out your tongue they can stick their tongue out back and now do you think about that that's just absolutely mind-boggling that they can do that and they really can they really do seem to be able to do that right at the moment of birth and so you know you hear babies have no theory of mind it's like ah yeah no they can imitate that's pretty bloody amazing man like you haven't seen robot that can do that yet although there are robots now that you can teach by moving
1:06:43
their their arms you move their arms and then they'll do it and so you can actually program them by moving them and then they'll just repeat it and so they're getting damn close to imitation they're really getting close and then look the hell out man because they're gonna be imitating each other as well as us and they're gonna do it so fast you just won't be able to believe it so that's coming the organism adapts itself by but materially constructing new forms
1:07:09
to fit themselves into those of the universe where as intelligence extends this creation by constructing mental structures which can be applied to those of the environment that's that there are winny an idea that I just mentioned you know the guys that are building the autonomous cars like they don't think they're building on Thomas cars they know perfectly well what they're doing they're building fleets of mutually intercommunicating autonomous robots and
1:07:30
each of them will to be able to teach the other because their nervous system will be the same and when there's ten million of them when one of them learned something all ten million of them will learn it at the same time so they're not gonna have to be very bright before they're very very very smart because us you know we'll learn something you have to imitate it's like god that's hard or I have to explain it to you and you have to understand it and then you have to
1:07:50
act it out we're not connected wirelessly with the same platform but robots they are and so once those things get a little bit smart they're not going to stop at a little bit smart for very long they're gonna be unbelievably smart like overnight so and they're imitating the hell out of us right now too because we're teaching them how to understand us every second of every day the net is learning what we're like it's watching us it's communicating with us it's
1:08:16
imitating us and it's gonna know it already knows in some ways more about us than we know about ourselves you know there's lots of reports already of people getting pregnancy ads or ads for infants sometimes before they know they're pregnant but often before they've told their families and the way that that happens is the net is watching what they're looking at and inferring with its artificial intelligence and so maybe you're pregnant that's just
1:08:41
tilting you a little bit right to interest in things that you might not otherwise be interested in the net tracks that then it tells you what you're at what you're after it does that by offering an advertisement so it's reading your unconscious mind so well so that's what's happening so all right so what's the motive for development dis equilibria that's a Piaget lien term well this is a life is suffering idea it's like why
1:09:07
learn something cuz you're wrong who cares it makes you suffer you care so you know if you run out a little scheme in the world a little action pattern you don't get what you want if you're especially if you're two years old you burst into tears and cry and why is that it's because you don't know what you don't know where you are and you don't know what you're doing it's like time for some negative emotion it indicates that you're wrong and
1:09:31
that's terrible in some sense because it all it almost always means that to learn requires pain now I don't believe that exactly because people are curious you know and to go out and be curious and to learn new things can be very exciting and so what it seems to be is that there's there's a rate of learning that's too fast and that hurts you that's what makes you cry but if you get the rate just right you're just opening up enough novelty so that you can
1:10:02
benefit from the possibilities that gives you a dopamine kick fundamentally you can benefit from the possibilities without being overwhelmed by the by the unexpected element of it and you can tell when that's happening and this is one of the coolest things as far as I'm concerned this is and I learned this partly from Piaget it's like you know in order to withstand suffering let's say your life has to have some meaning okay well that that means a bunch of things
1:10:26
it means that part of the way that you overcome suffering is by making the suffering into something meaningful and I don't mean that metaphysically I mean it technically you made a mistake it causes you suffering you learn something about it you don't make that mistake again it's real adaptation it's not it's not defense against death anxiety or something like that it's real adaptation but more importantly the reality that
1:10:50
you learn through pain is the oldest reality will say it's it's really old it's as old as nervous systems and so you've adapted so that you've learned to transform your knowledge structures in a way that will minimize your potential exposure to future pain they at a rate you can tolerate or maybe even enjoy and so what's happening is you don't actually like being static it bores you but you don't like being thrown into chaos it's like no a little
1:11:19
bit of that's fine what you want is you want to be opening up your knowledge structures on the periphery to transformation voluntary transformation that's voluntary exploration and letting those things manifest a little bit of interesting chaos and so you have a little bit you put a little feeler out there that you're willing to let die and it comes apart and you gather a bit of information it comes back together stronger and you do that all the time if
1:11:42
you're if you're smart and you're looking for new information foraging for new information and that means you keep taking little bits of yourself apart and reconstructing them and overtime that keeps you alive and active you know part of the reason you're alive is because you're dying all the time right all the cells in your body like if they don't die you get cancer and that that's it you're done you're a very very tight balance between death and life at every
1:12:07
every single level including the cognitive level and it's not that fun to learn something because you have to kill something you already know in order to learn it that's another piece yet in observation because you're always interpreting something within a structure and if that interpretation is wrong even in a microwave you have to kill that structure and it's a biological structure it actually hurts to kill it but maybe you can generate
1:12:29
something new in its stead and if you get the dynamic right let the rate right then you find that exhilarating not painful and that's and that's well you can tell when you're doing that as far as I can tell you can tell when you're doing that because you're engaged in the world in a meaningful way and what your nervous system is doing is signaling to you that you're not in a static place that's death you're not in a chaotic place that's death your balance between
1:12:55
the static and the chaotic such that the static structures are transforming at exactly the right rate to keep you on top of the environmental transformations and so you're surfing you know in Hawaii the surfers surfing was sacred well that's why it's like do you can you tell someone how to surf well you can't because they have to go out there and dynamically interact with the wave but they can stay on top of the wave and that's
1:13:20
what you have to do and if you're staying on top of the wave properly then it's exhilarating and that's the kind of meaning that that it rejuvenates you literally it makes you able to tolerate the suffering in life and it's not metaphysical precisely it's because that is what you're doing at that moment you're you're overcoming your limitations and of course that's what you have to do in order to to know and to learn because you want to be doing
1:13:45
both of those things at the same time that's what you do when you play a game properly your parents say it doesn't matter whether you win or lose this is a PSAT and observation it's how you play the game what does that mean well it means that you should play the game in a manner that increases the probability that you're going to be invited to play many games in the future perfect so you master the skills of the game but at the same time you master a set of meta
1:14:09
skills which is the skills that remain constant across transforming sets of games and that's what it means to play fair that's a bloody basis of morality as far as Piaget was concerned it's so damn smart you know because you think all interactions have this game-like quality they're sort of bounded and but there are commonalities across all the games and you want to extract out the commonalities and you want to learn to inhabit the universe that's made out of
1:14:37
the commonalities between games and that's what it means to be a good person roughly speaking you know it varies to some degree from culture to culture obviously because each culture is a game unto itself but there's something that transcends that that's the nature of games across game contexts and you know that you know that because you can tell the difference between a game and and something that isn't a game instantly everyone knows and it's not like there's
1:15:02
only one kind of game there's hockey say and there's there's a world of warcraft I know it's way out of date but so am I so it's not surprising so but the fact that those things are very very different in many many ways doesn't stop you from identifying the underlying commonalities you know they're games and they're they're like stories in a sense so and that's a piagetian that's a piagetian observation very very smart so why do you develop well it's because
1:15:36
your your previous idea their your previous frame micro frame let's say doesn't fit the circumstance and so something happens it you go like this what's up well the world isn't what you thought and there's something wrong with your knowledge structure this is partly what's makes Piaget a pragmatist you see the pragmatist American school of philosophy William James and his followers they knew that we had bounded knowledge we don't have infinite
1:16:01
knowledge and so they thought well that means we can't really be right about anything because we're definitely wrong and so how is it that you can operate in the world given that you're always wrong and the answer is you you set up a procedure that has rules for what constitutes true within the procedure itself so you play a game and at the same time you set up the rules so you might say well is this joke funny and then the answer is well do people laugh
1:16:30
now when I tell the joke do they laugh and if the answer is yes then it's funny enough you've you've you've taken a particular definition of funny you've transformed it into a local phenomena and if your behavior matches the prediction in that local area you say well that's true enough is it like transcendently funny well maybe you'd have to tell it to 200 different groups of people to figure that out but mostly it's it's funny enough so that when I
1:16:57
predicted what would happen when I told the joke that's what happened and you don't predict it by the way you desire it it's not the same thing because prediction has no motivation in it but desire does and we're always motivated always always motivated so well here's a way of thinking about the Piaget teen system so two-year-olds they're very chaotic and they bounce between one highly motivated emotional state to another and so the first thing that the
1:17:26
two-year-old has to do is get his or her act together more or less inside and so you know two-year-olds still have tantrums and they still cry a lot and and they still run around like mad being joyful crazily which you have to train out of them right away because it's nothing but disruptive and it's one of the most painful things about being a parent like 90% of the time you're going stop having fun stop having fun you know and
1:17:51
then you turn into a teenager and your parents get what they ask for and so but because positive emotion is so impulsive and so chaotic it's really hard to manifest itself it's manifested within it within a predictable environment and so you're dampening down your child's enthusiasm non-stop it's but it has to be regulated because happiness is impulsive and chaotic and people don't like to think that because they think well we should be happy it's like Mannix
1:18:18
are happy but they're maniacs that's where the word comes from like they're just you it's not good they're too happy way too happy like someone who's way too stoned on math or on cocaine and I mean that technically because it's it's they're very similar they're very similar biochemical states so and and cocaine produces happiness pretty much in its pure form so does meth very rapidly and so it's just not good you know you lose judgment
1:18:49
you happy people you don't have good judgment they're too happy maybe they get dopey it's like you know it's like irrational stock market bubbles oh boy it's always going to go up it's like no no it's not always going to go up but that's what you think when you're happy anyways the two-year-old has to get all these motivational systems sort of hammered into one thing internally now in some sense from the PIA jetty in perspective that happens within the
1:19:17
child he thinks of the child is egocentric but and that that development takes place internally and then it's not till a child's let's say about three that it can learn to bring its controlled unity into a unity with another controlled unity and make a game that happens around three and so what happens is that instead of the child only pursuing his or her goals although modulated by the social environment the child is able to
1:19:42
communicate with another child and establish a shared goal and that's what happens when they play and so obviously you play Monopoly that's what you're doing but when you play peekaboo you're doing the same thing it's like with your parent you're actually playing with object permanence dad's go on oh look dad's here haha he's there dad's gone that's here yeah it's gone dad's here like a kid man you can do that for like
1:20:05
three hours they never get tired of it because every time you reappear it's an it's a miracle unis watch babies it's so funny like you go like this and they go then you talk back holding like they're so happy they're just overjoyed and then you take yourself away and they're like what's going on what's going on bang you reappear they don't have a real memory you know it's like reality is manifesting itself in all its freshness moment by moment and and they can't
1:20:33
remember there are neurological conditions that do that so sometimes and there are people who that this has happened to so they get hippocampal damage and so they can't move short-term information into long-term storage and there's this one guy it's very interesting case he was a concert pianist and he had hell of a neurological injury and he could still play the piano he couldn't remember eight he couldn't he had amnesia and he couldn't move information from short-term storage into long-term
1:20:59
storage so as far as he was concerned it was it was always like ten days before he had his accident he never got passed out he was stuck in that moment and then but he could still play the piano and but was so interesting you watch him there were films of him before he sat down to play the piano he'd have like a seizure and then he could play the piano procedural memory that was intact and then at the end he'd kind of have a little seizure and then he'd go back to
1:21:21
being who he was but he had these notebooks and all he did was write in them over and over the same thing it's as if I have never seen this before it's as if I've never seen this before it's as if I've never seen this before so he's in this ecstatic state where everything was novel and new and pure and paradisal but there was no continuity and so when his wife would come to visit him he would just be overwhelmed to see her overwhelmed every
1:21:47
time and even if she just left the room and came back in it was exactly the same thing it's just like the kid it's like no object permanence and every time the face appears it's it's a staggering and you can see that in the reflexes of the child and that's that's without object permanence and so that's what Piaget was talking about with regards to object permanence it's very very cool so anyways the two-year-olds a collection of these sort of random motivations more
1:22:13
or less gets his or her act together by about three if they're being socialized properly and that means that the parents are doing their best to make the child acceptable to other children that's your damn job as a parent you have to understand that because if your child isn't acceptable to other children they won't play with your child and then your child will be lonesome and isolated and awkward and they will never recover because if the
1:22:39
kid doesn't get that right between two and four it's over they're never gonna learn it the other kids accelerate forward that kids left behind and it's not a good life for that kid they don't learn how to play with others and then they're done and there's a huge literature on trying to rectify antisocial children say from the age of four on it's like no you can't and you can go ahead and read three four hundred papers on rectification of antisocial
1:23:05
behavior and figure it out for yourself but I did that for about five years and it was a while ago but I know the literature hasn't changed so you got to get it right between that period you got to get the kid together enough so they can control themselves well enough so that they can adopt a mutual frame of reference with a peer so that they can start using that to scaffold their development further and become more and more sophisticated in social
1:23:28
interactions and that's what you're you're acting as a proxy for the social environment as a parent that's what you're doing now a gentle proxy an informative proxy maybe even a merciful proxy but a proxy nonetheless because they're not going to be around you forever they're gonna be out there among people who don't really care about them and if they don't have something to bring to the table at least the ability to cooperate they're gonna be lonesome
1:23:52
and isolated and that's not going to be good well here's an here's an here's an idea so as you're moving from what is to what should be you're in this little frame of reference this little game this little Piaget alien game sometimes you get what you want or predict that's on the left-hand side that makes you happy and it validates your frame so if the frame keeps working across different circumstances you get a reward from that the reward produces a dopaminergic kick
1:24:19
that makes you feel good but the dopamine also enhances the strength of the circuitry that underlies that particular representation that's what reinforcement is it's different than reward reward is what you feel let's say roughly speaking reinforcement is the effect of the dopamine bathing the neurological tissues to make it stronger and grow and so if the neurological tissue underlies a sequence of actions that produces a desired outcome there's a biochemical kick that strengthens the nervous
1:24:47
structures that were activated just before the good thing happens and so that's how something you know that's valuable gets instantiated and if it fails instead you get punished pain anxiety and that that starts to extinguish that circuitry and we don't know how that works exactly we don't know exactly if those circuits then start to die because they can degenerate across time or if what happens is you build other circuits that inhibit them
1:25:13
so it's like you've got this knowledge structure it's built into you and once it's there there's not really much getting rid of it but you can build another one that tells it to shut up that's sort of what happens when you're addicted to drugs so cocaine bathes the tissue that was active just before you took the cocaine with dopamine and so that gets stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger and so you're basically building a
1:25:34
cocaine seeking monster in your head and that's all it wants and it has rationalizations and it has emotions and it has motivations and it's alive but it wants one thing and the problem is once you build that thing especially if you nail it a couple of hundred times with the powerful dopaminergic agonist like cocaine that thing is one vicious monster and it's alive and it's in there and you can't get it to go away the only thing you can do is build another
1:25:59
structure to shut it up but the problem is is that as soon as you get stressed it interferes with that new structure and the old thing comes popping back up not good I wouldn't recommend it and the faster acting those dopaminergic agonists are cocaine is a good example but so is math the faster they hit you which is often why people inject them instead of snorting them say the faster that transformation from steady state to dopaminergic path the bigger the kick is
1:26:28
and so you know so speed of introduction of the substance matters which is why you drink shots instead of drinking say wine or beer because alcohol has you know very similar very similar effects so all right so if you get what you want well then you feel good but not only do you feel good but the frame itself is validated and if you don't get what you want well then not only do you not get what you want but the frame itself
1:26:59
starts to come apart at the seams and the question part is how far should the frame come apart how deeply should you unlearn something when you make a mistake god it's a very very very hard problem and I'll show you a partial solution to it this very useful thing and this is a pia jetty an idea - let's see yeah I'm gonna go to this for a minute so so I'm gonna decompose something for you and and this is partly to give you an introduction to the way
1:27:28
behaviorists think but it's also to help unpack how the pia jetty in oceans work and so from a piagetian perspective high-order abstractions are actually made of what's common among actions and perceptions so and those things are unified in some sense so an abstraction isn't what's common across sets of objects it's more like what's common across sets of perceptions and actions and so that's a hard thing to understand but but this will help you understand
1:27:54
okay so let's say you want to be a good person it's kind of abstraction all right and then you think well what does it mean to be a good person it's a box it's an empty box no it's a box and it says good person on outside but it's full of things it might even be full of transforming things so but you know what it means you say good person you kind of know and you kind of know but you know if we started talking about details we
1:28:17
might start to argue but it's like pornography you know what when you see it okay so what does it mean to be a good person well we could decompose it we could say well if you're one way of being a good person is to be a good parent and you basically say that being a good parent is a subset of being a good person right because person is bigger than parent and maybe it'd be to be a good employee and to be a good sister and to be a good you know to be
1:28:41
to be a good good partner sort of on the same level of abstraction so you decompose good person into your major functional roles let's say and you're good at all of them whatever that means well let's say if you're a good parent well you have to have a good job because otherwise you starve and so do your children so at least you have to financially provide in some manner that's a subset of being a good parent it's not the only subset and then to be
1:29:06
a good to have a good be a good parent you also have to take care of your family and so you could decompose that into play with baby or complete meal you might say well if take care of family you can either order a meal or you can cook one it's like good for you and so then you're cooking a meal and you think well what do you decompose that into well now you're starting to get to the micro level say because let's say you're making broccoli so you take the broccoli
1:29:33
out of the fridge and you put it on the cutting board that's actually action that's not abstraction it's actually something you're doing with your body so the abstraction grounds itself out in micro activity actual action that's the connection between the mind and the body and so you're cutting broccoli right but that's not abstraction and so if you take apart these higher-order moral abstractions what happens is you decompose them into action perception
1:29:59
sequences and they're embodied now Piaget is basic claim is you build the dam abstractions from the bottom up that's his that's the fundamental Pia jetty and claim it so the kid comes into the world with some reflexes and starts building a body of embodied knowledge out of that interaction with other people and then they start playing games and that abstracts but but they move from the bottom of the hierarchy which is actual micro actions up to the top of
1:30:25
the abstraction world and so it's this is how you boot yourself up little bitty stories what little bitty stories at the bottom cut broccoli you know and then cut corn here set table do dishes complete meal take care of your family be a good parent be a good person and you know one of the propositions that I am offering you in this class is that to be a good person you're actually not stuck in one of these to be a good person means that you're the thing that
1:30:52
transforms these things continually and so that's what's at the top of the hierarchy and that's basically the hero story which is you're in a state of being and it normally occurs you allow it to demolish you and then you rebuild and that's at the highest end of the moral hierarchy and that's also a sense reappears Yeti and claim so so let's think about emotional regulation because this is a really good schema for understanding emotional regulation how
1:31:18
upset should you get and how do you calculate it because if you make a mistake you wake up in the morning in your side hurts okay you it's the first symptom of pancreatic cancer you're dead in six months 100% chats or you know you pulled a muscle well which is it you might say well the chances of the pancreatic cancer or low but they're not zero and like infinite times any proportion is a very large number so you might be thinking why don't you just have a screaming fit any time ever any little
1:31:48
thing happens to you which is exactly what happens by the way if you're two years old right that is what you do so and it's because you don't know you don't know like things fell apart what does that mean could be anything well that's no good well so let's say you're arguing with your with your partner you know and they I don't know if they make a lousy meal or maybe no meals and you're kind of sick of it you know and so you say you're a bad person and
1:32:15
what's the evidence not only are you a bad person but you've always been a bad person and the probability that you're going to improve in the future looks to me to be zero it's like what's the person supposed to do punch you right really because there's no room in there for any discussion you're done it's like you're horrible and you don't change and you've always been horrible and you've never changed and you know inferring from that into the future
1:32:43
you're gonna stay horrible and you're not going to change well any argument can go there immediately it's a really bad idea and it happens all the time and this is why people can't have a civil discussion you know they can't say here's an example so you've got your four-year-old you want them to clean up their room and so it's full of toys let's say they're three and a half you look at it you say look you know clean clean this up clean up your room so you
1:33:13
shut the door and you go away and you magically hope that when you come back the room will be clean but of course the child has no idea in all likelihood at that age or maybe it's two and a half something like that they know what clean up a room means that's like way up here man it's like you told your child there's mass every be a good person you know and then you come back in half an hour and they're no better a person than they were and you get upset it's like you can't do that you have to
1:33:37
say you see that teddy bear and you know that that kid knows how to see a teddy bear and they know how to pick it up because you've watched them see a teddy bear and pick it up and you know that the child knows the name of the teddy bear it's teddy bear and so you point to the teddy bear and you say do you see that teddy bear and they go yes and you say that's good pat pat and they get a little kick of dopamine so that's happy day for the kid
1:34:00
and then they smile at you so you feel pretty good about that too and then you say you think you could pick up that teddy bear and they say yeah and so they go over there not every kid by the way but they go over there and they pick up the teddy bear and it's like it's a good day for both of you and then you say you see that little space on the shelf because you know they know what a shelf is and you know they know what a space is and you say take that teddy bear and
1:34:22
put it in the shelf and then go over there and they put it in the shelf and then they look at you and you're smiling and so the probability that they'll do that again is now increased because but watching you smile produces a dopaminergic kick and you've just strengthened those circuits so I would highly recommend that you do that with your children and with your partners right you watch them like like a sneaky person and every time they do something
1:34:46
that you actually want them to do you notice and you give them a little pat on the head yeah and then they like you that's cool but if they don't if you don't want them to like you because you hate them and then you won't do that but and you think well I don't hate them it's like oh yes you do you just think about the last month man there's been twenty times you absolutely hated them and maybe that's the predominant emotion and that's not so good over time so when
1:35:09
they do something good if you really want to screw things up watch like a hawk and wait till they do something good and then punish them that's really fun that is that really messes with them and people do that all the time so if you really want to mock things up you can even do it more subtly you can wait till they do something good especially if they've never done it before and they're just kind of tentatively trying it and then you can ignore them that's a
1:35:32
really good what that's even better than punishing them because at least when you punish you're paying attention if you ignore them it's like that's that's just perfect also takes hardly any effort on your part so that's an additional plus so anyways so if you're having a discussion with someone it's like what you're doing with this kid you know it's like you say maybe you're negotiating about meals you don't start with you're
1:35:55
a bad person let's way the hell up here you know you blow the whole person schema right out from underneath them and you might as well get divorced which is what will happen if you keep doing that soon you'll roll it your eyes at each other that means you're getting divorced by the way so if you ever watch it he does I'm serious there's good empirical data on that once you're at the eye-rolling stage there's no going back so you should intervene way before
1:36:17
that it's discussed that AI role once you've hit disease-carrying rodent status in your mates eyes there's no coming back so anyways so what you do if you want to have a conversation with someone that's a corrective conversation is you sort of take a piagetian attitude and the attitude is go to the highest level of resolution that you can manage so let's say and that's what you're doing with the kid it's like clean up your room be a good
1:36:48
person it's like no they don't know any about anything about that but they do know how to pick up a teddy bear and then maybe you think cleaning up your room is a hundred things like that and so you have to teach the child each one of those hundred things and then they learn this is the scheme they learn what's the same across all of those different actions that's clean right pick up the teddy bear put away the Legos make your bed what those have
1:37:12
nothing in common really like the motor outputs completely different but they fall under the heading of clean but unless you fill the heading of clean with all the subordinate categories of the action perception sequences that make up clean kid can't do it and so partly what you're doing by attending to your child constantly is noticing where they are in the construction of this hierarchy and they start way down here right and so that's why you play
1:37:37
peekaboo for example it's like they can do that and you can you know you interact with them because you can watch you do a little something and if they respond you got some sense that you're you're at the same level and kids and playgrounds do that with each other right away so if you if you see two three-year-olds together say they're fairly sophisticated for three-year-olds what they'll do is they'll start playing a little primitive game with each other like door like a dog you know what a dog
1:37:59
does what it wants to play it kind of goes like that and and that's what kids do and that's what adults do too it's a plague it's play it if it tastes like I'm ready but you're smiling it's not like I'm ready it's and so you can tell the difference between a play fight and play and kids can too so it's an invitation to play and so if you're interacting with your little kid they got that play circuit man that thing's in there like
1:38:22
when they're from birth I think because you can play with a kid right from birth at least something like peekaboo and so you're on the same wavelength fundamentally and then you interact with them and you see if they're following what you're doing is what I'm doing when I'm lecturing more or less I'm watching you guys and seeing if we're more or less in the same shared space you know and we want the space to be expanding because if it's just staying the same
1:38:48
well you might as well play whatever you play on your computer it has to be expanding at the same time that's optimal and so when you're playing with your kid you put them on that developmental edge where they're undoing and then rebuilding their little skills you know you can do that like I had this memory from when I was a little kid a while back and I remembered I used to go over to these peoples house with my father and my mom and it was way up in
1:39:15
northern Alberta and these people were Russian immigrants as children of Russian immigrants and they had a farmhouse way way out in the country way out by the way there where the railroad actually ended if you walk north from there you'd walk until you hit like southern Europe without fun running into another person it was way the hell out in the middle of nowhere and anyways they had a nice house it's like a warm house you know they had three kids and
1:39:38
they were way older than me but it was a real fun comfortable place to go and I used to sit in the living room with my father and his friend whose name was Nick and Nick was a really playful guy I really liked him he was like my surrogate grandfather and I used to I don't think I was more than about three I'd sit there and I try to hit his foot with my fist and he would be talking to my dad you know and my dad would say Jordan don't bother Nick and Nick would
1:40:02
say well he's not really bothering me and his dad was checking it out to see if I was anoint were poor if I was a fun kid you know cuz it's a fine line and so I tried to hit his foot and he would move it and now I had this memory while back and I thought wow that was a good memory and I thought what is going on there exactly and I realized well he's sharpening he was sharpening me up you know it's like I was aiming at something
1:40:26
you're aiming at something if you're pointing your eyes at it you're pointing your whole damn soul out it you're aiming at something and you're trying to get your behaviors and your conceptions in line and organized so that you can attain that aim that's what people do you know we throw rocks at things we we fire arrows at things we shoot guns at things we aim at things our whole body is that platform for aiming and I was trying to aim at his feet and he'd move
1:40:51
his feet you know but he'd let me hit it what now and then and so let's say you're a rat okay because like I said it rats a good model for a person let's say you're a little rat a juvenile male and you want to play because you want to play and you'll work to play and that's how we know you want to play if we're experimental psychologists because you're Bosch put button push like mad to get access to an arena where you can wrestle with another little rat and so
1:41:16
rats wrestle just like human beings and they even pin each other just like human beings and they love that and so if you put little rat a in with a little rat B and little rat B is 10% bigger little rat B can stomp the hell out of little rat a all the time so they go out there and they have a little dominance competition and little rat B is gonna win because he's bigger so now he's dominant rat so then they play in they wrestle and little rat a loses but and
1:41:43
then next time they both know that little rat a is the inviter because he's subordinate so he's the one who has to go up to the big rat and go you ready and the big rat then we'll wrestle however if you repeatedly pair them and the big rat doesn't let the little rat win at least 30% of the time the little rat won't invite him to play anymore and that was york panksepp who figured that out and that is mind-boggling because it tells you like
1:42:12
the bit there's a there's an ethical basis for play that's so deep that the damn rat and their rats not known for their sense of fair play the big rat has to let the little rat win 30% of the time or the little rat will not play anymore and even rats know that it's it's so profound that discovery like banks have discovered the play circuit in mammals that's a big deal that's like discovering a whole continent like that's a big deal he
1:42:37
should have got a Nobel Prize for that and to see that that's built in that sense of fair play that's mind boggling you know cuz that's evidence for the biological instantiation of a complex morality fair play even if you can win you shouldn't all the time well so when I'm trying to hit Nick's feet with my hand like I'm really paying attention and he's moving it pretty well but now and then I get to nail it and I'm feeling pretty good about that you know
1:43:03
and he makes a little bit more difficult all the time so that my aim gets better and better and I'm building up my motor coordination I'm building up my social skills cuz I don't hit too hard and I don't cry when I miss because that just makes you annoying to play with right so I'm learning really complicated things about how to go about finessing my aim and that's what you're doing with your kids and what are they aiming at well they aim higher and higher so when my
1:43:28
son was about two and a half we had him start setting the table it's you don't say you know you want to take grandma's fine china and go set the table it's like no you don't do that you say you know what a fork looks like he goes yeah see if you wanted the forks are well that doesn't work because the Drover's way up here right so you have to hand him a fork you say look take this fork and go put it on the table he's like this high you know so he goes
1:43:52
over to the table and he puts the fork up here can't even see what he's doing he puts the fork up there and then you know he's reasonably happy with that and you could give him a path and then you go and give him a really sharp not no you don't do that you don't do that you give him a spoon and you say well go put the spoon beside the fork and you don't say look you're stupid kid you got to leave enough space between the fork and the spoon so the plate can fit there
1:44:17
don't you know anything you're stupid it's like well that's right up here right you're a bad kid no that's bad you don't do that you go down here and you say well good micro routine adaptation there Chum well let's try it again you know when you build that up and like men you can't extend the kid past its point his point or her point of exhaustion because it's got to be a game and a two-year-old can probably only do that
1:44:42
for you can watch them and some are more persistent than others but 10 minutes 15 minutes you pushing your luck you can take a two-year-old to a restaurant for about 40 minutes and expect them to sit and behave but after that you know they're the will exhausts them all right well anyways that's Piaget in his nascent form fundamentally and so if you if you remember that diagram and you think about how that would be built from the bottom up and how there would be a
1:45:10
stage transition every time those things are learned you kind of got the essential elements of piagetian theory so we'll see you Thursday
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