2024-08-26 Reason Is Fun #6 - Are Feelings Ideas
Duration: 01:26:19
Transcript
Lulie Tanett
Welcome to the Reason is Fun podcast. I’m here with a conversation with David Deutsch and a special guest, Mark Alexander, who has been on the podcast before. And I’m trying to resolve my epistemology crisis between the David Deutsch critical rationalism and the more emotional embodied Art of Accomplishment type ideas. I had so much fun here. I’m definitely a step closer to resolving my crisis, which is nice for me, and I hope you enjoy. So I’m really excited to have you both here because I’ve had something of a, I call it an epistemology crisis because, you know, I grew up around David type ideas and it’s all very kind of to do with the theory and the, it’s not a, you know, David’s a theoretical physicist rather than an experimentalist. And so a lot of the intuitions are around like these sort of abstractions. And then recently I’ve been getting into embodiment practices and the Art of Accomplishment stuff and like all of this kind of psychology and thinking with your body and all of this stuff that I didn’t think was possible, but apparently is real. And so I’m hoping to kind of like tease out some of these, like confusions that I have around this. And I thought, because yeah, we’re, Mark, you are like the intersection of these two worlds for me. So I thought it’d be an interesting conversation. Yeah. So first, so David, you, you have a particular approach to how to deal with hangups, which I haven’t really seen basically anywhere else. I don’t think.
David Deutsch
Well, wait, wait, just before you go on. Yeah. I don’t think I have any approach about how to deal with them. I have a certain approach to what they are, but which I think might help sometimes, but what to do about them. I’m, you know, I’m an amateur, you know, anyway, sorry to interrupt.
Lulie Tanett
And yet, and yet, I think like there are some things that you say about it. And, well, we can, we can explore and I don’t know, really this conversation is just exploring around ideas anyway, and none of us really know. So, you know, so when, so David, you use the word hangups in situations where other, psychology, like personal development type stuff would say something like trauma or places where you’re stuck or like kind of anything that is this reoccurring unpleasant thing, I guess. Recurring unpleasant thing.
David Deutsch
I’m quite happy calling it that if you want. Cause both those things are essential. Like if it’s, if it’s not unpleasant, then okay, let’s go with it. You know, who cares? And if it’s unpleasant and not recurring, then it can either be. Getting better or getting worse. Um, and, uh, if it’s, if it’s getting worse, then, you know, it’s going to be unpleasant if it’s not unpleasant now, then it’ll be unpleasant very soon. Uh, and if it’s getting better, well, that’s as it should be, because we’re not, we’re never perfect. We’re, we’re always a mass of contradictions and everything. And if we’re making progress in that, then that’s, that’s kind of. At least a large component of happiness.
Lulie Tanett
Would you say that, uh, that suffering is necessarily hangups?
David Deutsch
Um, no. Um, suffering is, is necessarily a certain kind of conflict between ideas. And normally they are being resolved. Sometimes the reason that they are not being resolved is like a hangup. It’s like, it’s an, it’s a, it’s something going wrong without thinking. But another kind of, uh, way, um, it can not be solved is if there’s an external, um, entity, um, burning you at the stake and, uh, you know, while you’re being burnt at the stake, you don’t have enough time to come to work out how to be okay with that. And so since you don’t have time, your problem solving ability is, is thwarted and then you’re unhappy. And people will, you know, in a shorthand you say, well, I’m unhappy because of the pain, you know, it hurts to be burnt at the stake, but then, you know, you can point to places where people are in great pain and they’re quite happy. So for example, uh, somebody running a marathon can be, you know, very close to fainting from pain. Yeah.
Lulie Tanett
I’m going to pause you here because I actually have a question about this very thing that I will get into later, but I kind of want to set up my, um, first question, which is around basically how to deal with when you get stuck or when, uh, you have a life problem or when you are, um, and when I say suffering, I mean kind of more of the everyday type of suffering. Um, so what I’m interested in is how do we get unstuck when we are stuck? Like if we’re going around in circles and everything. Um, and how do you deal with if you have, so I’m, I’ll use the word hangups here. So, um, it’s not just that, uh, you are stuck for no reason. It’s that you in your own mind have a process that is happening that is keeping you stuck. Yes. Um, and so, um, in, based on my conversations, uh, with you before David, um, you’ve talked about getting over hangups, um, by things like, um, first of all, not going directly into them and, um, sort of like directly trying to address them, but rather kind of going in a more indirect way. Is this familiar? Yeah, yeah. Uh, but it has the mark of, um, sort of the best I can do because I don’t know much about this. So, uh, I mean, not going at it directly.
David Deutsch
The reason why I think that that usually won’t work is that the thing that is keeping the hangup in place is itself creative. So you’re pitting some part of you, which is creative against some other part of you, which is creative, and that is going to lead to unhappiness and you’re not going to enjoy that process. Whereas if you can find some other way of thinking yourself into that, into that area where the, where the, where you can be making progress again, then there’s less chance of, uh, um, of just making a new problem, making a new unhappiness for yourself by trying to run up against something head on. So you’re saying to not go into the hangup directly because basically it can fight back, um, because there is a reason that you have that and that part of you that is keeping this thing in place has that for a reason that isn’t being addressed if you go directly.
Lulie Tanett
Yes. I mean, it might be, but yeah, it sounds a lot more like the AOA type ideas than I was thinking before, because it’s basically so in Art of Accomplishment, they have this concept of resistance and you only want to go at the speed of the resistance because if you’re just kind of like forcing through, uh, you’re not addressing, um, that thing. Um, it, this also makes me wonder whether is the voice in the head creative?
Mark Alexander
Uh, that’s a great question. The notion is, um, you can just do the experiment. Um, we’ll build it up from the ground up. Um, say out loud. This is my voice. David say, this is my voice. Oh, this is my voice. Great. Now we’re, we’re going to do exactly the same thing. We’re just not going to say it out loud. So this is my voice. That’s the voice in your head. And that may seem very simple, uh, but that’s generally how it presents. This is a way that we can recognize what we mean by the voice in the head. Um, my experience of it is that it can have all different kinds of voices. It can be critical. It can be abusive. It can be divine. It can, it can give us wisdom. It can, it can say all kinds of things to us that are really helpful. Um, and in some people it’s highly somatic and so it’s not really experienced so verbally. So the degree to which it’s experienced verbally does vary across people. And in a given person over time, like previously my voice was completely silent and then it got really verbal. And then now it’s not so verbal. It’s very somatic. Um, but a characteristic that I notice about it is that it really acts like a chat bot. It does not seem to be what we would call intelligent or creative. Well, forget intelligent. It’s not what we would call creative. It’s, it’s, it feels like patterned neural structures and it’s generally working on old data.
Lulie Tanett
How does that explain the experience I had? So, um, there’s a, so in the, um, Voice in the Head episode of the Art of Accomplishment podcast, there’s this thing about you talk to the voice in different ways, uh, and then this changes how it talks back to you. So if you’ve got a very critical voice, then, um, you, you know, you try and argue back or you try and say, oh, I see you really care about me, or you try and say, and you try these different things. And, um, one of, uh, my experiences of trying that has been to view it with compassion as if it were, uh, there was something precious about it and that it, it kind of really cared about me. And when I did that, um, and had this internal conversation, it seemed to respond to that, and so if it’s only a chat bot, then how does that even make sense? How does it make sense that I can kind of experience empathy? Is it that I’m getting to the roots of the kind of code where it was originally created and so now I’m kind of going in and modifying that, but then otherwise it’s this uncreative sort of chat bot like thing.
Mark Alexander
It seems like there’s aspects of creativity to it. And one way of explaining what you’re talking about there is the same evolution that you see as an AI is updated with new training data. And so it doesn’t necessarily point to creativity. It sure looks like creativity. Is it creativity? Don’t know if we can say.
Lulie Tanett
Neat. I would have thought that the, um, this, this idea of, uh, feeling your feelings and that this is a route to undoing, um, some of these stucknesses or hangups. I would have thought that that would be a more direct approach to the hangup. So instead of being like, oh, I have this fear of, let’s just say fear of spiders. Um, and so one, one thing that you could do is go into that fear and be like, Oh my God, yeah, I really have that fear. And you kind of let yourself feel it. And you know, you have all of these associations from when you were three and you got bitten by a spider or whatever it is. Um, and then I would have thought that that’d be the direct path where I think David would be less inclined to that path and be more about deconstructing. Um, well, why do you have this fear and what does that mean? And are they actually that dangerous? And so on?
David Deutsch
Uh, not even that. I mean, that’s still quite direct. Um, so how would you, um, well, you know, supposing I want to rid myself of a fear of spiders. So the first thing is I must’ve come to that desire somehow. Um, either it’s, it’s ruining my life or, you know, let’s say I was on a trip to somewhere that has a lot of spiders like Australia, and then I find that I can’t enjoy the trip because, because, you know, wherever I am, I’m always looking around in corners for a spider and so on. So, and that activates a preexisting feeling of revulsion, which is activated by seeing a spider and in Britain, it doesn’t happen that often and the spiders aren’t dangerous and, you know, so it’s, it’s not a big deal. If I was in Britain, I wouldn’t need to spend hours or days examining my, my, the interior of my brain to try to rid myself of this. So it’s, it’s much easier just to live with it because it’s not, it’s not disabling. Um, if it were disabling, then I’m, as you say, I’m quite suspicious of, uh, wondering where this came from. Like, was I really bitten by a spider or were spiders used to scare me when I was a child or any of that I’m, I mean, again, I can’t say it can’t happen. It could happen, but I would guess that the problem is now and, um, the, in other words, the theories that are in conflict with each other, the mental states that are in conflict with each other and forming an unresolved, unresolvable knot, um, are there now and they’re active now. And what put them there in the first place is much less important. It could be that what they’re actually, how they work.
Lulie Tanett
It could be that what put them there in the first place is a clue about what the structure is.
David Deutsch
Yeah, it could be. Um, yeah, I mean, it’s like, uh, how can I make a metaphor for this? Say, say there’s a traffic police officer who is ordered to go, said, you know, his boss says to him, there’s a terrible traffic snarl up at 23rd and something. And so he goes there on his motorbike. And, uh, so a lot of people come up to him and say, well, this happened because so-and-so and it was his fault and it was his fault and so on. And I don’t think it matters. If you want to clear up the snarl up, you’ve got to be an expert on snarl ups, not on what caused them. And so either policeman will, will say, uh, okay, you know, we’ll sort that out later, but for the moment, we’ve got to get the traffic moving and to get the traffic moving, first of all, we’ve got to get that bus out of the, and so on.
Lulie Tanett
What’s, what’s an example of, um, of views or of a view where, uh, going into the past is actually not helpful. Like, could you, could you construct, uh, a, like, is it that, I don’t know, Freud or whoever it is, uh, but you have in mind when you think it’s not helpful?
David Deutsch
Um, well, I have, as you know, I’ve read very little about this. I have read some of Freud, never a whole book of Freud.
Lulie Tanett
Um, so yeah, I, so, uh, say, say you have a, um, uh, fear of intimacy because your parents were avoidant when you were growing up. And so you would say that it’s not actually useful to look into that. It could be useful. Like a million other things could be used. Like it’s could be useful to the policeman to find out how this thing started. Uh, it could be, but that’s not the way things usually are. Usually the snarl up is there and it’s, and the reason that it, it’s difficult to get the traffic moving again is because of the way that the bus and then and the van and the cars are placed now. And you need to move them around and get it moving again. And then you can let the people who say it’s someone’s fault, um, make their case. I, you want me to think of a real psychological example? Yeah. I’m sort of wondering kind of where this sort of difference in intuition comes from. And now I’m wondering whether it’s something like the same as the reason that, um, reductivism reductionism, reductive, uh, doesn’t make sense that, that, that there’s a sort of, uh, you can’t get knowledge out of reducing something further and further. And I’m wondering if that’s the thing. Like, yeah, basically I have an intuition that in psychology, going into reducing often is useful is reductionism is the philosophical theory. That all problems or, uh, all scientific theories, uh, have to be found by reducing, um, something to lower and lower levels until you get to the ultimate level. That has worked sometimes, you know, we know about atoms, we know, we know about the properties of matter because they’re, we know they’re made up of atoms. Um, but, uh, in other situations like, um, you know, how did the universe begin?
David Deutsch
Uh, it’s, it’s no good looking for a, uh, a microscopic reason, uh, in the nature of atoms or something below atoms or whatever, um, how it began is a process and it’s not composed usefully of smaller processes. So we can have a theory of that. And there are all sorts of theories that aren’t reductionist, like theory of evolution. So going back to specific examples of hangups in people’s lives, my view now is something like that, um, it’s not the, maybe here’s the difference, the way that you described, uh, having, uh, getting over a fear of spiders and how, oh, now you’re, you’re not in England anymore and you’re in Australia and so on and so on.
Lulie Tanett
All of these specific details to me doesn’t necessarily get at what is actually causing the block, which is the unwillingness to feel the emotional sensation of fear all the way through. So there’s a sort of, so you have this fear, you kind of contract around it. You don’t want to go near it. You don’t want to put yourself into a state of mind where you’re kind of touching it, which means that all then all of those ideas are kind of now frozen because you’re not exposing them to the light. And so you’re saying, oh, well, you can just take those ideas and expose them to the light. And I’m kind of like, well, that’s not where the…
David Deutsch
No, I’m no, I mean, that would be me giving a sort of panacea, a general solution. I’m the opposite. I mean, I’m saying that I’m sceptical, what I’m sceptical of is that that, that …
Lulie Tanett
Is what you’ve just suggested is a general purpose solution.
David Deutsch
I can see that it might be sometimes. And I can see that, that being afraid to go into and properly feel the emotion can happen. And even when it does happen, it may or may not be the thing to work on. The thing to work on might be any one of the things that are in conflict with each other. And once you find one that can move and can enable a bit of creativity to happen, then it could be that your reluctance to experience the fear properly will, will be moot because you’re not experiencing it anymore.
Lulie Tanett
I think that is another route in. Mark, I’m quite curious whether you think it is a general purpose solution. I think it could be. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t make that assertion for sure, but like, one thing that I really like here now that we’re zeroing in is that I don’t think we need the past anymore. Like, I think you can say that we’ve got everything we need to resolve this in this moment. There is no need to go into the past. There is, you know, there, there’s some training data in our system and it’s in our system. So we’ve got everything we need to work with right now. Um, one thing I want to bring in is, is just, uh, I want to get coarse about defining it. So if you have deconstruction, if you, if you work with these things purely on a neural level, on a logical level, you can get a lot done and there’s some that just seem to never resolve. And then Luli, you bring in this notion of feelings and the role that they have. And then David, you bring in this notion of, Oh yeah. And that can loosen up just enough creativity that you can now get into a new, um, space of possibilities. The notion I want to bring in here is this kind of head, heart, gut notion where we’ve got these three different kinds of intelligence. And it’s very easy as modern humans to live very much in the head and kind of buy into the illusion that that’s all there is. That we don’t, we don’t have physical bodily intelligence that, um, emotions are unproductive and therefore they’re a nuisance. Um, or that there’s kind of a, that there could be some kind of a deep evolutionary intelligence in our body, in our gut feelings. Um, my sense of how this works is that all three of these are kind of like a tensegrity structure, like whether or not we acknowledge the other intelligences from the head, there are ways in which the learned structures of the head are tied deeply into the heart and the gut intelligences. And if nothing is moving, if nothing is allowed to move in, say the emotions, well, I’m just kind of coarsely calling that the heart, you know, emotions, heart, um, nervous system, gut, without getting some kind of movement in one of those areas, you’re just going to end up with the same links between these two. So you’ve got this kind of tensegrity structure where everything’s holding itself in place. I can want to make changes in the neural structures, but without some commensurate changes in the heart and gut structures, I’ve only got so many degrees of freedom. And then if you open up the other degrees of freedom, oh, okay, cool. Now we can really rearrange things.
David Deutsch
I’m not familiar with tensegrity. I’ll use a different word, just highly interconnected. Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Tensegrity is like when, if you imagine a stick, um, with some elastic being held to another stick, um, and then also being held to another stick and they’re all kind of being held. And so they’re held in this sort of position.
Lulie Tanett
Mm. As you know, um, I’m fundamentally against, um, hierarchy of relevance or whatever, among different kinds of idea, uh, between, between explicit and inexplicit, between conscious and unconscious ideas and bodily ideas.
David Deutsch
Well, I, I’m hoping I don’t have to actually endorse a particular location for these bodily ideas. Uh, it could be that all the bodily ideas are actually reflected in the brain because they’re connected. And if you, if you sever the connection from, um, you know, from your gut to the brain, then you will no longer feel stomach ache. And also your stomach will no longer be able to, uh, do anything to you. Uh, you, you, you might notice indirectly that, that your digestion isn’t working properly, but it can’t hurt you if the nerves are cut. So it, it, but it doesn’t matter because whatever theory of sensory perceptions and, uh, sensory intelligence or whatever, uh, it turns out to be true. Um, the, um, interaction between them, including problems and hangups involving more than one of them will be happening somewhere. It’ll, you know, I think it’s probably happening in the brain, but it doesn’t matter. It’s, it’s happening somewhere. And wherever there are ideas in conflict, and I use the word idea extremely broadly, basically, it’s any configuration of information in our nervous system that can affect something. That’s an idea. Um, and so among ideas, there’s no hierarchy in the sense that there’s, there’s, there’s no rule that says that one kind of idea knows that the other one is wrong and therefore it, it has to take priority. Any of them could be wrong and all of them could be wrong at the same time. There doesn’t have to be a right one. Or it could be that there’s more than one of them that is right. Or it could be that there’s more than one of them that’s almost right and they can, um, provide information to correct each other. But there’s no, uh, I don’t, I don’t believe in some going with the flow or going with your gut or, uh, going with your mind or, you know, any of those things. Pay attention to those things, yes, but they might be wrong. Your, your gut might simply be wrong and your carefully worked out logical conclusion might simply be wrong. Yeah. All of, all of the senses lie. Yep. All of the senses are, are unreliable in their own ways. Yep. So to translate what Mark said about head, heart and gut into David’s framework.
Lulie Tanett
So David, you usually have that there’s explicit ideas and inexplicit ideas and we kind of sweep all of the emotions and embodiments and everything under inexplicit subconscious ideas. Yeah, with a broom. Um, and yeah. Nice. Try not to, yeah.
David Deutsch
Yeah. And, um, and the, there’s, it doesn’t make sense to prioritize explicit ideas over inexplicit ideas because there could be criticism or good ideas from either side. And to choose one side would be authoritarianism.
Lulie Tanett
Yeah. Would be choosing based on, yeah, based on source rather than merit.
David Deutsch
Um, okay. But then, but then there’s also this, but like the heart and the guts and are these metaphors? Are they, is there an actual thing? I don’t know. And I don’t think it matters. Like they are, they are a category. Yeah. And I don’t think it matters. That’s, that’s why I put that caveat in that it’s a coarse way of thinking about it, but I find it a very useful hack and a very useful handle to just refer to them that way. This gut kind of corresponds to like body or movement or nervous system. And then a heart kind of corresponds to emotions. And that’s how I think about it. Yeah. Cause I often find that if I’m thinking about my guts, that there is sort of a different set of emotions that are often associated with it compared with if I think about my heart.
Lulie Tanett
When I say think about, I mean, sort of put my attention into those places and then see what comes out. Yeah. And they can become recognizable in that way. They’re kind of coded. It’s almost like there’s an odor of like, Oh, this, this smells like an emotion. So, um, what does it mean to think from the body? I would say it’s to, it’s to be thinking from wholeness. It’s, it’s listening to all three. Because I can imagine, um, people listening to this being like, what do you even mean thinking with your body? Cause thinking happens in your head and in your brain in particular. And it’s this sort of abstract thing. Uh, but then it turns out that if you do things like put your attention in your chest, then you have this other experience and different types of thoughts, which is weird. That’s weird. I find that weird. I find it weird that like biology also can affect your thinking. Uh, it doesn’t kind of fit neatly in my sort of Deutsch informed view. Like, I don’t know if you’re hungry, then you might be irritated, but the irritation then has particular types of thoughts like, uh, that maybe other people are to blame more or that, um, bad things are happening to you or that there’s a, the problem is bigger than you think it is. How does that even work? How is PMS a thing? How is that a thing?
David Deutsch
Yeah, beautiful. Like, uh, I mean, one, I would tie it back to that notion of highly interconnected, these three intelligences, like you can have a bodily sensation of hunger that then kind of sets off an emotion is associated with an emotion that comes up as like, oh, it’s not okay for me to be hungry. And then it, and then has a corresponding one in sort of the primate brain of somebody’s to blame for this. So it’s, it’s your interaction with your own set of sensations. And so you have associations with those and you have a particular way you respond to those. So if you feel a particular thing coming up, then you might be like, uh, I guess it’s other people’s fault. Or if you have a different thing coming up. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. If blaming others has, has been an effective strategy for you to be with that emotion, then that’s going to be kind of a habituated path.
Lulie Tanett
It’s like, oh, well, somebody must be to blame here. So if I imagine, so, um, with PMS, which by the way, I didn’t think existed until I was in my thirties, I thought that was made up. And then I experienced it and then it’s like, okay, so level four problems then feel like level eight problems. Uh, and so it seems like, oh my God, this is a much bigger deal. Uh, so is that noticing? But the thing is I can’t tell that there are sensations, like the sensations themselves are below the level of consciousness.
David Deutsch
So it’s not like, oh, I’m feeling like I have a tummy ache and therefore I’m in a bad mood and I’m trying to suppress the tummy ache because the emotions or the sensations themselves are below the level of conscious perception as far as I can tell. And so I have this, so I have this problem and I think, oh my God, this problem is I need to end my relationship or I need to quit my job or something.
Lulie Tanett
Uh, and then I think, no, wait, I have PMS right now. I’m going to wait until a week later, but then, but then what is, so is it that some, some part of me is noticing that kind of sensation and then thinking, ah, that must mean that this is a big deal. Is that what’s happening? Yeah. Can you, can you rephrase the question? The question is, how could it be that this physical process, uh, of PMS makes a problem that is only a level four in big dealness feel like a level eight problem such that my thoughts are like, maybe I should take bigger action to deal with this. Yeah. I think my, my simple coarse answer would be that there’s cross modulation happening between these systems. And I would think that PMS, I don’t know the male analog of this, but I can kind of make some guesses about, okay, what makes me irritable or having a migraine or, um, there’s a, there’s a modulation of the neural chemistry, which tends to set off more alarms. And then, and now I’m back in, okay, what’s the emotional interpretation of these alarms? What’s the neural interpretation of these alarms? It’s notorious that, that, um, one’s digestion can affect one’s, um, assessment of the seriousness of a situation. For example, people like judges. Yeah. Allegedly. Uh, you know, I don’t believe, I don’t believe studies, but unless I, unless I agree with them in advance. Yeah. But I can see that could happen with, uh, for the people who don’t know what I’m talking about. I mean, uh, judges when they’ve eaten, uh, I think do more lenient sentences when they’re hungry, they’re, they’re, they’re more, um, censorious, censorious.
David Deutsch
Yeah. Um, uh, the, but you know, people can be called dyspeptic, meaning they’ve got indigestion, but that that’s not used to describe indigestion. It’s used to describe a state of mind, a type of person who habitually behaves like average people behave when they’ve got, um, uh, a stomachache. And, um, uh, I think an integrated person needs to, uh, understand that this is happening and form his own view about what’s actually important. You know, uh, it seems to me that this is very important, but is it no or yes, it could be that you’re- If we get so- Go ahead. Sorry, I think this would have lagged. Um, if we get so easily influenced by our biology, uh, is it not then quite important and fundamental to develop a good relationship with your sensations? Because those are actually, so I’m kind of coming back to the whole, well, isn’t feeling your feelings like basically the button that you can press again and again. Yes, but whenever you mention this, you seem to, you seem to be assuming that what the emotions are telling you is true. And I think they could be true, they could be false, they could be anything in between. Yeah, no, I’m saying feel them regardless. Like, like set aside whether they’re true or not for the time being and just feel them.
Lulie Tanett
If you want to feel them, then you should feel them. But if they’re unpleasant, you shouldn’t. Well, ah, so that, so there’s the disagreement and I think that you don’t actually disagree. And once, once we talk about this, then you will come to agree. Um, if you don’t, so the actual situation is that you don’t want the problem that they are, uh, that there’s a tension, right? Like, it’s not actually about the sensations themselves because they’re just sensations. Well, a sensation by itself can be unpleasant. So. No. So going back to, and I think we talked about this in episode one, the fun episode. If you have a sensation, I don’t think that is necessarily inherently, um, coercive or unpleasant or suffering. The thing that makes it those things is the resistance to the sensation, the inability to interface with it, the contracting or trying to avoid it and whatever. And when you can feel it and be like, be okay with it, then you don’t actually, like there can still be a particular sensation, but it doesn’t feel unpleasant anymore. Okay. This desire not to, not to engage with the sensation is just an idea and it could be true and it could be false. I mean, this is my view. So when, if you’re a child being spanked, then you don’t want to engage with that pain. There are various ways you can get around it. You can either identify with your oppressor or you can dissociate or you can put yourself in a position where you don’t mind or you can say, Oh, I’m used to this or whatever, you know, there are a wide variety of stances you can take and none of them are inherently right. I mean, the, but the reason you have that problem in the first place is that it’s an unpleasant sensation. If it weren’t an unpleasant situation, you wouldn’t have a problem. And another different thing that can happen, if I can just put a different angle on this, supposing I’m driving to the university to meet professor X and I find that I have indigestion. And then I think that’s funny. You know, I seem to always have indigestion when I, when I go and see professor X could be that there’s something about this interaction that I haven’t taken into account. It might be that, and then there could be a thought process. It might be that, that I’m, you know, responding to some obsolete idea about professor X or about professors in general or whatever. And that, and that if I think about it rightly, I won’t have stomach ache anymore when I go and see him. Or it might be that actually there’s something wrong with him. And I’ve been persuading myself that there isn’t, but in fact there is. And you know, that, that could be the solution. But so as I said, you know, any, what any of these ideas could be true. Any of them could be half true. But the reason this is a problem is that stomach ache is unpleasant.
Lulie Tanett
It’s not that I’m withdrawing from it that’s making it unpleasant. I’m withdrawing from it is just one of the ideas in contention. You know, some process in my mind thought that withdrawing from it would, would solve the problem. And if it had, fine. David, how do you know that withdrawing from it isn’t the thing that creates the pain? Or that creates the suffering rather?
David Deutsch
Well, withdrawing from it was an idea to solve something, to solve a problem. And therefore there must have been a problem for it to. And the problem to me is at least two conflicting ideas. A single idea can’t, can’t produce a problem. So, you know, you’re being burnt at the stake. One of the ideas is I’m feeling a sensation of hot. And the second idea is I don’t want to. And those are, you know, in real life there’ll be dozens of things in a serious situation like that. There’ll be dozens of ideas in contention. And I think that’s the idea of contention. And so you asked me, how do you know, how do you, sorry, how do you know what?
Lulie Tanett
How do you know that withdrawing from the pain is what causes. Oh, isn’t, yeah. Isn’t, yeah. Yes. How do you know that withdrawing from the pain isn’t what causes the suffering?
David Deutsch
It might make it worse, but it, there must be at least two other things involved. Before you had the idea of withdrawing from it, because there must have, it must have been a problem that this was, yeah. There’s a tension between them. Now the tension has arisen. It’s like, oh, tension. Yes. Yes. And then maybe this is the way. And, you know, often that’s, that’s, that’s the right answer. You know, if you’re having a medical procedure and it’s, it’s unpleasant, then you could say, well, I’ll think about something else. And then, you know, if the procedure, if the procedure only takes 10 seconds, that might be the best solution or the solution. Yeah. But I’ll throw out an idea. I’m curious how you, how you parse it. I’ve had migraines for decades, not very often, thankfully. And they’re pretty classic. If you, you know, read up on what that means. A few years ago, I don’t know, five, six years ago, a friend of mine who’s also has migraines says, Hey, the darnedest thing happened.
Lulie Tanett
I started having a migraine. I could tell it was coming. And I just welcomed it. I said, I want to, I want to inquire into every aspect of the feelings of this thing. And holy, wow. It wasn’t that bad. So next time I had a migraine, I tried this out and said, okay, I feel it. All right, I’m going to fully embrace this. Okay. What is here for me in store? What does it feel like?
David Deutsch
Because at this point I’d read books on it. I knew that it wasn’t harmful. I had the neural idea that this is not harming me. It’s just a ride and I could treat it like an unexpected dose of LSD. So, okay, here I am. I didn’t want to take the LSD, but it got on my tongue and now I’m going to be off in this thing for the next six hours. And it became not only less suffering, but also interesting and crazy enough enjoyable by actually allowing myself to have the feelings.
Lulie Tanett
Like, what does it feel like to have this pain in my head? What are these aural distortions? In what way are they making the music more interesting? What is this in my visual field? So bringing in curiosity and wonder with it completely transformed the experience. So I’m curious what you make of that. I don’t see how this connects with anything I’ve said. I mean, the migraine previously was a problem. That is, it was a conflict. Something in your mind interpreted some neural impulses as pain and therefore as unpleasant. And something also found out that certain things like moving your head or taking a pill or whatever doesn’t solve it. So then you tried investigating it very closely and identifying with it.
David Deutsch
Well, my first guess, and okay, you know, I don’t know anything about stuff like this, but my first guess is that you are investigating something. You’re investigating something that has a rich structure and where the structure is important to you because it is causing you suffering. So I would guess that anything that you’re investigating that has structure could have this effect. You know, if you’re trying to work out how to make your farm profitable. And I’ve been watching Jeremy Clarkson’s TV show with his farm. So you suddenly realize that you’re actually, although you thought you were making a profit on, you know, the cows or something, you realize that if you take into account so-and-so, you’re actually making a loss on the cows. And if you replace them by pigs, and again, there’s this rich structure. If it was simply just what I said, it wouldn’t be interesting. But if you’re into the farm and you’re into farming and you want to make the farm work, then I wouldn’t be surprised if you don’t care about the migraine. So if it’s important to you and you’re making progress in it, then pain is less important. And another thing, another sort of way in which I’m some scenario which illustrates this is that I read somewhere that when there’s an emergency on an airplane, people often push over each other and try and get out, try and get to the emergency exit and so on. And they do not behave optimally in that they don’t obey the instructions of the flight attendants and so on. But parents do. Parents do not panic because parents see, you know, they might push someone aside so that they and their child can go ahead, but they do not panic. They don’t do pointless things because they are thinking about their role as taking care of this child. And therefore then their movements and their thoughts are not dominated by the insolubility of a problem. They are dominated by what they know they have to do now. And that takes creativity as well. And it’s devoted to that. And so the parents don’t panic. I don’t know if that’s true. You know, this whole thing might not be true. But if it’s true, then it doesn’t surprise me at all.
Lulie Tanett
This also reminds me of David, an example that you’ve mentioned to me in the past, which is a painter from, you know, the past where you have to go and mine your own pigments and the lapis lazuli and maybe it’s a long journey and you have to ride a donkey and everything smells and you have to get messy and all of this and then you have to clean your brushes and everything. If you’re really interested in the painting, then all of that, all of it, including the donkey and the getting dirty and everything, is part of the experience of creating this painting.
David Deutsch
Yeah, that’s another example. But I feel like there’s a slight difference with the migraine example because it’s something like in the lapis lazuli painting example, all of that would otherwise be separate. You know, now we have technology and we have machines that farm this pigment and everything. And so it’s slightly separate, whereas with the migraine, you’re investigating the sensations themselves or with a fear of spiders, you might be investigating the sensation of fear itself instead of, oh, this is worthwhile because then I cannot do this other thing.
David Deutsch
I see those as the same thing because in all cases, you only have access to this thing, whether it’s your own fear or a mountain with blue rocks in it or outside your body or inside your body or inside your body. You feel that it’s inside your body, but it might be somewhere else in your body and whatever. All those things are the same thing. They’re all just ideas. You only have access to them via your conjectures. You have a conjecture that the sensation you’re feeling is coming from your…
Lulie Tanett
Can we pause you there? Because that was a controversial statement that you made where we only have access to them via conjectures.
Lulie Tanett
Yes. Well, everything is conjecture. Mark, what was your thought there? I could feel the turn. I didn’t. And something made me laugh. I don’t know that I can formulate what the tension was with that, but I could feel that we moved into a different realm when it’s like the way that we interface with all this is through conjecture. And I thought, oh, wait a second. Do I agree with this?
David Deutsch
Because there’s another way of immediate experience. In this moment, looking at this screen with this arrangement of pixels on it, as Mark says, Mark and the K of that syllable comes through. This immediate experience, this moment, there’s something happening in that experience, the awareness of this experience, that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with conjecture.
Lulie Tanett
Well, I don’t think so. I think there’s no such thing as an uninterpreted experience. It might be interpreted via an inborn theory that we’ve never examined, but nevertheless, it’s via a theory. So like conjectures all the way down even to the micro microstructure?
David Deutsch
Yes, down to the microstructure. But more important, it’s down to the level which assigns meaning to the thing, including feelings. So my recent example, I don’t know if I told you this, Lulie. This was a couple of years ago now. This is about sensations and pain in particular. I was pouring boiling water from a kettle onto something. I forget what it was, possibly instant mashed potato. And I was pouring the… And it says, pour boiling water onto this. And it’s got to be 475 milliliters. And if it’s a bit more, it gets watery. If it’s a bit less, it gets stodgy. And so I was going very careful. And while I was doing this, and it was on the scales, so I was also looking at the number on the scales, and it’s going up to 399, 400, 401, and so on. And I noticed that there was a sensation on my foot. And I thought, what’s happening? Am I pouring some of this boiling water on my foot? And then I thought, it can’t be, because the spout is here, and there’s a table here. And the water, I can see the water coming out of the spout, and it’s not going onto my foot, which is somewhere completely different. And I felt the sensation, but I… So something in me was saying, this can’t be pain, because that’s impossible. The boiling water cannot get to my foot. And it was only then, only like several seconds later, did I see that there was something wrong with the spout, and the water was coming out. Because I was pouring it so slowly, the water was coming out of the spout and sticking to the kettle by surface tension, and going all the way down to the other end of the kettle, and then dripping onto my foot. And it had filled my shoe. And it was only with boiling water. And it was only just in time to avoid having to go to hospital for this. Gosh. It turned out well. It turned into a nice anecdote. But I think if that is so powerfully affected by an interpretation, and it’s not even a built-in one, it was a culturally learned interpretation that I had to kind of work out. Although there wasn’t an inner voice saying, well, it can’t go there. This was all inexplicit. I looked there and I realized that it couldn’t be going down to the ground from there. That’s what we call the somatic inner voice. But yeah, go on. Okay. Well, yeah. But that whole thing is learned. I mean, babies don’t know this. And yet it was able to nullify the sensation of being scalded. Now, it couldn’t have nullified it forever. But that’s because it would have caused more problems. So the problem just caused by being scalded was nullified by a false interpretation, as it turned out, by a false interpretation of what was happening, which I put into words as saying it can’t be the boiling water. But it was never stated in words. It was just, yeah. Yeah.
Lulie Tanett
Mark, how would you interpret this story? Well, how do you think about it?
David Deutsch
I think it relates to, there’s a lot of things we could relate it to. The thing that I’m mostly playing with as I listen to this is this notion that it’s conjectures all the way down and it fits. Like as I’m looking at it, I was like, oh yeah, check, check, check, check. Yeah, I think I would just classify this as there was something maladaptive in what had been learned. Like if there’s this really important idea of water only comes out of the spout when you’re pouring a kettle, water only comes out of the spout. Well, it turns out we just learned that’s a maladaptive learned notion. How does this relate to direct experience? Yeah, that these three systems all interrelate with each other. And what that meant in this scenario was that the gut sense, the body, the somatic, the reptilian sense of this is pain, got hushed by, you know, who knows where the idea exists that water only comes out of the spout. Is it neural? Maybe. Is it emotional? Probably not so much. Is it somatic? Could be. Like reflexes of what it’s like to tilt your arm and pour out of a spout, things like that. Go ahead. The way that I was hearing David’s story is that in the context of everything is conjectural, there were these sensations that were interpreted first and then, you know, all of the experience. But you’re talking about, no, there was actually a thing that happened before the, oh, well, the water can’t possibly be on my foot, where there was a, like a physical sensation perhaps or a somatic reptilian gut, whatever, of, hey, this thing hurts. And then that was immediately shushed. And then, but then that first experience was what you might call the direct experience. Then it was interpreted. And then more sensation came later. Yeah. Yeah. And I think even that direct experience
Lulie Tanett
Is like really low level, but it still qualifies as a conjecture in this example, because you’ve got cells that are somehow sensitized to heat and you’ve got nerves that conduct them. But all of that goes down to molecular machines. And so there’s a conjecture even at the level of, oh, when this many sodium ions pile up, that means heat. There’s a way in which even that’s a conjecture. If you resolve my epistemology crisis, I will cry. I’m happy about this. Okay. And so does that make sense to you, David?
David Deutsch
Yeah. Yeah. There’s a question of when you experience it. I think you only experience it after, like after it’s been through some interpretation. Like I said, that your reptilian interpretation is still an interpretation. We do not feel the electrons coming through the nerve fibers. We only ever feel- Importantly, it’s not an interpretation. Sorry? Importantly, it’s not an interpretation that goes via the explicit type of thinking or something that looks like a- Well, okay, here’s a question.
Lulie Tanett
Is it always something that looks like a proposition? Is it that kind of interpretation?
David Deutsch
Basically, I’m kind of wondering whether your conception of the word conjecture and interpretation just includes a big range of things that are also feelings and very low-level processes and that sort of thing that other people would count as a different thing, because when you talk about them as a different thing, then you have access to these different thoughts. But then …
Lulie Tanett
You’re saying that it’s all, they’re all just different types of conjecture? The words there are too ambiguous to state categorically. In the reptile, there is also a pathway from certain cells being excited and sending electrical signals and then those going to the brain and then the brain sending out signals to the limb and the limb moving and so on. There’s that pathway. But in a reptile, there’s only one thing that pathway can do. I mean, sorry, that’s oversimplifying because a sensation could be, it might be a painful sensation or it might be a prey animal or you know. But basically, in a given cluster of nerve signals will give rise to a given behavior. So there is no, the only thing that’s doing any interpreting there is evolution.
David Deutsch
Evolution has given certain excitement of nerve cells a meaning, if you can call it a meaning, which is, you know, this is painful, get away, but you know, the reptile doesn’t ever think that. Evolution thought that as in quotation marks. Clarifying question. So are you saying that in people, at every level of this, you have the creativity program doing something with the raw data that in animals would just be an automaton? Yes. Well, I don’t know about every because there are, you know, if you talk about something as complicated as vision, then there is indeed a whole load of processing that goes on in the eye. And so there is direct experience. Well, but you don’t experience that. So if you cut the optic nerve, the eye was still doing the experience.
Lulie Tanett
You only experience stuff where there is interpretation, aka stuff where the creativity program can modify. Yes. And then otherwise you are not. So then all the other stuff still happens, but you do not experience it. That’s an accurate way of putting it, which I hadn’t arrived at, but you did. Thoughts, Mark?
Mark Alexander
Just reflecting the mind blow of that and holding open the possible.
Lulie Tanett
Okay. So what would it be like if I were experiencing the firing of my retinal cells? Like, is that something that is actually something I can experience? Is that something that my awareness can have access to? Theoretically, it seems like the answer can be yes.
David Deutsch
Well, you had some technology that you inserted behind your retina. It could directly, you know, feed into your headphones, something like. And then you would be directly experiencing. Well, sorry, not directly. You would be experiencing another interpretation, which was built into the, which the technician who set up the thing that converted this into sounds and everything. So that technician would have an interpretation, which you could then experience your vision through. But you can’t experience anything that hasn’t been created by your mind. Yes. In my view. And I think the only adjustment that I might put in there is that it is possible to perceive lower and lower in the stack, but it makes no difference to what you’re saying. Yes. Yes.
Lulie Tanett
I was going to ask, meditators who are very practiced often report being far more sensitive to any kind of physical things. So whether it’s diet, whether it’s like subtle physical sensations. And so I’m thinking, like I’m imagining the hot water example. And if one of these experienced meditators was doing the same thing, then he might have a different experience compared with what your experience was. And I’m kind of, I’m trying to reconcile does, is this a counterexample to everything is conjectures or is it like a lower level thing? And I’m kind of asking both of you this question, what you think.
David Deutsch
I think what Mark just said, you can train yourself to intercept at an earlier stage. And you’ve done this, I know you’ve done this with color perception. So you see color more precisely than the average person because you have trained yourself to do so. And musicians can hear, you know, musician can hear a tiny difference between two tones that a non-professional can’t.
Lulie Tanett
There is a different thing of, I’m making a claim and I don’t know if I believe it, but there is a different thing of getting knowledge in order to perform a skill better. So learning the Munsell color system in order to perceive color more accurately or learning, I’m sure there’s a technique for learning perfect pitch to do the same with music. And this thing that is more general or universal that meditators do that is more about looking at their moment-to-moment experience and their sensations in this sort of raw form, I’m wondering whether that is taking these sort of raw sensations and then bringing your perception or your, like the creativity insertion or something to these things that for most people it’s just the animal body is just kind of dealing with it. But for an advanced meditator, they are now looking at this and then which means that they can do more with that raw data. I would agree with that. And I think that’s a great point.
David Deutsch
I would agree with that if I could delete the word raw from that whole paragraph. There is no raw. If you inject a local anesthetic anywhere along the pathway from where this raw sensation originates to the brain, then you won’t feel it. It will still be doing its thing. For example, with the eye, if you put a local anesthetic, I’m not sure this is safe, so don’t do this at home. Then you’re changing the sensation?
Lulie Tanett
If you inject it. But David. Yes. But then aren’t you changing the sensations rather than?
David Deutsch
No, well, the eye is still doing the same thing. The eye is still doing its convolutions and it’s edge detection and all that and it’s sending that information up the nerve and then halfway up the nerve, it hits local anesthetic and it doesn’t get any further and you don’t perceive anything. You don’t perceive that raw stuff. If you then take away the local anesthetic and allow it to get there, then eventually it will get to the part of the brain’s apparatus that perceives things and that part, I think, is always creative. That part is always conjecturing what this is. So you can look at the same, there are many optical illusions that work that way. You can look at the same picture and therefore produce exactly the same sensation of your eye, but if you think of it as a rabbit, it looks like a rabbit and if you think of it as two faces, then it looks like two faces and the raw sensations are identical. The same thing happens with colors. You can look at a color, be convinced like I was with someone’s hair once. You know the story that I was sure she had red hair and I always saw her as having red hair until she told me that her hair was brown. Then I looked at her again and it was brown. That’s a raw sensation as much as it can be, but it’s obviously not raw. But the thing that happened there was, so the way that I’m thinking about this is that you were accessing a different set of thoughts. You weren’t thinking, I’m going to perceive this color like I might where I’m kind of looking at it and comparing it to other colors in my mind.
Lulie Tanett
You were taking the clues and then making a guess. Which is what one always does. But I don’t think that’s, because then it comes back down to the meditation example where, I’m trying to figure out what is going on here. Are you just looking at a different set of ideas, information and interpretation or are you going to a more basic level?
Lulie Tanett
I’m wondering if Mark can make sense of any of this for me or kind of has a sense of what I’m trying to figure out.
Lulie Tanett
My sense is it’s the former, not the latter because the latter doesn’t give you any interpretation. Other than an arrangement of black and white in a spatial array. So then what is happening when you go to what seems like more direct? You have more possibilities for interpretation is one thing that you get. You can reevaluate the stimulus. You’re no longer locked into one path. You’re no longer locked into, oh, it must be a rabbit. It can only be a rabbit. It’s like, oh, I go one level down. This could be a two faces or a rabbit. Go a level below that. It’s like, oh, this arrangement of black and of ink on a white background could be manmade or it could be a happenstance, could be noise, could be data. You can go lower and lower and lower in the questions you ask about it. The thing I think I want to put my finger on is when most people hear David’s, oh, it’s all conjectures and it’s all interpretation, what they do in practice is go to their head and then analyze the entire world from their head. And this is a particular phenomenological move that happens. And whereas actually what David is saying is no, it’s not about whether you’re being explicit or whether you’re thinking from the head. It’s that the structure of the, you might call it ideas, but again, that will make people think it’s a head thing. But the structure of the information that is contained in the entire system, in the body, in the head, in the nerves of all of this, has this structure that is like computers or ideas, or there’s a sort of a way that we can draw a parallel to, I have this feeling in my tummy that is this fear feeling, but that is not fundamentally a different kind of thing as, oh, I have an opinion about the danger of spiders. And so I want to drill down on how to not be confused by this, because it is the case that if I attend to my gut and attend to my heart, I have these different ideas and there’s a way that I can go more down to the physical sensations and the direct, there’s a thing that we’re calling direct perception, which philosophically is not direct perception because everything has this creativity thing infused in it, but also in everyday language, it is more direct because you are looking less at what your abstract imagination, I don’t know, when I’m drawing something, I can do this thing where I’m thinking, oh, that’s a cup, a cup has a handle and I’m going to do this symbolic representation of a handle, or I can be like, I can just view it in terms of the light and the shade. And so I can be, okay, this is a shade level of six, and so I’m going to color in with a shade level of six. And in a way that is more direct because I’m not doing this thing of taking the information, imagining some kind of symbolic representation, which is a very kind of heady thing, and then putting out this symbolic representation.
Lulie Tanett
Instead, there’s a way that I’m more direct, is what I want to say. And so-
Mark Alexander
I think there’s the thing I’ll add there, and I think David will be able to classify this one, like what’s the issue with it. Uh, the mistake that I think can be made is in thinking that it is all ideas. If you are not willing to feel emotional feelings, then you will have an absence of evidence around what those feelings can tell you. And if your system is so habituated to not feeling feelings or certain classes of feelings, then you can have the illusion that none exist. You can interpret the absence of evidence as an evidence of absence. The experiments, Luli, that you and I have done in kind of delving into this suggest otherwise, suggest that no, no, no, no, there’s, there’s a trove of information there that’s easy to ignore if you think that everything only exists on the level of ideas up in the head. How well does that fit what you’re saying, Luli?
Lulie Tanett
Yes, and I just want to kind of clarify that I think the conflating what David is saying with it’s all ideas in the head isn’t necessary for his own theory. David, what do you say?
David Deutsch
I never said it was. I mean, so people, as I said earlier, I think all ideas obey the same epistemology. It’s a mistake to give any of them precedence over any others. And so, Mark, what, the thing you’re calling ideas is, is only a subset of what I would call ideas. So, it’s, it’s explicit ideas expressed in language and also ideas which could be translated into language, if one did it, like, you know, knowing that the water from the kettle can only go there. Even if you don’t say it in words, its meaning is in words. But that’s different from, say, a stomach ache or even more a sensation that you’re not aware of. So, an unconscious sensation is still an idea in my terminology. By the way, this is all Popper. None of it is me. It, Popper is, is all his examples or most of his examples or whatever come from science or from politics. And both those are highly explicit fields. And so, his examples come from there. But his theory doesn’t make sense if it’s not universal. Like, there, there, if somebody has inexplicit knowledge, like knowledge of how to drive a car or knowledge of grammar, which I think is an example that Popper does use. So, we, we know that certain sequences of words are grammatically correct and some aren’t. And in the majority of cases, if you ask people who know the rule, what the rule is, they’ll get it wrong.
David Deutsch
Only, only the most accomplished of linguistic analysts will, will have a better idea of why we say, you know, one of my favourite examples is when we say the something, when we say the BBC. And you say, why are you saying the BBC? You know, and they’ll give you, people will give you some, some confabulation as to why they say that. Then you, then you point them in the direction of ITV. Say, do you say the ITV? No. I just say ITV does this. And then they come up with a confabulation about that. And then, you know, you say, what about, what about Vladivostok Symphony Orchestra? And so we know things inexplicably.
Lulie Tanett
Yes, go. Sorry. Yeah, we don’t have that much time. And so I just want to ask one last question to kind of zoom out a bit, unless there’s anything else about this, this thread that so I’m thinking about how it happens that we get into this state where we have hangups, or we have these traumas or these emotions that we don’t want to feel. And what happens sort of originally when there is a baby that is crying and sad. But like, I kind of wouldn’t call a baby crying for milk, as a baby is grieving. Like it’s, it’s sort of, it’s, it’s having this unpleasant sensation where it wants this milk, and it’s trying to get it and everything. And then, and then what happens is that you comfort the baby, and you take care of the baby, and so on. And then this continues to happen through, you know, young childhood. And then it seems like there’s a thing. And so it seems like something’s going wrong, if you’re not comforting your child, which is different from if you’re not comforting an adult, maybe, I don’t know, like, I’m kind of, I’m circling around the question of, is pain basically okay? Or is, are all emotions basically okay? Like, grief can be this sort of very sweet thing, or anger can be this very kind of empowering thing in everything. And so what makes the difference between an emotion or a sensation that is not okay versus okay? And then so in Art of Accomplishment, there’s this thing of that, when you’re resisting it, then that is where this basically suffering comes from. That’s when stasis and everything. But if you’re fully feeling it, then that’s great. However, a child or a baby, fully feeling it, like, like, I wouldn’t want to say, oh, you shouldn’t be crying. So I agree with that. But there’s also a way that like, that is my job, if I were a mother, to make sure that whatever is the problem that that baby has is being solved. So this is my final kind of confusion between these two different frameworks. Mark, I don’t know if you have a… What’s the confusion? Is, does it work differently for adults than for babies and children? Like emotions? Is it, and this kind of comes back to a thing that David was saying near the beginning of, before all of the, there was a problem in the first place. Was it with the, with the, was a migraine? I can’t remember what the example was, but the migraine, say. Being burned at the stake was one. Oh, being burned at the stake. Yeah. Yeah. So, I think that’s the first thing. And then the second thing is, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it the same thing?
David Deutsch
Yeah. So, if all of the emotions are okay, then there wouldn’t be a problem. But it seems like structurally, it needs to be a problem. No, it could be just signaling. I mean, I, you know, I don’t think people know how babies work, and I certainly don’t. So we don’t know whether babies are distressed when they’re, when they cry and then want milk or whether they’re just signaling.
Lulie Tanett
Wait, should we say four year olds?
David Deutsch
Well, four year olds, you can ask them and they will tell you. So there’s no, there’s no problem once, once, I mean, there’s, there’s no ambiguity. Once they- Except when they are crying and they want something different. Yeah. Well, so if I’m in a restaurant and I, and I’ve just eaten the chili and it’s too hot and there’s no water and I want water from the waiter and I say, could we have some water over here, please? Now, there is an objective difference that either I’m suffering or I’m not suffering. If I just am signaling because I want something, that’s not suffering. If I am in distress, Okay. And then signaling because- Yeah. So you just had these hot chili, either what you can do is signal to the waiter and get some water and resolve the sensation, or you can be like, ah, I’m going through this thing and it’s impossible for me to get water right now. And now I’m kind of enjoying that it’s sort of painful and I’m really hardcore. Yes. Yeah. So humans are very good at interpreting things and interpreting them differently from the lizard apparatus. So what makes it bad advice to tell your child, oh, you should just interpret it like you can, you embrace the feeling of whatever. Because that, that, you know, if this is the first the child has heard of this, it’s going to take him more than a few seconds to get into the Zen state of enjoying the feeling of, I mean, it might do, it might do, but more likely if he sort of screams and says that hurts, then you want to address that problem. And if you insert things like you ought to be feeling something else, that’s the kind of thing that causes trouble.
Lulie Tanett
Yeah, I agree with that. That’s why, you know, my maxim is I blame the parents. I would love to ask this in more detail, but I know that we’re coming up to time. Mark, did you have any final thoughts on this? I’m not sure if I fully asked my question, but there we are. Life is short.
Mark Alexander
Yeah. Yeah. No, nothing to add there.
Lulie Tanett
All right. Well, I feel very unsatisfied. This is a wonderful place to be. I would love to have more conversations about this. I would love to fully understand this. I’m not sure if I ask any of my questions. It felt like great groundwork. Yeah. Yeah, but it has been an absolute pleasure to have you both. And let’s do this again sometime. Yes, absolutely.
David Deutsch
Thank you so much. Thank you.
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