Subtitles section Play video
[Music] all right so I suggested to you last
class that human beings world as a place of action through the lens of their
social cognitive biological sub structure and I made that argument on
the basis of the supposition that our primary environment was actually other
people and I mentioned to you I believe that those other people are arranged in
hierarchies of influence and authority or power or dominance which is often how
its construed and that the dominance hierarchy as a structure is at least 300
million years old which makes it older than trees and it's
for that reason that you share the same neural biology to govern your
observations of your position in the hierarchy as lobsters do which is a
remarkable fact you know it's a remarkable that the lobster uses
serotonin as the mechanism to adjudicate its status position and that modifying
the serotonin function in the lobster can produce changes in its behavior can
can / help the logs to overcome defeat for example which is very much
equivalent to what happens to a human being when they take antidepressants you
know it's it's it's a good example of the conservation of biological structure
by evolution and another a good illustration of the continuity of life
on Earth it's really amazing but the other thing it is a testament to is the
ancient nature of the social structure now we tend to think of the social
structure as something other than nature right because society is I suppose
mythologically opposed it's opposed in a narrative way cultures opposed to nature
it's the town in the forest but the town has been around a long time so to speak
and the structure of the town is also part of nature in that the dominance
hierarchy is part of and because it's so ancient you have to
consider it as part of the mechanism that has played the role of selection in
the process of natural selection and so roughly seem what seems to happen is
that there is a plethora of dominance hierarchies especially in complex human
communities and many of them are masculine in structure in that their
dominance are keys that primarily men compete in or that has been the
historical norm and that some men rise to the top based on whatever the
dominance hierarchy is based on and they make their preferential mates and it's a
good strategy for women to engage in because why and many sorts of female
animals do precisely this is they let the male's battle it out and then pick
from the top and or often the dominant males there's no choice on the part of
the females it's the dominant males just chasing away the subordinate males but
with humans it's usually the case that the females have the opportunity to do
at least some choosing and so we have if you think about that what that implies
is that we have evolved to climb up dominance hierarchies and then I would
say it's not exactly that even because there are many different dominance
hierarchies and so the skills that you might use to climb up one might not be
necessarily the same skills that you would use to climb up another and so
then I would say what we have all evolved for instead and I'm still
speaking mostly on the masculine edge of things historically speaking is the
ability to climb up the set of all possible dominance hierarchies right and
that's that's a whole different idea it's like the averaged hierarchy across
vast spans of time and I think it's for that reason that we among others that we
evolve general intelligence because general intelligence is a general
problem-solving mechanism and it seems to be situation in depend
so to speak and of course there's been an arms race for the development of
intelligence between men and women because each gender has to keep up with
the other and women have their own dominance hierarchies there's certainly
no doubt about that and of course now men and women more
increasingly compete within the same hierarchies and we don't exactly know
how to sort that out yet because it's an extraordinarily new phenomena but in any
case because of the the permanence of the dominance hierarchy it has come to
be represented in fundamental narratives because human beings and this is
something that we share everywhere it's the thing the Wall Street bankers shares
with with the kalahari Kung Bushmen who are among the genetically speaking they
seem to be very close to what the original most original human beings were
like in Africa before the Diaspora about fifty thousand years ago but you know
both of those people despite their vast differences live in
communities that have a hierarchical structure that are composed of
individuals that are embedded in a natural world you know the world outside
of the dominant Sarki and so that's the standard human environment I would say
and so stories that rely on the representations of those environments
and their interactions are what you might describe as universal stories and
that's why people can understand them and I would say further and this is
drawing substantially on say derivation of the work of Carl Jung because I think
he delved into this more deeply than anyone else so a lot of this stuff is
quite Union in its in its origins we the commonality between human beings so you
know you have to have commonalities in order to communicate right axiomatic
commonalities because otherwise you have to explain everything and so there's
many things that human beings don't have to explain to one another we don't have
to explain anger we do have to explain jealousy we don't have
to explain fear we don't have to explain pain we don't have to explain joy we
don't have to explain love etc those are built into us and so there are
predicates of being human and you could say that those human predicates and the
standard human environment produce standard narratives and then you could
say even further and this is more of a leap I would say is that those who act
out the role of the victor in those standard narratives are precisely the
people who attain victory in life and I would say biologically defined in that
they make more attractive partners but also I believe that there's an alignment
between human well-being which is a very weak word and participation in these
meta narratives that drive success because well do you want to be a failure
or a success well you know it's hard to be a success you have to adopt a lot of
responsibility and so you might be willing to take your chances as a
failure but I can't exactly I'm not going to make the presumption that
that's going to put you in a situation other than one where you experienced a
lot of frustration anger disappointment depression pain and anxiety at the
bottom of the heap and so generally that's not what people are aiming for
although under certain circumstances if people don't like responsibility and are
willing to take their chances they might take the irresponsibility and it's
apparent freedoms over the necessity of thinking things through the medium and
long run anyways we stop here I suggested to you that one of the primary
narrative representations was the known or culture or order I think those or the
explored territory or the dominance arc I think those things are basically
interchangeable from from a representational perspective and you
know in the movie The Lion King that's represented by Pride Rock which is the
central place of orientation founded on Raw
which is the sort of thing that people embed their memories in that's why we
make sculptures and gravestones and that sort of things rock stands for permanent
and to have rock under your feet as to be on a solid foundation and that's a
pyramid in some sense in that movie and the pyramid has topped by you know the
king and queen and they're their offspring so that's that's the divine
couple that's one way of thinking about it and Simba of course is the newborn
hero and you know you extend that even though it's lions and drawings of lions
at that and animals are acting it out it's completely irrelevant to you that
those characters happen to be animated and that what you're watching is a
fiction so and I would say to you with regards to fiction you know you might
say well is fiction true or not and the answer to that is yes and no it's not
true in that the events portrayed in fiction occurred in the world they
didn't but they're fiction is true the same way numbers are true I would say
like you know if you have one apple and one orange and one banana the common
analogy between all of those three is one and you might say well is one as
real as one fruit is the abstraction one as real as one fruit and I would say it
depends on what you mean by real but representing things mathematically and
abstractly gives you incredible power and you could make the case that the
abstraction is actually more real than the phenomena that it represents and
certainly mathematicians would make that case they would say that mathematics is
in some sense more real than the phenomenal world and you know you don't
have to believe that mostly it's a matter of choice in some sense but you
can't deny the fact that an abstraction has enough reality so that if you're
proficient in using it you can really you can change the world and in and in
insanely powerful ways you know I mean all the computational equipment you
people are using or depending on the abstractions one and zero
essentially and I mean look at what emerges from that and so I would say
with regards to fiction if you take someone like Dostoyevsky oh I think it's
a favorite of mine by the way I would highly recommend that you read all five
of his great novels because they are unparalleled in their psychological
depth and so if you're interested in psychology Dostoyevsky's the person for
you Tolstoy is more of a sociologist but
Dostoyevsky man he gets right down into the bottom of the questions and messes
around transformative reading anyways Dostoyevsky's characters this character
named her skull in the Cobb is a character in crime and punishment and
Raskolnikov is a materialist rationalist I would say which was a rather new type
of person back in the 1880s and he was sort of taken by the idea that God was
dead and took and convinced himself that the only reason that he that anyone
acted in a moral way in a traditional way was because of cowardice they were
unable to remove from them the restrictions of mere convention and act
in the manner of someone who rose above the norm and so he's tortured by these
ideas he's half starving he's a law student he doesn't have enough to eat he
doesn't have much money and so you know he's not thinking all that clearly
either and he's got a lot of family problems his mother's sick and she can't
spend him send a much money and his sister is planning to engage in a
marriage that's loveless to someone who's rather tyrannical who he hopes
will provide the family with enough money so that he can continue in law
school and they write him brave letters telling him that she's very much in love
with this guy but he is smart enough to read between the lines and realizes that
his sister is just planning to prostitute herself in you know in an
altruistic manner he's not very happy with that and then at the same time as
all this is happening he becomes aware of this pawnbroker who he's you know
pawning his last possessions to and she's a horrible
person and not only by his estimation she pawns a lot of things for the
neighborhood and people really don't like her she's grasping and cruel and
deceitful and and resentful and like and she has this niece who's not very bright
intellectually impaired whom she basically treats as a slave and beats
all the time and so Raskolnikov you know involved in this mess and half starved
and a bit delirious and possessed of these strange new nihilistic ideas
decides that the best way out of this situation would be just to kill the land
let the pawnbroker take her wealth which he all she does is keep it in a chest
free the niece so that seems like a good idea so remove one apparently horrible