← Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
350 | J. Eric Oliver on the Self and How to Know It
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- [00:01]
Sean Carroll
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- [01:27]
Progressive Insurance Announcer
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- [01:49]
Sean Carroll
Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. As someone who writes books, I can't help but occasionally peek at what other other books are selling really well. My books sell pretty well, but you know, you could always aim higher, right? So you peek at the bestseller lists, you walk into the airport bookstores and look around for what categories are flying off the shelves. In the nonfiction sections, of course, there's going to be a lot of books about how to become rich, make money, right? It's going to be a lot of books about how to lose weight or eat better food or something like that. And then there's a lot of books and Maybe the latter two categories also count that you would classify as self help. How to become a different, better kind of person. This isn't the kind of beat we traditionally cover here on Mindscape. I like to think that listening to some of our episodes would help you become a better self in different ways. Just because you're learning a whole bunch of cool stuff about the universe and ourselves. But it's not an explicit aim. We're not giving you advice on how to become a better person. What we might do is ask questions like what do you mean by the word self? What is that concept supposed to mean? Does it really hang together? Where does it come from? And by thinking about those, you could very easily help yourself to become a better person. If that's what you wanted to do with that knowledge. Today's guest is J. Eric Oliver, who's actually a political scientist at the University of Chicago. But he's been teaching a course for quite a while now called the Intelligible Self, which has become very popular among the undergrads at Chicago. And he's turned into a book called how to know the art and science of discovering who you really are, which could easily be read as the title of a self help book. And I think that there are things in the book that are self help oriented. But a lot of it is okay. You're a collection of particles moving under energy and forces and things like that. Where do we get this idea of what a self is? How does it come together? Is it really there? After all, we're different people now than we were in the past or will be in the future. And also, what are the implications of that idea? Is it true that you could help yourself? Can you actually, as an agent in the world, make choices that will make you better? Can you do practices that will fine tune yourself into the self you want to be? From a real philosophical, but also scientific, social scientific perspective In a lot of ways, obviously, the idea of a self is something that's been discussed widely in world history. And we'll talk about the aspects that we get from Western philosophy and religion for that matter, as well as Eastern philosophy and religion, modern science, thinking about these things. If there's any sort of short version pressy of the whole conversation. The self is not a thing, it's not an essence. It's not a single thing that locates itself where you are. It's a process. This is something that we've said various times in various ways here on mindscape thinking about how human beings emerge from the underlying description in Terms of atoms and molecules, et cetera, thinking about the role that entropy increase plays in making you a living organism and also a social organism with a view of the past, present and future and so forth, how that all comes together to make an intelligible thing called the self. And it is a process, and it's a messy process. There's a lot of impulses poking at you from both inside and from outside. So it's one of those topics which is great to think about because there's a lot of science, a lot of deep thinking involved. But we've all been there. We all have selves, right? We don't all necessarily experience the wave function of the universe or things like that, but we all have a picture of who we are, where we're going, and how we could get better at it. So that's a wonderful topic for this kind of discussion. So let's go. Eric Oliver. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast, Sean.
- [06:12]
J. Eric Oliver
It is such a pleasure to be here. I'm such a huge fan of the podcast and have been waiting for so long for an opportunity to come on. So this is great.
- [06:19]
Sean Carroll
The audience loves it when podcast guests are podcast listeners. They feel. They feel, feel a connection there that serves them well. But there's at least a little bit of a story to be told about how you in particular came to write this book, in particular. I'm sorry, I don't have the book with me here, so tell the audience what your book name is and how it grew out of a class that you're teaching.
- [06:43]
J. Eric Oliver
Sure. So the book is called how to Know the Art and Science of Discovering who youo really Are. And it started from a course I've been teaching here at the University of Chicago for 20 plus years. And when I came to Chicago, one of the great things about teaching here, as you know, is that they basically let us teach whatever we want. And I had this eclectic interest in psychoanalytic theory and philosophy and neuroscience and Buddhism. And so I thought, well, what would it be like to put a class together with all these eclectic interests? And my wife jokingly said, oh, you should call the class stuff I'm interested in. And I was like, okay, I could call it that. Or I just put it together and it ended up being a real success and the students got a lot out of it. And I realized this is a class on how to know yourself. And so I ended up calling the class the Intelligible Self and had been teaching it for decades. And during COVID I had met a lot of people who Were saying, oh, I wish I could take that class. Do you have a book to recommend? And problem is, I had hundreds. And I thought, well, maybe here was an opportunity to do something useful and to put these disparate strains of science and wisdom and conversation with each other and try to integrate them into this way of understanding how we apprehend this experience of being that we're all going through.
- [08:02]
Sean Carroll
That makes perfect sense to me. I think that you probably would not have gotten a lot of students if you just called the course stuff I'm interested in, but in particular for our audience, You're a professor in a political science department, and probably not a lot of your political science colleagues are teaching courses about the South.
- [08:20]
J. Eric Oliver
No. And I. My students always ask me, why is this a political science class? And I'm like, well, because I'm in the political science department. But it does draw a little bit on my past research. So I do. In my day job as a political scientist, I do research on public opinion and political psychology. And my last book in particular was examining this way politics get organized by human intuitions. And one of the things I wanted to say was that when we look at modern American politics, we have people who are on the rationalist side of things and people who, I would say, on the intuitionist side of things. And that actually explains a lot of sort of the growth of populism and conspiracy theories and these types of things. And so within political science, which is a big epistemological tent, there's an opportunity to explore a lot about psychology and philosophy. So in some ways, it's not entirely inconsistent with our discipline. Yeah. Even though, if it goes into a much more personal and introspective kind of version here.
- [09:16]
Sean Carroll
Well, as you know, as we both know, disciplines sort of do professionalize after a while, and certain questions are deemed askable and others not askable. But in principle, political science should certainly involve the individual people's notions of themselves. Right, Right.
- [09:34]
J. Eric Oliver
Well, I was thinking about you, because aren't you now a professor of natural philosophy?
- [09:39]
Sean Carroll
I am. That's my. That's my title.
- [09:41]
J. Eric Oliver
And I thought, well, on those lines, maybe I should be a professor of moral philosophy. Kind of going back in time and that's maybe is kind of reclaiming that tradition.
- [09:49]
Sean Carroll
Yeah, no, it's great. And it's good to have the seniority to get away with these kinds of things. You young people out there looking for an academic career, don't try this at home. It's a little dangerous. So. Okay, so let's dig into the substance here, I mean, you're breaking the question a little bit, but is there a thing called the self? Is that a useful notion? When we talk about ourselves as human
- [10:11]
J. Eric Oliver
beings, I think that's one of our biggest misconceptions. So when we think of ourselves, we typically think of ourselves as things. And there's a good reason to think of ourselves as things, because things are easy to sort of discern and apprehend. They're stable, they're fixed, they're solid. But of course, when we look at ourselves, there's nothing singular, stable, or silent about us. And one of the claims I make in the book is to really understand yourself, you have to get to the more elusive idea that you're a process, or more importantly, a set of processes that elaborate, liberate up from some deeper inner cores. It's like a set of Russian nesting dolls, if you can think of it that way. And at the sort of deepest level, and this is one thing I'm very excited to talk to you about, is we are energy systems at our deepest, deepest core. And this is where physics can actually tell us quite a bit about ourselves. So I actually start the book talking about physics and what physics can tell us about, both energy and life, for that matter.
- [11:11]
Sean Carroll
This does seem to involve a presumption of something like naturalism. Right. Like that you're not thinking of the self as the expression of some eternal soul.
- [11:23]
J. Eric Oliver
Yeah, I think that's the interesting thing that we always have to confront with ourselves because our intuitions want to tell us, at least my intuition does, that I am the same person that I've always been since childhood. Even though I know I'm different, I've had these different experiences. There seems to be this kind of core element to me. And, you know, in the Western tradition and actually in the Eastern tradition, this goes way, way back. And this is this notion of dualism. Like, there's the body that's there, that's corporal, that's temporal, that's, you know, farting and burping and doing all this terrible things. And then there's the mind or the soul that's pristine and eternal. It seems to go on forever. And I think that reflects how we oftentimes think of ourselves. But of course, that is an illusion. And one of the biggest challenges for knowing ourselves is getting past this kind of illusion of dualism.
- [12:12]
Sean Carroll
Do you know Derek Parfit's teletransporter experiment?
- [12:16]
J. Eric Oliver
I don't know that experiment. I know Derek Parvat, but it's one of. I Know his work.
- [12:21]
Sean Carroll
I recently had a conversation with Adam Elga, who's a philosopher at Princeton, who does. What if there are multiple copies of us in the universe? How do we reason about who we are? So Parfit was interested in personal identity, and he said, what if you jump into a transporter machine like in Star Trek, but by mistake it makes two copies of you rather than just one? Which one are you? And he comes to a similar conclusion that you're not. There's no answer to that. There's a process going on, and there was one person and now there's two people, and they both have just as much claim to being the original. Right.
- [12:55]
J. Eric Oliver
Or another way of thinking about this is the ship of Theseus paradox, which is, you know, there's no part of us at a molecular or cellular level that is constant. It's always getting replenished and replaced. So how can you say that you're the same person that you've been all along? And in some ways you can say, well, you're not, but in other ways, yes, you are, because there's a continual process that's going on, this continual process of life generation that's sustained within the structure of you. And so if there's anything that has a claim to be you, it's this life force that's animating you and continuing to animate you.
- [13:32]
Sean Carroll
Yeah. It's obviously very consonant with the ways I think about entropy and processes and things like that. So I'm going to be a big fan. It does raise the question that maybe we have life events that change who we are dramatically, and then maybe the concept of a continual self doesn't fit as well.
- [13:52]
J. Eric Oliver
I think the answer to that question is yes and no. So at one level, there is a continual life force that is contained within our DNA and the processes that our DNA are coding for and sustaining. That's particular to us. But in some ways, that's a little bit of a myopic view of it, because you could actually trace us back in time and say every living thing is just cousins in the same underlying life force that traces all the way back to our last universal common ancestor, what biologists call luca. And everything that has been alive on Earth since then is a descendant of luca. And we all share a certain number of genes, and we could all think of ourselves in some ways as just different elaborations of the same underlying life force that started with Luco 3.7 billion years ago. So in that sense, we are part of this continual force, and it's not necessarily we can think of ourselves as distinctive, but we're not necessarily that distinctive. It's like, you know, if a leaf on a tree thinks it's very distinctive from all the other leaves on the tree, then you know that you get that. That idea. On the same time, if we go up in elaborations of our life processes, there are elements to us that I would call sort of our linguistic self and more importantly, our egoistic self that are these social, cultural constructions that shape the ways that we interact with reality, that are really, really important and distinct and do reflect our individualistic life history. But that's kind of a higher level of elaboration of our self processes. So that's why I would say the answer is both yes and no in some ways.
- [15:33]
Sean Carroll
But. But the idea of a linguistic self and an egoistic self means that there's more than one notion of the self.
- [15:40]
J. Eric Oliver
Yes. Yeah. And I think that's. That's a common misconception. So when we go back and we think of the self as singular, there's nothing singular about us. I mean, even. Even at a biological level, if you think about, like, you know, your cells carry around mitochondria that have a different DNA that the DNA that programs for you. And, you know, the biologist Lynn Margolis championed this theory in the 1960s that this was result of this early symbiotic relationship that developed between a eukaryote ancestor and an ancient bacterium. And rather than destroy it, the two work in concert. But what that means is at our cellular level, we are an amalgamation of two different domains of life, not even just species. And, you know, if you throw our microbiome in there too, okay, there. There's more kind of stew and complexity. And of course, as a linguistic species, we are totally contingent upon language for our survival. So that links us to this whole cultural legacy as well. And as a social species, we depend on other people. So we are just a fundamentally social being. And these processes are highly, highly socially determined. So there's no. We should all be using they, them pronouns really, at the end of the day. Like, there's no real I there.
- [16:56]
Progressive Insurance Announcer
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- [17:18]
J. Eric Oliver
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- [17:45]
Sean Carroll
Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Well, this is a very common thing that happens in science, or I guess more broadly that we have a notion, sort of a primitive folk notion that makes sense to us is almost inescapable. And then we think about it hard philosophers do this too. And you realize, oh, it's much more complicated than I thought it was. And some people are going to be resistant to being told this story.
- [18:10]
J. Eric Oliver
Yes, exactly. And this is, I think part of the challenge of self knowledge is we have certain habitual intuitions and ways of thinking about ourselves and we get very attached to those. And at some level, I would argue our psychology or our mind holds on to those because A, we really like certainty and we really like predictability and we can get into that of like how our brains are these sort of prediction machines, but we at some level, psychologically, we think they're necessary for our survival. So we hold on to these notions of ourselves or even our own emotional and mental habits because we think that's what we need to get by. And that oftentimes impedes us from either addressing what are real imbalances in our self processes and we can go into what those might be and growing as people. And so we oftentimes live in a kind of a less than optimal state.
- [19:05]
Sean Carroll
And the fact that this concept is more subtle and complicated than you might have naively thought doesn't mean it's useless. Right. Like I, it is true that I think of myself as having continuity with my past self and my future self. And I, I almost can't imagine thinking differently. Like I make decisions now for the benefit of my future self. Right. What else could I do?
- [19:31]
J. Eric Oliver
Exactly. And that's, I think part of the hard thing too is that what it means to transcend that is to let go of those conceptions that are very, very hardwired into us. And in some ways letting go of even language, like moving to a level of consciousness that involves more direct sensory perception that's not always necessarily filtered or even distorted through this linguistic prism by which our kind of conscious cognition typically operates.
- [20:00]
Sean Carroll
I will note it note parenthetically that there are some people out there who refuse to accept the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics because it messes with their notion of personal identity over time.
- [20:12]
J. Eric Oliver
Sure. Yeah. And okay, I mean, it's funny because I know this is a. Is totally off base, but one of my favorite interpretations of dreams is dreams is how you actually link up with your different cells and all these alternative universes. You know, I don't think that's the case.
- [20:28]
Sean Carroll
I don't think it's the case. But it would be fun. Yeah, it's. It's a good thing to think about.
- [20:31]
J. Eric Oliver
But.
- [20:32]
Sean Carroll
But the process view of a self rather than, you know, a fixed essence kind of thing doesn't have any problems, I don't think, with splitting. Whether it's through many worlds or transporter machines or having a copy of ourselves uploaded onto the computer. Like we can evolve from a single process to multiple processes and there's all still part of the original self.
- [20:56]
J. Eric Oliver
Yeah, it's getting over the notion of preciousness about yourself that we hold on to.
- [21:02]
Sean Carroll
So another along those lines about thinking about my future self. Lori Paul was a former Mindscape guest. She's a philosopher at Yale who has this notion of transformative experience. What do you do if the example she always uses is becoming a vampire, but really it's just code for having children and what it means is.
- [21:24]
J. Eric Oliver
Or giving birth to vampires.
- [21:25]
Sean Carroll
Maybe the idea is you're going to do something that will fundamentally change who you are. So much so that your current views of what would make you happy and unhappy are different from the future used views of what would make you happy and unhappy. And how should you act rationally in a situation where right now the thing you're going to do to yourself makes you unhappy, but once you do it, you're happy with it?
- [21:54]
J. Eric Oliver
Well, there's an interesting debate right now in controlled experiments using psychedelics that's very similar to this, which is like, oh, how can we get informed consent from research subjects about experience that's going to be so transformative and, and something that they've never experienced before that they have no idea if you've never taken LSD before. And it's such a very distinct and disruptive experience that is so hard to describe with ordinary language. How can you ever even get informed consent about what you're about to do? And we could say that there's an interesting analogy for this writ large. And that's. I think if we go back to the wisdom traditions, the big struggle of our various contemplative wisdom traditions are about trying to deal with this very subject, which is how do we unlearn these habits of mind when every fiber of our psychology is desperately clinging to them. And I think this is really the kind of the heart of Buddhism in that regard and trying to differentiate and distinguish that down. And it's a big task for us. It's a big challenge. I know my mind doesn't want to be unlearned. I'm very attached to this mind.
- [23:05]
Sean Carroll
Well, I guess, and this is a very open ended question. I mean, I guess that there are things we learn by thinking carefully about the science and philosoph and psychology here. But then there's the sort of operationalizing of those lessons like so, okay, so I'm a process, not an essence or whatever. So what? How does that affect how I go through my life?
- [23:27]
J. Eric Oliver
So one of the ways I describe it is that I spend a lot of time with a lot of unproductive thoughts. I mean, I'm in my head all the time, I'm professor academic. But you know, I would say like a lot of times I'm going through the day and I know I'm obsessing about this lecture I'm going to give or I'm worried about like my children's future or you know, any number of things. And I stop and I say, okay, is this thought really helping anything? And I would say about 90% of my thoughts I don't think are really helping me very much. You know, they're just my mind practicing or processing or just obsessing. And so when you begin to understand yourself as a process, it gives you a loose, a little bit of space to sort of step back from this and appreciate, okay, this is not only are my thoughts necessarily not as real as I assume them to be or as important necessarily as I often assign them to be, but I can begin to recognize them. This is my brain as a prediction machine kind of running through old routines. And really this is the whole. For me, what I think is the big promise of self exploration and books like mine on self exploration is that they give us an expanded vocabulary, vocabulary of our lived experience. And with this greater vocabulary of our lived experience, we can begin to take different perspectives on situations that normally keep us trapped or limited in any particular way.
- [24:58]
Sean Carroll
I like that idea, running through the old routines. I know that some research on psychedelics. Here at Johns Hopkins we have the largest psychedelics lab in the United States. Part of the research holds out the promise that it will help people escape from addiction or PTSD or things like that. Because it does sort of bump us loose from whatever ruts we keep running around in again and again.
- [25:22]
J. Eric Oliver
Yeah. And a good way to think about this is what neuroscientists call the connectome, which is we. Now, I think the best working theory on how the brain operates is that it's a series of these networks, these neural networks. And we know that we have different dedicated networks within our brain. Like, we have a salience network that's kind of keeping us focused on particular things. We have a. Or as makes. Makes us sensitive to, like, loud, unexpected stimuli. We have an attention network that helps us focus on particular things. We have a visual network in the back part of our brain, et cetera. And these networks oftentimes are learned early on. Part of our. That one of the thing that's beautiful about being human is that we're incredibly plastic. And this plasticity is heightened when we're infants and in our. The first years of life. And this is where these neural networks are really being coalesced. And so that's great. It helps us move very efficiently. We learn about the world, and we learn patterns in the world, and we learn to move efficiently through the world. But then the problem is that those early childhood experiences leave an oversized imprint on our neural architecture. And so we end up carrying around what might be a lot of either outdated neural routines or archaic or dysfunctional neural routines, depending on sort of our early childhood experiences. And so that, as an adult, is what we need to begin to unlearn if we want to live, I think, in a more optimal and healthy way.
- [26:52]
Sean Carroll
I guess. You know, we've been going to these slightly science fiction y things about many worlds and teletransforwarder machines, but everything you've just been saying reminds us that even right here, right now, whatever the self is, it's not very unified. Like, there's different parts of us inside kind of arguing with each other.
- [27:11]
J. Eric Oliver
Exactly. And, you know, another way of describing it is it's like if. If you are a process, you're. You're something like a river or a fire. And. Well, how do you describe a river or a fire? I mean, it sounds like a Zen koan kind of thing, but. But there's a truth to it. And a lot of. It's like learning to kind of let go of a certain need for everything to be concretized and predictable and to be comfortable with ambiguity and be more comfortable with uncertainty and more comfortable with this kind of indeterminate flow of this life force.
- [27:45]
Sean Carroll
I guess you mentioned that there's all sorts of different traditions that weigh in on this. But I have an impression which is an entirely uneducated impression. So tell me if I'm wrong, that Western philosophy, from Aristotle through Descartes, et cetera, has been especially insistent on this mind, body distinction and a little bit reluctant to think of the self as something plastic, changing, disunified. Is that true to other traditions? Are they more comfortable with that?
- [28:17]
J. Eric Oliver
Well, yes, the Western tradition, definitely. So. So the ancient Greeks were this way. This got incorporated into kind of early Christian theology as well. And then I think Descartes is the champion of dualism in this way. And in the east, you actually see it too in the early Vedic traditions, the Brahmins had a similar notion of this Atman, which is sort of like the soul and then the body, which is temporal. And this is actually what explains one of the big schisms between Hinduism and Buddhism was this debate over the, you know, the Atman, which the Hindus said that we had. And then the Buddhists had this idea of Anaman, which is no self or non self. And so that's why you often hear in Buddhism, this Buddhists say there's no such thing as the self. And what they're really saying is that there's no Atman. This sort of. And what the Hindus believe is that we all have this Atman, and it thinks of itself as distinct from Brahman, which is sort of this great mystical energy source in the universe. And part of their spiritual practice is to reunify Atman with Brahman writ large.
- [29:21]
Sean Carroll
I think you might have given me an insight onto Buddhism, which I know very, very little about. But so when the Buddhists talk about no self or the lack of self, they're moving within a tradition that has connotations attached to the word self that maybe I, as a Westerner don't recognize.
- [29:39]
J. Eric Oliver
Right. I think this is one of our challenges when we even have the concept of self. I write about this in the book. Like when I was in high school, my English teacher wrote know thyself on the blackboard. And she said, okay, these two words, you know, crystallize the distilled wisdom of the ancient Greeks. Like, this is if you wanted to live this meaningful life, you had to know yourself. What she didn't tell me is that the Greeks didn't really have a word that meant self in the way that we have self. They didn't mean this kind of modern, introspective, individualized. When they said know thyself, what they really meant was know thy place. It was another way of saying, okay, you are in this very tightly bound, traditional cultural context, right? And if you want to survive, adhere to that context. You know, you, you know what your role in the tribe is. You know, you, you don't question your purpose, you don't question your place, you don't ask what love is. You know, you just. And the tribe will protect you and keep you in place. And those customs and traditions evolved, I think, relative to the local ecology. So most of our ancestors lived in very, very parochial circumstances. And so these cultures evolved that way. It's only like, I think, with the Enlightenment and the rise of industrialization and liberalism and kind of this mass individualism that we experience that we know self in this individualized way. And the same holds, I think, when people, we encounter philosophical or contemplative traditions from the east, we oftentimes interpret them through this modern lens. They have their own traditions.
- [31:06]
Sean Carroll
So you're telling me that as a post Enlightenment individual, when I hear the phrase know thyself, I'm hearing almost the opposite of what the ancient Greeks actually meant by it?
- [31:16]
J. Eric Oliver
Yes, exactly.
- [31:18]
Sean Carroll
Okay, that's good to know. But, but, but still, you know, I want to, you know, pull at the threads of how useful this concept of a self is. You already mentioned thinking about your own thoughts. And this kind of, I don't know, how can we, how can we conceptualize that? Who's doing the thinking about your own thoughts? Aren't you?
- [31:37]
J. Eric Oliver
Your thoughts? Well, okay, I think to answer that question, maybe I could step back a little bit and I want to engage you a little bit as a physicist on this, because really what the self starts with, with is we as energy systems. And the way to really understand these self processes is to understand that we, like everything else in the universe, are an energy system at our very deepest core. But we are something distinct in, in so far as I don't think we know, and maybe you can correct me on this, that there are any other energy systems that are doing what we're doing, which is pushing back against entropy. And this was Erwin Schrodinger's, you know, great idea about what is life? Which is life is an energy system that is drawing in free energy to push back against the greater entropic tide of the universe. I mean, we're all going to eventually succumb to it too, but at least, you know, we're like a little eddy in this greater entropic stream that's going forth and that the living things do this through what I would call a life force. And that sounds kind of mystical. But what I really mean, it's just the process of what I call food, sex and death. You know, it's taking free energy and food. It's replicating itself with an opportunity for evolutionary development that sex and it's resisting destruction. And I say death because that's more fun to say than survival. So, you know, food, sex and death. And that's, that's what builds up when I say a life force. And it's interesting, I think there are spiritual traditions that try to interpret this in a, in a distinct way. They call it like prana or chi. But you know, we can think about it from physics that yes, we have this, this particular way that energy is getting configured on our planet, this life force. And one question I would have for you on this is, you know, it's. Would, would. Is it even worth considering life as a force in the same way that we think of other physical forces? And I, I'd be curious as a physicist if that has any validity in your mind.
- [33:31]
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- [33:53]
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- [34:53]
Sean Carroll
I actually don't know if I'm being my my. When you ask if life should be considered as a force or could be, my immediate reaction is no, don't do that. We have, you know, forces are like electricity and gravity and things like that. But of course that's not true. There are emergent higher level macroscopic forces. There's famously something called an entropic force. If you have a system which, you know, has a favorite size to be depending on it's just trying to maximize its entropy, then you could easily have a situation where you try to squeeze it to be smaller or pull it to be larger and it will resist, it will pull back because it's trying to maximize its entropy. So in some very generalized sense, like you say, we think of living creatures as physical manifestations of certain complex things going on in a world where entropy is increasing, is it useful to think of them as exerting a particularly lifey kind of force? I don't know. Maybe. I bet force is probably not the word, but I bet the spirit of the question has an answer that is yes.
- [36:03]
J. Eric Oliver
Yes, right. And this also is an interesting corollary here that I, I would be curious to hear your reflections on, which is when I was young, I thought, oh, you know, if I could just get a handle on this self, I would have the keys to the universe. And I thought, oh, maybe I could understand this through some deeper, you know, physics theories about how the universe works or some, you know, ancient Vedic tomes. And I think you see a lot of these sort of, of kind of self proclaimed gurus that are out there who try to sort of elicit these ideas and say, I know the secrets of the universe. And it seems to be this dude. And it's always like a dude who is, you know, claims to be this.
- [36:45]
Sean Carroll
It's very lucrative.
- [36:46]
J. Eric Oliver
Yeah, it has this privileged knowledge that YouTube can access for the low price of 49.9amonth. And you know, the thing is, the problem with all of that is I don't think our brains, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think our brains are actually designed to actually fully apprehend energy. When I think about energy, we have these placeholder concepts for it and ancient traditions used ideas of spirit or chi or prana. And physics gives us an elaborate and very interesting set of concepts like our formulas, like E equals MC squared, our definitions. But boy, when you really start thinking about energy, at least when I start thinking about energy, it quickly moves away out of my normal intuitive conceptions. And I begin to wonder, like, is physics something like math, something that we have discovered or something that we invent? And it seems to be a little above.
- [37:44]
Sean Carroll
This is absolutely a classic chestnut in the philosophy of science. Right. Do we discover or invent the laws of physics? I do think, I mean, one quick thing and I'm Sure. You know this. You got to be careful when you say our brains are designed to do blank, but they are. You can say that they're optimized to do certain things by the process of natural selection. And Absolutely. Understanding physics is not one of the things that our brains are optimized to do. They're optimized to understand a certain kind of what we call folk physics or the manifest image. You know, apples fall from trees. They don't fly upward when they release. But formalizing that abstract thought. Abstract thought is fascinating to me because on the one hand, it's one of the things that makes us uniquely human. Right. On the other hand, we're not very good at it. And, yeah, that's why we had to try to train ourselves to become better. So I don't think it's surprising to me at all that when you formalize an idea like energy or force or matter, you end up with something that is not comfortably equivalent to what we always thought it was. It's something a little bit new and different, and you have to expend some effort to try to wrap your brain around it. Right.
- [38:54]
J. Eric Oliver
And thanks for the correction on that, too. I mean, it's so funny because I've written about this and I do this all the time, and I think it shows our intuitions, like, it's very hard to understand evolution at some level. And so we intuitively, even if we know evolution and think about it and champion it, we go back to this whole, like, old rhetoric.
- [39:11]
Sean Carroll
I totally knew what you meant, by the way.
- [39:13]
J. Eric Oliver
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but thanks for pointing that out, because it's funny, you know, you always slip up on that. But I think this also speaks to the issue of why it's so challenging to know ourselves. Because if at a core, we are energy systems and energy is ineffable to our ordinary minds, at some level, we're going to know. Knowing ourselves is going to be, well, is there an essence that, well, I can objectively know? Or is knowing myself always going to be something of a subjective experience? And it's analogous to the. You know, is math something that we discover or something that we invent? And it's both.
- [39:48]
Sean Carroll
Well, my colleague Janan Ismail at Johns Hopkins, who's a philosopher, she's written a book called the Situated Self, and she's written another book called How Physics Makes Us Free. And her theme, over and over again is, we are little subsets of the universe, and there are interactions between yourself and the universe that get in the way of Full understanding. Right. That you can't actually predict what will happen next in a world where you're the one making the prediction, but the world is out there also. So I do think that this overly simplified point of view of that neither you nor I nor any grown up really believes that ourselves are dots with an essence that just floats through time and births and is born and then dies, is way oversimplified. And when we push it and when we really think about who we are in the world, it's going to necessarily become more complicated than that.
- [40:45]
J. Eric Oliver
Right. And I think that probably the best that we can say, or at least what I concluded from writing this book, is that what is me, this process here? Well, this is a process that's negotiating between this life force and then me, this particular incarnation of the life force and reality.
- [41:03]
Sean Carroll
Yeah.
- [41:04]
J. Eric Oliver
So everything that is, is that I know, from my cellular metabolism to my sensory apparatus and my brain structure, to my use of language, to the notions in my head, the laws that I follow, the mores I try to observe, to my own egoistic ideas of identity and personhood and me, all of these are part of these processes. And we are very complicated beings here. This is why it's so hard to know these processes because they exist in all of these elaborations. And most of them exist in ways that are not apparent to our ordinary consciousness. Most of them are going on under the hood. So I can't see. For example, if I didn't have a microscope, I wouldn't know I had cells. Same thing with my neural architecture and my psychology. So all of this stuff which is so important for defining this experience of being that I'm having right now that I'm mostly unaware of.
- [42:04]
Sean Carroll
And yeah, so we need the psychological equivalent of the microscope to reveal some of these things. I do wonder about things like psychedelics or even just meditation, things like that. Or are we really learning something about ourselves by doing that? Is it crucial? Should everyone do it? I tried meditating once. It didn't really work for me, but I'm in favor of other people doing it.
- [42:28]
J. Eric Oliver
As you should be. Yeah, if everyone else can meditate, the world would be great. Well, I've actually had a pretty long experience with meditation and gone on a lot of these 10 day silent meditation retreats. And one of the things when I first started meditating, it's like, oh, I want to meditate in order to be a better person. And then I realized, well, no, that assumes that I'm a flawed or bad person to begin with. And There was nothing in the meditation that was stopping me from being a certain kind of person. I think the genius of meditation or just contemplative practices in general is what they do is they help us unlearn the mental habits that we have. If you sit there in a contemplative state where you're focusing on your breath or a mantra and you're not reacting to any momentary stimulus that's going forth and it's sort of saying, oh, my knee hurts, I'm going to react to it. I'm just going to. Instead, you're going to sit. I'm going to sit and observe this. With some equanimous detachment, you begin to unlearn the mental habits that calcify in our brains. Now the problem with that is all of this happens unconsciously. And so we don't, we can't really, you know, there, it's a. We can sort of measure our progress with, oh, okay, I feel more contented, I feel more at ease. I'm not sort of so buffeted by all my emotional storms. I mean, you can see that with people with kind of advanced meditation practices, they, they're always so present and so quiet. That's a really lovely, you know, going back to your point of if only everyone else meditated, we'd be surrounded by all of these very quiet, attentive, lovely people. And I've noticed this with, when I go on retreats and like advanced meditators had this really wonderful way of being, but, but it's all happening kind of unconsciously. Now science does give us a few clues about what might be going on with this. And I could go into that if you wanted.
- [44:18]
Sean Carroll
Actually, I do want you to go into that a little bit more. But first, just for the audience and for myself, what is it like to be in a 10 day meditation retreat? What is going on there? Is it very explicitly instructed on how to spend your 10 days or are you just like left alone for 10 days?
- [44:35]
J. Eric Oliver
So before I went on my first retreat, I was terrified because I had tried to meditate. I would like sit down and after 10 minutes I would get up and on this big agitated state. And I was like, okay, how am I going to do this for 10 straight days in silence? But I practice for a meditation called vipassana, which comes out of the Theravada Southeast tradition in Southeast Asia. And there are a number of centers here in the United States. And these are kind of remarkable cultural institutions because they give you a lot of instruction and they give you a lot of support. And it's really a place for you just to go and learn how to meditate and sit with all of your business for 10 days in a very safe, supported environment. So they do give you a lot of instruction. And the way it typically works is you spend your first three days called doing what's called anapana meditation, which is just focusing on your breath. And what you're doing there is basically just getting this constant chatter and discourse of your mind to quiet down a little bit. Once you kind of get to that state, then you're moving to what's called vipassana meditation, which is focusing on the body as the focal point of concentration. And you're basically just scanning your body from head to toe, head to toe, back and forth. And what that reveals is some really interesting stuff because as your mind gets quiet and you're in this very, you know, desensitized environment, the of sense, this inner processes and this inner sensitivity really expands. And suddenly like, I remember I was going, I was like, oh my God, I can trace down my esophagus through my stomach, have some sense of my intestines. And more interestingly, this more subtle effervescence becomes manifest. So, you know that feeling you get when you get goosebumps, that kind of tingly feeling, you're really always experiencing that this is just your nervous system. But, you know, it's usually too subtle to meet our ordinary consciousness. And so when I go on a meditation retreat and I sit down, it's suddenly like I get plugged in and I become this body electric. And it's. It's a really wonderful and remarkable experience of being. Now the challenge is that on when I'm feeling great, there's this energy flow and it's radiant and it's ecstatic and it's wonderful. But when I'm dealing with all of my past habits and challenges of mind, you suddenly get exposed to, you know, very intense discomfort. And they become, and they have a word for it called sankaras, which these. These kind of psychosomatic responses there. And for me, like, I had this feeling of being, like, stabbed in my chest with a severe. I've been working for a long time on. On dealing with that. So meditation is really, really hard work in that regard. And I have this joke I tell my students is like, why are you Buddhist monks always smiling when you see them in photographs? Because they're so happy not to be meditating.
- [47:21]
Sean Carroll
Are you at least allowed to check your email at the end of the day? At the one of these meditation,
- [47:27]
J. Eric Oliver
it's all done not in a way to restrict you, it's in a way to sort of help you. And because when you're in that kind of sensitivity, if you saw an email like from your mom saying when are you going to be home? It would just like. It's like dropping a huge stone in a still podcast.
- [47:43]
Sean Carroll
Yeah, I don't know, I figured. I just, I just had to ask. Okay, it's a lot to ask. But going back to the. The idea of our sort of flow through time in entropy increasing and things like that, I just wanted to ask again a vague question about the relation of time and the self. Like clearly me right now, I have memories of the past. They may or may not be accurate. Right. But I have an impression of what I was doing in the past. I have have expectations or imaginations of the future. And I feel like the sort of moving from the past to the future is absolutely crucial to being a self. Is this just my idiosyncratic idea or do you think that there's some purchase there?
- [48:29]
J. Eric Oliver
Once again, I think the answer is yes and no. Okay, there's going to be this theme here. At one level you're at, as I said earlier, your animal brain is a prediction machine. So we animals evolved since organs and brains as a way of mapping the universe around us and predicting what's coming next. It made us much more efficient in terms of being able to go out and eat other living things. And so we see these elaborations. And so for most animals, that puts us in time, in a timeframe. As one of your brain becomes a prediction machine about taking in information and anticipating what's happening next. You are now living in yourself, is living in time. But I don't think most animals have a time horizon that extends beyond a few seconds. If they have, they have like accumulated experiences that may, you know, they have learned behaviors. And you could say that's the residue of their past experiences that are shaping them. So maybe that pulls them back in time somewhat. But I think most animal, their conscious experience takes them from, you know, maybe 90 seconds. Four is what they're projecting. And you can think about that their emotions, like if they're getting triggered for a particular emotion, if that trigger is not sustained, that emotion will for most animals last, I think the psychologists estimate about a couple of minutes and then they go back to their homeostatic set point. We, however, are a linguistic species. And what does language do to us? It allows us to begin to imagine the future or ruminate on the past in a way, because we can now hold abstract concepts in our heads.
- [50:04]
Sean Carroll
So sorry, let me interrupt. So that capacity to ruminate on the past and imagine the future is clearly critical, I agree. But you're giving credit to language for that?
- [50:17]
J. Eric Oliver
I think so. And I don't. I mean, maybe my dog, we were talking about this, I was talking about this with my wife last night. It was like, you know, does our dog think about us when we're not at home? And I don't think, you know, my dog, you know, has a vision of me in his head. Swing. Oh, where is he? You know, I don't think he's doing that.
- [50:37]
Sean Carroll
Yeah, that's an excellent question. I don't know how to test that.
- [50:39]
J. Eric Oliver
We can't ask him.
- [50:40]
Sean Carroll
Exactly.
- [50:41]
J. Eric Oliver
And maybe there are some animal biologists out there who would figure out some test of doing that. But the problem is when we do any of these tests with animals, we're always doing them through some sort of human based subject. I have a good example of this. Like so, for example, do animals have the capacity for self reflection? And there's a famous experiment that was done by this guy named Gordon gallop in the 1960s where he wanted to know if animals could have a. Had a sense of themselves in the way that we have a sense of ourselves. And so he did this thing that's called the red dye test or the mirror test, which is they would put an animal or a young child in front of a mirror and see if the animal would have any signs of recognizing themselves in the mirror. And a lot of animals, they see the reflection and they think it's another animal. They charge it or they run away from it. And so they don't seem to do this. But what they would do is then they would surreptitiously mark the faces of the animals or the children with red dyes or some kind of marker and then put them in front of the mirror again. And some animal species, like elephants, chimpanzees, even dolphins, I believe can sort of indicate towards the gesture. It seems to show that they have some sort of self recognition. So does that mean that animals can understand themselves? And I think this goes to this question, do animals think of themselves in time in this way? Yeah, well, yes. But on the other hand, mirrors don't really exist in the wild. And so when we're testing that, we're always interpreting through the lens of human culture. And so it's really difficult for us to know. I think whenever we study animal species, we're inevitably doing it through our own cultural prisms. And because animals don't have that ability to communicate abstract concepts, we can't really interrogate them and find out what's going on in their heads in the same way.
- [52:31]
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- [52:54]
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- [53:22]
Sean Carroll
But we human beings, I mean, I don't know, correct me if I'm wrong, we do have this capacity to remember the past. And even our memories aren't very good. So we sort of condense them into the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. I mean, at one point in the book, you're asking if, you know, we are defined by our stories. Who is the author of these stories anyway? Are we writing the stories or are they sort of being imposed upon us from outside?
- [53:49]
J. Eric Oliver
Right. And I think when I describe the self, I have these various layers. I describe this. There's a cellular self, which is this energy system in our cells. This is animal self, which is our biological collection of multicellular processes that are happening to enable us to exist as a source, this fantastically complex multicellular creature. There's a linguistic self which comes from our shared language and all of its cultures and laws. And there's an egoistic self that's there, which is all of the psychological processes that help us negotiate with other people. Because we're very, very social species and we have these egos and they get informed for us in a lot of ways. Now, here's the challenge for us when it comes to the egoistic self. Science can't tell us a lot until us a little bit it. But the way we know our egoistic selves typically isn't through some sort of scientific paradigm. It's through stories, it's through the humanities, through language. I mean, if you think about, like what therapy is about. Yeah. Therapy is going and sitting on the couch, and you're just interpreting your stories. It's. It's narrative. And this is. This is where I think self exploration shifts away from. It can't be a solely scientific endeavor. It becomes a cultural endeavor. And in that way, one of understanding our stories. And this is something I talk to my students a lot about. I sort of say, well, you know, here we are when my. My thoughts are oftentimes always in stories. So this is how I think we should actually call our species Homo nerens. I mean, we're storytelling human. Not necessarily why it's human because we love stories, and that's how we. That's how we organize information in a way that's very efficient for us, and it binds us. Because a lot of the times, I think a lot of my expectations about who or what I should be are very much caught up in these narratives. You know, I'm. I'm a good student. I want to be a successful professor. I, you know, I want to do these various things. I want to have this happy life. And a lot of those narratives were not necessarily ones I came up with on my own. They were ones that were bequeathed to me by either my culture and its myths and stories or about my or my family and their own expectations about who or what I was supposed to be.
- [55:55]
Sean Carroll
And I think this is actually, this is the thing I've been waiting to discuss with you. I think this is fascinating to me. You mentioned the word expectations, and we talked about how animals are a little bit different than human beings. I have this idea that one of the ways in which humans are most different from animals is that we do have expectations for ourselves. And. And we also get nervous or embarrassed if we don't think that we're living up to what the culture around us expects of us. Is this something that is, you know, I don't know if it's uniquely human. There's always a spectrum here. But it seems that this ability to sort of say, well, there's something I should be doing and I'm not doing it, is, you know, one of the crucial hallmarks of human existence.
- [56:43]
J. Eric Oliver
Well, I think ultimately this is Freud's big contribution to our knowledge is understanding that we are species that are culturally determined. And one of the ways culture determines us is that we internalize our cultural norms in terms of our own psychological processes. So, you know, in Civilization as discontents. He famously says that we are not just these, you know, feral beasts. We actually have morals and notions that we're supposed to internalize. And we do that, we begin to police ourselves. And so he has this whole idea of this sort of edifice of psychology is built around this ego structure that's trying to negotiate with the world. And then a super ego, which is this internalized police figure which is keeping us and punishing us, keeping us from doing things that might cause our destruction and punishing us when we have untoward thoughts or we engage in bad behaviors. And it punishes us through these neuroses, you know, these extended feelings of anxiety or guilt or resentment. And so I don't think any other species does that. I mean, sometimes my dog looks like he's shamed or guilty, but it's just. That's a submission display action. Yeah, yeah, I'm just interpreting it that way. And. But that's really, I think, is part of the challenge for us with. As a linguistic species is that when we are in the state of nature. I think this is. You could go back to Rousseau or any number of philosophers who talk about this, like, oh, we were unconstrained by expectations. We could just behave as the moment allowed. And then once we start living in a moral society where we learn, not only learn rules, but we internalize these rules within us, and we develop ways of adhering to those rules, even if there's nobody else around, or punishing ourselves, if we don't, then we become, I think, very, as you would say, very clearly bound by other people's expectations about
- [58:37]
Sean Carroll
who or what we're supposed to be in some sense. I don't want to get political, but you are a political scientist, so maybe this is okay. I have this theory, this feeling, that some of our political issues today arise because the world is changing. Expectations are changing, norms are changing. There used to be a script, in terms, at least in the minds of many people today. There was a golden age when we all knew how to behave. There were roles, and women played certain roles, and men did, and white people and black people and rich people and poor people. And now it's harder to tell. Like, everything is breaking down and this causes extra anxiety. And maybe this has something to do with why young men in particular are sort of looking for something better. Do you think there's anything. Anything to such a story like that? Like, this notion of the clarity of our expectations is important to us?
- [59:30]
J. Eric Oliver
I think that's a theme that if you look through political History is always happening. There's always this.
- [59:35]
Sean Carroll
We always think we're unique.
- [59:36]
J. Eric Oliver
Right now, earlier era, you go back to the ancient Greeks and they were like, oh, in early Greek times and the Roman Republic, I mean the Roman Empire especially, they were like always fetishing like the virtue of the early Roman Republic. So yes, there is eternal theme of things are always better before. I think the challenge for us is that we are in an epoch of such incredible rapid technological and cultural change. And I think about, for example, smartphones and social media within smartphones. These are part of our self processes now. They become so deeply involved in. If you think about the amount of waking hours that most people spend on their phones are interfacing with reality vis a vision, this mediated device and all the software that's on it, I mean, that didn't exist 20 years ago. Like, wow, like, I mean, and what is this doing to us? And is this, you know, is, are these technologies helping us optimize our self processes or are they kind of corrosive to us? And I don't know if there's an. We don't know the answer because it's happening so fast.
- [60:44]
Sean Carroll
Yeah, I mean certainly the idea that we offload some of our cognition to our devices and things like that, there's a benign aspect to that. Like, I take notes as I'm sitting here writing to you. I do not need to keep everything in my brain I can write on a piece of paper. That's very useful. There are worries. There was just a quote as we're having this conversation, there's just a quote from a day or two ago and I'm going to butcher it and not get it exactly right. So sorry, but Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said something like, yeah, people will forget how to do certain intelligent things because they're leaning on AI too much, but that's okay. We will sell intelligence back to them. That sounds a little dangerous to me.
- [61:26]
J. Eric Oliver
I mean, would Gutenberg have said the same thing? This is what I think is really scary about AI for us, is that it seems to be supplanting some sort of core traits within us and, and offering us. And on the one hand, the seductive promise of hey, you don't have to think for yourself. Does that mean I'm giving up my autonomy, my capacity, my career, my ability to sustain myself? On the other hand, what a seductive technology. I mean, like, wow, like, and is just. Is this inevitable? Is this. And I, I don't know if we know the answer to this. I haven't been able to puzzle through this, but this notion of, of is AI just the next step in the evolution of our self processes here?
- [62:10]
Sean Carroll
Right.
- [62:11]
J. Eric Oliver
And it goes back to then. The one way I think about this is, is to what extent is this energy efficient or not? Because the way to really have an optimized self is to have a notion of what I would say homeostatic balance within our self processes between their ordering function here, sort of the way they're structuring us, and then the vitality itself, the flow of the energy itself. And you know, a self processes with too much flow and energy can be incoherent and chaotic. You could think of it like a cellular level that's cancer, for example. It's too much energy going on in the cell. A self process with too much order and constrained is going to be inhibited and not going forward. Okay, so then we have AI. So is AI. What is doing AI doing to our self processes? It's requiring a lot of energy and maybe we're going to have more efficient AIs in the future and it won't require so much energy. But is that the benefit it's providing for us worth the tremendous energy expenditure that is tasking for us?
- [63:08]
Sean Carroll
Well, there was another thing again came out recently and I'm going to again butcher it because I didn't like write down the specifics. But the large language models are trained on this giant corpus of text and other things and in some sense they will inevitably smooth out the bumps. Right. They're going to take an average, be a little bit bland, be a little homogeneous. And apparently some people are beginning to reflect that sort of way of thinking and talking and writing and so forth. And one of the new dangers of AI is that it will make everyone sound the same.
- [63:45]
J. Eric Oliver
Yes, but doesn't our language and culture do that anyway? I guess that's sort of the devil's argument here. It's like, well, sure, but we're doing that anyway. Our culture. I didn't come up with the words that I'm using. They were bequeathed to me. And maybe it does pull us down to this lowest common denominator in some regards, but so does listening to FM radio.
- [64:12]
Sean Carroll
Well, I think it's an excellent point because the common denominator need not be the lowest. Right. When we are approaching a situation where everyone is connected to everyone else and you can't have the growth of micro cultures or even individual personalities in quite the same same way. And I think there are good aspects to that and bad aspects.
- [64:33]
J. Eric Oliver
Right. And I think also who knows how this technology is going to grow and develop. And evolutionary terms, like, I already know a lot of people, I think about this, like with AI generated imagery, like when it first came out, I was like, oh my God, look, we have, you know, cats jumping off of diving boards. Like, this is remarkable. And then how quickly we begin, like, okay, cats jumping off of diving, it's AI.
- [64:55]
Sean Carroll
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [64:57]
J. Eric Oliver
And then so we want something distinctive. You know, we're so insofar as I think of AI as a digital prosthesis for us, I think we're going to be utilizing it in ways. And I think there's always going to be some sort of cultural avant garde and maybe it will be using AI to sort of advance some sort of notions here. I think we're in the early stages. We're still, we're so overwhelmed by this new technology that we're back down to the slowest common denominator. But I think at some point we're going to get sick of it it and we're going to want to push it. But maybe that's just me being optimistic.
- [65:29]
Sean Carroll
Yeah, well, it's good to be optimistic. I'm in favor of that. But okay, we indulged ourselves with the AI a little bit. Let's pull back to our messy biological selves. So one question that is very obvious when we talk about the self to me is the fact that human beings will sabotage themselves. Like, we're not always rational. There's things inside us that just certain destructive behaviors come up again and again. Is that something you think, think we understand why that's true? Does thinking about who we are and what our self is help us escape that?
- [66:01]
J. Eric Oliver
So I would say hopefully yes to the second part of that question and to the first part of the question. I mean, it does beg the question. Well, if we have these self processes that are there to sort of help us thrive as an energy system and a life force, what explains things like, say, schizophrenia or our neuroses or even you can think about our political and social systems where we indulge in genocide or mass exploitation of other people. We can think of our political and social systems as expressions or elaborations of these self processes that we're doing collectively. And how do we then account for these dysfunctions? And I think you can look at it from an evolutionary perspective. You can say, okay, we're always developing kind of random new tendencies. And some of these get then, you know, culled over the course of time. The ones that exist or don't you know, that don't help us thrive. Some are spandrels. They just kind of keep, you know, going there. And part of it has to do, I think, with the, you know, the, the challenge and the dilemma of, of being a linguistic species though, because what language ultimately allows us to do with some level of plasticity in our self processes. But the problem is it's on top of this undercurrent of these biological imperatives. And I'll give you an example of this. Like, I love ice cream and I know it's not good for me, but I feel like it's my total, total weakness. And I mean if it was up to me, I would just eat it every day, all the time. And my ancestors didn't have ice cream so they didn't have to face this problem, problem. But you know, my culture has created this, this now, this temptation and the struggle for me and it's both wonderful and problematic. So yeah, I think, you know, this goes back to the question, okay, well what do we do with this once we, once we have self knowledge and how do we cope with this? And this was the hardest part for me of writing the book because I don't have a set formula. And I think we should be genuinely suspicious of anyone who has to have a claim of like, oh, just follow my seven step plan and you'll find the happ that you deserve, you know, which you see in a lot of self help books, for example. But what we need to do, I think are two things. On the one hand, we can begin to recognize where the imbalances in our self processes lie and there are different modalities that are out there that, that can help with this. So I think some spiritual traditions can offer really good advice in this regard. Psychology can give us a helpful framework for identifying what these imbalances are. A good friend can really help with that. But once we then because it's very, very hard for us to see our own imbalances, it's very easy for other people to see them. And sometimes if they're close to us, to the light and letting us know where they are. But it's very hard for us to recognize them on our own. But once we begin to recognize them, then the question is how do we take the corrective steps? And a big part of it is really just letting go go. And letting go is kind of the deceptive concept here because when I initially think about letting go, I think it's, oh, it's like I'm just kind of, you know, Kicking back with a bong and a PlayStation and letting the world, you know, go to hell around me. It's. It's like. It's like a sense of abdication or giving up. But if you look, I think in the traditions that actually cultivate greater self optimization, and these typically are the spiritual traditions, letting go is a very engaged, vigorous activity. It goes back to what we were talking about with meditation. Meditation is incredibly arduous because you are, you know, you're trying to unlearn your deep core habits there, and those habits don't want to be unlearned, and they throw up a lot of resistances. And part of what it means to live in a more mindful, transcendent, optimized way means engaging every moment with your imbalances, and those imbalances will throw up a lot of discomfort. It means kind of, how do I coexist with this discomfort? When my intuitions are. When I feel any kind of pain or discomfort, I want to run away from them. I head for the freezer and I get the ice cream stuff, medication. And rather than running from, for example, pain is recognizing. Oh, pain is there with information for us. Me, you know, in a biological way. Oh, I have pain in my leg. It means my leg is broken. I should stay off it until it heals. But a lot of our pains reflect imbalances within us. And the more that we can sit and try to be open to the pain rather than just reacting to them and kind of be attentive to what the pain might be able to communicate to us, the more I think we can move forward in a kind of a productive way.
- [70:49]
Sean Carroll
So it's interesting, I think, think two different things just happened there. Like one you mentioned that it seems to be a challenge just saying the statement that we want to improve ourselves. Like, it's the we who are doing the improving, and we are already who we are. Like, how can we trust ourselves to figure out what it would be to mean improvement? And therefore, we look elsewhere, we look to other people, we look to wise traditions or whatever. But it sounds like when it comes to actually doing the improving, you're putting the responsibility on the individual.
- [71:25]
J. Eric Oliver
Yeah. Ultimately, we have to take responsibility for ourselves. And I think this goes back to a question I actually wanted to ask you. I was kind of curious to hear your answer, which is, what is your life's purpose?
- [71:35]
Sean Carroll
To have a good time.
- [71:37]
J. Eric Oliver
Okay.
- [71:37]
Sean Carroll
Yeah. Now, having a good time can be interpreted very differently. Right. I have a good time by learning things and teaching people. But as well as it's both pizza and ice cream for me. Like those. Those both play an important part of my role. Living in a loving relationship with my wife and my cats and traveling the world. But, but I want to make, want to make the world a better place. I think that the combination of having, you know, look, what do I know? I should say this is. You just ask my personal opinion here. I think a combination of having relatively thoughtful and refined notions of what it means to have a good time plus having a good time leads to a good life.
- [72:24]
J. Eric Oliver
Right. But if I would posit that there's something underneath all of that. And this goes to an Aristotelian idea about what our true purpose is. So Aristotle famously said that if you want to know anything purpose, you need to know its function. So you know, take a hammer. Its function is to smash things. So if a purpose driven hammer would try to smash things, but smash things as excellently as it could. And the Greeks were, they loved this notion of excellence. There's this idea of eudaimonia. And the same thing really holds for us. If we want to know how we live better, what our true purpose is. It's about optimizing these cell processes. And so I think when I hear you say, yeah, you want to have a good time. What I think that really means in terms of having a good time is two things that you identify which I think are really, really important. It's not about pleasure. Yeah, you know, the pleasure of ice cream quickly fades. All pleasures are designed to be short term. They're not really there for our long term benefit. But when it comes to sort of a satisfied and meaningful life, I think there's a couple of things, one of which is our connections with other people and sustaining and using helping other people help us sustain that homeostatic balance. Balance without other people, we would be completely out of balance. We are designed to be co regulated with other people around us. I use the term designed again.
- [73:38]
Sean Carroll
That's okay, I got that on myself. We got it.
- [73:41]
J. Eric Oliver
We evolved to be, I should say, co regulated. And the other thing is, I think, which is, I think distinct to us as humans, but maybe other animals have this, which is exercising our competencies. And I give my students this exercise and I say go out and do something that gives you pleasure and go out and do something that gives you satisfaction. And notice what the difference between those two activities are. And the pleasurable ones typically are very solipsistic and individualized. But the satisfying ones are either ones where they're connecting with someone else. Or they're exercising a competency. They're doing something that they become. They've trained that to be good at. And if they can combine those together, like, for example, if you practice guitar and then you play music with other people, I mean, it doesn't get any better than that. And so I think that's the way that we optimize ourselves is by both enhancing our connection to other people and then finding out ways to exercise our competencies.
- [74:36]
Sean Carroll
I guess I mostly agree, but I do want to. Two things. Number one, I want to open space for. I'm super pluralistic about purpose and meaning in life. And I'm open to some people just not wanting to deal with other people. Maybe their optimal state is isolation in one form or other, either mild or were pretty severe. I'm not going to say that they're making a mistake if, if they're like that. I'm open to that possibility.
- [75:04]
J. Eric Oliver
Sure, maybe. I think the evidence out there is pretty good, though. For most people, it's really hard to have a good life or a meaningful life or have a good time in. In total isolation. And there, there may be the occasional, you know, deep introvert or someone who has a psychological profile, but that's not. If you. And if he goes back and you think about what our ancestors needed to survive in the wild, you know, we're these relatively fragile creatures and we and other people can be super, super annoying. So we need some strong biological mechanisms in place. And one of those is loneliness and that sense of, you know, complete discombobulation that happens if we're really cut off from other people.
- [75:51]
Sean Carroll
But the thing I think that you said, I hope I'm not misinterpreting, but that I sounded like I super agree with, is we have our own notions of what gives us satisfaction, let us say. And then the world has expectations of us or things that it would like to get from us, and seeking a balance between those is crucially important. Maybe there's something that brings me satisfaction. The world just doesn't. Doesn't either want me to do or just doesn't care about. And that's sort of less successful than getting that positive feedback from the world. I tell my graduate students, think about the questions you're really passionate about answering and also think about the questions that the rest of the community cares about and try to work at the intersection of those two sets.
- [76:39]
J. Eric Oliver
Yeah, I mean, I think we have to be pragmatic about this. Like, there'd be, you know, part of me would love just to go Move to Costa Rica and surf on the beach. Beach every day.
- [76:47]
Sean Carroll
There you go.
- [76:48]
J. Eric Oliver
But I don't know how I could sustain myself over that. And I think ultimately I might get bored with that as much as I enjoy those activities. So, yeah, there's always some pragmatic choices. And like, for example, I wouldn't have written this book early on in my career. You know, I'm now in a place where I can do these things. So, yeah, there is a negotiation. We're not completely just free. But on the other hand, I think it is really important for us to question whether or not what we're doing is leading to somebody else's expectations. I tell my students this idea of the gold star trajectory. I think a lot of us carry on this idea, oh, I'll just go collect my gold star. So I go to the right school, I get the right job, I get the right house, I find the perfect partner, and then suddenly everything works out and I don't have to worry. I have all my ducks in a row. And then life takes care of itself. And of course, you know, most people, even if they collect all their gold stars and they get into their 40s and they realize, wait a minute, I'm not.
- [77:43]
Sean Carroll
I'm still not happy, really fulfilled.
- [77:45]
J. Eric Oliver
Right. What's going on here? And so that's where I think it becomes really important is to recognize when we're living according to somebody else's expectations, and the earlier we can address that and figure out, okay, well, what are my own expectations for myself? What can I do to maximize those relative to the pragmatic necessities of living in a post industrial consumerist economy? The way that we live, and it's challenging. I think it's actually part of our biggest challenge. I noticed this with my students and with many people I talk to, is figuring out, okay, well, what is it that really animates me? Where is this feeling of greater authenticity? And I think there's a common misconception that there is somehow another within us, a core, authentic self.
- [78:34]
Sean Carroll
Yeah.
- [78:35]
J. Eric Oliver
And that's, you know, and that's part of the idea of self discovery. But of course, that's going back to the idea of the self as a thing. And I think it's better, better to think about all the self as these processes and can we get these processes to work in a way that are more efficient and kind of less burdened by a bunch of past neural habits? And, you know, some things we can do also just how we're interfacing with the moment. I I think there is something to the power of positive thinking. So, for example, you know, I may have. The only job I can get may be flipping burgers. And I could go in and say, okay, that's a terrible circumstance and I'm miserable and I'm flipping burgers all day and how horrible that is. And that's one mindset or another mindset is, well, I can go in and I'm now able to support myself and my family. I'm feeding a lot of hungry people. I can try to flip burgers as well as I can. You know, that's. So it's complicated. Yeah. I mean, part of it is adopting, I think, and this is, I think, the stoic idea, adopting a more proactive, healthy mindset with respect to how we negotiate between sort of what the world demands and what we really want.
- [79:41]
Sean Carroll
You mentioned the word authenticity, and I should have brought this up earlier because it's one I really struggle with. Like. Like, part of me wants to say what, what you just said, like, there is no single authentic self we can change. We can, you know, adapt and things like that, or influenced by a million different things, internal and, and external. But I also think that there is some reality to behaving authentically versus being fake. Right?
- [80:05]
J. Eric Oliver
Yes. I mean, when we describe someone as being fake, what typically means is that they are prostituting themselves relative to some social circumstance or some social expectation. So. And it's more of a projection. I think all these other people are going to be demanding these things of me, so I'm going to act relative to what I imagine other people are wanting me to behave. And oftentimes we're. We're misregard.
- [80:29]
Sean Carroll
We're.
- [80:30]
J. Eric Oliver
We're misunderstanding that or we're doing it in a way that's relatively shallow. It's going to provide us some shallow rewards that. So I don't know anybody who's really become happier because they have a million Instagram followers, at least over the long haul. I don't have a million.
- [80:47]
Sean Carroll
Maybe they don't know.
- [80:50]
J. Eric Oliver
Well, let me ask you this way. I mean, you've now achieved this level of kind of public acclaim. I'm sure it's provided you a lot of benefits. You get invited to do a lot of nice things. You know, you're all over YouTube. Yeah. Do you think that in of itself has provided you with greater life satisfaction?
- [81:10]
Sean Carroll
Obviously, I need to say a little bit. It has. It's nice. I have the right level of public acclaim. I think I don't want to be recognized on the street or anything like that. But when I get emails from people saying, oh yeah, 10 years ago I heard a lecture by you and Now I'm a PhD student in particle physics, that makes me feel really good. So I am a give and take person about this. Clearly that's not the point. It's not like the central thing I could have, I say this very often. I could easily have a more popular podcast and write more best selling books if I did just try to optimize for that. But I'm optimizing for other things at the same time. I'm just lucky enough that the things I want to do also appeal to some other people.
- [81:54]
J. Eric Oliver
People. Well, there you go. I think that's, that sounds, being pretty authentic.
- [82:01]
Sean Carroll
I tried to be a little bit authentic.
- [82:03]
J. Eric Oliver
And so I guess, I mean, I guess maybe another way of that is self aware.
- [82:07]
Sean Carroll
Yeah.
- [82:08]
J. Eric Oliver
In terms of realizing, oh, it's, it goes back to ice cream. It's like, yes, they're the pleasures that are there, but they're going to be short lived and they're not going to be great for long term waistlines.
- [82:17]
Sean Carroll
Yeah. Okay, so this is a good place to sort of, I mean, wrap it up with, with, with a kind of slightly difficult question, but how practically useful is it to the people listening or people thinking about this to really examine themselves in the Socratic way, to really. Or transcend themselves in a Buddhist way or something like that? How much do we know about the actual practical benefits? Is it mostly that it's kind of, of interesting and fun to do it, or do you really think we can become better by taking these issues seriously?
- [82:55]
J. Eric Oliver
I have two thoughts on that. So one of which is what's the alternative? The alternative I think is continuing to live according to forces, stories, imperatives that we did not choose for ourselves. So if you do want to have some measure of autonomy, and I think if you ask most people, do they want to be autonomous, do they want to have some control over their own lives? I think most of us would say yes. And so self exploration is absolutely vital towards that end. If you want to have that autonomy. If you don't, if you just say, okay, I'm just going to go along, you know, that's your, that's your choice. Because ultimately though, we don't matter all that much. I mean that's the other part.
- [83:36]
Sean Carroll
Yeah.
- [83:36]
J. Eric Oliver
To the universe, even to life itself. Like we, we could destroy ourselves through any number of cataclysmic events and microbial life will happily go along.
- [83:44]
Sean Carroll
Right.
- [83:44]
J. Eric Oliver
With apps, you know, we Are. We are not, you know, the. The culmination of life by any means. We are. We are this one strange derivation. And we. We. We're this evolutionary moment and who knows how long we'll keep going. So yeah, you could say, okay, you know, in that sense, you could just kind of kick back with the bong and a PlayStation and just let life carry you around and. And maybe. And okay, sure. But I think most of us want a little something more. And so that's where self exploration. And then the second question is, does this actually work? And I think we have pretty good evidence that there are a number of things that we can do to improve the quality of our lives. And it starts with just think about your cellular self. What do your cells need? Nutrition, eating, getting plenty of sleep, having contact with loved ones. This greatly, you know, having a strong foundation of these self processes is vital. And other things that I mentioned, I think if you ask people who seem to be the most contented in life, it's the ones who have strong social connections, who are exercising their competencies, who are connecting and helping other people around them.
- [84:57]
Sean Carroll
So what you're saying is eat, drink, play, love.
- [85:00]
J. Eric Oliver
Yeah, well, but not in the Elizabeth Gilbert narcissistic way so much, you know, and that's. They're also. The real challenge is, okay, how do we do this where we're not just completely self indulgent, but we're actually maybe eat, pray, work with others.
- [85:17]
Sean Carroll
Right?
- [85:18]
J. Eric Oliver
Yeah. Maybe the addendum.
- [85:19]
Sean Carroll
Yeah, I mean, it's useful to know there's multiple aspects of ourselves going on inside of us, and there's other people out there. And taking all these seriously is probably a good idea.
- [85:30]
J. Eric Oliver
Yep.
- [85:30]
Sean Carroll
All right.
- [85:31]
J. Eric Oliver
No self exists in isolation. We are all interconnected here.
- [85:33]
Sean Carroll
We're all interconnected. I like that. That place to wind up. So, Eric Oliver, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape podcast.
- [85:39]
J. Eric Oliver
Sean, this was such a pleasure. So thank you so much for having me.
- [86:05]
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