2024-01-03 Reason Is Fun #4 - Decisions
Duration: 00:54:19
Transcript
Lulie Tanett
Welcome to the Reason is Fun podcast. I’m your host, Lulie Tanett, and today I’m having a conversation with David Deutsch about decisions, the role of creativity in decisions, how we need institutions for making decisions, and all sorts of things about decisions, decision making. Figure out your life. Come on. 2024, it’s the new year. Let’s go. Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Lulie Tanett.
David Deutsch
I’m David Deutsch.
Lulie Tanett
And it’s been a long hiatus since we recorded. I actually want to understand decision making, because it seems like this is a topic. So first of all, I don’t think you and I have ever had a conversation where we actually talk about decision making as a thing or the philosophy of decision making.
David Deutsch
I think so, yes.
Lulie Tanett
Like the abstract ideas. And lots of people have very weird ideas about decisions. They think that you have to collect all the data before you make a decision, or that decisions are made from pros and cons lists, or you need to think about something a lot. And then there are tons of hang ups that people have around decisions like perfectionism, where they have to get all of the different ideas and not make an error when making decisions, or that they are overwhelmed by too many decisions. I get that one a lot. Are there any difficulties you have with making decisions?
David Deutsch
I very rarely make decisions, or at least not in the sense you mean, not in the sense you’re talking about. All that framing, everything you just said about decisions, seems to me very mechanical. It’s not something that a person does. It’s like a machine where you’re cranking the handle and you’re collecting the data. Well, you can collect the data, you know, you could get your dog to collect the data. That’s not the human part of decision making.
Lulie Tanett
What do you mean you can collect your dog?
David Deutsch
You can get a robot, you could train your dog to go out and collect things. But collecting things is only worthwhile after the creative process. You start with the problem, not with data. You start with some ideas which seem to conflict with each other. We’re making this product and it’s not selling enough, yet it’s a fantastic product. I use it every day, so why aren’t we selling lots of them? So that’s a problem. Sometimes that problem, you might think, well, I think that, but obviously other people don’t, or apparently other people don’t, so we could ask them.
David Deutsch
Your colleague might say, it’s no good because in regard to this problem, this particular problem, people are going to lie. They’re not going to tell you the truth when you ask them, you know, do you want to do so and so, because this is a charged issue. You know, they have all sorts of hang-ups, like they don’t want to get fat, so they don’t want to admit that they like that kind of product and so on. So in that case, just asking them might not do. But you might think of a cunning way of asking them something else where the answer to your question about why they’re not buying your product will come out. What’s the decision in this case? Decision is, well, yes, you have a problem. You don’t yet know what the decision is until you have formed the options. So the decision might turn out to be, well, should we advertise more? Should we change the way we advertise?
Lulie Tanett
When things are going well, do we ever actually do this process that is making a decision or is it more like in retrospect, when you encountered option C after thinking only about options A or B, then you just naturally went with C because that solves your problem?
David Deutsch
Yes. And then the A and B correspond to two different theories about how to solve your problem that were in conflict. And so you can kind of think of it like a decision, like, oh, should I choose A or should I choose B? But actually, a decision is always actually a problem. And so usually it’s always going to be this third answer. Usually, yes. I mean, human minds are complicated. So if you’re not sure whether you should have a Big Mac or a fillet of fish, and as you walk towards McDonald’s, you’re in a situation where you’re in two minds. And now it could be that when you get there and you see the big illuminated signs with the Big Mac and the fillet of fish, you decide, well, I’m going to have both. Or you decide, wait a minute, the way I would enjoy the Big Mac is the same as the way I would enjoy a cheeseburger. So what about a cheeseburger and a fillet of fish? Or how about having the two of them but not finishing either of them, leaving half of either of them? Or, you know, I could go on forever thinking about possible alternatives. When one doesn’t have food hangups, what actually happens both from an external observer’s point of view and from your internal observer’s point of view is you want to have a nice dinner. This place serves lots of nice dinners. You go in and you choose which one you want. And that’s difficult to express as a decision-making process in the conventional way, because all that’s happening is that you’re having dinner. That’s what’s really happening.
Lulie Tanett
So what’s the difference between the word choose and decide?
David Deutsch
Only that there’s a formal theory called decision theory, which involves things like options and weighing and probabilities and so on. And that has gotten into the general culture, so much so that people reinterpret ordinary thinking or creative thinking in terms of that. Creative thinking is never correctly represented by that because decision theory always casts decisions as mechanical processes. You make the list of things that are not so simple. You put the different utilities on the list. You add them up. You choose between them. There’s nothing in there about making a new option or about looking at existing options in a new way. Or, you know, now again, I could go on for an infinite time about how one can reinterpret the problem so as to make it easier to solve.
Lulie Tanett
What do you mean by reinterpret the problem to make it easier to solve? Oh, you mean like the example with the McDonald’s? I mean, there it seemed less about reinterpreting and more about thinking about different aspects of the problem that you hadn’t thought about before. Whereas in my mind, reinterpreting means taking a thing and then being like, oh, maybe I do want this after all, or maybe I don’t need this after all.
David Deutsch
Yeah, I suppose there isn’t any terminology that’s sufficiently general to talk about thought processes. But I think the important thing is that thought processes in general and choosing between things and living one’s life is all about creativity. And it comes from problems. As Popper says, all life is problem solving. And whether you think of it like that or not, that is what is happening when you’re thinking.
Lulie Tanett
So when you said that you don’t make decisions or you don’t often make decisions, what does that mean?
David Deutsch
It means that I don’t often find myself in a situation where it seems to me that there is option A and option B. And if I adopt option A, I’m losing whatever was good about B and vice versa.
Lulie Tanett
It’s that you don’t make trade-offs?
David Deutsch
Not consciously anyway, but I think probably not at all. Or I try not to.
Lulie Tanett
How could that be possible? Surely no option is perfect. Surely every option has a problem.
David Deutsch
Well, you know my standard example about buying an iPhone.
Lulie Tanett
And surely all theories are imperfect as well. So wouldn’t that also apply to…
David Deutsch
You can always reinterpret a thought process as not having been creative.
Lulie Tanett
Do you want to remind me, because it’s been a while since I heard the iPhone example.
David Deutsch
Right. Well, the decision theory analysis… I go to a shop, or let’s say before I go to a shop, I find out that there’s a new iPhone available. I go to the shop and I look at the iPhone and I decide to buy it and I hand over the money and I take the iPhone and I walk out of the shop. Now, that’s how I would describe the process. But decision theory would try to dissect this process into pieces that are mechanical. So the idea is first of all, once I’ve seen the iPhone, I work out how much I value it, how much I would value having it. And also how much I value the 400 pounds or whatever it would cost.
Lulie Tanett
Is the word decide about dicing up into pieces?
David Deutsch
I doubt it. But…
Lulie Tanett
Does it mean to cut off, I believe? Like to cut off options?
David Deutsch
It would be decise if it was that, but decise could easily turn into decide. I’m going to look this up. Right. Alright. Well, I look this up. So decision theory would say that what I’m doing, whether I know it or not, is I’m evaluating how much pleasure or satisfaction, whatever.
Lulie Tanett
Yo! Sorry, I was right. Well done. To decide from Latin decidere, to cut off from de, off, sedere, or cadere. I don’t know how to pronounce these things. Cadere, yes.
David Deutsch
Cadere, to cut. Okay, well, I’m wrong.
Lulie Tanett
So that’s sort of resolving difficulties at a stroke.
David Deutsch
I thought that cutting was a sort of quiso, C-I-S, rather than C-I-D.
Lulie Tanett
There’s probably multiple words for it. Anyway, yes, you were saying.
David Deutsch
Yeah, so the reinterpretation of my behaviour is that I attached, I worked out how much pleasure I would get from the iPhone, how much pleasure I would forgo by handing over the £400. I would have to think of the other things that I could buy with it, or the things that I would forgo by buying it.
Lulie Tanett
Sounds exhausting.
David Deutsch
Yes, and I think it almost never happens except to people who are ideologically committed to thinking that it must go like that. So, and then, when I hand over the £400 and take the iPhone, the actual benefit that I got from doing that is the pleasure of the iPhone minus the foregone pleasure of the…
Lulie Tanett
Because you’ve tossed away some utils.
David Deutsch
Yes, exactly. And for example, if it had been, if those two pleasures had been exactly equal, I would have been indifferent to whether I buy it or not. And then, you know, if they say, okay, make it £399.99, I would say, oh, thanks, good, now I can buy it. But the amount of pleasure I would get from that would be one penny. And that’s false. The amount of pleasure I would get from that is, if it made sense, it would be the whole £400. The money that I’ve given away was only there in order to get that kind of pleasure. So…
Lulie Tanett
I once was trying to decide on an Airbnb, and all of the Airbnbs that I could find in Prague seemed to have some sort of problem or something that was, you know, it was either too far away from the venue or it was shared or it was whatever, or it was too expensive. And the thing that caused me to finally make a decision was that I found one that cost $777 and I thought, you know what, that’s a really satisfying number. This is actually the thing that has caused me to make this decision. And so you might think that the value of money is by the exact amount of money it is, and that if you have, you know, $10 off, then you get $10 more pleasure, but that’s not true.
David Deutsch
That is a good example. And it might even have made you think that, well, maybe the landlord there has got a sense of humour, or has got an eye for, you know, wry facts.
Lulie Tanett
She did have a sense of humour because she cancelled two hours before I was going to. So…
David Deutsch
Right, wrong kind of sense of humour, yes. Anyway, the thing that decision theory is missing there is the creativity that I devoted to this whole process. And that creativity was not a kind of decision-making creativity in the way that’s usually imagined. It’s more like imagining myself owning the iPhone and imagining myself delaying and buying the next iPhone, and thinking that I would like to do the first of those things. Not how much would I like to do the first of those things compared with the second, because obviously I’d like to do the first of those things. I mean, obviously I’d prefer it if it was only the iPhone involved. So this aspect of thinking, of the idea of cannot be mirrored either by decision theory or by any mechanical theory, or model, or computer programme, or anything like that, because we do not yet know how to make a mechanical thing that has creativity. And by the way, side remark, if we did know, it still wouldn’t be good enough, because it would be making its own decisions in life, building its own way of interacting with the world.
Lulie Tanett
It sounds like it’s not just about creatively finding the most optimal option though, because in that example you gave, you said, ah, I would like this option. And so it sounds like there’s an emotional part of it, and it’s a bit of the context of my question, is that I did this how to make great decisions course with Art of Accomplishment, and one of their big things was that decision making is always emotional. It’s never that we have this list of pros and cons and that we do the right optimal whatever, which is similar to what you’re saying, although a bit different, and so I’m kind of curious to explore that. Also, incidentally, Damasio, Antonio Damasio, is who wrote The Feeling of What Happens. He also talks, I think he’s a neuroscientist or something, and he also talks about how if the region in your brain gets damaged, that governs emotions, that completely destroys your ability to make decisions. So for example, if you’re trying to think about where to have lunch, then it can take you an hour to figure out where to have lunch, or just to decide between which colour of pen to use, then it can take you 10 minutes to figure that out. So first of all, I guess my question is, do you think that sounds plausible? And then the second one is, how do emotions factor into your view of decision making, given that it seemed like it was this kind of hidden key thing in what you said?
David Deutsch
So let me first answer the first thing you said, whether decision making is always emotional. I think that’s the mirror image mistake of thinking that decision making is always mechanical. Internally, our thoughts aren’t divided like that. We have conjectures and we have criticisms, and we have all sorts of information that we can use to check whether our ideas are satisfactory. And problems can arise from the conscious, explicit part of our minds, and from the emotional parts, or from conflicts between those parts. And so can progress. Progress can also come from an interplay between the parts, and I suppose usually does. When we’re talking about, now to answer the second part, when we’re talking about people with brain damage, you’re really talking about, unless the brain damage is in the brain, then it’s so severe that they are not capable of creativity anymore, that they’re basically apes. Then unless we’re talking about that, if we’re talking about someone who is capable of creativity, then what we’re really discussing when we’re talking about what people do when they have a certain type of brain damage, is we’re talking about how they reinterpret their life and the world as a result of the incapacity or suffering or both.
Lulie Tanett
How could they have different specific types of reinterpretation? I’m thinking maybe this is actually a big can of worms. I get itchy every time you talk about this topic, because the way you talk about it, it sounds like, oh, well, we’re either intelligent and creative, or we’re nothing. We see with many, many, many examples that you can damage a specific part of the brain, or you can have a specific type of thing, or there’s a specific chemical that does a specific thing fairly reliably. However, this is a conversation about decisions, and so I want to make sure that we don’t go off onto that rabbit hole. Maybe I will put a flag, a pin in that one. I did want to say, so you were talking about how emotions play into decisions, and you were saying basically that you need both the analyzing stuff and the feeling about stuff. Is that right?
David Deutsch
Yes.
Lulie Tanett
This is super interesting, because usually I think of the stuff from art of accomplishment as being this emotional development thing. But actually, in this decisions course that I did last year, there was also a very big emphasis on what they called principles. In their conception of principles, a principle is something that makes a decision easier to make, or makes it more efficient or more enjoyable. Basically, it gives you what we would call knowledge to make the decision by. In the course, you come up with a list of principles that you have for yourself, and then you test them, and then you figure out what works well. I was thinking about this, and I was thinking, huh, it’s interesting that they have this thing that is apparently not about emotions at all. It’s about this concrete thing that you believe, this idea. How does that fit into all of this? Then I realized, and then I was also thinking about how this might correspond to the kind of Popperian, the Deutschian framework. I realized the thing that they call principles is the same thing as what you and Popper unusually call institutions.
David Deutsch
But institutions can be changed.
Lulie Tanett
Indeed. The whole course of the principles thing is that you’re constantly improving them and modifying them. It really is like, you start, okay, this is your existing set of principles, and then you test them, and then you change them, and you improve them. As you go through this, then it gets easier to make decisions. It’s never this static thing. I think what it is, because, okay, you look like you want to say something. You have a disagreement bubbling up inside you.
David Deutsch
Well, yes, but I don’t know if it’s a disagreement with what you said. It does sound to me like this is making the hierarchical mind mistake. That your subsidiary decisions are made by investigating your deep principles, which specify what you really want, and then you bring those up, and you use those to decide the less important things. Now, you just also said that you can change your principles, but you obviously can’t change your principles by looking deeply into your principles.
Lulie Tanett
That’s not what I said at all. I said the principles of things you make up. You make it up. You’re like, okay, so for example, one of my principles last year was it should be fun. The idea of this principle is that if I notice that I’m doing something, but it’s not fun, or that I’m doing this work, and I’m kind of doing this work for some other reason, and so it’s a principle that sort of invites me to look like, ah, maybe there is a way to make this more fun, or maybe this is actually the wrong thing for me to be doing. And this was a principle I kind of came up later on in the course, and all of these are just made up. I don’t know, I could have a dozen principles, and you do. You brainstorm them. So I don’t think they’re making the error. It’s not about looking deep inside you. It’s the opposite almost. It’s the emotion side. That’s maybe more about the looking deep inside you, but the principle side is something, it’s basically a list of the things, like your best guesses about what your ideas would say if you were, and it’s not just what your ideas would say if you were consistent, but it’s about actually testing and iterating on them until you actually get something that does work for you.
David Deutsch
I thought that the principles were ultimately about your feelings.
Lulie Tanett
No, that’s the thing. I’m saying it surprised me initially that in art of accomplishment, which is often about, oh, if you just sort out your feelings, feel your feelings, then everything is easier. It has this other component. And so when before you said, oh, well, I think that’s going too far. That’s the mirror image of trying to analyze everything is just trying to use your emotions on everything. Well, actually, it’s not like they have this other thing, which is the other sort of equally important thing. Now, I think they don’t, well, they don’t have the same explicit philosophy that we do on that, namely institutions and stuff. But so the reason that I think that it’s similar. So, okay, first of all, the way that you use the word institutions is really weird. You use it in situations like a relationship institution is the set of practices and knowledge about how to interact with a given person. Like if you have a relationship institution between you and another person and …
David Deutsch
Expectations, expectations. Yeah. And …
Lulie Tanett
Whereas most people think of institutions like an old building with outdated bookkeeping, I don’t know.
David Deutsch
Well, you know, there’s the institution as an old building, which Popper would disagree with. So he would say that the institutions are ideas. I’m not sure to the extent to which Popper would use the word institutions or even have the concept institutions for all possible domains of thought, as I would. I would say there are institutions in one’s mind and in groups of people’s minds that determine for the moment how they will interact, what they will get out of each other’s existence and communication and so on. So yes, I use that. I’m not sure that I don’t know whether Popper would use it like that. I don’t care, of course.
Lulie Tanett
So you specifically use institutions to mean a broad thing of, is it like set of existing knowledge and practices and expectations and…
David Deutsch
Yes, especially knowledge and practices and expectations about how other knowledge and practices and expectations will be treated.
Lulie Tanett
How is this different from rules of thumb?
David Deutsch
Well, rules of thumb could be anything. You know, you can have a rule of thumb that green means go and red means stop.
Lulie Tanett
So an institution is something like, you could think of it like a filter. So if you think of a filter, so if you’ve got some object level thing and you’re trying to decide between different object level things, then you might have a more meta level institution for making that decision. And so what’s an example of that?
David Deutsch
Well, so for example, if I’m standing in the bus queue and somebody pushes in front of me, that will invoke or activate certain institutions about how people should behave in bus queues, how if they don’t, what they can expect other people to do, what you can expect the bus driver to do and so on. And it also includes political institutions because you’ll be thinking that you’re entitled to so and so and the other person isn’t or is. You know, the other person could be disabled, in which case the institutions would say they should go first and so on.
Lulie Tanett
So is It Should Be Fun a bit of institution?
David Deutsch
Yes.
Lulie Tanett
And what’s the institutions that it is part of? It is a bit of? Well, it’s… You wouldn’t say it’s an institution in itself?
David Deutsch
All sorts of theories participate in implementing or judging the principle It Should Be Fun. To call something an institution and really nothing hangs by what you call it, but I would call something an institution if it’s to do with how we judge and expecting. So if you have that principle and you then… you have that institution, what that means is that you are in the state of mind where if something isn’t fun, it’ll raise a flag. And someone who doesn’t, someone who says, you know, what would Jesus do or, you know, whatever, would simply wouldn’t raise a flag. Their flag would be …
Lulie Tanett
Raised by something completely different. And I guess this also fits into that when things are going well, you’re not making decisions. You just have this creative process that is modified by your ideas about what qualifies as a good idea and what you want and so on. Yes. So yeah, I find this really interesting. So on a knowledge or information perspective, if we’re thinking like, okay, how do we get the best things possible? How do we get the most knowledge or the best knowledge or the best ideas or the most progress and whatever? And how do you make better or worse decisions? And it sounds like there’s two things happening here. One of them is that you have this what you want thingy, which isn’t just an algorithmic here is all of the information and therefore this is the necessary option that we will choose because there’s a well, what do you want in this situation, which might be considered the emotion side of it? Question mark?
David Deutsch
Well, in part, yes.
Lulie Tanett
And then and then the other thing is what are the types of things that lead to you getting what you want or the good thing happening, which would be this institution’s principles thing?
David Deutsch
Yes. Again, I have a feeling that’s slightly oversimplified. But yes.
Lulie Tanett
What detail would you add there?
David Deutsch
Well, one thing I’d add is that our wants may be contradictory. So, you know, when you ask somebody, do you want another piece of cake? They might well they might express their answer in all sorts of ways, which have the wrong epistemology and whatever. But the fact is, there’s a process running in their mind that does want the cake and there’s a process that does not want the cake. And they’re in conflict and one one or other of them will win unless unless they’re losing that part of their breath. They’ve lost that part of their brain and they just sit there forever, not knowing whether they want the cake or not. That part of their brain, namely the part that can solve the problem.
Lulie Tanett
Well, no, I mean, according to this theory that you told me a few minutes ago. Well, they’re they just wouldn’t have wants in the first place. And so it’d be difficult to Well, they must want to choose otherwise they’d get up and walk away.
David Deutsch
Huh? Well, I don’t claim to know the theory myself. There’s something that there’s something I haven’t quite understood at least. As you said, I would always translate something into …
Lulie Tanett
Yeah, but there would be maybe it’s something like the relative salience of the different wants. And so if everything feels about the same, then it’s difficult to resolve.
David Deutsch
That’s not true. If everything feels the same, you just take the first one. Why the …
Lulie Tanett
First one? Why not the second one? Well, yeah, or you take the second one or walk away or huh? Yeah, what is happening when that when okay, so when your emotions get messed up by brain damage? I mean, there does seem to be a thing where depressed people have a difficult time doing anything. And so they just lie in bed.
David Deutsch
It’s not because the mental electrical potentials of the different decisions are all equal. It’s because something is sabotaging whenever they get close to choosing a thing, something is sabotaging them and saying that that’s wrong.
Lulie Tanett
I’m not sure that these two things conflict. Okay, so maybe what’s happening is that somehow it causes this sabotaging process to happen more.
David Deutsch
Yes, but it shouldn’t though. That’s double checking or something. That’s a that’s a …
Lulie Tanett
Hang up. I don’t I don’t know it’s fully. Because you can get in the state of mind where you are doubting every I mean, it could be a hang up or a mistake, but you can get into the state of mind where you become a skeptic about everything. And so suddenly you’re thinking, oh, why do I think this? Or why do I want this? And maybe I’m wrong about that. Let me just check. And then the let me just check. You know, this is a sort of a thing. It’s almost like you have to re figure out your existing ideas or your why you believe things or something like I don’t know, this is kind of running into the justificationist stuff.
David Deutsch
Yes. And, you know, it is exactly that all the authoritarian theories of knowledge… So if your hang ups were formed at a time when you were subordinate to authority all the time, and if, having got out of that situation, you’re still expecting authority to tell you which is the right answer and not to punish you for choosing the wrong answer, then you may sit there and in front of the different coloured candy floss and not know which to take. Because every time you want to take one. But in fact, like I said just now, if you feel overwhelmed by the fact that there are 10 different colours of candy floss, and you can’t choose which one, and you’re not walking away, that means you want candy floss, and something is sabotaging a very simple mental process, which really shouldn’t you know, isn’t it’s hardly worth being called deciding.
Lulie Tanett
None of our ideas are true or complete. And so all of our ideas have some kind of problem with them.
David Deutsch
Well, have some kind of falsity with them, but not necessarily a problem. Well, if …
Lulie Tanett
You encounter a falsity, then isn’t that a problem?
David Deutsch
Not unless you have some reason to believe it’s false or reason to think it’s false.
Lulie Tanett
So if you think it’s false, then isn’t that a problem? If you have a particular reason you think it might be false, then that’s a problem. So if you both think it’s true and think it’s false, that’s a problem.
David Deutsch
Right. Well, if you don’t have a better idea, and you’ve encountered a, you’ve thought of a criticism of the thing that hasn’t been answered.
Lulie Tanett
So okay, one time I was feeling kind of bad, and I wanted to do something other than lie on the floor in my living room. But every idea I came up with, I thought of some reason that it wasn’t worthwhile, or it wasn’t going to work, or whatever. And so what was going on there?
David Deutsch
Well, for some reason, you ended up lying on the floor, which might have been the best thing to do, or it might not. But either way, you also had a theory or feeling or impulse to do one of these other things. And every time you thought of doing one of the other things or lying down on the floor, I put those all into the same category, something sort of made you feel bad about that. And for such a simple decision, which again is hardly worth calling a decision, being stuck on it and not being able to resolve that situation can only be a hang up.
Lulie Tanett
I think what was happening there is that something like I was being too critical, and this, my critical filter was turned up too high such that nothing could get through. And so the solution that I found to it, so first of all, I was trying to do some Alexander Technique thing. I thought, what if I just, I non-do something? And I thought, yes, I will non-do something. And I was thinking about this. And then I was like, okay, but meh. And then I realized, oh, I was sort of trying too hard to do this non-doing thing. Because I thought, well, it doesn’t matter what I choose. Like anything is better than lying on the floor. I’ll just choose something. And then so something came to my mind. And I thought, okay, now I will choose this, I thought to myself. And but then the process of criticizing it kind of came in. And so what I did instead was I decided that if the hint of a notion of something comes up, the next time the hint of a notion comes up, then I’m just going to do the thing and I’m not even going to think about it. And that was actually the thing that caused me to get up and do something else. Like, I guess I don’t fully know what the, what you’d call a hang up was there. But it seemed like dwelling on things caused me to be unable to decide between them. And I think if you analyze any option, you’re going to find problems with it. And so isn’t it, isn’t it partly just the case of going with your gut instinct or like, I don’t know, how do you view this whole thing?
David Deutsch
First of all, I, from what you described, that is what I would prima facie say is you found a way to sabotage the process that was sabotaging the decision making. So you decided in advance that when it next comes up, you’re going to ignore it.
Lulie Tanett
No, no, no, I didn’t. What happened was that I had a thing that came before that process could start up. Like, I found a way to act before that process.
David Deutsch
Okay, well, a bit like people with migraine, you know, they get an aura or something before the pain starts. And so they know that when they get the aura, you know, whatever, something like that.
Lulie Tanett
Not like a migraine, because that is when you get the aura of it’s going to start up. But I’m talking about before that happens, I’m going to look at the other thing, namely the what would be nice to do thing before the other process kicks in, because before it would be what would be nice to do. Oh, maybe I’ll go get a tea.
David Deutsch
I see.
Lulie Tanett
And then, ah, but I can’t get a tea because blah, blah, blah.
David Deutsch
It’s not that you interrupted the process, you overrode the trigger that usually starts the process.
Lulie Tanett
Right. And so what I’m saying is that the trigger that starts the process or maybe the process itself is being overly critical. And I guess the reason why I’m talking about criticism is if we think of knowledge in the Popperian way, where everything is either conjecture or criticism, or actually it’s kind of both at the same time, but increasing this critical filter then causes nothing to get through, whereas you want you want some conjectures to get through. And then I guess my question is, what is the thing that causes certain conjectures to get through? I suspect there’s something to do with emotions there. What’s your view?
David Deutsch
I don’t have a specific view about that in that sense. I think it has to do with emotions and it has to do with thinking and analysing and so on. They all, with something that’s like bothering you, then all different kinds of theories are going to be involved in solving it. I don’t think we can know, and if we did know, I don’t think it would be helpful to cast it as your emotions did so and so, and your analytical part of you did so and so. I don’t think it’s like that. Sometimes we can dissect with hindsight a piece of thinking in that way, but it’s always an approximation. And as I say, it’s not very helpful.
Lulie Tanett
So what is actually happening?
David Deutsch
So just thinking, I mean, there’s conjecture and criticism and so there’s a problem. But from the way you described it, you were separating that from the other options, because you consider the other options as substantive and the lying on the ground as just a symptom of not being able to decide between the things. And I was assuming that it was the latter, that lying on the ground was a symptom of not being able to decide between the things. And so I want to reject the idea that the reason this was difficult was that they all had equal utility. And I also am suspicious of the theory that it was just being over critical. I mean, it may, it sounds though it definitely was being over critical, but that’s not the point. The point is that there was a process which was using criticism to specifically prevent you making that decision.
Lulie Tanett
So AOA would say that the critical thing would be a way to not feel something rather, and that if I could feel my feelings, then the decision would become sort of obvious or second nature.
David Deutsch
Could happen.
Lulie Tanett
Is there an alternative? Like, what do you think is happening?
David Deutsch
Yeah, well, there are lots of things that it could be.
Lulie Tanett
I mean, on the theory that decision making requires this emotional component.
David Deutsch
Requires?
Lulie Tanett
Well, so deciding something is a physical action. And physical actions require, you know, physical processes to happen in the body. Now, this is sort of more my Alexander Technique inspired take. And so in order to physically act, things need to happen in the body. And I suspect that emotions are for causing particular physical actions to happen in the body. So fear might be for running away. And, you know, when you get scared, then these processes happen in your body such that it is easier to move and you get stronger or whatever. Or faster or more reactive or whatever. Similarly, like if you’re very angry, like lots of people do angry workouts because you get stronger because you’re, you know, you’re protecting something or you’re, you know, whatever, whatever is anger is about like boundaries, whatever, I’m going to fight. And then I could give a similar example for all of the emotions. And so I kind of think that emotions in humans, it’s sort of like emotions in animals, if we can call it emotions or feelings or the same kind of chemical processes that we’ve inherited from our animal ancestors. In animals, they all had a physical act, action associated because they would need to, otherwise they would not evolve. And so now in humans, not only do we use emotions for this physical moving thing, we also use emotions to think in certain ways or to, I don’t know, some kind of relationship between emotions and what we think and what our relationships are and so on that is more sophisticated than the equivalent version in animals. And so going back to what happens when decision making gets stuck, surely it must have some kind of emotional quality because emotions are to do with actions. That’s an argument.
David Deutsch
I don’t think emotions can be, I don’t think emotions are necessary for actions, especially not emotions that evolved for the action.
Lulie Tanett
How can you do an action if you don’t want something?
David Deutsch
So if, well, you might want something, but you might not want the thing that the emotion evolved to make you want.
Lulie Tanett
Well, no, I’m not talking about whatever the emotion. I mean, I think we’re people and we have re, we have done something with the emotional process so that it’s much more customized. So we can do things without wanting to, you know, we can, once you’re a skilled driver, you can. Isn’t it, isn’t it that you, a different part of you wants that thing? I don’t think we can do things without, like, some part of us thinking that this is the best option that we can do, right?
David Deutsch
Well, that’s, that’s slicing it up too mechanically. I think an actor can act angry or act frightened in a way that’s from the outside indistinguishable from the real thing. And similarly, as I was just saying, you, you, you, if you learn to drive, then after a while you can drive. You can put the clutch down without ever feeling that you want to put the clutch down.
Lulie Tanett
Well, a subconscious feeling is still a feeling like having an intuition for something.
David Deutsch
So an animal can want to run away, but doesn’t specifically want to put its paws down on the snow in a certain order, because that’s an automatic process honed by evolution. But humans can do that. They can just want to walk across the room without ever thinking about their pacing, or they can think about their pacing, or they can pace without wanting to.
Lulie Tanett
Isn’t it the case that you don’t know what is needed for thinking? So how come you don’t think emotions are needed for it? I say straw manningly.
David Deutsch
Well, I could. I’m not saying I know it isn’t true. I’m just saying I don’t know it is true. I can think of examples of types of thinking that are apparently not emotional, like automatically driving a car or automatically doing a calculation. So you may have you say you’re a physicist and you have a theory and you’re doing a calculation to see if it’s viable. Then you might have strong feelings about whether it’s viable. You know, you’re kind of hoping or fearing. But the hope and the fear, first of all, don’t affect your actual motion of your hand as you’re doing the calculation. And secondly, they are not necessary for it.
Lulie Tanett
I think that it does. So first of all, I think that it does affect your hand. Second of all, going back to the example you gave with acting. I think that basically, I think that method acting is how actors act. And the thing is, do they have a layer of something else going on or are they like fully merged with the role? And so I don’t think that it is the case that no matter what they say, incidentally, that professional actors who just act without having the feelings, I’d be very surprised if that were the case. Like if you measured them, then it would come back with, yeah, they don’t have the feelings. Or I would expect that to impact their acting in some way. And maybe most people don’t notice whether the feelings are real. And, you know, I know someone who is an expert in circling who can read someone’s internal feelings. And I asked him, OK, so we’re watching this program and can like do what they are acting as correspond to what the actor is feeling inside. And so it was interesting because it was the program Shrinking. And so there was Harrison Ford, who was indeed very consistent with his insides. And there was another actor who on the inside was basically being more performative, according to my circling friend who can read people that I believe is a real thing. And so, I don’t know, I think that maybe people can’t tell most people can’t tell unless you are trained in something like circling or another type of inner work like that. But for the peak of acting, like if you really want to act with your full being, I think you would have to have some amount of those feelings. Otherwise, it would look good because then you’d be having the feeling of wanting to do something else, namely to perform, for example. And so and then that would come across in some way because there’d be some aspects of your acting in the world as in behaving, moving that is coming from the wanting to perform rather than the role that you want.
David Deutsch
So I can imagine. I mean, you’re just imagining things. I can imagine an actor who is whose feelings are invested in accurately portraying characters. And it might be that the way that they do this is to have an accurate model in their minds, not of the. Of the characters feelings, but of their behavior. So you have to closely observe people until you work out, you know how the facial muscles do so and so. Yeah, I suspect this isn’t possible. I wish we had an actor here that we could just ask.
Lulie Tanett
Why not?
David Deutsch
Well, because all that they know is their theory of how they do things.
Lulie Tanett
Well, yeah, but there might be an actor who studied various different schools and can.
David Deutsch
Yeah, but even so, I mean, they would have an opinion. It might be valuable, but they don’t have access to the truth.
Lulie Tanett
Well, I’m not saying I want someone with certain access to the truth. I just want someone who knows what they’re talking about instead of us talking about the field that neither of us knows anything about.
David Deutsch
I’ve seen actors talking about acting and being contemptuous of method acting.
Lulie Tanett
It could be that method acting in particular is a version of acting. OK, here’s my guess. Not having read any about any of this. And so these are just my guesses based on what I know from more personal development psychology things. But my guess is that method acting is where you what in internal family systems we’d call merge with the part of you that is doing this acting. Whereas a different type of acting might be that you have that part of you, but you are whatever, observing it or that there is another part of you that you do know how you feel about something. But you’re just inhabiting this character that feels a different way about that thing. And you can access both of them. And so when people are contemptuous of method acting, I think that might well be just correct because it might well be that you are limiting yourself by being merged with one part of you or like this character or something and losing yourself in the process. But it’s not because another school of acting is you can learn to control your facial muscles by thinking about the exact face like I would be very, very surprised if there was a single school of acting. That was about that that had anything of value or possibly just that it would exist because I based on what I know about Alexander technique, you cannot separate mind and body in that way. The way that you learn to hold yourself in a different way in the Alexander technique is that you do a different thing with your mind. And then that has emergent effects that the body kind of responds to that. And so I would have thought the same is true in acting.
David Deutsch
Well, it could be. I mean, you know, I’m not. As I say, I don’t know. I only like disagree when you have a theory that the knowledge from these different parts of one’s mind is of a different kind, that it doesn’t obey Popperian epistemology or it’s somehow got supernatural access to things that physics says it doesn’t have access to.
Lulie Tanett
I believe that my theory does neither of these things, although it is possible that it does pose a threat to some bits of Popperian epistemology, depending on whether interactionism is true. And what was the other thing? Representationalism or something? Whatever those David Chapman people talk about. That’s a thing I would definitely like to talk about at some point. I think this is actually a good place to wrap up. So thank you for coming on the podcast again and restarting it.
David Deutsch
Thank you for having me.
Lulie Tanett
So fun fact. The reason I have this podcast in the first place is that I did this art of accomplishment, how to make great decisions course, and it’s coming up in about a week. And you have until January 8th to sign up. And if you use my code LULI100, you get a discount of one hundred dollars. So I super recommend this course. It has been very life changing for me. And I hope to see you there because I’m also going to be in this cohort.
Markdown