2024-01-04 Reason Is Fun #5 - The Art of Decision Making
Duration: 00:49:13
Transcript
Lulie Tanett
Welcome to the Reason is Fun podcast. I’m your host, Lulie Tanett, and it’s an unusual one today because following the episode on decisions, I have one of the facilitators and producer of Art of Accomplishment’s Great Decisions course, Mark Alexander. So it’s a three-way conversation about decision-making, hang-ups or mental blocks, and what to do when one encounters them. I really loved Mark’s decisions, and it was a pleasure to have this conversation. Enjoy.
Mark Alexander
I listened to the episode that you recorded with Lulie, and there was a few things that kind of piqued my interest. One of them was around competing wants, where I think you were talking about ice cream and different flavors of ice cream, or something to that effect. And there was this notion that you can want the ice cream, but you can also not want it. And so you have these competing wants inside. And when I think of that, it takes me into kind of the realm of shoulds. And I wanted to see how that squares with you and how that fits in.
David Deutsch
As with many words and concepts in everyday language, should has two pretty opposite meanings. One of them is, I could say, it’s the proposed solution of a problem, namely the problem of what to do next, which is a problem faced by any creative entity. So to be creative, creativity comes from solving problems, and all life is problem-solving, and the problem is at least two competing theories. And so in that sense, when I say I should do so and so, it should, that ought to be, should be the conclusion of a creative process, which at the beginning did not have, had many possible outcomes. So that’s one way of looking at should. The other way of looking at should, and if I, it’s often connected with other people, but to keep it uniform, let me think of it again as just being inside one mind, where you’re saying, to cut a long story short, you’re saying I want to do so and so, but I should, I shouldn’t. So in the case of the ice cream, it would be that I want the ice cream, but I shouldn’t. And existing culture kind of thinks that this is what morality is about, this is what life is about. We, there are, as Michael Lockwood said to me once, morality is the theory of, let me get this right, the theory of why you, why you don’t do what you would do if you didn’t know about morality. So his idea is, if it weren’t for our theories of morality, there’d be a thing that we would do, like we would do the animal thing or the base thing, or the, but because we have moral theories, we don’t do those anyway, despite in some sense wanting to do them. Now I think that is, that is a description of what happens when moral thinking goes wrong. It’s, it’s, it’s a very bad way of characterizing moral thinking in general. Yeah. What’s, what’s wrong with it? Well, it, it envisages a perpetual unresolvable conflict. And you know, that, that’s the definition of hell or something, you know, that, that’s, that’s, I mean, you know, it’s never exactly that, that, that’s, that’s oversimplification of what the prevailing view of morality is, because I think the prevailing view also includes the idea that one can, one can want to be, to do the moral thing. It’s not quite the same as saying one can want to be moral, because according to Michael Lockwood’s definition, that want can coexist with another want to be immoral.
Mark Alexander
I have a question about the should thing, which was that, so you said that should was something like at the end of a creative process, that’s the, whatever, best answer that you’ve got.
David Deutsch
Well, that’s the answer. I mean, that’s the answer, which is, has solved the problem for the moment.
Mark Alexander
In what sense is it should that thing, like, like, why do you need the word should in the first place?
David Deutsch
Because it’s not a factual statement. It’s, it’s, it’s not a statement so and so is true. It’s a statement that, that so and so should be true. Like if it isn’t true now, we’ll make it true.
Mark Alexander
How come you can’t just say, I want to do such and such?
David Deutsch
Yes, but you need an explanation. I mean, you have an explanation. You’ve just worked out quite possibly a complicated explanation for why you now want this. And so there’s something extra. It’s, it’s beyond just wants. You had wants at the beginning. At the end, you have a want.
Mark Alexander
And you found that by considering morality. Like as though the morality is driving the want?
David Deutsch
Yes, absolutely. It always does. That’s another thing, you know, thinking it’s the other way around is, is another of the misconceptions about morality that’s built into our culture.
Mark Alexander
I think I see it. Okay. So when I, when I think of morality, the word morality, the way it’s being used, I was thinking of it as like an extra layer being laid on top of like, it’s a layer of shoulds. I think of it as a layer of shoulds. I think what you’re saying is not that it’s saying that morality is inbuilt in the creative being. Is that a fair statement?
David Deutsch
Yes, yes, yes. And it’s, it’s built into the faculty of having wants in the first place, because a human, any creative entity has got problems, i.e. conflicting theories, conflicting ideas, conflicting wants, conflicting moralities. We think about morality in order to solve these moral problems, which we have by virtue of our nature as creative beings.
Mark Alexander
Ah, so one thing I see there is, is when you’re in that inquiry, the inquiry could be one of, because this is inbuilt, it can be navigated through looking at what do I want. And there’s another way of navigating it, which was, which is purely intellectual based on kind of the text of what this morality is supposed to be.
David Deutsch
I think that’s not quite, I wouldn’t quite put it like that, although, you know, one could put it like that. Let’s say, let’s say you’re having a vaccination, and you, you feel the needle going in, and you have an inborn tendency to wince, that is to pull your arm away, but you want the vaccination to go well. So one way you can think about this is that you’ve decided you should have a vaccination and therefore your want to wince should be overridden, and you should just power through and do it anyway. But I think that for most people, you know, we call people who haven’t been able to be rational about this issue, we call them, you know, a needle phobic or whatever.
Mark Alexander
I’m very sympathetic with that. So what’s happening in the resolution of this conflict, you know, somehow you’re seeing this whole vision, you’re saying, well, I want the vaccination and like, this hurts. So you have these two conflicting things, these two conflicting feelings, two conflicting wants. I want to get this injection and I don’t want to get this injection.
David Deutsch
It’s often the way, by the way, if you view an apparently intractable problem just from a different angle, you, you, like I say, sometimes you, you, you go and climb a hill and look at the problem from a different vantage point. It’s not that the hill is part of the solution. It’s the different perspective on the problem makes it a different problem and therefore one that maybe can be solved.
Mark Alexander
In your, in your formulation solutions and decisions, what do they have in common and how do they, how are they different? So if a decision is problematic, then you can say the process of, you know, rationally reaching the right choice, making the right decision
David Deutsch
Is, is a process of solving a problem. But I think many decisions don’t have this kind of conflict in the first place. I think they are many decisions, like I said in the podcast with Lulie, because nowadays we think in terms of game theory and decision theory and of probabilities and utilities and that kind of, this has entered the culture. It’s not that old. I think it only entered the culture like after World War II. We, we retrospectively frame decision making as being this game theoretic process, which by the way does not include any creativity. It doesn’t involve any, actual solving of problems. It’s, it’s, it’s all kind of mathematical. You, you can end up saying, you know, yes, I want to do A and not B because A outweighs B. That doesn’t go anywhere towards solving the problem. Well, it might go some way towards it, but there you’re still left with a problem. And, you know, doing A when you still want to do B may be very unpleasant. It may be …
Mark Alexander
Traumatic. Oh, this is great. This is great. Doing A when you, when you want to do A and no
David Deutsch
Longer want to do B, that’s a solution. If there was a problem, but often, you know, when we’re, when we’re choosing so-called choosing in a restaurant from a menu of what to have for dinner, it’s not really accurate to say that the different meals on the menu are choices which you are weighing. It’s, you want to have dinner and you’re, and you’re, you’re trying to find a nice dinner to have. And then you find it and you have it. And nowhere did this resemble a scan of the menu, a construction of the utilities, a construction of the probabilities.
Mark Alexander
Right.
David Deutsch
And so on.
Mark Alexander
This game theoretic approach. And what was the role of creativity in that? How was that different from the game theoretic approach to the same problem?
David Deutsch
So in the game theory view, the options are fixed and the utilities are fixed. There is no game theory for how you change your utilities. They are permanently attached to the options and there’s no acknowledgement that a new option can be created. I mean, you know, it might be acknowledged in the paragraph before all the equations, but that paragraph, if it’s honest, will say, we are not analyzing the issue of where the preferences come from, where the utilities come from, where our estimates of the probabilities come from. We’re assuming those are all given and will not change.
Mark Alexander
Right. And it’s creativity that’s required to introduce the new possibilities. Yes. Yes. Now with creativity, we could theoretically create anything, an infinite number of new options, which seems also unhelpful. Yes. What do you suppose guides that process?
David Deutsch
Well, it’s always in response to a problem. So for a start, what guides it is we’re thinking of possible candidate solutions to the problem. By the way, when one is stuck on a problem, this search for candidate solutions goes around in circles. So you keep coming back to the same thing. What about so and so could, oh, no, that doesn’t work. What about this? No, that doesn’t work. And then you go back to the beginning and you have sort of cyclic thoughts, because if it weren’t, if that weren’t so, then either you’d be spiraling upwards and find a solution or you’d be spiraling downwards into a state of despair. And both those things can happen. But if you’re stuck, then whatever is causing this stuckness, the hangup is creating stasis or circularity.
Mark Alexander
What exactly is a hangup? Because I heard you use it and I really appreciated your use of it, but it got me wondering, wait a second, I don’t think I understand exactly what he means by hangup.
David Deutsch
Well, it’s a process which operates in parallel with other processes that are perhaps trying to solve problems, and it sabotages them. So it sabotages either it sabotages the creative process by or it sabotages the critical process. Or maybe those are both the same thing, because at any rate, it installs something that knocks down every, no, they’re not quite the same thing. Knocking down creative process means criticizing absolutely everything. Whatever comes up, it’s going to be criticized and by the same criterion, and it’s painful. So you want to get away from that.
Mark Alexander
Are hangups always kept in place by pain?
David Deutsch
No, they might have been originally caused by pain. I think always, but I don’t claim to understand the human mind. If I did, I could make AGI, and I can’t. Also, there are some people who are okay with pain.
Mark Alexander
Yeah, well, it’s not pain. What about if we use the word suffering?
David Deutsch
Yes, yes. So it’s always caused by suffering, I think. I can’t swear to that, but I’m guessing. It’s always originally caused by suffering. But then, once it gets entrenched, it can become part of one’s personality. So that one can have these circular type of thoughts, without it ever actually being painful. What happens is that you’re kind of fearing the pain, but that’s not right either, because fear is also suffering. But it’s kind of, you’re chronically avoiding the pain, and you’ve succeeded in never feeling it. Fear with resistance is suffering. Is that right? Yeah, quite possibly, yes.
Mark Alexander
What did these hangups have to do with emotions? How do you see that they interact?
David Deutsch
Okay, well, as in the case of phobias, like needle phobia and so on, the ideas that are in conflict are not all explicit. They’re not all of the form, you know, I want to do a, but if I do that, then this will hurt. And, you know, it’s not like that. Some of the ideas are inexplicit or unconscious. Often one isn’t aware of what they are, or what they were, but they participate in an unconscious process that does this sabotaging thing.
Mark Alexander
Would you say somatic?
David Deutsch
I don’t know. I mean, perhaps you would say somatic, but I don’t have such a clear picture of unconscious processes or inexplicit processes. I know that they’re always there and that they are essential. I also am fairly sure that no mental process is entirely conscious, entirely explicit, entirely analytical. For example, when you’re speaking, when we’re speaking, some unconscious process is bringing up the words I need. You know, I said need just now. Why did I say need? I’m not aware of the process that fetched that from memory, and I don’t even know why it fetched it. It just did, unconsciously. I can conjecture, like, if I don’t like the outcome, I can conjecture what the unconscious process might have been. I might have used a long word, and it would sound awkward in a certain context. Then I can go back and say, well, the long word sounds pompous. Then I’ll switch it to a short word, like Winston Churchill did. I don’t want to be the kind of person who uses long words that are pompous, because I don’t want to be pompous. Exactly, except in certain situations where I do want to be pompous. So, you know, you can criticize and criticize. If something becomes problematic, you can criticize and solve the problem in principle.
Mark Alexander
Gotcha.
David Deutsch
And the only time that this gets stuck is when there’s something irrational underway, as I described, and that’s what I call a hang-up.
Mark Alexander
Gotcha, gotcha. So what do you find really helps
David Deutsch
Decision-making? I try to avoid decision-making. I mean, it depends what you’re calling decision-making. I might have a problem, and I might be seeking the solution. This doesn’t usually look like having an array of solutions. I mean, usually even having one solution is pretty good. You know, the problem is that we have no solutions. But I’m, generally speaking, I only have one kind of thing I want. And if I have another one, it’s quickly resolved, and I don’t have to have a policy for how to resolve them. I mean, obviously, problem-solving involves at least two things. So I solve problems, but I don’t think this comes into decision-making much.
Mark Alexander
But somehow it is only one thing at a time, and there’s never like cross-talk, or you’re never encountering something that makes it feel like there’s a trade-off or there’s a suffering thing.
David Deutsch
So yes, if you’re talking about everyday things, then there’s really no reason why they should be problematic. And yet? The kind of problem I’m working on are problems to do with ideas. So I’m trying to develop constructor theory, and constructor theory has this major flaw or gap that it doesn’t deal properly with time in physics. And almost every other theory in physics has got time deeply built into it. And I think that for many reasons, some of them inexplicit, no doubt, but for many explicit reasons, I think that constructor theory is either true or it’s definitely the path to the truth. And yet I can’t think of a way of incorporating time. I mean, actually, I’m describing my state of mind a little earlier, some days ago. So there I’ve got rival theories, and those trying to change those rival theories produces a whole lot more rival theories, and none of them are satisfactory. And I’m thinking of new ones, and I’m thinking of new criteria by which to judge them. In fact, one way of looking at constructor theory is that it is a new way of judging theories in physics, which removes these sort of inherent problems in the existing ways.
Mark Alexander
So when you were, and I love that you’re at a different point in the constructor theory arc than you were when you were just describing it. When you were at that point where you were describing it, where you were evaluating all these possibilities, I imagine there are an infinite number of possibilities. How did you, and you know that you have finite time, how did you decide where to put your attention?
David Deutsch
Each new possibility was an attempt to solve the problem or problems in the old possibilities. So, you know, now I can’t describe it in as much detail as you may want, because again, that would be, if I could do that in sufficient detail, I could make an AGI to do it. The reason it doesn’t explode to infinity is that each of the possibilities is there for a reason. It’s, you know, I’m hoping that it will resolve so-and-so, and then I can check to see whether it resolves so-and-so, or maybe half resolves it, or maybe, you know, there are many maybes, and each maybe is chosen with a view to it solving the existing problems. This whole process is intensely pleasurable. It’s fun. Although I’m beset by problems, that’s where I want to be. That’s why I don’t want to do my tax return. It’s so that I can have those problems.
Mark Alexander
Wow. So you’re following the pleasure. The fun, yeah. Yeah. So what’s the role that fun has in your creative process? Because if I’m following, creativity is necessary in order for this not to …
David Deutsch
Just be some game theoretic exploration. Yes. Yes. So I think that fun, the state of mind that we call fun is intimately connected with creativity. It’s unblocked creativity. That’s what fun is, I think. I mean, you know, we can only talk in very hand-waving terms about mental states and mental processes. It’s very ill understood in my view.
Lulie Tanett
Yeah. This is also why my podcast is called Reason is Fun. It’s the same worldview. Yeah. Yeah.
Mark Alexander
I’m so curious to what extent this maps onto your way of thinking about things or the art of accomplishment way of thinking about things. Oh. And whether there are any disagreements in particular. Well, I’m not seeing any yet. And of course, that’s the main thing that I’ve been looking for. The one that was kind of an interesting one was where David is saying, oh, I don’t have dilemmas. I only ever have one want. And that made me think, maybe we’re not talking about the same thing. Or maybe this really is David’s world. And that’s just how it is. And for many of the rest of us, it’s not that way. Like, I encounter a lot of dilemmas or things that feel like dilemmas, places where there’s competing wants. And that’s where I find that some tools, or just to zoom back out and say, oh, wait a minute, what is it that I’m not willing to feel here? That tends to be a very fast path back to the creativity for me. But I think we’re speaking the same language insofar as the connection of fun and creativity.
David Deutsch
I just wanted to insert that having competing wants is not the same thing as being in a hangup. Competing wants, again, it’s this thing that the same words can describe two opposite things, can describe two opposite states of mind. Having competing wants in itself is pleasant. It’s like it’s food for thought. You know, if all life is problem solving, and if problems are competing ideas, and in particular competing wants, then all life is and should be competing wants. The thing that makes it unpleasant and pathological is when there’s a process underway also in one’s mind that sabotages conjecture and criticism and tries to not let the mind as a whole make progress.
Lulie Tanett
In the emotions view of decision making, Mark, you said that it’s a quick path to getting back to the creativity.
Which reopens the options so that I can get to a good decision quickly. Whereas David’s view seems to be something like taking a different perspective or there are tons of different ways to get to that. And this is one of the tensions that I have that I’m wondering about. When do I go into whatever emotion it is versus when do I find a different intellectual view or a different perspective or something? Because, okay, when most people go into their heads and try to intellectualize it, that takes them further away from the things they want. And then somehow in David, it doesn’t. It takes you closer. It sounded like you were seeing a choice between feeling the emotion versus do I engage creativity or do I feel the emotions? And in my experience, it was more like what is the path to re-engaging creativity? And for me, that path is feeling the emotions. Like one just goes straight to the other. The emotions are the fastest path for me to get back to creativity, which opens up the options, which leads to a cleaner decision. I think David often recommends basically finding the fun or finding the enjoyment as your first step. Like if you’re suffering, if you’re whatever depressed or whatever, the first thing is feel better.
David Deutsch
Absolutely. Because we haven’t mentioned yet, because suffering is simply distracting and is therefore another thing that prevents proper thought from happening. So, and suffering, especially suffering that can be mechanically lessened, like, you know, can be lessened by having a cup of tea or lessened by going on a run or whatever. If it can be done mechanically, that’s obviously the first thing to do. Because then you will definitely be in a better place without even having begun solving any problem.
Lulie Tanett
If you are suffering and you want to solve your problem of suffering, but the suffering is preventing you from being creative, what do you do? How do you feel about it?
David Deutsch
If there’s nothing you know of, like a cup of tea or a hug or a run or whatever, that will reduce your suffering, then you can’t. You have to do it another way. But if that’s available, then I think it has to be the first thing, because unlike everything else in the whole story, it can be done mechanically.
Mark Alexander
So here’s where the emotions view comes into it, which is when there is nothing like that, that seems like it can just put you into a better state, according to this emotions view, like, okay, what is the suffering in the first place? I would say that it’s some kind of resisting of an experience. And so if you find that place in you that you are resisting, that emotion that you’re resisting, and then you embrace it, basically, this is why art of accomplishment uses it to get to this state of creativity. So I don’t know if you agree with that, or what do you think of that whole thing?
David Deutsch
I mean, I haven’t thought deeply about that kind of thing. I suppose that the reason why people don’t naturally do this is in cases where the hang-up is causing suffering directly, not just from the fact that it’s there, but it’s actually hurting you, like each time, every time you go around the loop, it goes, you know, you are no good or something, then you try and get out of it, and you go around in a circle, and you come back to you are no good again. So the reason people don’t want to embrace the process that’s doing that is that they fear being poked again. So I don’t know.
Mark Alexander
I mean, you know, it’s not a good state to be in. I mean, at some point, it feels like there’s a bifurcation that happens where that loop happens over and over and over, and you keep getting poked. And it just kind of, wow, life just sucks and sucks more and sucks more and sucks more. And then the bifurcation point can happen where this is untenable, like where you, quote unquote, hit rock bottom. And then you’ve got the energy to do something big and drastic.
David Deutsch
Yeah, I can easily imagine that happening. And if it happened, it would be a case of explicit theories having changed the environment in which the inexplicit theories are operating and allowed them to evolve. In general, the theories of these different kinds are not conflicting because they are contradicting each other, as it were. Not usually anyway. Usually they do it indirectly by changing the environment in which so, in this case, the explicit theory, this can’t go on. Well, you know, this is rock bottom, therefore it can’t go on. Therefore, I can’t do the usual thing. Therefore, I must do a different thing. That, if you just said that, it wouldn’t make any difference to the situation, but you feel it because the way that your feelings are evolving is affected by you having reached that decision or that theory. I say I switched to theory because I always want to stress that none of these things are sources of knowledge. They, or rather they’re not infallible. They’re not, none of them are privileged as knowing what the answer is if you don’t. They could all be mistaken.
Mark Alexander
Would you consider emotions as a source of knowledge? A fallible source of knowledge. A fallible source of knowledge like everything else. Though reasoning is also a fallible source of knowledge.
David Deutsch
Mm hmm.
Lulie Tanett
I’m still personally curious when to do the going into emotions move versus when to do the David take another perspective, solve the problem mode. I encounter this, you know, every day of my life. Yeah, it sounds like there’s even a decision process happening to determine which of those you take. What’s going on when you find yourself in that position? Either I’m either I’m doing my practicing art of accomplishment thing, or I’m having conversation with David and so kind of doing that. Or let’s see if I’m on my own. Ah, I have, I seem to have, I don’t endorse this. I seem to have a, the idea that something like always go into the emotion thing, because that’s what I should do. Because, because my head led me wrong in the past, and therefore it’s not to be trusted for the time being while I’m relearning the whole embodied emotions thing. So it has, I don’t know, it has bits of truth and bits of falsehood, shall we say. Yeah, what a landscape. Like there’s, there’s the should in it. There’s the, I also hear the experiment in it. Like, oh, well, my mind steered me wrong last time. So I’m going to experiment with a new approach. I’m going to try this other thing. But there’s also the, there’s a going into the emotion, which sounds like a voluntary process. How does that work? Yeah. And there’s also a reaching for what is the right answer. And will one of you tell me?
Mark Alexander
Yeah. So what was your question? How does what work?
Lulie Tanett
How does it work when you’re going into an emotion? And I just put up air quotes and what do you mean by how does it work? What are you, what are you doing when you say go? What are you doing to go into the emotion?
Mark Alexander
Um, I’m looking for what is the strongest thread of sensation in my body. And I’m also asking myself the question, what am I resisting? What emotion am I or what sensation am I resisting? Well, I don’t know. There’s actually like a dozen different moves that I make that different things I asked myself and so on.
Lulie Tanett
Yeah. And it, my guess is that that’s many times fruitful and sometimes not. Is that fair? Yeah. What’s the difference between those two?
Mark Alexander
Yeah. I can only think of specific examples where the, um, where I’ve been making specific, I now in retrospect think, um, errors. So for example, with sadness, then I might go into a sadness, but then it kind of like takes me over and then I just kind of get into a, …
David Deutsch
Into a wallowing state. It, it occurs to me that there’s this picture that you just painted. I mean, you know, I’m a, I’m a total newbie in this area, but you said there’s, there’s your analytical side and then there’s the emotion side and you, you’re, you’re giving the problem to one or both of them and saying that, that you’re hoping that one of them will tell you the answer. Well, they are actually in real life, both, both of them are part of you. They’re, they’re part of, um, but so is the thing that’s giving them the problem yourself when you’re giving it to them. And it seems to me that you’re, the description you gave only allows two out of those three to be creative. You are just going to sit there and wait for the answer. So, but you know, I may have got hold of the wrong end of the stick in describing me.
Mark Alexander
No, no, no. Yeah. This is brilliant. Yeah. Just that notion that all three are, well, would you say that all three could be creative entities?
David Deutsch
Yes, yes, definitely. Non-creative entities are a wholly different thing. Like if you, if your glasses don’t work and you want to see something better, then feeling better about it isn’t, it’s not relevant, but I’m talking about things inside the mind and all those things inside the mind worth calling mind are creative.
Mark Alexander
Hmm. What would you say in that respect about the voice in the head?
David Deutsch
Yeah, like the critical voice. Yeah. The super ego type voice. Well, uh, I think it, I don’t like it. It’s an entrenched, um, it’s a picture of an entrenched conflict between the ego and the, or even the ego and the id and the super ego. They all don’t like each other and are fighting and, um, and they’re all pretending to know something and they’re all fallible. In fact, it could be that none of them are right and so on, or it could be that all of them are right, but they don’t realize it yet and so on. Can’t the critical voice also be creative? Yes. Yes. Well, the critical voice is, is a, it’s an anthropomorphization of a part of a person which casts them in an authoritative role and authority is bad. So although the authority may well be creative and may well have knowledge and may well have the answer, that doesn’t mean that they’re entitled to be authoritative.
Mark Alexander
Is it, is it always authoritative? Oh, because of by virtue of being critical?
David Deutsch
I, you know, I’ve never seriously read Freud and I’ve only read a bit of it and maybe this is just my interpretation of Freud, but I think his interpretation is, you know, we’re born with just an id and then that becomes sharpened to become an ego and then super ego forms and that’s where morality is. The id and the ego don’t have morality in them. One just has wants and the other one just has, has calculations and then the super ego comes in with morality. So how does that square
Mark Alexander
With, when you talk about wants, when I hear that, that parsing of it, the id is where I see the wants as living. And when we were talking earlier, we get onto the idea of wants being the seat of morality. And so is that in conflict with Freud’s?
David Deutsch
I think it probably is because I think he thought of all three of these things as being largely immutable. I mean, they might evolve as you get older and they might evolve with experience or something, but basically, you know, during any period of your life, they are, they are the interaction between those is what constitutes your life. And I don’t think that’s accurate.
Mark Alexander
If they were mutable, then is it all cool?
David Deutsch
Yes, but then you have to ask mutable by what? Then, you know, this, this whole picture of bits of the mind that control other bits, but are mutable. Well, what’s going to mute? What’s going to mutate them? Is it yet another bit, you know, a super, super ego or there isn’t the terminology for saying a super ego, you know, an extra bit of ego that can analyze the super ego and so on ad infinitum. That’s not, that’s not how anything could work. It’s impossible.
Mark Alexander
I once heard someone describe the mind and specifically wants and desires and so on as being it’s, it’s as if you are the zookeeper and you can’t force animals to do particular things, but what you can do is open a pen or like, you know, put some food there and then they’re going to do what they’re going to do. I’m curious if that.
David Deutsch
Well, that’s a bit like what I said about different parts of the mind altering the environment in which the others are evolving. They don’t directly instruct other parts of the mind, but unlike Freud, I think that first of all, I think there’s lots of these and also I think that they’re not arranged in any kind of hierarchy. They may at one particular instant, like one of them might be affecting the others and not vice versa, but that’s not built into the system. Anything can criticize anything and you mentioned, ah yes, about reaching rock bottom. So that’s an example of an explicit theory changing the environment in which an inexplicit theory is evolving, but I think more often it actually happens the other way around. So it’s actually good to have that example just to show that both directions are possible and there’s nothing that, so if it were a hierarchy, then the thing at the apex of the hierarchy could never change unless it changes automatically with your age or whatever, you know, changes at puberty or you know, but something being immutable is irrational and also in practice is going to sabotage problem solving because it will rule out certain conjectures and it will also rule
Mark Alexander
Out certain criticisms such as of itself. So amid all these parts of the mind, what is it that draws us forward toward good explanations, toward better explanations?
David Deutsch
Well, it doesn’t always. We learn language, you know, when we’re babies and toddlers and that we must be doing that by Popperian conjecture and criticism, but Popperian epistemology is not built into us in our genes. It is itself a piece of knowledge, so when it comes to something more complicated, I hesitate to say complicated because complicated language, learning language, is incredibly complicated, but when it comes to something less straightforward in terms of the considerations and one’s wants, then it’s not obvious. One can, you know, Popper only invented his epistemology in the 20th century. In the 19th century, nobody knew it.
Lulie Tanett
The question was like, what actually causes us to do this? And you were saying more like, the process that is used is Popperian epistemology, but I, maybe I’m wrong, but I think Mark was asking more like, why do we choose to learn language in the first place?
David Deutsch
Yeah, well, we have problems, so we’re born with problems already and we try to solve them by conjecture and criticism, so we’re born with the problem of wanting food or whatever and we also are born with theories about how to interpret some of the movements of our limbs, not all of them, but so on. So therefore, we’re born with the propensity to be frustrated. So, you know, you want to reach for something and you can’t reach for it, so you want to, so one of the ways of making that better is to learn to control your inborn fine motor control capacities.
Lulie Tanett
And frustrated can be enjoyable according to your special definition of frustrated that not everyone may share.
David Deutsch
Yes, okay, so I just didn’t want to say problematic too often.
Mark Alexander
Yeah, I love it because what I heard in there was the suffering of the kind of the annoyance of not having food.
David Deutsch
Yeah, no, that’s not necessarily it. I mean, that happens when you’re blocked, when you can’t make progress in this problem. That’s suffering. But if it’s just a problem, that’s enjoyable. I mean, we know that even very young children try to do things like putting blocks on top of each other and they fail and they try again and they’re enjoying that whole process. Sometimes they get frustrated and suffer and something has gone wrong there. That’s not what we’re built to do. That’s something that has interfered with what we’re built to do.
Lulie Tanett
So when you say frustration, you mean like his attempts were frustrated?
David Deutsch
Yes.
Lulie Tanett
Ah, not in the sense of annoyance, but in the state of like blocked.
David Deutsch
Yes.
Lulie Tanett
Interesting. And in that, I hear the beginning of the rock bottom.
David Deutsch
In the bad kind of frustration. Yeah, exactly. Yes, yes, yes. Because when you, one of the things that happens is that you can form bad theories about thinking. For example, that thinking is not effective. That what’s effective is screaming, let’s say. And what’s effective is hurting someone or, you know, you can, those theories are mistaken. You can learn this. Yeah, well, you learn it, you conjecture it. And then you may be misled by misleading experiences into concluding that that’s how the world is.
Mark Alexander
Do we ever have to suffer?
David Deutsch
Well, you know, depends. What does have to mean in that case? It is certainly within the capacity of the human mind to live a life without ever suffering. But there are things in the world that get in the way of that. And I think for young people, it’s principally coercion. I mean, in the sense of other people coercing you. I think it is possible to get into a state of internal mental coercion or, you know, intractable problems mentally without being forced to from the outside. But I think that’s unusual. It’s not, that’s not the usual, that’s not the usual problem. It’s usually the objective issue, the thing that is actually at stake is not very difficult. Like, you know, you’re a toddler and you want the ice cream. And there certainly is a way in which the laws of physics don’t stand in the way of you getting the ice cream. It’s always your parents. In cases where it is the laws of physics, you don’t usually get upset because a real problem, sorry, a real evil or whatever it is, is always, it’s always amenable to solution. Not, maybe not directly, maybe not immediately. Like, you know, you say, oh, we’ve run out. Well, can we go to the shops? Well, the shops are shut. Well, will something else do? You know, there’s always the problem, a real problem has a structure. I said, I think I said, in one of my books, I said that, yeah, it’s in The Beginning of Infinity, that an imaginary, we’re talking about antirational memes, and I said that the idea that there is a, that there’s a, what’s an evil spirit called, not a gremlin, Hobgoblin. That’s it. So this was in the memes article, which everyone should read.
Lulie Tanett
Did I take it out of the book? Well, well, now, well, now the evolution of culture has been published to the internet. It’s, it’s, I think one of David’s best writings, it’s all about coercion and hangups and everything.
David Deutsch
Okay, well, one of the things I remarked in that was that if there’s an antirational meme that asserts that there’s a Hobgoblin that is your enemy and coming for you, then unlike for true theories, unlike for rational memes, the antirational meme is actually helped in its propagation. If the fact that it asserts is false, because a real danger, unlike a Hobgoblin, a real danger is always finite and always is to some extent tractable. You can always make, make yourself a bit safer from the wolf, but if it’s a Hobgoblin, it’s defined as that you can’t make yourself safe from it.
Mark Alexander
Looking forward to reading that article. It’s not all about Hobgoblins. Excellent. David, Lulie, I am so happy we could do this.
David Deutsch
Indeed, it’s been fun.
Mark Alexander
Good. I’m really glad to hear that. This is awesome. I would love to do it again sometime. So nice to meet you.
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 a 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.
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