June 16, 2025 • 42 mins
Is your brain a one-person show or an ensemble cast of rivaling neural networks? How do we manage the conflict between different drives, and what does this have to do with literature, deities, maturation, and what Nietzsche meant when he said “every drive wants to be master, and it attempts to philosophize in that spirit”? Join Eagleman this week with Jordan Peterson as we examine the way lives are built on conflicting wants.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
You consider yourself an individual, but are you in fact
built of rivaling neural networks? Can we see ourselves as
a collection of personalities? How do we manage the conflict
between different drives in our brains? And what does this
have to do with deities or literature or maturation? And
(00:27):
what did Friedrich Nietzsche mean when he said that every
drive we have wants to quote represent just itself as
the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of
all the other drives, Or as he also put it,
quote every drive wants to be master and it attempts
(00:50):
to philosophize in that spirit. What exactly does that mean?
Welcome to inner Cosmos with me David Eagle. I'm a
neuroscientist and author at Stanford and in these episodes we
sail deeply into our three pound universe to uncover some
of the most surprising aspects of our lives. Today's episode
(01:28):
is about how we are built of complex circuitry. Each
of us is not like a simple computer program, but
instead a machine built on conflict. This is a topic
I have loved and written about for many years, and
in today's podcast, I talk with a colleague who equally
loves this topic from the point of view of clinical psychology.
(01:51):
Today we talk with Jordan Peterson. He's one of our
most well known psychologists. He was formerly at Harvard University
and the University of Toronto and has now started his
own educational platform called the Peterson Academy. You likely know
Jordan from his books which have found wide audiences, like
Twelve Rules for Life and his newest book, We Who
(02:13):
Wrestle with God. Jordan and I are going to visit
some key points in our conversation. The first is that
as we age, we find ways to make these networks
in our brain work together better, and this is in
a sense, the definition of maturation. We'll also talk about
the spectrum from a basic drive like reproduction to something
(02:37):
richer that we might call a personality.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Will come to the.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Role of setting contracts with yourself to wrangle the behavior
of the networks. And finally, we're going to discuss the
role of literature and religion in setting up a way
to direct the conflicting networks by giving them an external
exemplar to look to with no out further ado. Here
is my conversation with Jordan Peterson. So, Jordan, I'm very
(03:09):
interested in how we are a collection of different things
going on on the inside.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
We use the term individual when we talk about.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Ourselves, but in fact we're made up of many different
drives or personalities or neural networks.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
This is what we'll get into. So in my.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Book in Cognito, I talked about as a team of rivals.
I know you think about things as a collection of personalities.
I'd like us to get into that. So how do
you think about what we're made of?
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Who we are? I like the metaphor of personality might
be deeper than a metaphor. It might just be a
description because it works on a variety of different levels.
It adds sophistication to the idea of drive because a
drive has an algorithmic and mechanical connotation to it. But
(03:58):
a personality has perceptions, emotions, and it has ideas, and
it has opinions, and our internal motivational states are like that. So,
like sexual the desire for sexual gratification brings with it
a perceptual framework. Obviously, the same with anger, the same
(04:18):
with hunger.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
And perceptual framework means what we notice exactly, how we
prioritize our attention, and how we sequence our actions.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Yeah, yeah, But then there's a there's a deeper level too,
which which I think you'll you'll find interesting. So I
stimpend a lot of time studying the work of a
historian of religions named Merche Eliada, and Eliada described a
pattern he saw across cultures which was probably the psychological
(04:48):
record of integration of tribes across time. So imagine every
tribe has a value structure. It's usually represented by a
superordinate deity or a set of deities. Okay, now, and
one tribe meets another and they start to interact. Well,
(05:09):
that often involves war and certainly involves discussion. It involves
cooperation and competition. But there's a cognitive element to that too.
So as the cultures integrate, the ideas integrate. Well, that's
represented in the mythological literature as a battle between gods
in heaven, right, And one of Aliata's points was that
(05:33):
the battle between these gods, so these are personalities, tends
towards a monotheism. Across time, as multiple cultures integrate, they
integrate towards a monotheism. You might say, well, what's the
evidence for that. It's like, well, mono implies unity, integration,
applies unity. If culture is into penetrate and there's no unity,
(05:53):
they're not integrated. They might be occupied the same territory,
but they're not integrated. Interesting, and I think there's a
parallel between that war of personalities that's represented, let's say,
in the mythological literature, and the integration of fundamental motivational
states in the process of maturation within a culture. I
think those are the same thing. And if that's the case,
(06:14):
then while you see a unification of phenomena across a
very wide range of inquiries.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Let's talk about what we mean by integration, because in fact,
what we have is a battling of these networks all
the time. Is certainly when you're a child, but even
as you grow older and you set the path for
your life and so on, you're always battling with yourself,
as in, oh, I should need the case, I should
need the cake, I should go do this thing.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
I shouldn't do the thing.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
And so you can cuss it yourself, you can conjole yourself,
you can contract with yourself. You can get angry at yourself.
And the question is who is getting angry at whom?
That's for sure, right, So in a sense, we're still
like the polytheism on the infinite.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
We never quite made it to a monotheism. Okay, okay,
So I'd like to address that well simultaneously addressing something
that you said at the beginning of this discussion. So
you talked about us as individuals who are at war
with our internal states. Let's say, or we're a battleground
of warring internal states, and so we're made out of
parts and we coalesce at the individual level. But I
(07:16):
would say that's not exactly, that's not sufficient. That's a
necessary description, but it's not sufficient because the idea of
integration levels doesn't stop at the level of the individual.
Because I could say, for example, well you're married, so
now you're a part of that. That's another superordinate structure.
(07:40):
It's a real structure. It's not a structure that's embodied
in a single body, but it's a structure that's embodied
in two very closely interacting bodies. So that makes another
it's a metabody. But then that's integrated in a family,
and that's integrated in a community, and then a town,
and then a state, and then a nation, and that
and even the level of the nation isn't necessarily the
(08:02):
highest level of integration. And to identify the individual as
arbitrarily as the pinnacle of the integration process is an error,
I think. And this actually that addresses the problem of
self regulation. So you're not integrated properly when your wife
hates you, right, So a huge, a huge source of
(08:25):
information that we use to determine whether we've integrated our
internal states properly isn't whether they're functioning for us as individuals.
It's whether they allow us to integrate ourselves harmoniously into
a marriage, into a family, into a community, into a town.
And then the measure of integration becomes not the existence
of the individual, but the existence of harmony across every
(08:47):
single one of those levels simultaneously. And so that harmony
is what we're striving for. I think that harmony is
exemplified by music, by the way, I think so well.
Music does the same thing. It takes diverse elements and
it organizes them into hire and higher order integrated hierarchies.
And you can see people acting this out when they dance,
(09:09):
like to an orchestra, of all the diverse players who
are doing the same thing, they're integrated. And then you
see people moving themselves in couples and then in a
community in relationship to the music. It's a it's a
model for this, it's a heavenly hierarchy. That that's the
way you express it in terms of ideas that are derived,
let's say, from the history of religion. And so I
(09:30):
think we've made a big mistake as psychologists. Assuming it's
because we're basically liberal Protestants in our orientation. We assume
that the individual is the pinnacle of the integration process.
But that's not it's not accurate.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
I would say, there's there's other reasons why we why
concert on the individual there, because that that's you know,
bound off, it's got borders around it.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
It lives and dies. So this three pound.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Brain will at some point go away, but the other
brains in the community will stick around.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
That sort of so it's a natural place. But of course,
every reason to assume that it exists, right, whether it
exists as the pinnacle, that's the other question.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Okay, fair enough, But what it's trying to do within
its three pound universe is figure out all these tasks. Okay,
how do I work within a community? How do I
work within my larger nation state.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
And so on.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
But I think we can corner it to that three
pound organ and then talk about what are the neural
networks in here?
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Okay, but what Okay, that's possible, but I'm not thoroughly
convinced of it, because I think it's reasonable, Like, why
not assume that the neural network that's made out of
a communication a communicating group is like it's it is
part of the work, and it's certainly moving information back
and forth, and it like it has an existence, like
(10:49):
it's not as obvious to our perceptions as the embodied
form of an individual, right, and so it's more abstracted
in that sense. But I don't see that it's of
a lower order of reality.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
I totally agree. Okay, it is a network inside large network.
That's absolutely right. But as a neuroscientist, that's the that's
the level that I choose.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
As a fair sociologist, yeah, fair enough.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
So within that you've got these different networks. One of
the things that you and I have talked about this previously,
but this question about Okay, So, as Frederick Nictzschi said,
each drive philosophizes in its own spirit, meaning when I'm hungry,
when I'm angry, when I'm happy, when I'm addicted, when
(11:32):
I'm addicted, these things don't just drive me, but they
actually have their whole story.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
They tell me, oh, this is true, this is the right.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
And Nietzsche had a what do you call this perspectivism,
I think, which is this idea that this is why
it's hard to say what a single truth is because
you've got all these different drives, which we might call
personalities and whatever, but you've got these different things that
tell you different.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Truths also have different criteria for truth exactly right. And
this is something that pragmatists under William James were wrestling
with at the end of the eighteen hundreds. So the pragmatists,
who saw analogies very directly between their philosophical work and
Darwinian theories, really derived a new theory of truth. And
(12:20):
the new theory of truth was something like truth good enough,
like something is truth, it's good enough as a tool
to obtain a certain end right. And it's an interesting
definition because it takes into account the fact that none
of our truths are ultimate right, all our truths are proximate.
And then you might say, because we're ignorant. We're bounded
(12:41):
by our ignorance. Nothing we know is absolute. So then
you say, well, how do you know that something's true?
And the answer is something like it functions in relationship
to its intended purpose, in relationship to a goal. Now
that lays open to the question of what our true goals.
But that's okay for now. And when a drive philosophizes,
(13:02):
it's looking for the truth that enable it to obtain
its end. Yes, right, right, that's its criteria for truth. Yes, right,
this is a good enough argument to win the battle
with my wife. Right, it's true enough for what so
I can dominate her? Let's say, right, right, right, yes, exactly.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
And so the thing that you and I have discussed
before is the possibility that instead of each of these
drives actually owning its own personality, it might be sort
of reaching out to other places and saying, you know,
when I think about what I want to get out
of the pre filled cortex, or you know, what I
want to get in terms of words to use in
this argument or something, it's drawing on these other mechanisms,
(13:41):
these subsystems that are there.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
But here's the thing. The question is.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
About the conflict in these things and the way that
these things battle with each other. So how do you
think about the way these battle and the way as
we mature we are working these battles out, We're working
out how to get these things.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Well, I think that is the job of the cortex.
But the cortex is highly socialized, right, so you can
think about it neurologically, it's the job of the cortex.
But then the cortex is programmed by these larger networks, right, definitely. Okay,
So what happens to you if you're well socialized is
that these underlying motivational systems arrange themselves in the game
(14:28):
so that each of them gets what they want at
often enough, in a manner that doesn't interfere with the
future or makes the future better even and in a
manner that allows for the benefits of social community. Right.
So there's a very tight set of constraints, and I
think that I think the developmental psychologist PHA probably modeled
(14:49):
this better than anyone else I know of, and he
put it in terms of it's not game theory exactly,
because game theory is a technical endeavor of its own.
But PSA spent an awful lot of time analyzing the
structure of games as the prototype of both maturity and
of socialization. And a game for PSA, a game is
(15:13):
a voluntarily shared aime with agreed upon procedures, the voluntary
part being very very important. And I would say, you know,
if you're trying to integrate rage and lust, let's say
you can use pain as a suppressive or fear as
a suppressive mechanism, even neurologically, like as a parent, you
(15:33):
could punish your child viciously every time they were aggressive,
and that aggression would come under the inhibitory control of fear,
and you could call that socialization. But a much more
effective way to do that is to entice and invite
the child to integrate. That integration into something like higher
(15:54):
order competition towards a distal goal. And that's what you do.
For example, if you trained a competitive child, sot aggressive
child to be an athletic victor, so the aggression is
now directed towards a social aim, right, because that would
be the game, and the aggression actually becomes something that's
good rather than bad. Because if you have a sports team,
(16:15):
you want your players to want to win, you want
them to be competitive. But then if they're well socialized.
It's like aggression within rules towards an aim name would
be the victory of the game, but not just that,
the well being of the team, the growth of the
team across time, the ability of the team to get
along with other teams, and the generalization of that to
(16:36):
a broader range of games. That's what it would be
to be a good sport, for example. So's that's a
game like model of motivational integration towards a higher order ethos, right,
future oriented, community oriented, right exactly.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
So we're putting we learn as we grow from a
child who has these different drives, we're learning how to
make these cooperate for communal reasons.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Yeah, yeah, and for the future, yeah exactly.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
The thing that's interesting the most is how these things
stay rivaling our whole lives and how we work.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Out strategies for this.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
So one thing you and I've talked about before is
the Ulysses contract, where you say, you know, I know
I want to do this kind of thing in the future,
and so I'm gonna contract.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
I'm going to make some.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Unbreakable pact where I can't break it, and I have
to do this thing in the future.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
But I'm Also, I want to.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Talk to you about story and religion and how those
can be ways that steer us when we are thinking
about these internal conflicts.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
Well, I was interested in your Eleas's contract model, but
the model that sprung to mind for me when you
walk through that was the Old Testament model of covenant,
because covenant is actually contract. So unpack that. Well, the
relationship with the divine in the Old Testament is characterized
as a covenant. That's a contract. Okay, it's a sacrificial contract,
(18:17):
which is very specific kind of contract. And I think
the sacrificial contract is the basis of maturity and community.
I think it is by definition. Well, and what does
that official mean? Like means I'll give up something now
to get something later, got it? Oh? Okay, that's the sacrifice.
There's no difference between that and work, right, because when
(18:38):
I work, I sacrifice the present to the future. Yeah, right,
that work is sacrificial. Okay. Now, once this is a
matter of definition. Once you know that, a very interesting
question enters the stage. You might say, which is what's
the most effective form of sacrifice? Right? And the biblical
(18:58):
stories examine that from every conceivable angle. So, for example,
one of the very early stories in the biblical Corpus
is the story of canaan Abel, and it's the story
of two patterns of sacrifice, one of which succeeds at
least in the divine sense, and the other which fails cataclysmically.
And that's the sacrifice, the false sacrifice of kan. It
(19:20):
sets up a pattern of sacrifice. One is immature, prideful, usurping,
and self serving, and it degenerates into murder and genocide, right,
and then the flood comes. That's how those stories are arranged.
The other is the sacrifice of able and able sacrifices
of the are those that are pleasing to God. Well,
(19:42):
that opens the next question, which is well, exactly as
we pointed out earlier. Once you know that the foundation
of community and the future is sacrifice, the only question
that remains is what's the appropriate sacrifice? And that as
a very complex question. There's other ordering possibilities, like the
(20:03):
postmodernist notion essentially is that power is the uniting meta narrative.
What's an example of that. Well, the Marxist presupposition that
society is as a zero sum competition between the oppressor
and the oppressed. On the economic plan, that's been generalized
by the neo Marxist let's say to be what a
(20:27):
multi dimensional battle of power? And you know, you can
see some truth in that when you think about, for example,
if you're thinking about the solution to the problem of
rivalry only as competition, as unbridled competition, but as soon
as you understand that there's bridled forms of competition, maybe
that's why you're interested in the Ulysses contract because that
(20:50):
puts structure around rivalry. Right, how do you structure rivalry?
So maybe that's why it captured your attention so intensely,
because that's a crucial question, right, how do you delimit
the demands of power? M'd say, that's another way of
looking at it. Yeah, that's right, And I'm interested. I mean,
what's your take on the role of story in sayings?
Speaker 1 (21:13):
So I've always got all these possible paths that i
could take, and I'm always facing temptation.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Everyone is.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
And the question is, you know, do story in general,
biblical stories or otherwise give us a sense of Oh,
here's a model that I hadn't thought of before, and
I can look up to this character and I can
or that's right, and navigate myself accordingly.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Well, okay, so a story is a description of a
hierarchy of value. That's an embodied hierarchy of value. Okay.
So when God assigns a role to add him, he says,
your role is to name, identify, and subdu, and subdu
means to put everything in its proper place. Okay. So
(21:59):
someone's character is the manner in which they put things
into place, right, their priority. When you go watch a movie,
what you see is the embodiment of a structure of prioritization.
This person has an aim, they have a strategy, They
have some things for them come first. That's the things
they attend to. That's what you're watching. When you watch
the character, you reflect the perceptions and the emotions, and
(22:24):
you observe the success of the strategy. Right. So what
a story presents to you is a hierarchy of intentional
and action priority, and it's extremely valuable. And then you
can test them out. And I say, that's the technical
definition of a story. And so we're always looking for
a better story, and the story would be the structure
that integrates the conflicts. That's another way to say that.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
That's really lovely, right, because I always think about the
story as what always has grabbed me is the way
that we slip so easily into characters, into.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Story in other ways. Yeah, right.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Neuroscientists we study the brain. We say, look, here's how
the visual system works. You have photons that the retina.
You know, you figure out what you're looking at, what
you're hearing from. But in fact, what brains do most
of the time is they don't care at all about
what's in front of them.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
They're thinking about other things. They're simulating possible future.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Is that reminiscing about the past, or they're slipping into
literature and absolutely the character. So I love what you
said about the reason you become the characters. You get
to experience the world from a.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Different attentional exactly exactly, it's a different structure. Well look, look,
so a typical story element, let's say, in an action
romantic action adventure movie, is do you save the woman
you love or do you serve your country? Right, that's
very so you can see there's both of those are
very well developed hierarchies of value. There's real reasons to
(23:45):
prioritize the person you love, and there's real reasons to
prioritize your nation. Okay, so now what do you do
when those are head to hit? Well, the character of
the protagonist determines the answer to that question, right right, right, right.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
So see gets to live in those shoes and see
what he does, and see what that resonates with you.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Yeah, and you can see whether that's an uphill that's
an uphill journey or a downhill journey, yes, right, and
so or or a variant of that. And this is
the most standard variant is the comedic variant, which is
obstacle crisis resolution, but resolution at a higher order, right, right,
that's the divine comedy. Tragedy is just the dissent, right,
(24:27):
that's the emergence of entropy. That's a way of thinking
about it. Give entropy would be while your your belief
system collapses because it encounters an obstacle that's insurmountable. Now
you're bereft, and that's the end of you. Right, that's
tragic dissolution of the would be hero, that's right.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
And just symone's following the entropy is this idea of
you know, instead of having a clear path, you've got
multiple possibilities. That's this idea of an increase of entropy.
Your brain is anxious and it has does things.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Fall apart, or which you don't know which way is up,
or when you don't know where you're going, or when
you're lost in the desert right right, or you're just
in despair. Right. All of those those are high entropy.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
States exactly, And what the brain is always trying to
do is save energy. That's essentially its mainful life. Yeah,
that's right, right, Oh, that's.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Yeah, yeah, that was Schrodinger's definition of life. Essentially, it's
an anti entropic function, right, So the association of anxiety
with entropies is very, very fundamental, very fund Stories are
ways of constraining entropy. That that isn't all they do,
because they provide an aim and they provide hope. But
even that's an entropy constraining function to some degree.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
Oh, fascinating, Yeah, it's it's it's it's really a key realization.
As soon as you understand that a story describes a
hierarchy of attentional prioritization, you think, oh, well, of course,
because that means that the story, the story is literally
how we make sense of the world. It's a description
of a structure of making sense in the world.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
Navigation. It's a navigational.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Structure, right, And all these lessons are as we plow
through novels with these lessons give us is ways to
manage the own conflict within our heads with all these
different drives going on.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
And to do that in relationship to other people in.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
The future that's exactly right, and ourselves in the future, right, and.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Ourselves of course, of course, of course, because we're actually
a community across time, right. So that's partly why there's
an analogy between the self and the community. It's like, well,
why should you take care of the old, Well, you're
going to be old. So if your society doesn't take
care of the old, that's you, buddy. Why should you
take care of the sick? Well, you may be naive
(26:37):
and think you're going to be healthy your whole life,
but you're not, you know, so over the course of
your life you're going to it. While you could say
you're going to inhabit the entire sociological cosmos. So you
see reflections of this. For example, this is a very
canonical example of this in the insistence that the savior
is born in the lowly place. You see that with Moses,
(26:58):
and you see it with Christ is born with the animals,
among the animals in a stable. Why well, because at
some point, at some point in his life, even the
greatest hero occupies the lowest position. And so then if
that's the case, then you want to set things up
psychologically and socially so even those who occupy the most
(27:18):
lowly of positions are protected as if they're of infinite value.
Speaker 4 (27:22):
That's the ethos, oh I see, that makes them very
appealing to the whole demographic to watch the story, because
if the hero is someone who already is born in
privilege and rich and so on, maybe you lose a
lot of the audience that way.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
As this course, the audience doesn't have the opportunity to move.
It means that it also means that the story that's
being told doesn't span the entire range of possibilities. It's like, well,
here's a hero story if you're rich, well fair enough,
and it's not like that isn't the guide, But a
better guide is here's the story that guides you when
(27:54):
you're coming up from the abyss, or from the depths,
or from the lowest possible place. Because the the total
story would take you from the lowest possible place to
the highest possible place.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
Right, I've always thought about that just as the size
of the delta.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
Being the important thing.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
But your point is that opens it up to you know,
everybody getting to see that where that spans.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
It's univers so well, and you can imagine that as
a solution increases in quality, it becomes more generalizable. Right
it is that's almost by definition. That's that's that's that's
a good indication of its utility. This applies to everyone.
So then the question is partly of course this is
the case. If you think it through, it's like, what
(28:38):
story are human beings attempting to work out across the generations? Well,
the story that applies to everyone, well obviously, while like
what else, what other story could they possibly be trying
to work out? Right, the story that applies to the
privileged few, well, that would work if the privileged few
were stable, But they're not, right. I mean, look, one
(28:59):
percent of the population almost always controls fifty percent of
the wealth. But the people who occupy that one percent
aren't the same people even within the span of their life.
So like the water that's running from a faucet makes
a stable column, but the molecules are different from second
to second. Well, it's the same with these distributions in
(29:19):
social status. And so you know, a rich person who
goes to school is still the youngest kid in the school,
is still going to be subject to bullying, is still
going to be low on the social totem pole. And
so you need an ethos that applies to everyone across
all possible social positions, right, and a universal That's why
Harry Potter's an orphan, right, because he's lost, he's parentless,
(29:43):
he occupies a low he lives under the stairs with
like tyrannical parents, right, But it doesn't matter because he's
the hero that redeems everything right. Right, So that's a
universalizing story, and that's why it's sold, like, you know,
hundreds of millions of copies.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Okay, So coming back to the issue of rivalry between
I think about them and networks.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
You think about them as personalities. Other people think about
them as drives. It'sarily some of the things are drives.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
Some of the hypothalamic issues are you know, thirst, fear, hunger.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
The more the more automated they are, the more they're
drive Like yeah, that's because right, So, and the more
the more phylogenetically asient they are because they can just
run as programs. That's a really good point.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
Actually, so we should we shouldn't call them all drives
or all personalities. I totally agree with what you're saying.
These really automated hypothalamic things. Those are really like I
think about the most personalities with.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Very few degrees of freedom. Yeah that's right. Right, So
like sexual behavior, once it's instigated, collapses into a relatively
there's a few degrees of freedom, that's right, but it's
a more dry but it.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Still has a personality in terms of the things that notices,
the things it says to try to seduce and so on.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Yeah that's right. Okay, Then we can think the more
phylogenetically ancient the motivational state, the more drive like it becomes.
Yeah that's right. Okay, it's mostly automated. Good personality is
on a spectrum. Okay, so complexity of personality at least, right.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
So how do you think about maturation and all these
personalities that you have.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
What's your take on what it means? Okay, Okay, here's
a way of thinking. I think this is very cool.
So imagine that you have a drive to admire, Okay,
because you do. Okay, okay, what other people sure? Just
the fact that that exists, it's like you'll admire someone,
It's like, okay, I would say, the drive to admire
is the manifestation of the instinct to mature. Okay, let
(31:50):
me understand that the impact. Yeah, okay, Well, so look,
a four year old is going to admire a six
year old, all things considered, they'll usually pick someone that's
in their zone of proximal development, so someone they could be. Right,
And so now this instinct that compels them to admire, right,
to copy and to attend to picks a potential future
(32:12):
self that's obtainable and then grips them. Okay, that's the
instinct to mature. Right. So then you could say we've
got all these hypothalamic functions. There are sub personalities, but
there's a metafunction as well that's also biologically instantiated, that
drives us towards maturation and integration and integrates all those
(32:33):
sub personalities, and that manifests itself in the experience of admiration.
And then we admire heroes in books, and we admire
religious figures, and those are all here's how you make
a religious figure. It's simple. You take ten admirable people
and they're the same because they're admirable, so they exist
(32:53):
in a category. You extract out everything that's admirable, you
sink it into a single personality and posit that as
an ideal. And you do that a thousand times, you
have a savior. A savior will emerge out of that.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Oh terrific, right, okay, and then we okay, And so
the to summarize this, what we then do is we
use that savior as a way when we.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Have an internal battle.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
We say, it gives us some you know, I don't
know what would Jesus do exactly?
Speaker 2 (33:21):
What would what would dny X do?
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Yeah, that's right, because right, so, both literature and let's
say religion, even at a higher level of this gives
us a way to deal with this conflict because, as
you what I've talked about before. You know, what we're
always trying to do is reduce entropy and not have
every possibility open.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
And often we know.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
That there's a conflict between instant gratification and long term
thinking who we want to be, and so that gives
us a way to grip onto it, to say what
would this deity do well?
Speaker 2 (33:51):
And the fact that that, the fact that that example
is exemplified in the story also makes it generalizable. And
here here's why. So think if you watch children play house,
Let's say a little boy is playing the father. You
might say, well, he's imitating his father, but that's not right.
What he does is he watches his father, and then
he watches instantiations of the father in say movies, Disney movies,
(34:15):
and the books he's reading, and he abstracts out the
character of the father. Now, the character of the father
is a far more generalizable understanding than pure imitation. It's
less drive like, it's more personality like. So, if you
have a savior instantiated in a story, you can generalize
from the story to the novel situation, which you couldn't
(34:36):
do if you were just imitating. Yes, right, so that's
how you encapsulate the spirit of the story. The spirit's
the pattern that can be generalized.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
What's interesting is this is not to my knowledge, it's
not really studied in neuroscience, so we don't know where
do you store the savior? I mean presuming this all prefrontal,
long term thinking stuff, some of that shapes your circuits,
the fact that I know of a savior, or we
study it in some ways, but we don't know we're
studying it.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
Okay, if you study vervet monkeys, for example, vervet monkeys
will look longer at photographs of high status vervet monkeys
that have low status in their tribe, right in their group. Right,
So there's an association between social status and movement towards
that admirable figure. And the alpha chimp is the highest
status chip. Okay, so you might say, well, he's the
(35:26):
most powerful chimp, he's the most brutal chip. It's like
friends to all blue that theory to bits, that isn't
the case. Stable alphas are reciprocal and they have very
dense friendship networks. Right. So now you could say you
take alpha you're a chimp. You take Alpha one in
one generation and Alpha two in the second generation in
three and four and five, and then you amalgamate them. Well,
(35:50):
that's eliot a tract that development in religious stories. That's
exactly what happens, is that that's how memory actually works.
Is imagine there's a historical figure who's memorable and stories
are told about them, but then it's three generations later
and everyone who knew him died. Well, all the stories
get amalgamated into a central hero figure, and that's what's remembered, right,
that's what's remembered, right, Yeah, And that's what stories are
(36:13):
told about. That's what's remembered, and that is what is taught.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
And when it's taught to somebody, then they can use
that hero figure as a way to navigate or they.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
Even acted out, they dramatize its. Right, Yeah, yeah, that's
that's right, that's exactly right. So the the historical memory
aggregates into singular figures and then those are elevated, exactly right.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
And my point is, I think this we don't understand
entirely how that we know about mirror neurons and the
fact that we in person and others. But but this
is a big part of why we have hero stories
in religion and so on, is so that we can say, oh,
that's somebody worth mirroring, that's definitely.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
Definitely and admiration is the key to that. And that's
so that's where you can say the instinctual basis of it,
and you know that admiration is probably the drive as
well that compels a child to listen to his father
if he admires it, right, because and you need that
because otherwise, why would the child make the father a
figure of intentional prioritization. There has to be an instinct
(37:08):
there which is an instinct to respond, let's say, to
the paternal and then if the father matches the paternal
template genetically, then he's going to catalyze that instinct for
admiration and learning is going to take place. Excellence, Yeah, excellent,
Thank you so much. Hey, my pleasure. I loved this conversation.
There were so many things that came out. Yeah, yeah, correct,
it was my pleasure.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
That was my conversation with Jordan Peterson, and I just
want to summarize a few of the parts that I
found particularly important. First, nobody, you know, is one thing
like a computer system with a single operating system. But
instead each person you look at can be somewhat different
under different circumstances. And the part that sometimes it's harder
(37:55):
to see is that this applies equally to ourselves. We
are each build of different networks with different goals, and
your behavior falls under the grip of different drives, like
when you're trying to obtain something or you're hungry, or
you're sexually driven, or you're angry, or you're calm and
thinking about your long term goals. Whatever state you're in
(38:18):
modifies not just how you act and what you decide,
but what you even notice and how you perceive it.
I'll give you an example. One study showed that when
people are thirsty, they're more likely to perceive an ambiguous
surface as transparent, like water. This is like a parts
traveler seeing mirages of water in a desert. Versions of
(38:41):
this sort of thing happen all the time. What we
see and what we notice depends on our drives. A
person with an addiction to drugs, sex, food, anything else
will notice threats and opportunities differently than someone else. They
know notice what they need to notice to obtain what
(39:03):
they seek. But because we're always trapped inside ourselves, it
can be difficult to see that we're different people at
different times. This only becomes clear in those moments when
we look back and we think, wow, I really can't
believe I did that, or said that, or thought that
was a good idea. A century ago, Albert Einstein commented
(39:25):
on how when a scientist looks at raw data, they
can only see what their frameworks allow them to see
he said quote. It is the theory which decides what
can be observed. In other words, there's raw data out there,
but if you don't have a framework for something, you
(39:46):
won't even see it. And the heart of today's episode
is the same sort of idea, not about a theory,
but a personality. The personality, the drive that grips you
at the moment, the neural network that is winning for
the moment, that decides what can be observed. If you're
a regular listener to this podcast, you know that I'm
(40:08):
obsessed with the differences between people in terms of what
they perceive from the world. But today's episode is fundamentally
about the differences between you and you and you at
different moments in time. Sometimes the role of religion or
literature is to set up ideals that we admire, and
(40:29):
that way, instead of just looking to other people, we
can look to an envisioned future self. We can say, Okay,
I have a vision that I kind of like for
the sort of person that I want to be, even
if you don't feel like that person. Now you can
build a model of that future you and ideal self
(40:50):
that satisfies the greatest number of constraints, both individual and communal,
and then you can navigate your decisions in deference to that. So,
as we wrap up, here's the takeaway. You are not
one singular, unchanging entity, but instead a shifting constellation of drives, states,
(41:12):
neural networks, each vying for control in different moments, and
recognizing this fluidity can be a powerful tool not only
for understanding your past actions and moments of regret.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
But also for shaping your future.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Self By consciously constructing ideal versions of yourself, whether through
thinking about it or writing on religious or literary exemplars,
we can use these to help guide our choices because if.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
We are in our core a team of rivals.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
Then the challenge and the opportunity is learning how to
captain that argumentative team towards the optimal outcome. Go to
Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to
find further reading. Send me an email at podcast at
(42:11):
eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and check out
and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of
each episode and to leave comments Until next time.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.
You consider yourself an individual, but are you in fact
built of rivaling neural networks? Can we see ourselves as
a collection of personalities? How do we manage the conflict
between different drives in our brains? And what does this
have to do with deities or literature or maturation? And
(00:27):
what did Friedrich Nietzsche mean when he said that every
drive we have wants to quote represent just itself as
the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of
all the other drives, Or as he also put it,
quote every drive wants to be master and it attempts
(00:50):
to philosophize in that spirit. What exactly does that mean?
Welcome to inner Cosmos with me David Eagle. I'm a
neuroscientist and author at Stanford and in these episodes we
sail deeply into our three pound universe to uncover some
of the most surprising aspects of our lives. Today's episode
(01:28):
is about how we are built of complex circuitry. Each
of us is not like a simple computer program, but
instead a machine built on conflict. This is a topic
I have loved and written about for many years, and
in today's podcast, I talk with a colleague who equally
loves this topic from the point of view of clinical psychology.
(01:51):
Today we talk with Jordan Peterson. He's one of our
most well known psychologists. He was formerly at Harvard University
and the University of Toronto and has now started his
own educational platform called the Peterson Academy. You likely know
Jordan from his books which have found wide audiences, like
Twelve Rules for Life and his newest book, We Who
(02:13):
Wrestle with God. Jordan and I are going to visit
some key points in our conversation. The first is that
as we age, we find ways to make these networks
in our brain work together better, and this is in
a sense, the definition of maturation. We'll also talk about
the spectrum from a basic drive like reproduction to something
(02:37):
richer that we might call a personality.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Will come to the.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Role of setting contracts with yourself to wrangle the behavior
of the networks. And finally, we're going to discuss the
role of literature and religion in setting up a way
to direct the conflicting networks by giving them an external
exemplar to look to with no out further ado. Here
is my conversation with Jordan Peterson. So, Jordan, I'm very
(03:09):
interested in how we are a collection of different things
going on on the inside.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
We use the term individual when we talk about.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Ourselves, but in fact we're made up of many different
drives or personalities or neural networks.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
This is what we'll get into. So in my.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Book in Cognito, I talked about as a team of rivals.
I know you think about things as a collection of personalities.
I'd like us to get into that. So how do
you think about what we're made of?
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Who we are? I like the metaphor of personality might
be deeper than a metaphor. It might just be a
description because it works on a variety of different levels.
It adds sophistication to the idea of drive because a
drive has an algorithmic and mechanical connotation to it. But
(03:58):
a personality has perceptions, emotions, and it has ideas, and
it has opinions, and our internal motivational states are like that. So,
like sexual the desire for sexual gratification brings with it
a perceptual framework. Obviously, the same with anger, the same
(04:18):
with hunger.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
And perceptual framework means what we notice exactly, how we
prioritize our attention, and how we sequence our actions.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Yeah, yeah, But then there's a there's a deeper level too,
which which I think you'll you'll find interesting. So I
stimpend a lot of time studying the work of a
historian of religions named Merche Eliada, and Eliada described a
pattern he saw across cultures which was probably the psychological
(04:48):
record of integration of tribes across time. So imagine every
tribe has a value structure. It's usually represented by a
superordinate deity or a set of deities. Okay, now, and
one tribe meets another and they start to interact. Well,
(05:09):
that often involves war and certainly involves discussion. It involves
cooperation and competition. But there's a cognitive element to that too.
So as the cultures integrate, the ideas integrate. Well, that's
represented in the mythological literature as a battle between gods
in heaven, right, And one of Aliata's points was that
(05:33):
the battle between these gods, so these are personalities, tends
towards a monotheism. Across time, as multiple cultures integrate, they
integrate towards a monotheism. You might say, well, what's the
evidence for that. It's like, well, mono implies unity, integration,
applies unity. If culture is into penetrate and there's no unity,
(05:53):
they're not integrated. They might be occupied the same territory,
but they're not integrated. Interesting, and I think there's a
parallel between that war of personalities that's represented, let's say,
in the mythological literature, and the integration of fundamental motivational
states in the process of maturation within a culture. I
think those are the same thing. And if that's the case,
(06:14):
then while you see a unification of phenomena across a
very wide range of inquiries.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Let's talk about what we mean by integration, because in fact,
what we have is a battling of these networks all
the time. Is certainly when you're a child, but even
as you grow older and you set the path for
your life and so on, you're always battling with yourself,
as in, oh, I should need the case, I should
need the cake, I should go do this thing.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
I shouldn't do the thing.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
And so you can cuss it yourself, you can conjole yourself,
you can contract with yourself. You can get angry at yourself.
And the question is who is getting angry at whom?
That's for sure, right, So in a sense, we're still
like the polytheism on the infinite.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
We never quite made it to a monotheism. Okay, okay,
So I'd like to address that well simultaneously addressing something
that you said at the beginning of this discussion. So
you talked about us as individuals who are at war
with our internal states. Let's say, or we're a battleground
of warring internal states, and so we're made out of
parts and we coalesce at the individual level. But I
(07:16):
would say that's not exactly, that's not sufficient. That's a
necessary description, but it's not sufficient because the idea of
integration levels doesn't stop at the level of the individual.
Because I could say, for example, well you're married, so
now you're a part of that. That's another superordinate structure.
(07:40):
It's a real structure. It's not a structure that's embodied
in a single body, but it's a structure that's embodied
in two very closely interacting bodies. So that makes another
it's a metabody. But then that's integrated in a family,
and that's integrated in a community, and then a town,
and then a state, and then a nation, and that
and even the level of the nation isn't necessarily the
(08:02):
highest level of integration. And to identify the individual as
arbitrarily as the pinnacle of the integration process is an error,
I think. And this actually that addresses the problem of
self regulation. So you're not integrated properly when your wife
hates you, right, So a huge, a huge source of
(08:25):
information that we use to determine whether we've integrated our
internal states properly isn't whether they're functioning for us as individuals.
It's whether they allow us to integrate ourselves harmoniously into
a marriage, into a family, into a community, into a town.
And then the measure of integration becomes not the existence
of the individual, but the existence of harmony across every
(08:47):
single one of those levels simultaneously. And so that harmony
is what we're striving for. I think that harmony is
exemplified by music, by the way, I think so well.
Music does the same thing. It takes diverse elements and
it organizes them into hire and higher order integrated hierarchies.
And you can see people acting this out when they dance,
(09:09):
like to an orchestra, of all the diverse players who
are doing the same thing, they're integrated. And then you
see people moving themselves in couples and then in a
community in relationship to the music. It's a it's a
model for this, it's a heavenly hierarchy. That that's the
way you express it in terms of ideas that are derived,
let's say, from the history of religion. And so I
(09:30):
think we've made a big mistake as psychologists. Assuming it's
because we're basically liberal Protestants in our orientation. We assume
that the individual is the pinnacle of the integration process.
But that's not it's not accurate.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
I would say, there's there's other reasons why we why
concert on the individual there, because that that's you know,
bound off, it's got borders around it.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
It lives and dies. So this three pound.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Brain will at some point go away, but the other
brains in the community will stick around.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
That sort of so it's a natural place. But of course,
every reason to assume that it exists, right, whether it
exists as the pinnacle, that's the other question.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Okay, fair enough, But what it's trying to do within
its three pound universe is figure out all these tasks. Okay,
how do I work within a community? How do I
work within my larger nation state.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
And so on.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
But I think we can corner it to that three
pound organ and then talk about what are the neural
networks in here?
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Okay, but what Okay, that's possible, but I'm not thoroughly
convinced of it, because I think it's reasonable, Like, why
not assume that the neural network that's made out of
a communication a communicating group is like it's it is
part of the work, and it's certainly moving information back
and forth, and it like it has an existence, like
(10:49):
it's not as obvious to our perceptions as the embodied
form of an individual, right, and so it's more abstracted
in that sense. But I don't see that it's of
a lower order of reality.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
I totally agree. Okay, it is a network inside large network.
That's absolutely right. But as a neuroscientist, that's the that's
the level that I choose.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
As a fair sociologist, yeah, fair enough.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
So within that you've got these different networks. One of
the things that you and I have talked about this previously,
but this question about Okay, So, as Frederick Nictzschi said,
each drive philosophizes in its own spirit, meaning when I'm hungry,
when I'm angry, when I'm happy, when I'm addicted, when
(11:32):
I'm addicted, these things don't just drive me, but they
actually have their whole story.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
They tell me, oh, this is true, this is the right.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
And Nietzsche had a what do you call this perspectivism,
I think, which is this idea that this is why
it's hard to say what a single truth is because
you've got all these different drives, which we might call
personalities and whatever, but you've got these different things that
tell you different.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Truths also have different criteria for truth exactly right. And
this is something that pragmatists under William James were wrestling
with at the end of the eighteen hundreds. So the pragmatists,
who saw analogies very directly between their philosophical work and
Darwinian theories, really derived a new theory of truth. And
(12:20):
the new theory of truth was something like truth good enough,
like something is truth, it's good enough as a tool
to obtain a certain end right. And it's an interesting
definition because it takes into account the fact that none
of our truths are ultimate right, all our truths are proximate.
And then you might say, because we're ignorant. We're bounded
(12:41):
by our ignorance. Nothing we know is absolute. So then
you say, well, how do you know that something's true?
And the answer is something like it functions in relationship
to its intended purpose, in relationship to a goal. Now
that lays open to the question of what our true goals.
But that's okay for now. And when a drive philosophizes,
(13:02):
it's looking for the truth that enable it to obtain
its end. Yes, right, right, that's its criteria for truth. Yes, right,
this is a good enough argument to win the battle
with my wife. Right, it's true enough for what so
I can dominate her? Let's say, right, right, right, yes, exactly.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
And so the thing that you and I have discussed
before is the possibility that instead of each of these
drives actually owning its own personality, it might be sort
of reaching out to other places and saying, you know,
when I think about what I want to get out
of the pre filled cortex, or you know, what I
want to get in terms of words to use in
this argument or something, it's drawing on these other mechanisms,
(13:41):
these subsystems that are there.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
But here's the thing. The question is.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
About the conflict in these things and the way that
these things battle with each other. So how do you
think about the way these battle and the way as
we mature we are working these battles out, We're working
out how to get these things.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Well, I think that is the job of the cortex.
But the cortex is highly socialized, right, so you can
think about it neurologically, it's the job of the cortex.
But then the cortex is programmed by these larger networks, right, definitely. Okay,
So what happens to you if you're well socialized is
that these underlying motivational systems arrange themselves in the game
(14:28):
so that each of them gets what they want at
often enough, in a manner that doesn't interfere with the
future or makes the future better even and in a
manner that allows for the benefits of social community. Right.
So there's a very tight set of constraints, and I
think that I think the developmental psychologist PHA probably modeled
(14:49):
this better than anyone else I know of, and he
put it in terms of it's not game theory exactly,
because game theory is a technical endeavor of its own.
But PSA spent an awful lot of time analyzing the
structure of games as the prototype of both maturity and
of socialization. And a game for PSA, a game is
(15:13):
a voluntarily shared aime with agreed upon procedures, the voluntary
part being very very important. And I would say, you know,
if you're trying to integrate rage and lust, let's say
you can use pain as a suppressive or fear as
a suppressive mechanism, even neurologically, like as a parent, you
(15:33):
could punish your child viciously every time they were aggressive,
and that aggression would come under the inhibitory control of fear,
and you could call that socialization. But a much more
effective way to do that is to entice and invite
the child to integrate. That integration into something like higher
(15:54):
order competition towards a distal goal. And that's what you do.
For example, if you trained a competitive child, sot aggressive
child to be an athletic victor, so the aggression is
now directed towards a social aim, right, because that would
be the game, and the aggression actually becomes something that's
good rather than bad. Because if you have a sports team,
(16:15):
you want your players to want to win, you want
them to be competitive. But then if they're well socialized.
It's like aggression within rules towards an aim name would
be the victory of the game, but not just that,
the well being of the team, the growth of the
team across time, the ability of the team to get
along with other teams, and the generalization of that to
(16:36):
a broader range of games. That's what it would be
to be a good sport, for example. So's that's a
game like model of motivational integration towards a higher order ethos, right,
future oriented, community oriented, right exactly.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
So we're putting we learn as we grow from a
child who has these different drives, we're learning how to
make these cooperate for communal reasons.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Yeah, yeah, and for the future, yeah exactly.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
The thing that's interesting the most is how these things
stay rivaling our whole lives and how we work.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Out strategies for this.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
So one thing you and I've talked about before is
the Ulysses contract, where you say, you know, I know
I want to do this kind of thing in the future,
and so I'm gonna contract.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
I'm going to make some.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Unbreakable pact where I can't break it, and I have
to do this thing in the future.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
But I'm Also, I want to.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Talk to you about story and religion and how those
can be ways that steer us when we are thinking
about these internal conflicts.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
Well, I was interested in your Eleas's contract model, but
the model that sprung to mind for me when you
walk through that was the Old Testament model of covenant,
because covenant is actually contract. So unpack that. Well, the
relationship with the divine in the Old Testament is characterized
as a covenant. That's a contract. Okay, it's a sacrificial contract,
(18:17):
which is very specific kind of contract. And I think
the sacrificial contract is the basis of maturity and community.
I think it is by definition. Well, and what does
that official mean? Like means I'll give up something now
to get something later, got it? Oh? Okay, that's the sacrifice.
There's no difference between that and work, right, because when
(18:38):
I work, I sacrifice the present to the future. Yeah, right,
that work is sacrificial. Okay. Now, once this is a
matter of definition. Once you know that, a very interesting
question enters the stage. You might say, which is what's
the most effective form of sacrifice? Right? And the biblical
(18:58):
stories examine that from every conceivable angle. So, for example,
one of the very early stories in the biblical Corpus
is the story of canaan Abel, and it's the story
of two patterns of sacrifice, one of which succeeds at
least in the divine sense, and the other which fails cataclysmically.
And that's the sacrifice, the false sacrifice of kan. It
(19:20):
sets up a pattern of sacrifice. One is immature, prideful, usurping,
and self serving, and it degenerates into murder and genocide, right,
and then the flood comes. That's how those stories are arranged.
The other is the sacrifice of able and able sacrifices
of the are those that are pleasing to God. Well,
(19:42):
that opens the next question, which is well, exactly as
we pointed out earlier. Once you know that the foundation
of community and the future is sacrifice, the only question
that remains is what's the appropriate sacrifice? And that as
a very complex question. There's other ordering possibilities, like the
(20:03):
postmodernist notion essentially is that power is the uniting meta narrative.
What's an example of that. Well, the Marxist presupposition that
society is as a zero sum competition between the oppressor
and the oppressed. On the economic plan, that's been generalized
by the neo Marxist let's say to be what a
(20:27):
multi dimensional battle of power? And you know, you can
see some truth in that when you think about, for example,
if you're thinking about the solution to the problem of
rivalry only as competition, as unbridled competition, but as soon
as you understand that there's bridled forms of competition, maybe
that's why you're interested in the Ulysses contract because that
(20:50):
puts structure around rivalry. Right, how do you structure rivalry?
So maybe that's why it captured your attention so intensely,
because that's a crucial question, right, how do you delimit
the demands of power? M'd say, that's another way of
looking at it. Yeah, that's right, And I'm interested. I mean,
what's your take on the role of story in sayings?
Speaker 1 (21:13):
So I've always got all these possible paths that i
could take, and I'm always facing temptation.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Everyone is.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
And the question is, you know, do story in general,
biblical stories or otherwise give us a sense of Oh,
here's a model that I hadn't thought of before, and
I can look up to this character and I can
or that's right, and navigate myself accordingly.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Well, okay, so a story is a description of a
hierarchy of value. That's an embodied hierarchy of value. Okay.
So when God assigns a role to add him, he says,
your role is to name, identify, and subdu, and subdu
means to put everything in its proper place. Okay. So
(21:59):
someone's character is the manner in which they put things
into place, right, their priority. When you go watch a movie,
what you see is the embodiment of a structure of prioritization.
This person has an aim, they have a strategy, They
have some things for them come first. That's the things
they attend to. That's what you're watching. When you watch
the character, you reflect the perceptions and the emotions, and
(22:24):
you observe the success of the strategy. Right. So what
a story presents to you is a hierarchy of intentional
and action priority, and it's extremely valuable. And then you
can test them out. And I say, that's the technical
definition of a story. And so we're always looking for
a better story, and the story would be the structure
that integrates the conflicts. That's another way to say that.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
That's really lovely, right, because I always think about the
story as what always has grabbed me is the way
that we slip so easily into characters, into.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Story in other ways. Yeah, right.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Neuroscientists we study the brain. We say, look, here's how
the visual system works. You have photons that the retina.
You know, you figure out what you're looking at, what
you're hearing from. But in fact, what brains do most
of the time is they don't care at all about
what's in front of them.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
They're thinking about other things. They're simulating possible future.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Is that reminiscing about the past, or they're slipping into
literature and absolutely the character. So I love what you
said about the reason you become the characters. You get
to experience the world from a.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Different attentional exactly exactly, it's a different structure. Well look, look,
so a typical story element, let's say, in an action
romantic action adventure movie, is do you save the woman
you love or do you serve your country? Right, that's
very so you can see there's both of those are
very well developed hierarchies of value. There's real reasons to
(23:45):
prioritize the person you love, and there's real reasons to
prioritize your nation. Okay, so now what do you do
when those are head to hit? Well, the character of
the protagonist determines the answer to that question, right right, right, right.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
So see gets to live in those shoes and see
what he does, and see what that resonates with you.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Yeah, and you can see whether that's an uphill that's
an uphill journey or a downhill journey, yes, right, and
so or or a variant of that. And this is
the most standard variant is the comedic variant, which is
obstacle crisis resolution, but resolution at a higher order, right, right,
that's the divine comedy. Tragedy is just the dissent, right,
(24:27):
that's the emergence of entropy. That's a way of thinking
about it. Give entropy would be while your your belief
system collapses because it encounters an obstacle that's insurmountable. Now
you're bereft, and that's the end of you. Right, that's
tragic dissolution of the would be hero, that's right.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
And just symone's following the entropy is this idea of
you know, instead of having a clear path, you've got
multiple possibilities. That's this idea of an increase of entropy.
Your brain is anxious and it has does things.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Fall apart, or which you don't know which way is up,
or when you don't know where you're going, or when
you're lost in the desert right right, or you're just
in despair. Right. All of those those are high entropy.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
States exactly, And what the brain is always trying to
do is save energy. That's essentially its mainful life. Yeah,
that's right, right, Oh, that's.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
Yeah, yeah, that was Schrodinger's definition of life. Essentially, it's
an anti entropic function, right, So the association of anxiety
with entropies is very, very fundamental, very fund Stories are
ways of constraining entropy. That that isn't all they do,
because they provide an aim and they provide hope. But
even that's an entropy constraining function to some degree.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
Oh, fascinating, Yeah, it's it's it's it's really a key realization.
As soon as you understand that a story describes a
hierarchy of attentional prioritization, you think, oh, well, of course,
because that means that the story, the story is literally
how we make sense of the world. It's a description
of a structure of making sense in the world.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
Navigation. It's a navigational.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Structure, right, And all these lessons are as we plow
through novels with these lessons give us is ways to
manage the own conflict within our heads with all these
different drives going on.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
And to do that in relationship to other people in.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
The future that's exactly right, and ourselves in the future, right, and.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Ourselves of course, of course, of course, because we're actually
a community across time, right. So that's partly why there's
an analogy between the self and the community. It's like, well,
why should you take care of the old, Well, you're
going to be old. So if your society doesn't take
care of the old, that's you, buddy. Why should you
take care of the sick? Well, you may be naive
(26:37):
and think you're going to be healthy your whole life,
but you're not, you know, so over the course of
your life you're going to it. While you could say
you're going to inhabit the entire sociological cosmos. So you
see reflections of this. For example, this is a very
canonical example of this in the insistence that the savior
is born in the lowly place. You see that with Moses,
(26:58):
and you see it with Christ is born with the animals,
among the animals in a stable. Why well, because at
some point, at some point in his life, even the
greatest hero occupies the lowest position. And so then if
that's the case, then you want to set things up
psychologically and socially so even those who occupy the most
(27:18):
lowly of positions are protected as if they're of infinite value.
Speaker 4 (27:22):
That's the ethos, oh I see, that makes them very
appealing to the whole demographic to watch the story, because
if the hero is someone who already is born in
privilege and rich and so on, maybe you lose a
lot of the audience that way.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
As this course, the audience doesn't have the opportunity to move.
It means that it also means that the story that's
being told doesn't span the entire range of possibilities. It's like, well,
here's a hero story if you're rich, well fair enough,
and it's not like that isn't the guide, But a
better guide is here's the story that guides you when
(27:54):
you're coming up from the abyss, or from the depths,
or from the lowest possible place. Because the the total
story would take you from the lowest possible place to
the highest possible place.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
Right, I've always thought about that just as the size
of the delta.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
Being the important thing.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
But your point is that opens it up to you know,
everybody getting to see that where that spans.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
It's univers so well, and you can imagine that as
a solution increases in quality, it becomes more generalizable. Right
it is that's almost by definition. That's that's that's that's
a good indication of its utility. This applies to everyone.
So then the question is partly of course this is
the case. If you think it through, it's like, what
(28:38):
story are human beings attempting to work out across the generations? Well,
the story that applies to everyone, well obviously, while like
what else, what other story could they possibly be trying
to work out? Right, the story that applies to the
privileged few, well, that would work if the privileged few
were stable, But they're not, right. I mean, look, one
(28:59):
percent of the population almost always controls fifty percent of
the wealth. But the people who occupy that one percent
aren't the same people even within the span of their life.
So like the water that's running from a faucet makes
a stable column, but the molecules are different from second
to second. Well, it's the same with these distributions in
(29:19):
social status. And so you know, a rich person who
goes to school is still the youngest kid in the school,
is still going to be subject to bullying, is still
going to be low on the social totem pole. And
so you need an ethos that applies to everyone across
all possible social positions, right, and a universal That's why
Harry Potter's an orphan, right, because he's lost, he's parentless,
(29:43):
he occupies a low he lives under the stairs with
like tyrannical parents, right, But it doesn't matter because he's
the hero that redeems everything right. Right, So that's a
universalizing story, and that's why it's sold, like, you know,
hundreds of millions of copies.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Okay, So coming back to the issue of rivalry between
I think about them and networks.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
You think about them as personalities. Other people think about
them as drives. It'sarily some of the things are drives.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
Some of the hypothalamic issues are you know, thirst, fear, hunger.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
The more the more automated they are, the more they're
drive Like yeah, that's because right, So, and the more
the more phylogenetically asient they are because they can just
run as programs. That's a really good point.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
Actually, so we should we shouldn't call them all drives
or all personalities. I totally agree with what you're saying.
These really automated hypothalamic things. Those are really like I
think about the most personalities with.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Very few degrees of freedom. Yeah that's right. Right, So
like sexual behavior, once it's instigated, collapses into a relatively
there's a few degrees of freedom, that's right, but it's
a more dry but it.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Still has a personality in terms of the things that notices,
the things it says to try to seduce and so on.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Yeah that's right. Okay, Then we can think the more
phylogenetically ancient the motivational state, the more drive like it becomes.
Yeah that's right. Okay, it's mostly automated. Good personality is
on a spectrum. Okay, so complexity of personality at least, right.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
So how do you think about maturation and all these
personalities that you have.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
What's your take on what it means? Okay, Okay, here's
a way of thinking. I think this is very cool.
So imagine that you have a drive to admire, Okay,
because you do. Okay, okay, what other people sure? Just
the fact that that exists, it's like you'll admire someone,
It's like, okay, I would say, the drive to admire
is the manifestation of the instinct to mature. Okay, let
(31:50):
me understand that the impact. Yeah, okay, Well, so look,
a four year old is going to admire a six
year old, all things considered, they'll usually pick someone that's
in their zone of proximal development, so someone they could be. Right,
And so now this instinct that compels them to admire, right,
to copy and to attend to picks a potential future
(32:12):
self that's obtainable and then grips them. Okay, that's the
instinct to mature. Right. So then you could say we've
got all these hypothalamic functions. There are sub personalities, but
there's a metafunction as well that's also biologically instantiated, that
drives us towards maturation and integration and integrates all those
(32:33):
sub personalities, and that manifests itself in the experience of admiration.
And then we admire heroes in books, and we admire
religious figures, and those are all here's how you make
a religious figure. It's simple. You take ten admirable people
and they're the same because they're admirable, so they exist
(32:53):
in a category. You extract out everything that's admirable, you
sink it into a single personality and posit that as
an ideal. And you do that a thousand times, you
have a savior. A savior will emerge out of that.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Oh terrific, right, okay, and then we okay, And so
the to summarize this, what we then do is we
use that savior as a way when we.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Have an internal battle.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
We say, it gives us some you know, I don't
know what would Jesus do exactly?
Speaker 2 (33:21):
What would what would dny X do?
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Yeah, that's right, because right, so, both literature and let's
say religion, even at a higher level of this gives
us a way to deal with this conflict because, as
you what I've talked about before. You know, what we're
always trying to do is reduce entropy and not have
every possibility open.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
And often we know.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
That there's a conflict between instant gratification and long term
thinking who we want to be, and so that gives
us a way to grip onto it, to say what
would this deity do well?
Speaker 2 (33:51):
And the fact that that, the fact that that example
is exemplified in the story also makes it generalizable. And
here here's why. So think if you watch children play house,
Let's say a little boy is playing the father. You
might say, well, he's imitating his father, but that's not right.
What he does is he watches his father, and then
he watches instantiations of the father in say movies, Disney movies,
(34:15):
and the books he's reading, and he abstracts out the
character of the father. Now, the character of the father
is a far more generalizable understanding than pure imitation. It's
less drive like, it's more personality like. So, if you
have a savior instantiated in a story, you can generalize
from the story to the novel situation, which you couldn't
(34:36):
do if you were just imitating. Yes, right, so that's
how you encapsulate the spirit of the story. The spirit's
the pattern that can be generalized.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
What's interesting is this is not to my knowledge, it's
not really studied in neuroscience, so we don't know where
do you store the savior? I mean presuming this all prefrontal,
long term thinking stuff, some of that shapes your circuits,
the fact that I know of a savior, or we
study it in some ways, but we don't know we're
studying it.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
Okay, if you study vervet monkeys, for example, vervet monkeys
will look longer at photographs of high status vervet monkeys
that have low status in their tribe, right in their group. Right,
So there's an association between social status and movement towards
that admirable figure. And the alpha chimp is the highest
status chip. Okay, so you might say, well, he's the
(35:26):
most powerful chimp, he's the most brutal chip. It's like
friends to all blue that theory to bits, that isn't
the case. Stable alphas are reciprocal and they have very
dense friendship networks. Right. So now you could say you
take alpha you're a chimp. You take Alpha one in
one generation and Alpha two in the second generation in
three and four and five, and then you amalgamate them. Well,
(35:50):
that's eliot a tract that development in religious stories. That's
exactly what happens, is that that's how memory actually works.
Is imagine there's a historical figure who's memorable and stories
are told about them, but then it's three generations later
and everyone who knew him died. Well, all the stories
get amalgamated into a central hero figure, and that's what's remembered, right,
that's what's remembered, right, Yeah, And that's what stories are
(36:13):
told about. That's what's remembered, and that is what is taught.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
And when it's taught to somebody, then they can use
that hero figure as a way to navigate or they.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
Even acted out, they dramatize its. Right, Yeah, yeah, that's
that's right, that's exactly right. So the the historical memory
aggregates into singular figures and then those are elevated, exactly right.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
And my point is, I think this we don't understand
entirely how that we know about mirror neurons and the
fact that we in person and others. But but this
is a big part of why we have hero stories
in religion and so on, is so that we can say, oh,
that's somebody worth mirroring, that's definitely.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
Definitely and admiration is the key to that. And that's
so that's where you can say the instinctual basis of it,
and you know that admiration is probably the drive as
well that compels a child to listen to his father
if he admires it, right, because and you need that
because otherwise, why would the child make the father a
figure of intentional prioritization. There has to be an instinct
(37:08):
there which is an instinct to respond, let's say, to
the paternal and then if the father matches the paternal
template genetically, then he's going to catalyze that instinct for
admiration and learning is going to take place. Excellence, Yeah, excellent,
Thank you so much. Hey, my pleasure. I loved this conversation.
There were so many things that came out. Yeah, yeah, correct,
it was my pleasure.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
That was my conversation with Jordan Peterson, and I just
want to summarize a few of the parts that I
found particularly important. First, nobody, you know, is one thing
like a computer system with a single operating system. But
instead each person you look at can be somewhat different
under different circumstances. And the part that sometimes it's harder
(37:55):
to see is that this applies equally to ourselves. We
are each build of different networks with different goals, and
your behavior falls under the grip of different drives, like
when you're trying to obtain something or you're hungry, or
you're sexually driven, or you're angry, or you're calm and
thinking about your long term goals. Whatever state you're in
(38:18):
modifies not just how you act and what you decide,
but what you even notice and how you perceive it.
I'll give you an example. One study showed that when
people are thirsty, they're more likely to perceive an ambiguous
surface as transparent, like water. This is like a parts
traveler seeing mirages of water in a desert. Versions of
(38:41):
this sort of thing happen all the time. What we
see and what we notice depends on our drives. A
person with an addiction to drugs, sex, food, anything else
will notice threats and opportunities differently than someone else. They
know notice what they need to notice to obtain what
(39:03):
they seek. But because we're always trapped inside ourselves, it
can be difficult to see that we're different people at
different times. This only becomes clear in those moments when
we look back and we think, wow, I really can't
believe I did that, or said that, or thought that
was a good idea. A century ago, Albert Einstein commented
(39:25):
on how when a scientist looks at raw data, they
can only see what their frameworks allow them to see
he said quote. It is the theory which decides what
can be observed. In other words, there's raw data out there,
but if you don't have a framework for something, you
(39:46):
won't even see it. And the heart of today's episode
is the same sort of idea, not about a theory,
but a personality. The personality, the drive that grips you
at the moment, the neural network that is winning for
the moment, that decides what can be observed. If you're
a regular listener to this podcast, you know that I'm
(40:08):
obsessed with the differences between people in terms of what
they perceive from the world. But today's episode is fundamentally
about the differences between you and you and you at
different moments in time. Sometimes the role of religion or
literature is to set up ideals that we admire, and
(40:29):
that way, instead of just looking to other people, we
can look to an envisioned future self. We can say, Okay,
I have a vision that I kind of like for
the sort of person that I want to be, even
if you don't feel like that person. Now you can
build a model of that future you and ideal self
(40:50):
that satisfies the greatest number of constraints, both individual and communal,
and then you can navigate your decisions in deference to that. So,
as we wrap up, here's the takeaway. You are not
one singular, unchanging entity, but instead a shifting constellation of drives, states,
(41:12):
neural networks, each vying for control in different moments, and
recognizing this fluidity can be a powerful tool not only
for understanding your past actions and moments of regret.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
But also for shaping your future.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
Self By consciously constructing ideal versions of yourself, whether through
thinking about it or writing on religious or literary exemplars,
we can use these to help guide our choices because if.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
We are in our core a team of rivals.
Speaker 1 (41:49):
Then the challenge and the opportunity is learning how to
captain that argumentative team towards the optimal outcome. Go to
Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to
find further reading. Send me an email at podcast at
(42:11):
eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and check out
and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of
each episode and to leave comments Until next time.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.
Host
David Eagleman
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