Lesson seven, part eight. The Epimethean Script? This is the last video of the lecture. I'd better start pulling it together. Going way back to video two, we have a dispute. It seems clear cut. Is Passion king and reason, the slave? Is the Hume Haidt view or is reason the king, the philosopher king, who governs the passions for the sake of reason? That seems to say it all. Passion over reason, reason over passion. Pretty stark opposition, but then again, not so clear. Why not? Well because this is in part clearly a metaphysical dispute. Hume thinks that his version of the picture is not just empirically but in some sense conceptually necessarily true. But we don't need to go down that rabbit hole, not just because we've got enough animals metaphors already, thank you very much, but because although this is a metaphysical picture, it's not clear that Haidt's dispute with Plato is a properly metaphysical dispute. Somehow, it's an empirical dispute, because it's supposed to be settled by empirical discoveries in cognitive science and psychology. It's not clear how, or in what sense. Why not? Well, because it's an empirical is that's somehow tangled up in some kind of an ought. If you just ask the question, do people tend to be ruled by their passions? You won't get any disagreement between Hume and Plato, or Haidt and Plato. Yes, people are ruled by their passions, normally, sad to say. But if you ask them, ought people to be ruled by their passions? You get very different answers. Haidt says, not sad to say. He says it's actually a good thing. Plato says, sad to say, people are ruled by their passions. How can empiricism settle an ought question, especially since empiricism may be an Hume's view seems to hold the view that there no is ever implies an ought? How do Hume and Haidt get from reason is typically normally in the median or modal case a slave to the passions. How do they get from that to and it ought to be that's a good thing? While staying on the cognitive science side of the line, such that Plato is somehow properly refuted on his side of the line, but is that a metaphysical side now? It gets worse. What do they even disagree about even at the level of ought? Both Plato and Haidt offer a rational, scientific account that tells us how happiness comes from between. As a function of a kind of cross-level coherence at the individual and societal level. It gets worse still. Chapter two of Haidt's book, as I said in the last video, starts with these quotes. "The whole world, the whole universe is change, and life itself is but what you deem it." Marcus Aurelius. What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, And our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind. Buddha. These quotes can be taken in a pop psych sense. Taken in that sense, it's highly doubtful that Plato would bother disagreeing. If you're happy, the world looks happy to you. If you're sad, it looks sad. Psychologists may be able to refine this sort of insight in various ways, but on some levels it's kind of obvious so there's no particular reason to think it isn't obvious to Plato. These quotes can also be taken literally, which would tend to make them highly metaphysical and controversial. We could have a metaphysical cave to rival Plato's own. A cave in our own mind, we are trapped in, with no hope of escape to the light of true reality and maybe that's not a bad thing. But, as I emphasized, it doesn't seem plausible that Haidt wants to take it that way. He quotes Dale Carnegie agreeing with Marcus Aurelia, Aurelius. Haidt calls Carnegie the world's most popular success writer. He doesn't say he's a world class metaphysician. I would guess Haidt strongly agrees with Plato's metaphysical picture, but Haidt doesn't think cognitive science has refuted it and, and opposes it with a different metaphysical cave. He isn't setting up an alternative metaphysical picture. Quote from Haidt. This comes at the end of his chapter two. The epigraphs that opened this chapter are true. Life is what we deem it, and our lives are the creations of our minds. But these claims are not helpful until augmented by a theory of the divided self, such as the rider. Which is the subject of chapter one, which I skipped over. But let's now turn back to chapter one, say a bit more about those animal metaphors, in the hopes of clarifying what exactly the dispute is between Haidt and Plato. Metaphors for the Mind. Here's how his book starts. "Throughout recorded history, people have lived with and tried to control animals, and these animals made their way into ancient metaphors. Buddha, for example, compared the mind to a wild elephant." "In days gone by, this mind of mine used to stray wherever Selfish desire or lust or pleasure would lead it. Today this mind does not stray and is under the harmony of control, even as a wild elephant is controlled by the trainer. Haidt spins this into a general question. Why do people keep doing such stupid things? Why do they fail to control themselves and continue to do what they know is not good for them? Well, the picture kind of tells you the answer, but if you can't figure out what the picture means, the next slide should help. Elephants, they're kind of hard to steer. Alright, that answers the question. Why do I keep doing such stupid stuff? I'm mostly elephant. Elephants are hard to steer. But now, I come up with another question. Why don't people do more stupid things? That, in a way, is the more puzzling thing, given just how elephanty we are. Now, Haidt doesn't emphasize this because it, he's sort of leaving the buddha beyon, behind at this point, but the answer would seem to be something like this. Elephants, they're pretty stable, they're pretty reliable. At this point, I should clearly replace my elephant graphic with something a little less alarming, but you get the picture. Elephants aren't just things that need to be controlled. They're things that you can rely on. And [UNKNOWN], unlike Buddha, emphasizes the, the reliability of animals. Even without our help. To put it another way, Buddha and David Hume don't seem to agree. David Hume. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. Back to Buddha. Is he saying that reason should be a slave to the passions? That is, the writer should be the servant of the elephant? It doesn't sound to me like that's what he's saying. Let's just read again to make sure. "In days gone by this mind of mine," the writer, "used to stray, wherever selfish desire or lust or pleasure would lead it. Today this mind does not stray and is under the harmony of control, even as a wild elephant Is controlled by the trainer. Note, courtesy of Wikipedia, I'm showing you what the tools of the elephant trainer are, chains and goads, sharp pointy bits. It doesn't sound to me like the rider is the slave to the elephant. But rather the elephant is the slave to the rider. Look at these two images. In the one case, we have a kind of transcendent rising elephant with its' rider. And the other we have an elephant literally chained to the ground. It's not clear to me that Haidt is quite right to align his message with the Buddha's in the way that he would like to. Let's try another angle. Plato's image of reason as charioteer controlling the dumb beasts of passion may overstate not only the wisdom. But also the power of the charioteer. The metaphor of a rider on an element fits more closely. Reason and emotion must both work together to create intelligent behavior. It's a quote from Haidt. He actually quotes the Plato Dialogue. You might wonder what image of the charioteer is this? It's from a dialogue called the Faedras, which Haidt quotes, and I'll read that bit to you. The horse that is on the right, or nobler side, is upright in frame and well-jointed with a high neck. And a regal nose. He is a lover of honor with modesty and self-control. Companion to two, true glory, he needs no whip, and is guided by verbal commands alone. The other horse is a crooked, great jumble of limbs, companion to wild boasts and indecency. He is shaggy around the ears. Deaf as a post. And just barely yields to horsewhip and goad combined. Hise act, Haidt actually omits a further detail that I have included in my cartoon. Plato describes the horses as winged, or sometimes winged. It's rather a long and involved figure in the original dialogue. Sometimes their wings fall off, I won't share you the story about that. I've compromised by settling for one set of wings. I did so by way of emphasizing how wrong Haidt seems to be about Plato overstating the chariot at his control. Admittedly, I make him look calm, he's reasoned. But this whole mode of transportation is the most spectacular accident waiting to happen. Isn't that obvious? What a dumb way to get around. No one would sell you insurance to derive this thing. So why does Haidt think Plato is selling us insurance, by selling us this picture of the soul? You're going to fly up, only to crash hard. You're going to run in circles. In short, it's like Plato's known you all his life. You sign up for 20 Coursera courses, planning to become an expert on everything. That's the horse on the right, seeking honor. You want all those certificates of completion. But then, you end up just sitting on the couch playing mind craft. Your hairy, shirtless chest slowly getting crusted over with cheeto dust. That's the horse on the left. Oh the shame of it. And reason keeps telling you this doesn't make sense. Keeps lashing you to get up. Put the controller down, go get some work done. Oh, the humanity. To put it another way, Plato's image is actually closer to Haidt's image than Buddha's. They both have a dream of this kind of crazily rising transcendent animal and apparent defiance of gravity, a form of transport that's half human, half heavy beast. So what's the difference between Plato and Haidt? Let's go back to our dogs. Here's a quote from the original paper, The Emotional Dog and His Rational Tail. Remember, this is moral judgment, it's mostly emotion. Little bit of strictly cosmetic reason up there. Here's a quote, incidentally, along the way that rather contradicts that. People may at times reason their way to a judgement by sheer force of logic, overriding their initial intuition. In such cases reasoning truly is causal and cannot be said to be the slave of the passions. However, such reasoning is hypothesized to be rare, occurring primarily in cases in which the initial intuition is weak, and the processing capacity is high. That is to say, mostly tails don't wag dogs. But actually, sometimes the tail can wag the dog. Haidt himself admits it, just in passing, but that's rather a significant omission. Let's think about that. To be fair, Haidt is attacking a fellow psychologist named Kohlberg who advanced a highly rationalistic picture of on which it is indeed, normal, for the moral tail to wag the rational tail to wag the, the moral dog of moral judgment. Colberg you might say, sees getting up and leaving the cave, for a more rational life to be a normal part of the human maturation process. But Plato, we all know this, obviously doesn't think so. Plato admits that such reasoning would lead you out of the cave is exceedingly rare. That's what makes it so valuable. So arguing against Coleberg, which I actually think is quite reasonable of Haidt. Is not tantamount to arguing against rationalism generally. Plato would be perfectly happy to admit that it's extremely rare for the tale of reason to wag the dog of the emotions of society general people don't usually listen to philosophers. That's why he says it's rare indeed for those prisoners in the cave to get up, turn around, and leave. If both Haidt and Plato agree that sometimes the tale can wag the dog, Reason can override the passions and emotion, what exactly are they disagreeing about? Let's find once more to find a clear difference between Haidt and Plato. Maybe Plato is taking this metaphysical matrix business too far, you might say. Not just in a metaphysical escape from the cave sense, but in a practical ethical sense. He thinks there's a red pill in it, blue pill, and he can know things in a new and pure way if he takes the right pill. That is, Plato's hero is Neo. Well, strictly, that's short for neocortex. Here's a quote from Haidt, from chapter one, where he talks about some of the newer parts of the brain and the old. The neocortex is one of the new parts. Quote. The front portion of the neocortex is particularly interesting, for parts of it do not appear to be dedicated to specific tasks, such as moving a finger or processing sound. Instead, it is available to make new associations and to engage in thinking, planning, and decision making, mental processes that can free an organism from responding only to an immediate situation. You are thinking, "Yeah, that's me." I am that guy. The guy who's mind is free from responding to an immediate situation. I'm cut out for management. There you are sitting in the cool corner office of your mind right above your eyes. You press a little button on your desk." Ms. Olympic, please cancel all my fighter flights responds this morning. I've got a long term problem I need to work through in a rational sort of way". Yes sir, Mr. Neo replies the obedient secretary, Ms. Limbick. I'm joking a little bit here. Okay, back to Haidt. The growth of the frontal cortex seems like a promising explanation for the divisions we experience in our mind. Perhaps the frontal cortex is the seed of reason. It is Plato's charioteer. It is Saint Paul's spirit, and it has taken over control. Though not perfectly from the more primitive limbic system. Plat's bad horse, Saint Paul's flesh. We can call this explanation the Promethean script of human evolution, after the character in Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods and gave it to the humans. In the script, our ancestors were mere animals governed by the primitive emotions and drives of the limbic system until they received the divine gift of reason, installed in the newly expanded neocortex. Unfortunately, as [UNKNOWN] goes on to point out, there is a flaw in the Promethean script. It assumes that reason was installed in the frontal cortex but that emotion stayed behind in the limbic system. In fact, the frontal cortex enabled a great expansion of emotionality. In humans. [UNKNOWN] clinical data. But it's also intuitive why this would be right. Freedom from responding to emot, to immediate situations doesn't mean being rational. It could mean being emotional about things that aren't immediate. You could get angry at the past, obsessed over the future. You can need to be reminded to live your life day by day, because you're so emotionally involved in the past or the future, and distant things that aren't here right now. Something no animal has has ever needed to be reminded of before. This here now is important. Your fight or flight impulses aren't cancelled, you've just got more things you can respond to, potentially, on a nervous sort of way. You can get caught in the headlights of life in more distant ways that are more complicated than any lowly deer ever dreamed of. It may be no coincidence that Pandora's Box containing so many miseries, peculiar to the human condition was sent by Zeus as part of Prometheus' punishment for stealing fire. Speaking of Pandora's box, it wasn't actually Prometheus who opened it. It was his brother, Epimetheus. And it wasn't the first time that Epimetheus screwed up. Let me tell you about the first time. This is a myth we have courtesy of exactly one ancient author. a certain fellow named Plato in a dialogue called Protagoras. And I think Heidt might like it if he doesn't happen to know it. He might say, the Epimethean script, that's an even more perfect way to put my anti-Plato point than My idea of the Promethean script. How so? Okay, let me tell you a bit about Prometheus. Do you know what Prometheus's day job was before he became a thief of fire and was punished for it? Well, I'll tell you. He was commissioned by Zeus himself to equip mankind for survival. Meanwhile, Epimetheus, his brother was in charge of equipping the other animals for survival. Prometheus name means forethought by the way. Epimetheus means afterthought. That is doing things, thinking later. Which has about the results you would expect. Epimetheus takes all the good bits Zeus gave the two of them to build all this good stuff. The teeth, the claws, the fur, so forth. All the stuff that's actually going to keep. Anything alive and he uses it all. And then Prometheus comes back and he's like dude where's all the stuff. And Epimetheus is like whoa dude I used it all. And Prometheus is like Epimetheus I ought to. So. In order to protect mankind, there was nothing left over that he could use to help them, Prometheus went to steal fire to give to man. Because man literally had nothing else. We were these helpless blank slates. But then thanks to Prometheus, we became powerful blank slates equipped with reason. I can almost hear Haidt saying that's perfect, that's exactly the blank slate mind as a general purpose computer view that I've been fighting all these years. He'd say I'm not surprised that Plato holds this crazy view. The view I want to combat is not so much the Promethean script, the view that we are like gods. It's more the Epimethean script, the view that we are nothing like animals. Essentially, because the truth is, now we're speaking for Haidt again, it's the elephant in all of us that keeps us alive most days. It's not true that Epimetheus ran out of stuff, we're all packed with animal goodness right up to the top. There's just a little shaving of reason on top of all that. Reason is just the puny little rider helping us around the edges. Unfortunately, it's not so clear that Plato disagrees with that. In the dialogue, it's Protagoras who tells this myth, not Socrates. And it seems like one of the reasons Socrates doesn't accept it, which he doesn't, is exactly the reason Hecht would. It kind of downplays the animal in us too much in an unrealistic way. Pythagoras has some somewhat naive views of politics as a result. He thinks you can just teach men virtue in this verbal sort of way. Socrates is not so sure, I think for reasons Haidt would more or less agree with. Gosh, I said I going to tell you what the differences between Plato and Haidt There has to be a difference. I mean they literally have the opposite view, and yet we don't seem to be able to put our finger on the sense in which they are opposite. I guess we'll just have to wait until next week. Okay that's just ridiculous building up suspense is one thing but I'm being down right intellectually counter productive here's what's causing the trouble and here's the solution to it. Haidt would say he's an intuitionist Plato is a rationalist this is sort of right but sort of wrong that's what's causing the problem there both rationalists. rationalist in what sense? Well, in Haidt's sense, I'm using his own sense against him. What's his sense? I'm quoting from his book, The rat, The Righteous Mind. I'll the use the word rationalist to describe anyone who believes that reasoning is the most important and reliable way to obtain moral knowledge. Well, not I'm going to quote from the happiness hypothesis. How can I find a sense of meaning and purpose? This is, here I'm quoting again, a question of fact that can be examined by scientific means. That second claim is really strong. I haven't ripped it out of context and made it sound stronger or more ambitious than Haidt really means. Anyone who really believes that second thing and Haidt does is a rationalist by Haidt's own standards. So when Haidt says there must be something beyond rationalism and then proposes his view. Turns out, the thing beyond rationalism is more rationalism. Although, admittedly, maybe a slightly different flavor of the stuff. Now, consider an option, but maybe the elephant knows more about morals than the writer does. We could argue about this, but I don't think so. The elephant has a lot of beliefs and attitudes, true beliefs and sound attitudes, mostly. But true belief is not knowledge. It's just a kind of heuristic. The elephant is a very heuristic beast. Insofar as we really know anything about morality Morality as opposed to just having pretty good instincts about it, which we do. It's mostly thanks to science, thank you very much. I think this is Haidt view. So, on we go. What's the difference between the two flavors of rationalism? Let me be brief. Plato believes in the possibility of rational accounts, that is, saying rationally writing a book that contains true knowledge of what morality is and how it works. He believes in the possibility of rational accounts, and in the possibility of rational persons. There is rational knowledge and rational knowers. Just not very much of the former and rather few of the latter. Haidt only believes in rational accounts. There aren't any really rational people. What do I mean by there aren't any rational people? Well let's take Haidt, Haidt is an example of a person. Haidt would say that he was about 1% writer, 99% elephant before he wrote his book offering his best rational scientific arguments about the writer and elephant, their true natures, and their real relationship and what we should do about it. After he worked through all that he was still - envelope please - 1% right, or 99% elephant. That is, he hadn't changed, even though he had offered a rational account. This is just a hint, although it's really pregnant hint, with, with significant differences down the line. But at least I finally gave you a hint. I'll give you one more and then we'll be done. Happiness comes from below? Reason, the rider can, though it usually doesn't, of course, examine by scientific means what the conditions for finding meaning and purpose in life are. But those conditions don't come down from on high from the form in the good. They're in the elephant. States of being and flow, feeling of elation The highest in us is a function of the lower in us. Haidt would say, that is, if the elephant is low and the rider is high, we couldn't rise up, make ourselves more truly happy by transcending our animal natures, not just because we can't in fact, sublimate ourselves into pure rational beings, but because even if we could that would bring us closer to the sources of happiness. It would take us away from them. I think the visual metaphor of Haidts cover maybe by sheer coincidence of the genius of the designer really gets at it. The heavy animal isn't a weight dragging us. Its like a cork rising in the water. Its the condition for the possibility or rising. Intuitionism is then a thesis about where are value comes from? Not how it's known. So intuition, intuitionism is consistent with rationalism. Rationalism and intuitionism in Haite sense are not really opposed. Nor more so then the rider and elephant. Haidt finds this so intuitive, I think, that he never really gets rationally clear about about it. Plato would find it so disturbing and abhorrent that I don't think he ever really considers it. Buddha wouldn't like it either. But I think it sounds kind of right. There, I ended on a positive note and tried to tell you something true instead of just making puzzles.
