Consciousness Live! with Jumana Yahya (S1 E6)

0:01 ready all right so we are live I'm here today with a very special guest Jumana Yaya and jimana for those that don't know you could you to say a little bit about who you are and what you're currently doing sure so right now I am a PhD candidate and researcher with osnabrück University in Germany I came from New York I was basically raised and grew up in New York and I did my associates there my bachelor's I went down to Atlanta to do my Master's and

0:35 now here I'm doing my PhD and I'm you could say I'm a philosopher by discipline but I've been transitioning into the cognitive sciences so the last few years been dabbling in psychology and neuroscience so trying to get a very interdisciplinary approach to my work yeah very cool and that's it I think we need more people like that better in got one foot in both world so to speak a philosophy in the cognitive sciences so I I think that's very cool and you've been working on self control yes that's correct

1:09 so and in particular I think you're interested in what's called situated cognition can you tell us a little bit about what situated cognition is and how it's um different from traditional theories of cognitive control absolutely so ah situated cognition is a fairly recent idea that's been a development basically the gist is is that the mind is not just contained by the cranium by the skull the brain is not all there is to the mind that there might also include other extracranial processes so

1:43 things like the body your environment and/or social circles so situated cognition has a lot of different niches people are giving different situated views for different types of theories so what I'm interested in right now is giving a situated you have self control meaning we look at self control not just as a cognitive ability that happens in the brain but also involves processes outside of the brain yeah so I mean in this is kind of a broad camp right the the situated movement because I think

2:16 you include people like Chalmers and Clark the extended mind kind of people absolutely I mean you can even say they're the pioneers of these kinds of views so situated cognition is a very broad umbrella term that includes a embodied cognition extended embedded in active distributed so these are just different terms are relating to which extracranial process you think is more important so for example environments for the extended people of the body for the embodied people and also the relationship that the brain has to these

2:50 other processes so whether they're two constituents of the same system or whether there's a causal relation but generally speaking any time you give causal credit to anything outside of the brain for any kind of cognitive process you're in the situated camp so it's that broad it's it's so huh that's interesting it's so it's just causal credit to something external as its oh it's not the claim that the external thing is literally a part of the mind or constitutes the cognitive process that's a lot of times sometimes that would depend on the view itself so sometimes

3:24 they're constituents of the same system but different theorists have different ideas on what they think that relationship is yeah so if it's just cause I mean this is something that I really don't know a lot about that's never stopped awful awesomer from saying so I'm just asking a Clara for Tory question right now but if it's just something that's causally impacting you then it seems like every Theory turns into a situated theory right because even like theories of perception obviously the external environment

3:56 stimuli they're causally impact you producing internal representations so to speak so that wouldn't be a situated Theory though right so yes and no it depends on what kind of causal relationship you're really pointing at so that's merely an influential cause or a contributory cause that might not be enough to be considered a bona fide situated view but it can give a necessary causal role to these external processes then yes you're absolutely going into situated the

4:28 and it's actually interesting that you mentioned perception because some of the most popular situated views and some of the most foundational ones start off in perception talking about so I believe I Gibson is one of the big names in this sort of field so perception theory and not actually also are theories of emotion have very much adopted the situated view to where almost all the theories and these fields have some sort of situated aspect to it yeah interesting okay and then just another kind of clarify Tory question about what the situated movement is so

5:03 you were very careful when you said that these are processes that are extracranial there if I defining brain as what's in the cranium and I wonder what you might say to someone who says who wanted to suggest that that was too limited of a notion of what the brain is so the brain is extended through the body sort of by definition the spinal cord and the nerves innervating every every muscle and so forth and so on so that doesn't count as part of the brain on the view that you are endorsing is that correct so it absolutely could and

5:40 they think that's the whole idea of the situated movement is to kind of get people to start being more comfortable with understanding the brain as something that's not just inside your skull that it also includes the nerves that extend out to it it also includes the hormonal balances that go on internally the sense perception that comes out externally so that all channels into the brain so we can't say that the brain is only the brain yes of course the spinal cord is part of it the rest of the body is part of it and arguably you know even environment

6:15 in society can also become part of it as well okay yeah good all right and then sort of one last thing about this sort of more philosophically you you would count even views like called external ism and philosophy as part of the situated movement so that the idea of that the meaning of terms depends on the environment that you're in so famously if you know about Putnam and twin earth and twin water and all those kinds of things that would also any kind of external ism then would about mental content what also counts is situated yes yes I would think so and

6:49 even perhaps though certain views of moral externalism can even give in the situated label yeah so given the broad camp it's hard to it's hard to see how anyone would be against it you know and there are also extreme versions of the view where people really give very little credit to the brain and say it's all about the environment it's all about the society so these more extreme views definitely opened themselves up to criticism yeah ok so then talking specifically about what you're working

7:25 on now so that's the self control kind of project so there I mean from I get the sense from reading your stuff that the dominant view is a kind of cognitivism and and you want to kind of switch the paradigm or get people to be more interested in situated theories of cognitive control excuse me have self control so the only work that I'm really familiar with that you talk about is Alfred Neely's work and some of the other stuff I'm only passing Lee familiar but so can you tell us what

7:56 what cognitive theories of self control are before we start criticizing them I guess absolutely so you're right to say that the majority of the self control literature is predominantly cognitivist so for them self control is a mental ability but more specifically it's a mental ability that's located in the brain the majority of self control theorists even take another step further and say self control is not just localized in the brain but it's localized in a very small specific portion of the brain that's the

8:29 prefrontal cortex now I find philosophers of self control to be a little more lenient towards looking outside of the brain so Alfred Neely for example makes a claim in one of his books that has views holistic meaning he's not just worried about these executive functions as they're called in psychology but self-control also extends and includes things like emotions subconscious perceptions however the psychologists are very very very much into this idea of the

9:02 prefrontal cortex that self-control is specifically the ability to inhibit emotional impulses and they localize in this variable one small portion and they concentrate completely on that one of the biggest problems that I see in that is these psychological theories are where underlying therapies and therapeutic designs so when people struggle with impulse control disorder they go to therapy and the thing that they hear all the time is all you need to start thinking the right sorts of thoughts you need to calm yourself down think these cool deliberate thoughts and

9:35 they spent years going to therapy sessions with these therapists learning how to think of these cool calm thoughts but it ends up being a very ineffective I mean cognitive behavioral therapy which is based on this idea that self-control is this inhibitory capacity in the front of the brain it's a very ineffective form of therapy for every person with impulse control disorder that goes through rehabilitation they have a 60% chance of relapse for their first time which is I think very very bad statistics a lot of people end up

10:09 dropping out of rehabilitation clinics before they could finish their course or maybe even years later the problem comes back so it just seems to me that it's essentially just ineffective working on these sorts of skills that people have a hard time accessing to begin with and that's why I think at least the psychology the field of psychology would really benefit taking other things into consideration and there has been slight movements here and there like the cognitive bias movement bringing attention to the fact that people can't

10:42 really fight cognitive biases at least not all of them but it's a very very slow progression getting to where we need to be with these sorts of views right so and the focus on the prefrontal cortex I mean it's largely the result of empirical data right when you or would you suggest that it is like for instance I mean in the famous case of Phineas Gage the sort of textbook example of a person who loses self-control after damage to their prefrontal cortex you hear all the

11:15 time about you know underdeveloped prefrontal cortex and people under the age of 25 being again somehow responsible for impulsive behaviors and stuff like that so what would you be your response to those kinds of empirical data points as sources of evidence for the cognitive view so I'm not looking to deny any of that empirical evidence I do believe that the prefrontal cortex is a very important player in self-control where my view differs is that I don't think it's the only important player I think that there are other members of the self control

11:47 system that could also help out and yes maybe in the perfectly functioning normal human adult's who has pretty decent activity in the prefrontal cortex and everything is going well and smooth maybe for these individuals these classic kind of cognitive behavioral therapies would be effective and would be helpful but I'm more interested in helping the individuals that don't have access to these abilities so the people with either physical deficiencies some sort of maybe bonk on the head or something of that sort that knocked it

12:20 out the kids under the age of 25 or even adults that are generally very self controlled but have one source of weakness that they just can't fight so that's where I think the situated views become very very helpful is finding what I call cognitive shortcuts so always to get the relevant behavior without having to utilize the sorts of abilities that these individuals can't access that they just can't tap into for whatever reasons right ok so that's very interesting so

12:54 the the view that you want to develop then is that while the prefrontal cortex is important it's not the only important thing so focusing solely on that is kind of missing a bunch of other factors exactly exactly so one of the things that I'm trying to do with my work is to shift looking at self-control is a signal single cognitive ability to understanding self-control as a system that has several interacting members the prefrontal cortex being only one of those members another important member is the emotional system so for example

13:28 there was this all wonderful study down by South sheket colleagues I believe in 2016 where they are suspended activity in the temporal parietal Junction and then they had people delay their gratification so wait for a larger reward that's in the future as opposed to indulging in the sooner reward smaller reward and when they found this every time they suspended activity in this one brain area people became really bad at delaying their gratification and one of the conclusions that the author's made from this is that the temporoparietal Junction one of its

14:00 functions is empathy cognitive empathy so when they're doing in suspending activities they're suspending cognitive empathy and that's what makes the individual but it delayed their gratification so essentially what happens is they don't empathize with their future selves so they're now willing to sacrifice their gratification now in lieu of satisfying their future self so they're right there we have empirical evidence for emotions being very important in this ability and I mean not not to give things away to quit

14:35 but I think the body is also incredibly important in this soft control system there's also been a plethora of evidence for environmental and social factors being very important for self-control so for example the self-determination theory by Orion and SC it's a great article where they canvassed so many different empirical studies that time and time again showed that internal motivation is best ah stirred when you have the right social circles and when you have the right environment yeah so I think that's very interesting I wonder

15:09 what you would say about recent criticisms of some of these kinds of social kind of work so you know the Stanford Prison Experiment it's come under great scrutiny recently with some release of tapes suggesting that Zimbardo was coaching the the bad actors in particular the prison guards the ones assigned there so that I mean also the marshmallow test the famous marshmallow test has come under kind of recent criticism suggesting that a few control for a class and well that the

15:44 effect disappears in effect suggesting that those who can delay self gratification can do so because they're not worried of how the future source of food and resources where its people who eat the marshmallow right away or not lacking in willpower necessarily but may just be worried about not getting something later because of their socio-economic class and there's other I mean so social psychology in general is kind of facing this replication crisis and since you're putting a lot of emphasis on these kinds of results I wonder what what you think about this kind of criticism yes well I tend to

16:20 agree with a lot of it so for example one of my biggest criticisms about the marshmallow experiments is that yes okay maybe kids will do well in delaying the gratification when they're sitting in the test room and there's an adult experimenter and in many versions they actually coach the kids they ask them leading questions to get them to think the right sorts of cool thoughts that gets the relevant behavior so I mean I absolutely agree there is this problem in social psychology I mean I myself as a student learning about all these are

16:54 there was always my number one criticism is how can you really test for these human-like behaviors and this very constricted sort of way on the one hand you're taking the people out of the real world and whatever results we get from that I'm not really interested in it and on the other hand these are people testing people with their own hypotheses that they're trying to show so subconsciously they might do certain things to manipulate the experimental paradigm to get the sorts of results that they want so I never take what

17:29 these results say too hard I never take it as solid fact I think it gives us glimpses into human behavior and one of the things I like to do whenever these criticisms come out is I started to look at the different kinds of experiments how they're criticized and see maybe what those sorts of insights are that do tap into actual human beings there maybe where they went wrong so for example to give a concrete example there's this study by Kearney and colleagues about body posture and this

18:02 is a study I think very often in my own work one of the things that they showed is that taking around a power pose reduces cortisol so it reduces the stress hormone versus taking a very small to close increases cortisol and there's just kind of their conclusion was that when you have power poses you feel more confident you're more positive you're more likely to behave and the ways that you want to behave and they've recently come under fire for cherry-picking their data so they were saying that in certain power poses they

18:37 found no significant difference and other poses they found the difference and they just took the information that gave them those significant results and kind of left out the rest and now one of the biggest defenses that I give towards this theory is or towards this experiment is saying that they were just looking at the wrong sort of thing they were looking just that the poses and what kind of effect that has on the cortisol but not taking into consideration whether the people were actually putting an effort into the pose so I could sit up straight without

19:12 thinking about it or I could take on a prideful pose where all my muscles are going into that contraction I could again same line of thought I could sit up straight but all my muscles beliefs versus sitting up straight with my muscles being contracted and I think that's where they were forced to cherry-pick that that I think got the power poses that didn't get any significant results where individuals that weren't really following through with it so from here on now like it's been a story and saying look yes the information that they they get it's

19:45 probably the people that were actually interested in participating with the SEC tivity the participants that were into the actual paradigm so from there even though again it's come under this criticism of cherry pink even still I think there's still some insight to be had from that but with all that said I do think that social psychology has a very long way to go and I think one of the answers is interdisciplinary cooperation among different people so on each experiment

20:18 have a neuroscientist a psychologist and a philosopher collaborating together I think that's the future of social psychology I think that's one of the ways that they could get better it's certainly something I agree with nice too that people actually do in cognitive science her thinking the same thing of course you're a bit special given your background in philosophy so I think that that's an important point that more people should take the heart while you were talking though something just occurred to me so if the difference between these power poses and I'm apparently I never am in a power pose

20:51 but if the difference that is between those who are really effortfully doing it versus those who aren't aren't doing it does this suggest that there's some kind of cognitive process so they're thinking the right thoughts or something as well right and they're thinking that I'm powerful this is you know buddy so I wonder if that situatedness of it and maybe doesn't support some kind of cognitive misinterpretation yeah yes so I absolutely agree with you that there is obviously this cognitive process also

21:25 happening at the same time and I think that's probably one of the biggest flaws in this particular experiment is the fact that they didn't take that into consideration this was strictly a behaviorist experiment so they were just looking to see whether the power post created the relevant behavior or not without taking consideration into what happens in between and when it comes to things like a motivation behavior self-control one of the things that is very clear from the empirical literature is that the right sorts of thoughts do matter the right sorts of perceptions do

21:59 matter if you perceive your resources being limited versus unlimited that will really depend on whether you keep persevering at a task or whether you quit early so the thoughts we do matter and they should have taken that into consideration I think if that was a manipulation check that they would have had they might have found better results with it but one thing that I do want to kind of emphasize and make clear with the situated sort of views so again as I said before they don't throw out the right sorts of thoughts they don't

22:33 throw out what goes on in the mind that's still a very very important player and that's the whole task at hand for are situated views is to show that the mind matters just as much as these other kinds of factors so it's really a at least the two-player endeavor versus looking at just the mind or looking at just the body right okay so yeah that's an important point it's not that you're trying to to say that one matters more than the other actually the view is that they matter equally exactly exactly so

23:08 um I presented this idea of a situated self controlled view at a conference in Argentina last year and one of the questions that I received is how is this different from regressing back to behaviorism and really that question is what made me realize that this needs to be emphasized that situated cognition is not regressing to behaviorism we're not saying that the mind doesn't matter so we need to look at only the body or environment or society rather that at least in the self control literature we

23:41 spend so much time looking at the mind already we spend so much time looking at the right sorts of thoughts the prefrontal cortex now it's time to look at these other players and see how they relate to the mind yeah that's very interesting so I guess one of the just backing up a bit we haven't released I guess specified what we mean by self control so yes I wonder if we could just say oh what is it that what is the target phenomenon is it it's it's not just simply like getting up and going to get food when you're hungry it's it's

24:12 but it's something more specific like the feeding temptation or something or is it both together yes so self-control very generally speaking is an instance where an agent sticks to their better judge men so first and foremost they have to have a better judgment they have to have some sort of goal in mind I ought to do X I assume a better judgment to be a sincere All Things Considered better judgment so kind of excluding second-order desires meaning when they say I want to go on the diets that's my

24:48 better judgment I genuinely desire to go on a diet for whatever reasons I have so anytime you act on that better judgment it counts as self-control but the self control literature makes a distinction between two types of self-control diachronic and synchronic most self-control theorists myself included are interested in distinct chronic kind so synchronic self-control occurs when you act on your better judgment when there's some sort of motivational opposition to that behavior the classic example of motivational opposition is

25:21 temptation I'm on a diet but I'm tempted by a slice of chocolate cake other forms of motivational opposition include procrastination so delaying acting on your better judgement but also cases of the diminished motivation so examples of extreme depression or apathy lethargy when you just simply don't have the desire motivational resources to do anything so anytime your better judgement phases this kind of challenge and you overcome the challenge and act on it anyway that's an instance of synchronic self control so I'm curious

25:55 about the notion of all things considered bestest judgment is this something that's subjective to the agent or do you mean that somehow objective like you know it's what's best for them even if they don't recognize it or is the idea supposed to be that they have to recognize that this is something that's in their best interest so philosophers debate about this back and forth up for me for my purposes I take a very very simple notion of in all things considered sincere judgment

26:28 I mean purely subjective whatever the agent wants to do judges as best for her and importantly realizes that anything else would be the worst option okay so so then I mean I'm more curious about a cases where you know in extreme apathy being from Generation X and all of that something I sympathize with but in cases of extreme lethargy or apathy isn't it not the case that at least and sometimes these these kinds of persons

27:02 don't have a best things all things considered best judgments so you know I just I want to lay on the couch a day there's no there's no part of me that wants to get up and continue the research project so in that kind of case self-control is impossible on your view or how do you deal with these kinds of cases where there isn't a conflict yes I would say that that wouldn't count as a case of self-control or in this situation weakness of well I wouldn't count that because the agents is essentially doing what the agent wants

27:35 to do the real cases I'm interested in is this cognitive dissonance that occurs when you wholeheartedly want and believe that X is the right and best and most desirable action for you but there's just this Y being so tempting that you also want to indulge it and it's this kind of war that happens inside the agents head between wanting to go to separate incompatible ways right so okay so in the other kids so those other cases are just simply not covered by the

28:07 kind of theory that you're interested in proposing no so I wonder if we can extend this to you know cases of moral judgments for instance condi famously suggested that a kind of cognitive dissonance but not in those words but a kind of conflict between what you want and what you judge you ought to do in terms of moral duties that there being a conflict between them is there a kind of reliable guide not the only indicator but a reliable guide that that your that there's something morally here involved

28:42 so it does you're kind of you also extend the cases where you know I really want to watch this episode finality of the Bachelorette but I also feel duty-bound to to go and pick up you know someone from the airport who I promised you or whatever so in those kinds of cases that's not temptation that's involved unless it's the other way the temptation is to do something that you want to do but you override it or at least one hopes that you can override it in case you trying to do what you think is right so that's still a case of that you're

29:15 interested in trying to account for or no I guess yes absolutely I think um everything that I say can be at least in some way extended to moral theory that's actually uh where this all started was from moral theory so my concentration I used to be a fickle and moral theories I was very into Aristotle Spinoza and all these guys and it wasn't until he took a moral psychology class again being interested in the moral part of it that I came across a paper on procrastination

29:47 by Donald Davidson and this was a very random thing I just read this paper and I was just bewildered by him what he was saying this isn't what I do when I procrastinate is what I said to myself so from there kind of launched this interest in weakness of will and self-control and how we could control our own behaviors to be the people that we want to be but I mean the moral theory is still very much part and parcel of everything that I have to say in fact one of the projects I'm currently working on is to carve out a

30:21 place for emotions in self-control theory and one of the emotions that I suggest as a candidate for a potentially self-controlling emotion is pride and one of the arguments I give for why pride should be considered to sulfa control emotion stems back to Aristotle in the Nicomachean ethics where he says that pride is the crown of all the virtues so I think these are very very much interrelated concepts and they do think that you could cross that bridge in tomorrow theory interesting even

30:54 though there's there's no weakness of will there unless it you've go the other way towards not doing what the moral moral thing would be or something yes exactly as long as there's two incompatible options and you want to do both of them that for me is a stage for selfish or weakness of well depending how it plays out but those are the kinds of cases I'm interested in okay cool so now can we talk yeah I want to talk about your specific views which we kind of mentioned a couple times but I haven't really build into so it's pretty the

31:27 role that emotions play and I'm guessing from what you're saying that the emotions are on your view embodied and not something that our cognitive so what can you tell us well first of all what how you use the term emotion what is it that you're picking out when you say emotion yeah so I used this term very very broadly for me personally my own intuition is that you cannot pick out a single instance of any cognitive occurrence without it being emotional or

32:01 affective in some way or another so for me I mean a very very broad sort of category anything that has to do with physical sensations feelings but also subconscious thought occurrences I'm very very broad in the way I use that I mean when I write about emotions I take into account basic emotions theories and stuff like psychological constructivism which are kind of about odds and I try to present the definition of emotions we're both camps would be satisfied with

32:35 it but generally speaking the way it fits into my view what I'm attempting to do right now is develop an embody the view of self control so for me as a situated theorist out of the three body environment or society I think that the body is the easiest source to tap into whenever you're going through cognitive dissonance in the moment so you're on the nine there's a slice of chocolate cake in front of you your body is your best bet and I'm trying to be the story if you will of how coordinated motor

33:10 movements in the body Creed's the right sorts of thoughts the relevant sort of self controlling thoughts that gets the right behavior and on my view emotions is the bridge between this coordinated physical motion and the relevant self controlling thoughts so on one hand there's already like I mentioned before a whole ton of research showing that there are relevant sub controlling thoughts that have to do with a sense of agency a sense of confidence strength resilience endurance these kinds of judgments about the self

33:46 on the other hand there's very few admittedly but there are some empirical studies that show the body's role in self-control the most prominent is a study by hung and LaRue where they showed that clenching your fists can help firm your will willpower there's another great study by Smith and woods that shows students who chew gum for two weeks got more academic work done there's another study with kids that found that the kids that move around a lot during the day that movement is a better predictor of their

34:18 academic performance than any sort of cognitive tasks or tests that they could do so on the one hand we have the evidence that the body somehow helps foster relevant self-control we have the evidence of what the self controlling things are and I think that what happens is when we move in the coordinated sort of fashion what it does is it invokes a sense of pride in us it makes us realize that we are in charge of our own bodies in charge of our own movements and that pride Creed's about thoughts of agency

34:53 and confidence and endurance and strength and all of that equaling out in the relevant behavior at the end of it so on your view then emotions are always conscious or can they occur unconsciously on my view there are predominantly subconscious I would say so predominantly subconscious that means occasionally conscious occasionally conscious yes I think people are especially those that take the time and

35:27 care about developing their self-control and becoming better they pay more attention to the sorts of feelings and emotions they have so they're more consciously consciously aware of what's going on and how that factors in but I think more often than not when it comes to everyday occurrences of self-control that these emotions occur subconsciously and we might not realize that it's the feeling that's motivating us as opposed to the cool deliberate kinds of thoughts that were thinking so on your view then this might explain why some theorists kind of

36:01 just focus on the cool thoughts because they're missing the subconscious contributions and just the thoughts themselves are conscious though right yes yes example one of the views that are kind of touches upon this idea is the cannon in Smith's frog and toad loose control this is a very popular piece in the self control literature and according to Kevin Smith self control cannot happen by getting yourself to think the right sorts of cool deliberate

36:35 thoughts why because you're just your attention is focused on this object of temptation on this cookie and you can't tear yourself away from it you're motivated to do that so how can you muster the motivation to get yourself to think the right sorts of thoughts not eat the cookie they say your only hope in avoiding and eating that cookie is if you train your disposition to be the kind that reflexively and subconsciously thinks the right sorts of thought so it gets the right sorts of images and

37:07 that's your only hope so if you see the cookie and you just spontaneously unmotivated ly start thinking about yourself is very overweight or maybe if you took out all the sugar added that cookie and laid it into a pile so these are the sorts of images that motivate you to stay away from the cookie not you sitting there telling yourself don't eat the cookie don't eat the cookie don't focus on the cookie they think that's not even an option so that's very much conscious I'm sorry to interrupt finish your thought sorry

37:45 I'm just saying that's absolutely the kind of intuition that I like to tap into I think the subconscious is a wonderful wonderful tool that we have at our disposal we could just figure out how to tap into it whenever we need to people subconsciously can do very amazing things so for example one of my favorite researchers is vias Ramachandran from San Diego University of San Diego and a lot of his work is focused on these sort of subconscious processes so he works at

38:19 blindsight patients people that are blind are not able to see but are able to stick a letter into a very thin slot in a white hole right in front of them with almost perfect accuracy so it's these subconscious sort of processes that allow them to do it because if you ask the individual you know can you do this they say of course not I'm blind I can't see the slot I can't even see the shape of the letter yet somehow they're able to do it anytime I see I study a lot of people and marking in physical sports activities our UFC fighters our

38:53 martial artists even snowboarders and skiers I find these to be very self controlled individuals and time and time again to think that they keep telling me is that for me to succeed I need to turn my mind off I need to stop thinking about it and I just need to kind of feel it so that's the kind of intuition that I'm trying to develop into a theory of what I think would be more effective and more efficient self-control so that's the kind of literature on flow is that

39:25 the sort of thing yes yes yes absolutely so kind of tapping into a state of flow and just being able to power through those temptations power through that diminished motivation actually one of my papers is titled a fighting fire with bureau and the end fira is a specific of specific version of Pride and the idea there is when you have these very hot vivid arousing temptations it's gonna be so insanely difficult for you to sit there and think the right sorts of

39:58 thoughts to get the right sort of behavior why not motivate yourself just as vividly just as passionately to push through that temptation instead of slowly convincing yourself to avoid it so so the if the embodied part or the situated part of your view doesn't seem to one or if I'm misunderstanding you so is it the case that on your view the embodied situated aspect of the theory isn't the emotion part or is it so because you were saying on the one hand there's the bodily

40:32 activity then there's the emotion that cut the thought and then between is the emotion so I'm wondering on your view what side the emotion is is it are you like going for it James kind of theory of William James where the emotions are physical responses in the body or something else where the emotions are either basic or cognitive constructed or are you trying to bridge that gap in a different way yes so I'm trying to more or less stay agnostic on exactly what I mean by an emotion so whether it's this feeling based thing whether they're

41:06 socially constructed intuitively if you just asked me what I think an emotion is I'm gonna put a lot of emphasis on the body the physical changes the facial expressions I think these are all very important the internal hormonal changes and chemical changes that you have I think those are very important if I had to choose one feature of an emotion where I say this is the most important I would go with the motivation aspect of it that emotions are there to motivate us but on how it fits into my view is essentially it's just a one more player

41:41 in the system right now in the development part it's a kind of a flowchart I have where it's body leading into emotion leading into the right sorts of thoughts but I have a feeling eventually as I continue developing this view it's going to become more of a circle that kind of feeds into itself where these are all yes they're all separate members but they're interacting with each other in these very complex and dynamic ways okay yeah all right so well I don't to get too distracted

42:17 because easily distracted is that but so I wonder how we could empirically test your view as opposed to some of these other views and I know you're working on some stuff now you can't really maybe tell me the details because you're still in the designing process but I just wonder if you could say something in general about how some of these ideas could be empirically tested absolutely so our four empirical test unfortunately this idea is very very very new combining situated cognition with self

42:50 control in fact as of right now as far as I'm aware of there's only four papers that talk about situated self control in some way or another so we're kind of starting off from scratch from a very blank sort of slate so the first step in testing these sorts of ideas is looking at just the behavioral kinds of aspects to see if the coordinated motor movement will get is the relevant sort of behavior so that's going to be the first step and that's kind of what we're working towards

43:21 in our empirical study now which we're going to be launching in the fall just to see what relation the body has with specifically perseverance right so continuing to undertake a challenge even though it's very challenging and you have the temptation to give up it's a little harder figuring out how to test for emotions within that but luckily I worked with some incredibly bright minds from all sorts of different fields or sorts of different disciplines so I have

43:54 a really great crew but that I'm brainstorming with right now to see how we could plug in emotions into that but essentially what we're going to be doing is we're going to be going towards these oh we're testing for these behaviors by manipulating emotional expressions in the body so it's kind of the facial feedback hypothesis but extended to the whole body so this idea that when you're happy you smile but also if you smile you get happy that same thing apply to the

44:26 whole-body so taking on say the body posture of pride right where you have the shoulders back the clenched fists of the furrowed eyebrows but the Baker in at the same time so to see these physical emotional expressions if they change the behavior that we're looking for so that's going to be on the first steps into going into this do you think it would matter whether the the facial body postures were the subjects own as opposed to someone else's so if I see a

44:58 picture of someone in a prideful position as opposed to a picture of myself in a prideful position do you think that that's going to not matter at all well I think it will have some sort of differences but one of the things that researchers have found us specifically Tracy and Matsumoto this great a study with Olympians in the Paralympics so these were a competing Olympians who were blind and one of the things that they found is their pride

45:31 postures very very much resemble the spontaneous pride postures of seeing individuals and these were congenitally blind individuals these are people that are blind their entire life so there was no way that they had the visual imprint of somebody else performing this so there's at least some evidence that the expression of at least pride is innate and universal most people really express it in very very similar ways they hit on the same kinds of behavioral markers so in that sense it won't matter too much

46:04 because I'm expecting most people even spontaneously to kind of fall into more or less similar positions it might be a little tricky with other emotion so once that maybe don't have this more or less Universal in the sort of expression but luckily those emotions are not on the table for now we're dealing with a fairly new one yeah I guess I mean that I agree with you that some of these things can kind of have a stereotypical expressions but I guess my question was about whether you think

46:40 seeing that the same expression in a different individual is going to have the same effect on me that it would be seeing myself that way so I wonder if it's more motivate if it's somehow more motive you know if you become happier if you see a picture of yourself smiling as opposed to someone else smiling or is that you don't affect that kind you don't expect that kind of effect at all you know actually that's a good point so I think there would be a difference in effect if say you were observing somebody that looked very different from

47:15 you know smiling versus looking at somebody that looks very similar or even yourself smiling so this just reminds me of another really cool study that they're doing at Stanford University with avatars so they have people sitting there and just watching an avatar walking on a treadmill for a few minutes and the avatars either look exactly like the participant or they look very different from the participant and then the participants go home the next day the researchers call them up and just ask them how jolly what did you do you

47:49 know today throughout your day take me through your activities and when they found is the people that watch the avatars that look like them spontaneously worked out the next day as opposed to people that watched avatars that look nothing like them didn't spontaneously work out the next day so I think there is something to this idea where I'm seeing yourself smiling or somebody that looks like you smiling is gonna maybe make you more comfortable it's more likely to spontaneously smile yourself then watching somebody else but these are the sort of things that we're

48:23 trying to account for at least in our empirical design so one of the things they have to do is give them a kind of trigger video to have them follow along with the expressions the physical expressions and we have several different videos with different people in it so that we could show people videos of people that look more like them so for women there would be women in the video for men that would be men and we try to see if we could discriminate so they look similar to each other yeah interesting okay and then so what

48:55 is the general idea supposed to be that by by engaging in these kinds of activities the process has become more automated so therefore that the barriers fall down or something is that is that the general idea yes yes so on one of the most popular terms in situated literature is the sighting of offloading so you offload your cognitive sorts of problems or dilemmas or tasks or anything you need to do on to the

49:28 environment or somewhere else so one of the prime examples is autos notebook Auto has this notebook you can't remember where the Museum of Modern Art a so he writes down and his notebook and then because part of his mind because he's offloading that memory on there so this is the same sort of concept whenever you're struggling with overcoming temptation or diminished motivation or anything at that sort and you feel yourself weak and you feel that you can't do it offload that strength that endurance that autonomy onto your body instead of just keeping it in your

50:03 mind and had the body kind of create these vivid passionate motivations to be able to over combat yeah so the the autos notebook of course that's from Clark and Chalmers there it is important for that that example that he sort of automatically and I mean reliably refer to the notebook so just writing something down in the notebook on their view isn't isn't the same as as having the only way that you can perform the action googly in the notebook is that

50:36 kind of difference matter for you as well as part of the offloading that you're talking about yes I'm willing to uh to to go that far but specifically for these kinds of situations where people are lacking the relevant self control on skills so in the more extreme examples of people that really struggle with chronic motivational opposition so people that are weak will to begin with and are trying to find a way to build up that self control I would absolutely be willing to go as

51:08 far as to say that they literally incapable of using the traditional self-control strategies in that sense so for these individuals to have any sort of success they need to offload that self-control onto their bodies I think it's the only effective strategy that they could use and by offloading it to the body what you mean is by developing certain actions which promote the emotional response that then lead to the Kotton yes exactly exactly so to make you I tap into this you mentioned the

51:42 word flow before so to tap into the state of flow where you're just automatically subconsciously doing what you need to do to get through that temptation it's interesting I see a lot of connections to Aristotelian ethical theory coming where you're saying that there's a kind of habit to habitus or whatever they were certainly in turn would be that the the virtuous person who's in control is does it automatically to the point where it becomes second nature and it's really the kind of a crazy or weakness of will that you seem to be interested in seems

52:15 to sort of break down exactly where Aristotle would have predicted where there's a kind of cognitive understanding of what the right course of action is but not the correct habits not the correct dispositions to follow through or the skill and I guess as he would put it so do you see a connection to those kinds of absolutely I mean Aristotle not just in my work but in my life has been insanely inspirational also a very similar kind of theorist Benedict Spinoza so he's also very very

52:50 similar to Aristotle and the kinds of claims that he makes in the kind of world that he has so he's very very influential in the way I kind of think about these things as well but yes absolutely it's all about this idea of creating the right sorts of dispositions the right sorts of habits and an idea that it's a very very undeveloped idea at the moment but it's something that I'm starting to think about is finding the source of weakness of well so what puts people into this

53:25 situation to begin with where they need self-control so it's a matter of cognitive dissonance right like I said before I you judge X is the best thing to do but you also really want to do why and they think that the reason why people come to these places or at least the more extreme chronic motivational opposition sorts of situation is because these are the kinds of people that their lives are very separated are very distinct in two different categories so there's this a division of selves right

53:59 but not necessarily a division of present self versus future self but a division between current self as you are and ideal self that you want to be right so the farther the ideal self is from your current self the harder it is to act the way your ideal self would act because these are two very separate things in your perception very similar people that go into a grocery store and they divide everything in the grocery store between healthy and tasty right so carrots carrots uh they're more healthy

54:35 than they are tasty so they must be healthy cupcakes are tasty so when they meet these sorts of divisions people look in their baskets that's filled with carrots and cucumbers and tomatoes and they start feeling very depressed there's like where's the tasteless about the cupcakes and I think that definitely promotes weakness as well seeing just the world as you know either things are going your way or thing terrible things are always happening to you so I think

55:08 the more that people perceive the world and these very harsh sorts of distinctions the more vulnerable they leave themselves to be weak willed right because now it becomes a struggle you're like here's what I wanted here's what I have to begrudgingly do versus people that don't make these hearts the distinctions in the world they kind of see the world was this unified interplaying sort of network I think those are the people that are more likely to look at it carat and say a carat can be both healthy and tasty

55:42 right and these are the people that are more likely to stick to diets or to get their term papers done on time or anything of that sort so one of the goals that I had in this project is kind of seeing how we could unify everything again together instead of making these distinctions which again is one of the reasons why I don't like to focus so much on the prefrontal cortex because there we're making the video making divisions within the brain here's the good slow deliberate part of the brain

56:15 and the evil then an impulsive part of the brain and I think that's where people get into a lot of hot water and kind of getting away from these harsh divisions and again having this more holistic kind of perspective feeds the motivation that feeds the self-control and I think that's something that Aristotle was really trying to point that right it's not that you're always either good or bad right sometimes you try to do the good thing and you mess up right so you're neither good knowing

56:47 you're bad but you learn from your mistakes and you keep going and keep getting better and better so this are absolutely the kinds of intuitions that are guiding this kind of project yeah I think that's very important – like for instance you take a typical students who's who divides the world into things I'm good at versus things I'm terrible at you know like for instance you know this is struggle a lot of students struggle with math they just think well I'm just not good at math and so of course it's no surprise that when it comes time to study for their math exam they find themselves tempted by the new

57:21 Xbox game or by the party down the street or by just watching a series of television shows but of course what they're missing is that you do only become good at math by doing it a lot so the fact that they've sort of already pre-marinated and set them up to to really not have the right kind of motivational states absolutely I mean just the anecdotally speaking on that same idea I might say I always joke around that there's a reason why I became a philosophy major because I hate math I was I I was good at certain parts of math but then there are certain

57:55 things that get me very very confused about it I guess as a philosopher I don't like having only one right answer that's kind of very weird to me and for the longest time I kept avoiding I said no no math is not for me I'm just gonna stay away from me until I took a formal logic class and I realized that philosophy is nothing but math except with statements as the variables instead of numbers as the variables and once I realized that and again this is going with the fact that I love the logic and

58:29 I very much enjoyed to improve some derivations and things of that sort once I realized that I started becoming very very interested in a harder math so like more experience to algebra where they're talking about relations between numbers and things like that and there was a period where I was actually a very very interested in those kinds of things that everybody around me was shocked like jimana doing math this is crazy but I mean it just goes to show you here was this harsh distinction math versus

59:01 philosophy once I realized these two things go hand in hand I'm no longer scared and the idea of doing that I'm no longer intimidated by it same thing with psychology and neuroscience when I first took my first neuroscience class I was so horrified and so nervous I'm like how am I gonna understand this it's a completely different world and when I realize that it's the neuroscientists do the same thing that the philosophers do it's just the content is different then I started getting a lot more comfortable with it I

59:35 started doing much better in the classes themselves I started being more motivated to learn these kinds of things so I think I think people that make these harsh distinctions they're really they're setting themselves up to be very vulnerable to weakness of well the people that see the world in a more holistic kind of way the hippies of the world if you these are the type of individuals that don't sit there regretting doing the wrong action you know more often than

1:00:08 not they're I think more likely to act out these better judgments I think that's interesting that yeah you come to the conclusion that the hippies are the more self-controlled I always have a very different very weird source of ideas of what self-controlled individuals are so for example video gamers to me are incredibly self controlled very self-motivated individuals I mean I've seen people sacrifice so much for the sake of winning a video game and you know opposed to anything else in their

1:00:42 everyday life so I actually very much commend individuals like that but I think an important point to be made here also is the fact that we really need to expand what we mean by self control the notions of weakness of will and things like that it's not just you sitting there telling yourself don't eat the cookie don't eat the cookie and then you don't eat the cookie that's not the only instance of self control people can get very clever when they're being self controlled so a person that puts a

1:01:16 padlock on their fridge to avoid eating the chocolate cake some people might say that's cheating I think that's a very clever way to get yourself to act in the right sorts of ways when you know your own weaknesses when you know what you can and cannot do diachronic self control yes yes exactly yeah this guy chronic self control and actually I mentioned before there's only a four or five situated self control articles or views altogether one of these is by dr. Tillman beer cons so he's got this great paper where he talks

1:01:52 about tying to the mast strategies referring to the story of Odysseus I tied himself to the mast to avoid the siren song and then he makes a very I think a great argument for functional equivalence of self control he essentially says I don't care how you do it if the function is the same then counts of self-control for me if you don't eat the chocolate cake because you prevented yourself from eating it versus you don't need the chocolate cake because it's locked behind the padlock and you gave your neighbor the keys the function is still the same you don't eat

1:02:26 the cake you stay on your diet and that counts for me and I very much agree with that I think we need to get a lot more clever with the kinds of self control strategies that we act upon us because take it from somebody that has tried these cognitive strategies and failed at them it's not fun to fail you really try you get yourself excited you're like yes I'm gonna be the kind of person that wakes up at five o'clock in the morning does an hour of yoga walks their dogs has a full breakfast maybe that works

1:02:58 for one day maybe two if you're lucky three and then you revert right back to where you are but the worst part is you don't just revert but you get those feelings of guilt of sadness of not being able to be accomplished and they think that demotivates you for pursuing and for continuing and they think there's a lot of strategies open to us if we just kind of look at this ability or capacity or system whatever you want to call it in a kind of different way yeah interesting I think that's an important point especially I mean that's

1:03:31 like typical New Year's resolution kind of pathway you resolve something on January and by you know April you're back to exactly if that long back to do exactly and it's definitely self-defeating because you're mean I think part of the kind of view that you're developing here has it that well you can develop the good habits but you can also develop the bad habits so that you can become more likely to be tempted more likely to give in by developing the wrong kinds of bodily responses which

1:04:07 lead to the wrong kinds of emotions which link to the wrong kinds of cognitive thoughts so that exam yeah so that either way yeah I mean it's very important which way you choose to go because you're either enforcing the good thing or the bad thing and I think that's an important point that's often overlooked that you can learn become more week without and I think another very interesting thing is the kinds of habits that you have they're gonna be good or bad depending on on your environment on the kind of people about you where you live so are habits that

1:04:40 are considered very good in one place might be very bad in another place so for example I've developed living in New York I developed the New Yorker habit of sunglasses headphones don't look at anybody walk in a straight line don't make any eye contact don't speak to anybody on the street and then I moved down to Atlanta for three years southern love no it was the exact opposite strangers look me dead in the eye on the street good morning how are

1:05:13 you everywhere I went right so here's a new habit that I developed is saying this so that when I go back to New York this good habit that was good in Atlanta is no longer good in New York because good luck saying good morning to a stranger on the streets of New York you get herbally assaulted inside who are you what do you want leave me alone do I know you so I mean just that you know again we need to be a very dynamic very open-minded very clever with these

1:05:48 sorts of behaviors that we're trying to indoctrinate it ourselves or kill off in ourselves yeah that's very interesting and so kind of bringing this full circle back to the brain a little bit well I'm wondering what you think about addiction and specifically the kind of idea that addiction is a brain disorder which is you know kind of gained I mean there's backlash against it but it's gained a lot of support I would say it's certainly the standard neuro science textbook presentation of what addiction is you know hijacking of the motivational system by by these

1:06:22 unconscious cognitive processes which lead you to you know desire the cocaine or the heroin or whatever but that is something that you literally can't defeat because there's a a very powerful unconscious neural architecture namely a motivational system which has been overtaken so does your view extended to this kind of stuff as well do you think the back can be corrected and the way you're talking about are all things absolutely in fact it not only extends to these kinds of cases or that's my

1:06:54 primary focus so like I said I'm very interested in these extreme chronic sort of cases addiction being one of the paradigm examples of what I'm talking about so I do a lot of research into different kinds of addictions and not impulse control disorders and but that's precisely the problem here is that there is this neural architecture problem this physical problem that's creating this kind of behavior seeking or drug seeking

1:07:28 behavior and one of the studies that I cite very often in my own work and presenting these these sorts of problems is a study that found on this backdoor pathway as they call it to drug processing so what they found as their suspect their pathway that completely circumvents the prefrontal cortex anytime addicts feel the desire for a particular kind of drug so they're not consciously aware of this they engage in the drug seeking behavior without realizing what's going on until in many cases that it's too late and that's

1:08:03 exactly the point how do you expect an individual that has these processes that are not taking any part in the prefrontal cortex how does the prefrontal cortex supposed to fight that it's literally impossible in this sort of way going back to the idea before you need to fight fire with fire if there's some sort of subconscious habits that are creating these behaviors then perhaps its subconscious habits that are gonna tackle those things as well right so teaching yourself to clench your

1:08:39 fists every time that this kind of desire comes into you it's actually very simple to do you could teach physical expressions through action observation alone the people don't even need to be doing it anything so I envision the therapy where we have drug addicts sitting there and watching somebody else every time they're in front of heroin or cocaine or whatever it be they just clench their fists they go up and they walk right past it and eventually they're going to gain that same muscle memory to do those same

1:09:12 physical sorts of movements and if the empirical studies are right in clenching your fists really firms your willpower then just subconsciously having that muscle memory reflex to clench your fists when the drugs are in front of you might be enough to firm that willpower to get you away from the job at the very least it puts you into a better position than if you would have had done that that's the kind of idea and again I'm always thinking of the drug addict whenever I read a cognitive sort of

1:09:45 strategy that's prescribed right so uh one of the most famous prescriptions implementation intentions right so telling yourself if this stimuli occurs then I do this right so you create this intention in yourself good luck telling a heroin addict of 20 plus years to form these implementation intentions like I look at these people as the ones that they lack the patience to work too long for it they like the physical energy but also mental energy

1:10:20 to put in too much work into it they're feeling a lot of stress right because they realize that they're fighting against this ingrained addiction that they see as a part of themselves so there's the physical stress involved in there too and they're in such a situation that even if they're successful in avoiding the drug one time I know those being able to avoid it the second time their resources will just be so spent they'll be so exhausted so I look at the kinds of strategies where I could prescribe the self-control strategy to an old 80 year old heroin

1:10:56 addict and he's not gonna say like oh that's you know some hippie stop I don't have the time or the patience for this you know I wanted to be very quick simple easy cognitive shortcuts to help the addicts get over the little humps while they build up these feelings of agency and confidence and get up to a level of threshold where they can start tapping back into these kinds of cognitive prefrontal abilities and eventually becoming a strong self

1:11:29 control of individual yeah I think that's important important work it certainly has many applications I wonder if I wrote a margin generally do you what connection if at all you see between freedom of the will and the kind of work that you're doing it's not sweet self control so the old free will debates so ultimately ultimately if you ask me on my intuitions what I believe I'm a pretty hardcore determinist I

1:12:04 I definitely don't go as far as libertarianism I don't think that we have this on the boundary will to do as we wish that we make our own stories and I think we're very heavily determined and so far I just had have had a really hard time wrapping my head around compatibilism it seems to me to never like really work out I find compatibilist more often than not are people who want to have their cake and eat it too kind of deal so so far I'm pretty hard into the determine this

1:12:37 can't so I don't really believe in the free will if I can borrow a term from Spinoza I rather refer to it as power of acting right we don't really have we will in the sense of where we can decide to do whatever we want to do but we have the ability to act more according to our own nature or more being acted upon by things outside of us again if you're familiar at all with Spinoza he believes that there's no such thing as a ultimate

1:13:10 freedom no human being had ever had that interestingly no human being would have actually want that either but that's besides the point so I think our behaviors are very much constrained I think they're very much constrained by our genetics our upbringing our environment our society one time the Sun shone in through your window this morning what side of the bed you woke up on all these little things very much factored into what our behaviors are going to be and they think that's probably one of the reasons why I keep pushing to emphasize to look at all

1:13:45 these other things pure pure willpower if you will I don't think it exists and there's actually just new interesting trend in the self-control literature where a lot of psychologists are hopping on this uh bandwagon and saying look pure willpower doesn't exist every time we go out there and we look at people that are successfully self-control that don't fall into temptations they're people that have avoided temptations altogether as opposed to once that fought and head-on and were successful

1:14:17 with it so I mean I much sympathize with that idea I don't think there's really much to be said about willpower I think instead if we want to act certain ways we need to look at the sorts of factors that make us act in certain ways and manipulate those as opposed to sitting inside our own heads and trying to manipulate ourselves from the inside I don't think it will work yeah so I mean I wonder why what you said isn't basically compatibilism so if you're if what you're if you're

1:14:50 determinist who thinks that there's still something called power of acting there can be still control mechanisms which determined or not are still internal to you doing internal to your nature or something like that as opposed to external isn't that basically a compatibilist position yes yes so you could say that uh maybe even we compatibilism the only reason I said before that I don't like the capitalist campus because even for this claim I don't have a really good argument for why that's the case for me I thank you either the only

1:15:24 arguments that as of right now the way they stand that I by the post is the determinists ort of arguments so I guess there is a part inside of me that wants to carve out a little compatibilism room give it a little bit of leeway but I mean aside from intuition I have no good argument to back that up right now which is why I haven't like I've really been talking about it too much in my own work the more philosophical idea free well okay interesting so and then finally about this stuff I wonder what

1:15:58 given what we've just talked about what do you think the impact of this should have on the criminal justice system is there one do you think yeah so such a fascinating question I actually I took this on euro law course in my when I was doing my masters and my professor dr. Nicole Benson she does a lot of great work between morality moral theory and law and things like that and she she made this very fascinating point that when we go into

1:16:31 the courts right right now one of the number-one defenses that you hear is I didn't do it my brain it drank my brain may be doing it it wasn't me and I want to do it so so one of the things that she said one day class I just really still stuck with me when we describe what goes on in the brain that led to the behavior are we giving an excuse for that behavior are we saying like look here's the reasons why it happened and obviously the person had nothing to do with it because we could D tell the brain stuff or are you just simply

1:17:05 describing what happened in the human being to get into that behavior and I think that um ultimately at the end all we're doing is describing at all times even when it's used as an excuse you're just describing what goes on and I mean ultimately again I have to bring Spinoza back into the picture I mean he said something very interesting on the medic said look there's no such thing as free will we can't control our own actions if you're gonna murder people you're gonna murder people and nothing could be done

1:17:37 about it if I'm gonna adopt the hundred puppies that's what I'm gonna do nobody could do anything about it right it's just the way it is but we still need to have a legal and court system because most people don't see the world this way so if you don't go through the motions of the legal system and courts and all that stuff that you know people are just gonna go crazy they're not gonna stand that you know all of humanity would collapse on themselves so I have a very similar sort of idea with that ultimately yeah your

1:18:11 brain did it your brain is always the one that does that but you are also your brain and I think we just ultimately I think that the only thing we have a right to do is either punish everybody or excuse everybody but also I realize that that's no way for our society to function at all so I think one of the things that we could do is understand better where the behavior comes from and instead of discriminating on whether your brain did

1:18:43 it or you did it because again I don't mind that distinction at all instead um we need to see what kinds of factors went into your kind of upbringing and whether those things could have been avoided or whether those things were just part of your life due to negligence so if I was being raised by formal parents but I had the opportunity to run away or move in with an author an uncle or something I did take that opportunity maybe some blame could be put there but if I was born into a bad family beaten

1:19:16 my whole entire life chewed out and spit through the system and then I murdered somebody it's really hard for me to point a finger of blame towards that individual which is probably why or good reasons why I'm not in the court system actually after studying moral theory and human cognition altogether I find it really really hard to blame people for anything but maybe that's why philosophers should not be lawyers yeah I mean so I think that's all very

1:19:55 interesting and even more personally I think you know we as a society blame addicts for their shortcomings you know if you were a better person you wouldn't have had that drink you know my family has struggled with alcoholism my father was the type of person who would cast the paycheck and immediately spend it all like all everything at the bar that night and then we had no money for food no money for rent and you know society looks at that and says well here's a terrible person who sir came to to succumb to temptation but it seems like the kind of view you're pushing suggests

1:20:29 that and and I sympathetic towards it by the way that these are the wrong categories of course there's something blameworthy there what he did was terrible because he wasn't supporting his family etc but it wasn't a moral shortcoming it wasn't like he could have done something different and chose not to do it so that when we take this other kind of view it certainly may not change the way we implement justice but it shouldn't change the way that society itself assigns blame or praise yes yes no I absolutely agree with that and I

1:21:06 think a lot of the people that make these sorts of arguments that you know oh you're an alcoholic my father you know being it after 20 years of all or whatever I think those are the kind of people that don't pay attention to the impact that the tiniest little change could have so I mean just to share my own story I was a high school dropout I dropped out my first month of high school I hated it did not have a good time there at all and I worked for many years I made really good money

1:21:38 especially for somebody my age and then something clicked in my head three years later and I just got bored I got bored of my situation I got bored of being at the same job with the same friends the same faces and I just wanted to do something to shake things up so I decided let me get my GED yeah I ended up going to this wonderful GED program where they had wonderful teachers and they were just so so welcoming and so warm and I ended up doing really great on the GED this idea let me just take

1:22:12 some Community College classes long story short almost ten years later I'm in the ph.d program now now my um my cousin he's uh we're very close he's like my brother he's 20 years old now and right before he graduated high school he was going through the same thing he just hated it he was not having a good time he was not doing well he came to me he said look I want to do exactly what you did I want to drop out I want to work for a few years and then I want to go back to school get my GED go to college everything will be fine exactly how you are the first thing I said I said don't do that

1:22:46 you should not do that at all because I got incredibly lucky that the circumstances in my life worked out in such a way that this thing happened if I would have had say a boss that was slightly more interesting than he was maybe if I would have went to work every day we would have had like slightly more interesting conversation I would have been less bored and not had that you know tiny little motivation to go back to school even when I went back to

1:23:19 school I signed up I wanted to be a psychology major because I was always interested in the workings of the human mind my first semester I took a philosophy class philosophy 101 chosen because it was the only thing that fit into my schedule I registered a little late this one fit nicely into my schedule it was with Professor Leslie Aaron's who you knows one of your colleagues and I just I still remember was the first day of class maybe it not actually there's the second date class and she said she was talking about this guy Socrates and all his crazy ideas of

1:23:53 I was just so entranced in it and I was like a wide-eyed kid at a candy store I fell in love with the subject never look back and from there the way I described my my academic progression is all literally a matter of luck as you know I make you back then and you were the one that told me to go to Brooklyn College and I looked up Google Maps directions on how to get there – error by subway every morning I went back to you I said

1:24:26 hey what about Queens College and I still remember you said if you're serious about philosophy go to Brooklyn College so I went on that four-hour and a subway right to Brooklyn College there I met another professor Justin Steinberg he told me apply to Georgia State I went to Georgia State I met Andreas guarantee you know there he said go to Germany go to osnabrück this is your place so these are all little things that kind of fell into place that pushed me the way I am if you ask me am I responsible where I am right now I say absolutely not I'll give you a list of all the professors

1:25:00 that nudged me in the way that I have to go like yes I did all the work in between but I never made these choices to go into this direction these choices will make for me and that's exactly what I told to my cousin's I'm like look there yeah it seems like the same exact situation on the face of it but there are tiny little differences right you're doing this ten years later than I am maybe there's some sort of different uh you know teacher in the GED program maybe the exception process with the community colleges works in a different

1:25:34 sort of way maybe you're not going to meet this one teacher and this one semester that's going to change your you know outlook forever we really we really take for granted the little tiny things in the world that make us who we are and make everybody else who they are who they are and I think it's very important to pay attention to these little tiny differences because it's the culmination of them that make us who we are more than anything else yeah look plays an incredible role people people neglect I

1:26:08 mean I don't think people have really come to grips with the with the amount of amount of luck everywhere you know starting going back to niggles classic are gone this moral luck it's it's an incredibly important point I think and also as if you're a determinist I mean I'm not especially sympathetic to determinism but that's I mean that's neither here nor there but I think if you are determine this if the plane make it extremely important the small causal influences can have a big impact so simply because things are determined doesn't mean you don't want to intervene in the system

1:26:40 and because small changes in the system will make changes in the system that's what that's what's important so it's not fatalism certainly isn't fatalism yes yes I mean I'm gonna determine this that still wakes up every single morning and says I don't like this I'm gonna change this or I like there's something to continue doing this I mean even this is determined to someone still out there maybe blindly but still thinking that I'm making some sort of change in the world so you're right not fatalism yes I agree and you know I mean I think you're

1:27:16 what I'm thank you for sharing that personal and devoted by your trajectory because non-traditional students students that have dropped out of high school that go back to community colleges I mean that's LaGuardia at work is where I first met you is that's the purpose of it or at least that's the purpose that I see for it is finding people who are non-traditional will have great potential certainly I view you as one of our great success stories I mean I think we have a lot of success stories but I think that you are one of one of the very nice success story of someone who came in kind of not knowing what they were going

1:27:50 to do found a direction and has pursued it and is on the great thing so it certainly was an honor of mine to have you as a student I always remembered you as one of my best students one of my most serious students and so it's really great to see how you've gone on a little bit bittersweet to see that you've defected from philosophy to cognitive science but I can't blame you give them the payment that you're developing I think it's important that we have people with your background doing this kind of cognitive work so it's really great to see you that you're flourishing in the true sense of the aristotelian question

1:28:24 over there in Germany and then I look forward to what you're going to accomplish in the future I'll be following your publications very carefully so I don't want to keep you here forever I'm kind of running out of time I'm wondering is there anything but at the that you would like to say that we haven't touched on so far um let's see well I mean just going along with a the idea of the commentary that you just made I think one of the things I really want to push for thought maybe to all your

1:28:57 listeners is the importance of the interdisciplinary collaboration I think that's something that's very important one of the things that breaks my heart is when I hear philosophers speaking to only philosophers listening to philosophical podcast versus a psychologist staying away from the philosophers and you know doing their own work the neuroscientists hiding themselves in the lab even under other disciplines like historians hiding in their own departments and things like that I think one of the things that

1:29:30 really came out in that conversation today is the importance of kind of looking at one topic or one problem from many different disciplines and that's something that I really want to push because I mean in my experience here in Germany we are all incredibly interdisciplinary in my research training team that we have here the only thing that unites us is this idea of situated cognition otherwise we're all very different I mean we have neuro linguists working with babies we have people working with pigeons and monkeys

1:30:05 adults humans we have people working on spatial orientation and spontaneous metaphors and solving mathematical problems self-control moral theory from all over the place and one of the greatest experiences I've had in the past year-and-a-half is really talking to all these people and seeing all these different points of views and integrating all of that into one viewpoint and I think there's the only reason why he defected to cognitive science I sorta speakest to have this

1:30:39 interdisciplinary sort of environment around me all the time and actually the reason why I went to Georgia State is because they had an interdisciplinary major of neuro philosophy where you got to on here wrap everything so I guess in the essence of being a non-traditional and being very interdisciplinary no matter what kinds of goals or better judgments you make for yourself in your own life the important thing is there's not one to every destination there's many different things you could do many

1:31:12 different strategies that you could come into play and I think the whole idea is to just really be very open minded to it be very clever in the sorts of way and be proud of who you are and what you do but I think is that they come message I want to leave with yes that's a very nice way of bringing it back a full circle so yeah thank you for taking the time to talk with us have been very thing I learned a lot from this discussion and want to just have you hang on for a second I'll talk to you

1:31:44 afterwards but other than that absolutely I'll see you later yeah thank you so much it was awesome