Latest / Mahon McCann / Ben White - Can the MEANING CRISIS be solved by TECHNOLOGY?

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Ben White - Can the MEANING CRISIS be solved by TECHNOLOGY? · Mahon McCann

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Ben,
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: thank you very much for rejoining me for a second conversation on active inference
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: and probably a bit more meaning crisis this time as well,
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: and technology.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's great to be back.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Powerful combo as well, obviously your work.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: like you're an expert in active inference and also the social media stuff.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: And really one of the pioneers, I think of applying active inference to digital technology.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah,
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: this is a,
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: obviously a topic that's important for my own research,
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: but to start off with,
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to ask you,
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: what's your framing of the meaning crisis?
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Do you accept kind of John Vervaeke's framing?
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think of it in more of an active inference way?
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um,
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to say, yes, I'm certainly not an expert on the meaning crisis.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: This is something that I've come to relatively recently.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say,
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: given that given the fact that I came to the notion of the meaning crisis through
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: John Verbeke's work,
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: I yeah,
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: that's the sort of definition that I would lean on.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: I would say that in thinking about a definition of meaning,
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to kind of run away immediately away from the question and off topic.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: But I would say like if there is any departure there,
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: I would say that I would probably consider myself to have a slightly broader
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: conception of meaning than John tends to use.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not attributing like a narrow definition to John.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: it's just that when I,
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: when you read him and hear him speak about the meaning crisis,
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: like I tend to kind of,
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: my inclination is to think that we,
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: we can maybe work with a slightly broader definition of meaning or at least bring
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: in different kind of aspects to meaning.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: I know he talks about four main aspects to meaning,
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: but,
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: um,
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: but yeah,
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: when we talk about the meaning crisis,
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: when I think about it or speak about it,
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm basically kind of using John's definition for sure.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: So in terms of like, cause John's,
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: i suppose i mean this is a bit of a my own version of his framing but that it
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: starts with this we have kind of a christian aristotelian worldview that makes
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: sense of people's lives through the medieval times scientific revolution that
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: starts to kind of break down and so there's a an issue with our modeling really
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: with the generative model that had been used to make sense of people's lives has
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: kind of broken down and now there's a
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: kind of i don't know you'd call it a i mean avoid nietzsche called the death of god
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: obviously and then you you get this kind of fragmentation of people's world views
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: um that is yeah causes even just prediction error i suppose of registering as a lot
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: of uh
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: more negative emotion or volatility uncertainty uh would you say that's fair enough
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: it's um that sounds fair enough to me yeah i think one of the key notions is that
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: john talks about um i think they refer to it as agent arena coherence or the kind
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: of fit between agent and arena where um it was easy to have there was a given world
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: view uh that provided both the model of the world and the kind of
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: a world of affordances that modeled kind of right action in a way that meant there
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: was a sense of belonging in the world.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: You existed in an arena as an agent that provided a kind of sense of significance, purpose, coherence.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, so over a fairly long timescale for various reasons,
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: the kind of apparatus that provided that coherence between age and arena has been
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: eroded in various ways.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: there were kind of cultural orderly things,
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: but even I suppose just the evolution of technology and the rate of change
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: increasing a lot probably since the Industrial Revolution.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: people never lived in like the same environment all the time,
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: but there seemed to be more stable structures anyway,
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: even in terms of like social structure,
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: maybe smaller populations where you're familiar with people that you knew and they
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: didn't change as rapidly as things have changed in our lifetime.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for sure.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: I think I know,
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: I know listening to John speak about this,
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: there's always,
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: he's very careful to make out,
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: to make sure that this isn't a kind of nostalgic kind of yearning.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: for the past per se you know there's nothing particularly attractive about any kind
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: of pre-black death England you know there's a lot of problems with it but there is
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: definitely kind of very plausibly I think I find it quite convincing
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: various kind of concomitant streams of change.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned one already,
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: which is various scientific revolutions,
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: and also the emergence of mathematics as the dominant mode of truth-telling about
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: the world,
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: where mathematics really abstracted from the precedence of subjective first-hand experience.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: subjective first-hand experience being less significant,
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: I suppose,
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: than a third-person perspective,
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: an object.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, for sure.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so you have a world where truth is kind of told through this abstracted
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: mathematical framework that,
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: of course,
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: most people are not fluent in.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so we come to rely on science and mathematics for our understanding of objective reality and truth.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then at the same time, the emergence of various forms of commerce and business, capitalism.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: I love it when John talks about advertising as being this kind of,
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: just this pure hose of bullshit,
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: kind of in the technical sense,
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: the kind of Harry...
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: Technical term.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: Technical bullshit, yeah.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: Of course.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: That resonates with me an awful lot.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's very true.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then I think another one that's really relevant to technology,
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: and maybe it's very closely related to what we were saying about science,
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: but also the tools that we have for maintaining an epistemic grip on our worlds.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: When you have developments like digital technology and news media that provide one
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: aspect of this is just purely like the amount of information that's available.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: I forget the date,
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: but you sometimes hear this kind of factoid thrown around about the last year that
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: it was possible to have read all the books in the world.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: So at some point we departed from this kind of state where it was kind of feasibly possible to have
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: um like a good grip on all of these sources of information in theory at least to
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: the point now where obviously we're having conversations around misinformation and
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: disinformation and conspiracy theories and just the ferocious rate at which social
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: media platforms can can perpetuate um all kinds of things really yeah and kind of
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: just break the frame like it's not possible to have
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: you know it seems like there's always no a new issue coming up there's a new thing
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: coming down the pipeline that you have to map out and these are all complex issues
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: that's like we're just kind of uh over overwhelmed or that there's too much um to
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: really we don't have the epistemic tools to model all of that volatility and i
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: suppose like your work on social media platforms have really evolved to present
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: that novelty to keep you coming back essentially um
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: to prevent it being totally reducible but this is obviously a broader you know
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: transformation based on technology that we have more access to information but that
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: creates more volatility i think there's like a purely kind of epistemic challenge
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: here which is uh the amount of information that we have available and the
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: difficulty kind of closely related issue which is the difficulty that we might have
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: in uh
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: kind of uh verifying those sources i mean it's especially and then and i kind of
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: another development is uh ai generative ai tools as well you know like it's very
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: recently become the case that i i can't really tell the difference between ai
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: generated video and and real video which is quite this i found that personally i
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: found that quite noteworthy and disturbing
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: when i realized that that i couldn't tell the difference but then of course like
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: you say there is another kind of layered issue which is uh how the platforms that
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: feed us that information then gamify our interactions and are engineered in ways
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: that kind of keep us keep us hooked so yeah i think in terms of like the meaning
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: crisis i think the the
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: the point about epistemic grip and this kind of information overload on a very
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: basic level is quite relevant.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: and I mean,
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: obviously,
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: like,
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: John has this 50-episode,
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: kind of massive,
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: like,
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: genealogy of the meaning crisis and all that,
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: so,
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: like,
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: we're not going to be able to do all of that,
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: but in terms of the problem,
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: because,
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: yeah,
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: I think this question of being capable of modelling your environment so that you
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: can control it and that this is connected to your emotional
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: sense of feeling like you have an optimal grip of feeling like you're actually you
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: know you're not overwhelmed by prediction error and negative emotion and that that
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: is because i think meaning i'd be interested in getting your definition of meaning
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: because for me meaning is tracking the expansion of agency like i think about
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: meaning in terms of flow like chick my highly chicks my highly flow states
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: Which is also the same as the kind of zone of proximal development with Vygotsky,
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: where it's like,
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: if you're at the edge of your capability,
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: optimal amount of uncertainty,
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: you're not bored,
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: you're not anxious,
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: you're expanding your kind of zone of competence.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: That edge is where you find meaning.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: yeah this is that's an interesting definition i think what you've described there
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: would sound more to me it would sound closer to a kind of general subjective
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: well-being so the sense that i'm i'm doing well i am skilled i am capable i am i
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: have a grip on my environment in a way that makes me an effective agent and of
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: course we know through
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: kind of work in predictive processing and emotion and Mark Miller's work on
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: aerodynamics that this is like a felt relationship with the environment so when
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: you're reducing prediction error at a kind of a slightly better than expected rate
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: that
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: feels good.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: And this picture is kind of fleshed out more with Mark's work on metastable dynamics.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not just that you have one stream of better than expected prediction error,
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: but it's actually that there's some kind of balance between various different cares
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: and concerns that you're able to flexibly move between such that you're not fragile
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: in that sense.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you only have one kind of effective
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: line of grip on the world then when that kind of when that's disrupted through the
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: inevitable kind of capriciousness of the environment then you're in trouble but i
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: think meaning for me and i think for john as well comes it's not reducible to
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: subjective well-being so it's not that they don't track at all but it's that they
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: come apart in very interesting ways and that one is not reducible to the other
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: So to steal an example from John,
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: which is a fantastic example,
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: John talks about one of the most meaningful things you can do with your life,
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: which at the same time is one of the most effective ways of nuking your subjective
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: well-being is to have a baby.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, totally.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah,
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think it gets quite complex in terms of like thinking about it in terms of aerodynamics.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: But I think John talks about meaning in terms of,
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: you have meaning in your life if you have things that you want to continue to exist
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: if you weren't here and that you have some kind of efficacy in.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: kind of impact in those things so yeah there's an interesting relationship between
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: the two for sure but it's it's more interesting i think to think about the ways
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: that they come apart yeah and because that's a really good point that there's the
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: subjective well-being element but then there's this kind of broader more
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: existential i know i'm familiar with the literature in terms of on the psychology
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: of meaning in life this idea that there's the coherence purpose and significance
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that coherence is like your life makes sense.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: Purpose is that you have a goal to pursue, which would be like the positive emotion.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then significance is like being connected to something that's valuable and that's real.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: Connectedness sometimes gets thrown in as a separate kind of, you know, the four of them, connectedness.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: And belonging as well, I suppose.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and the relationship, I mean, you would think that typically those things are going to result in
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: like consistent subjective well-being but uh but i think yeah john's point is that
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: one they're not reducible to each other so they are they are kind of separate
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: quantities in a way yeah i know that's really interesting so like even if you're
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: getting negative feedback essentially like you're exhausted do you have a baby
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: you're tired you're up all the time you don't feel good there's still something
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: else
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: to it.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just the consequence.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: I guess there's longer-term positive consequences.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: I know it's not immediate gratification, but... Yeah, it's all about timescales.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think in a very broad sense, way beyond just the bounds of this conversation, I think that...
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's always critical to think about cognition and affect well-being,
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: all of these things in terms of like there is a temporal aspect to them.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so maybe that's one of the strengths of the predictive processing framework is
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: it has this kind of inbuilt capacity to deal with temporal scope where we're
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: reducing prediction error and fulfilling expectations over,
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: as they say,
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: multiple interlocking timescales.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: So.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: um and maybe this is where subjective well-being and meaning really come apart in
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: in the sense that yeah if you have a baby um things are going to get really
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: volatile and there's going to be i mean i don't speak from experience i've not got
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: a kid but i hear there's a lot of volatility and a lot of violated expectations and
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: a lot of uncertainty especially for like new parents right you have this thing that
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: you
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: care about very deeply and is you know you probably sense is quite fragile and
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: you're not quite sure and you're consulting books and the internet and friends and
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: things and so it's extremely stressful and also you're you know you're
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: ability to maintain good allostatic kind of control in the short term is disrupted
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: because you're not sleeping your finances are disrupted maybe there's strain on
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: your relationship but there is now this thing that you as kind of come to supplant
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: yourself as the most highly precise expectation for consistent organizational
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: structure
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: yeah that's funny yeah the most that's that's a very cognitive science way of
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: describing the responsibility of a child but and but that is it's so key because it
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: is it makes me think of this kind of peterson adage of his uh meaning is that
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: responsibility comes from meaning um
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: that it comes from a burden something that you're actually you know saddled with
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: continuing that's more important than your own yeah kind of egocentric finding the
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: heaviest burden you can bear and then bearing it yes which kind of is dopaminergic
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: in a sense because like you know obviously it's the happiness of pursuit rather
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: than the actual grasping of reward i don't know do you think there's a
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because on some level,
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: meaning has to be...
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like,
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: it is connected to positive affect,
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: but not just,
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: consumatory reward.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, I think this is really interesting.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: And it's...
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: I should say...
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: I maybe should have said this at the beginning,
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: but...
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: So my work on technology and predictive processing really began in subjective well-being.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so the work I did on social media was...
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: very much,
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: wellbeing there was kind of defined as the absence of psychopathology,
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: um,
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: which is a very basic,
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: um,
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: notion.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think it's right.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously it's better to be free of psychopathology than not.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: But then there's this question about,
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: well,
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: okay,
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: even if you're free of,
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: you're avoiding depression and anxiety and addiction,
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: what does it mean to kind of like,
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: what does a positive account of wellbeing look like?
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um,
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: And it's only toward the end of my project here at Sussex,
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: like right now,
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: kind of as we speak,
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: that I've started really thinking about what I would call kind of philosophically
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: weightier notions like wisdom,
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: meaning,
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: connectedness,
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: all of these like sub kind of categories.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: And the relationship between them is kind of unclear.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: to me i think they get confused an awful lot and there is this question of like do
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: they come apart entirely um or is it necessarily the case that um pursuing
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: something meaningful is on a long enough time scale going to guarantee you some
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: measure of subjective well-being um
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: my instinct there is to say probably there probably isn't a necessary connection i
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: think we can probably think of examples of like meaningful pursuits and it depends
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: what you count as subjective well-being i mean you you might be in a constant state
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: of stress and anxiety and feel terrible and never actually feel happy but there's
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: like a sense of satisfaction or something kind of like a
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: analogous with physical training in the gym or in a sports setting where the satisfaction people
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: I do some work,
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: sorry,
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to go off on a tangent now,
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: you can feel free to stop me,
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: but I've done some work in philosophy of sport as well,
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: so I'm interested in the philosophy of combat sports particularly.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: And with the work I've done with my co-author,
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: Alexander Faux,
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: outrageously talented analytic philosopher,
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: we've kind of thought about the value of dangerous sports and the value of violent sports,
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: and
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: whether they can be morally justified specifically uh mixed martial arts where yes
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: these pursuits are violent they're painful they're unpleasant they're aesthetically
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: they can be they can be very beautiful martial arts can be very beautiful but also
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: mixed martial arts specifically can be very ugly and there's a question of like why
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: do people do this you know like what are people getting out of this what's the
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: value how do you justify like what is the payoff kind of a
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: How do you circumvent the, like, moral concerns?
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there's, like, these things kind of sit alongside each other.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: and there's so...
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: I actually have,
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: I've done,
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: I've fought in,
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: not in mixed martial arts,
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: but in Thai boxing and boxing.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: I have a black belt in Bojinkan and Jitsu as well, so...
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: i've been boxing since i was eight actually so i started at my first fight when i
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: was 10 and uh but learned a huge amount from like fighting sports and from boxing
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: in a way but then also i suppose see the other side of fighting which is that you
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: can get caught up in just the fighting like that's the thing in martial arts and
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: coach what always would have drilled into me is like there's a bigger meta game you
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: know if you over commit to the local game of just the fighting
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: uh you come out the other side you're broken up you're injured you're angry maybe
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: you're drinking all the time to forget about it um whereas you know like conor
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: mcgregor may optimize for the local game too much um
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: because there's a broader and the broader metagame i think is the virtues question
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: like it is because you're talking about a good life really and i think there is
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: that warrior like aspect like a good life could just be winning all of the time in
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: in these different games but there's other games like relationships family you know
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: state whatever it is um that i i
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: need to be in alignment with it so i think that well-being yeah i i definitely
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: think it's more than subjective well-being and i think it's connected to some idea
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: of the good life which does get us into philosophy and into some sort of positive
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: account of what it means to live a good life and be aware like well-being is a
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: means that you know you can construe it in different ways and i think a lot for a
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: lot of people well-being is kind of it overlaps heavily with
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: living a meaningful life.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think we have to be quite strict when we're talking about subjective wellbeing.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: We really are talking about like feeling good.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: yes yeah yeah which i i probably wouldn't have been strict enough on that to be
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: honest but you're that's fine like i mean what it's not i'm not you know i don't
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: think we should be kind of like too dictatorial about what these things mean but
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: it's for the purposes of like this specific conversation about you know meaning
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: well-being like there is this there is this thing which just is how good do you
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: feel how good is your mood on a day-to-day basis you know like um yeah you know you
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: could
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: plausibly gone through my entire PhD in a terrible mood,
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: constant state of anxiety,
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: never enjoyed a second of it,
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: and yet kind of persevered with it precisely because I found it to be something
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: that provided me with meaning.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: I could say that I
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: I would want this kind of research to carry on,
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: even if I wasn't here,
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: I would want somebody to be doing it.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's valuable beyond my own kind of prestige and career.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: And it just so happens that I'm fortunate enough to have like a high degree of
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: control over,
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: over the direction it takes.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so that provides something very meaningful for me,
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: but it could just also,
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: it could simultaneously be horrible the whole time.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why I don't like, I mean, utilitarian ethics really are consequent.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like,
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: because it is like oftentimes the most meaningful things are the hardest things
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: that we do so like they don't have that immediate you know yeah like under that
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: kind of subjective well-being like if you were just an addict the whole time like
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: just propping up positive emotion like in a kind of brave new world way it's like
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: yeah that'd be fine if there's no
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: you know if you can just escape the consequences of it so yeah i definitely don't
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: uh i agree i like this rather sort of fragile tenuous analogy with with mixed
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: martial arts i think there's i think there's some good stuff in there which is like
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: you say kind of if your attitude is one of um just training to win fights then
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: there's a sense in which you're kind of doing the right thing
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: in a way that's what you're supposed to be doing as a competitor but that doesn't
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: really get it doesn't answer the why question satisfactorily of like why so many
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: people put themselves through something that is like really dangerous and difficult
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: and horrible and i think the answer to that specifically with martial arts
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: competitive martial arts and this is maybe maybe doesn't transfer as well the quest
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: general questions about meaning but it's
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: I think that the arena of competitive combat sports provides a crucible for testing
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: high-level self priors in the self model that one rarely gets a chance to test.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's what they say about boxers.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: The ring is a truth-telling machine.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's like everything you did and everything you don't do is going to be found out.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's true, yeah.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: I remember having a conversation with one of my fellow researchers here at Sussex, Axel Constant.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure you're familiar with Axel's work on active inference.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: And having a conversation about this and Axel spoke to me about he'd always
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_01: wondered if he was courageous.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: Like he'd always wondered,
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: like,
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: he's always thought of himself as probably quite brave,
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: but always wondered,
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: when the chips are down,
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: would he act in accordance with this kind of notion of himself that he had?
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: And he described having a dream where he was in a train crash.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: And people were injured.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: And in the dream, he was like reentering the train to kind of drag people out and save them.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: And he woke up and was like, yeah, like, yeah, nice.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: I kind of believe it now.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I think like there's something going on with combat sports and dangerous sports in general.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: For sure.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: In our day to day life,
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: we just don't have,
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: I get the train to campus and it's all very leafy and everybody's very friendly and
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: like it's all very safe.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like,
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: I am just probably going to go through my life and never really get to stress test
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: certain aspects of my self model.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think we are epistemic explorers.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: We push the limits of certainty and we explore new areas and we want to test those expectations.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that for those of us that want to really kind of test those expectations,
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: we've created these kind of cultural social artifacts that allow us to do that.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: like a trial or initiation almost,
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: which sometimes in terms of like meaning,
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: people talk about that,
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: that part of the meaning crisis is not having these rituals and initiations whereby
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: you can actually verify if you are,
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: correct if you are that agent you're capable of taking on the challenge because i
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: suppose with an initiation as well it's such a big problem that it helps you
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: contextualize problems in general like it's like if i face that a lot of other
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: stuff is small potatoes in a sense it kind of gives you this you know um yeah i
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: sense not just in that arena but in in other areas um as well but another point on
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: the martial arts thing because
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: what you're talking about in the warrior aspect is the martial side of it but then
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: there's also the art and the art is the the art of self-cultivation that goes along
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: with it like MMA doesn't really have that because it's a competitive sport in a
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: sense and yeah and that's cool I mean you end up with very good martial abilities
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: but then it doesn't fix your self-destructive habits your you know this kind of
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: way of life of learning of self cultivation that you can get from other martial
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: arts that have a bit of that then you get like karate that's become just this like
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: wax on wax off everybody's talking shit it's a McDojo and then you end up with you
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: know the opposite end of that or you can get a good karate gym I mean that's a bad
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: example but a martial arts gym that's not focused on the warrior aspect and so it's
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: almost like there's these two
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: These two arts at play there,
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: where there's a martial side to it,
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: but then there's also the self-cultivation.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think you're talking about something that has featured in the work that I've done
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: on MMA and I think about a lot.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to turn this into an MMA podcast,
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: but I think it's why we like it when people,
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: athletes,
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: come along that do embody a kind of higher...
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: higher vision for competitive combat sports because it's one of the reasons that
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: mixed martial arts in particular is philosophically very interesting is because
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: there's like this huge scope,
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: this huge arena for kind of character and virtue.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah,
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: I know it's interesting because I think John is a traditional martial artist and
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: I've heard John talk about like the dojo as a setting for kind of ritual and
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: ritualized practices and
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the sense of connectedness and belonging.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I'm inclined to agree with that.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I would...
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: As somebody that has practiced kind of mixed martial arts as an amateur and really,
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: I think that the competitive aspect is very important.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: I am very, very keen to see those things transposed into mixed martial arts.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: I don't like,
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: yeah,
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: well,
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: it's,
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: yeah,
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: I don't like the kind of,
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: what I would say are the kind of baser kind of manifestations of mixed martial arts
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: where it just is this kind of arena of violence and there's a kind of just bleed mentality.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: you get with that yeah which works for a time until you have a you know cte and
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: then you know you die prematurely a whole whole other kind of uh whole other area
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: to explore um yeah
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: But I suppose,
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: yeah,
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: not to get off topic,
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: but the interesting thing about this is because,
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: like,
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: a lot of ancient philosophy,
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm doing a course on Plato's Republic at the moment with undergrads,
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: and,
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: like,
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: he builds this whole,
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: like,
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: educational program for the guardians of the city that's based on,
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: like,
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: physical martial training,
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: but then also on music and poetry and philosophy as these kind of,
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: almost like two sides of the good life,
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: um,
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: that you need in order to become i suppose a i don't know what you call it like
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: it's almost like training for the good life in some sense training your cognitive
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: systems your affective systems like this ability to um that we need some kind of
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: institution for this type of training because like i know john talks about the
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: meaning crisis as like a kind of crisis of not having these rituals and
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: institutions anymore that we used to have that kind of brought us along um yeah and
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: so
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm interested in the cognitive science of that.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, do you think there's... Do you see that developmentally in active inference?
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: I know I'm throwing a lot at you, but yeah.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: Is that part of the meaning crisis, do you think?
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I do.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's precisely what John's talking about.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think we take...
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so there's a lot in that.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: I mean,
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: in terms of,
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think what you're talking about there in terms of like training in various aspects,
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: we're talking about cultivating various kind of character traits.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: John's ecology of practices, he calls it, in order to get this kind of optimal grit
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: But he talks about it as a counterpoise as well.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: He has different exercises and practices from meditation to dialogue.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: For him, it's martial arts as well.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's different.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: To help, I suppose, your optimal gripping across different arenas, maybe?
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think essentially cultivating a broad,
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: diverse array of skills that are going to allow you to deal with volatility,
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_01: more effectively.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: I suppose it connects to the stuff we were talking about with multistable, metastable dynamics.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: This is a very bottom-up, cognitive science-y, computational account of the value of that.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: You want to be as
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_01: flexible and competent in different areas as you can possibly be because that way
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: you're less likely to encounter a field of affordances which is going to result in
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: unmanageable prediction error.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: But then there's just the value of kind of being a well-rounded if you've never
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: tested yourself in these arenas then you know less about yourself.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's true.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: yeah because that bringing in the aspect of affordances i mean because that's
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: john's solution anyways the ecology of practices in terms of and i i think a lot of
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: other that is kind of the recommendation a lot of the time is is the need for this
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: kind of different flow across different domains but that builds a general kind of
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: ability to handle uncertainty uh that just isn't really in the current educational
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: model that's very propositional and kind of lacks maybe these other aspects uh
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's interesting.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: There's an interesting connection there with some work that I did with the Xscape
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_01: people here at Sussex and these projects.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: It was a project led by Laura DiPaolo,
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: where we used active inference to kind of look at,
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: assess and investigate the differences between standard mainstream educational
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: practices and the Montessori method.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I've read some of that actually.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: Montessori.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I read well some of your paper.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: Laura's an expert on this,
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: and it was very interesting to look at the importance of various aspects of
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_01: Montessori education,
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: which are collaboration,
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: exploration,
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: a willingness to regularly,
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: consistently confront error and mistakes,
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: and how children are trained to respond to that affectively,
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: and also the role
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: kind of mastery of familiar material scaffolds plays so in the Montessori method
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: like very young children are given kind of like miniature versions of like everyday
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: items so they do their own washing up they take care of plants and they've got all
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: of the like miniature plates and cups and things and they work together in groups
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: and
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas in kind of mainstream schooling,
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: like you say,
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: it's very much more kind of propositional,
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: like learning and reciting facts.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_01: This isn't like, it's not like a super kind of binary, like there's some crossover.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: But generally speaking,
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: like in Montessori as well,
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: there's no like sit down written standardized testing.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: One of these really interesting aspects of this is there's a neuroscientist called
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: Solange Devereaux,
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: I believe,
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: who has done some work looking at the way that Montessori educated people respond
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: emotionally to mistakes.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: And what she found was that children educated in the Montessori school system
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: do not have like an overwhelmingly negative response to mistakes,
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: whereas people educated in kind of mainstream systems do.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: and obviously we should kind of we should be quite careful about what conclusions
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: we draw from that but you know it seems plausible to think that we scaffold those
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: affective responses through the particular learning systems that we have um so if
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: you have people if you if you say to i remember being a kid and constantly having
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: these two-hour written exams and like cognitive ability tests and we were
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: constantly told you know like if you fail this your life's over i think um
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: yeah it's very numerical as well in a sense of yeah yeah it's hard and completely
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: false as well i did terribly at my gcscs and you did a phd like yeah it's
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: completely false and it's i think when we're talking about these like the um you
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: know the well-roundedness and the willingness to kind of put ourselves through
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: these you know these arenas where failure is at some point very likely but it's
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: also collaborative and and um
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: think that there is some you know it touches with this montessori stuff where you
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_01: essentially you see children and adults who seem to to experience failure in a
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: different way like they they seem to be like more capable emotionally um they seem
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: to be i don't want to say they're more capable of dealing with failure that's maybe
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: a bit strong but they seem less perturbed by it actively
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, and that's the kind of attitude that you can cultivate from your education if it's done properly.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: I need to research that Montessori more.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: I don't really know a huge amount about it,
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: to be honest,
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: but there's something very interesting in that in terms of this imaginative play.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: I know Mark's done some work on play as well, and almost like that behavioral script.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: I've been reading a lot about behavioral scripts lately.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very interested in this idea.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: that almost like you learn almost dramatically in a sense of mapping out a space
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: that you learn what an object is how it fits in like the example of like miniature
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: cups and plates that they'd learn how to wash dishes and play that way and then
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: that prepares you dramatically for when you actually encounter dishes and a sink
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: that it's less of a you know yeah in fact it's interesting you bring up play
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: because um you know we're going on some really good tangents here but uh
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: One of the kind of sticking points in the Montessori stuff is,
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: and again,
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: Lauer is the expert here,
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: but as I understand it,
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: Montessori herself was quite explicit in that play had no place in her classrooms.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: So this idea of like imaginative,
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: like where you dress up as princesses and,
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: pretend you're a dinosaur,
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: all of this stuff,
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: playing with toys like there's none of that Montessori classrooms,
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_01: as I understand it.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_01: It is everything is kind of like focused on tasks that you are going to do in in the real world.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_01: But I remember speaking to Laura about this and reading this and then thinking of
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: Mark's work and Mark Anderson's work on play and thinking that this is just a false dichotomy.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like these kids,
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: this is play because this is essentially,
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: I forget the specific definition in Mark's work with Mark Anderson,
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_01: but what's happening in these Montessori classrooms is essentially the role of the
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_01: teacher is to provide a safe environment
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: for kids to explore the limits of their own skill capabilities in ways that feel
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_01: good right they're they're putting the limits and finding out what they're actually
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: capable of and this is one of the key themes in the paper was how this is
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: materially scaffolded so if you look at some of like the Montessori classrooms have
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: very specific teaching materials they're called
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so,
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: for example,
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: if you're trying to teach kids mathematics,
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: broadly speaking,
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: the children start with very material,
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_01: very physical resources,
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: materials.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then as they progress and they get older, the level of abstraction increases.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: So the kids are kind of more able to deal with abstract concepts.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: So play,
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_01: I think play in a sort of predictive process in terms where you're talking about
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: just kind of in a very safe,
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: rather pointless kind of way,
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: just playing with prediction error.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: You're just kind of using material,
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: cultural scaffolding to give children a place where they can make mistakes,
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: get things wrong.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: um they're pretending that they're doing certain things so yeah yes and yeah
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: reducing error in a way that's not going to be a catastrophic i suppose like
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_00: they're not you know it's a safe environment for them to practice they're not going
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: to you know die or hurt themselves or any kind of yeah the really negative
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: consequences are limited um by the environment
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: and so yeah i mean it seems like we need because like i do think the meaning crisis
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: is a kind of developmental crisis as well it's like a deficit of these skills that
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_00: can get you to that meaningful edge or i mean yeah depending on how you're looking
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_00: at it but at least to experience meaning the felt sense of it um does seem to
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_00: require some commitment to responsibilities but um that yeah that there needs to be
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: some sort of training of these this particular skill set um
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: yeah i'm interested it's interesting you said that the kind of like felt sense of
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: meaning because i thought about that quite a lot and what that means and whether we
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: kind of what does it mean to feel meaning but uh i think for martial arts for me is
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: the perfect example of like i can get into a flow state doing martial arts like
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: that like i throw a few shadow punches and i'm i'm in like
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'm already, you know, I'm there.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm moving around.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm bouncing.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm in the kitchen doing it.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it feels good.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the same.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_01: Not anymore, but I do weight train.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I find that this,
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_01: I suppose at the beginning I said I have,
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: my instinct is to have a slightly looser definition of meaning than John tends to
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: work with,
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: at least in like his talks and lectures.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I think like the one area this comes up is in physical training, like weight training.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_01: feels kind of inherently meaningful, but in a way that is at least prima facie
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: difficult to different to kind of the things john tends to talk about like sort of
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_01: like projects so you know like uh relationships and children and and um sort of
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_01: share ritualistic spiritual practices i mean i guess i guess it does fit in in a
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_01: way but also i tend to think like aesthetic experiences as being inherently
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: meaningful like engagement with beauty art the sublime nature these kinds of things
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_01: um and again i think they come apart from subjective well-being
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: I guess the question really is like, what role can technology play in this?
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_01: For sure.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: Which is what I'm kind of thinking of with this institutional idea of like what
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: kind of intervention,
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: because obviously you do a lot of work on ambient smart environments and that's
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_00: relevant to mental health and well-being.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess meaning ties into that as well.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like that,
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_00: the metacognitive affordances of the smart environments could help you get to that
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: kind of edge.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that's really interesting.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's like multiple areas of contact.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: I suppose,
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: so one,
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: so to start with a preprint that is still unpublished,
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_01: there's some work I did with Inej Ippolito on ambient smart environments in classrooms.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: specifically designed to support um children with autism or other neurodivergent
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: kind of needs you know a specific kind of unique style of cognitive engagement with
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: an environment where and this comes it comes back full circle i mean we were
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: talking about the agent arena coherence that john talks about right so the
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: fundamentally the root of the meaning crisis is that we we've kind of lost that
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: coherence and we're in arenas that don't provide kind of any
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: grounds for purpose and significance and connectedness.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: Again,
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: a really nice example is just the amount of meaningless advertising bullshit that's
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_01: around where people are constantly deafened by signals from entities that do not
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: care about the truth or usefulness of anything that they're saying.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: They're just trying to get you to buy stuff.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think that this really comes out in the work I did with Inej where
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: i think the suffering that children with neurodivergent conditions experience is a
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: result of this breakdown of agent arena coherence where standard classroom setups
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: the expectations that come with standard classroom setups are simply not coherent
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_01: with their style of grip on the environment and so in the paper we talked about the
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_01: ways that
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_01: this kind of technology could be used to facilitate a more coherent relationship
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_01: between neurodivergent styles of kind of grip and and educational settings so i
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_01: think you can definitely you can definitely in a kind of broad sense think of
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_01: adaptive environments in terms of coherence and again like you hit this kind of
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_01: root problem of uh
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_01: It has that potential, but obviously we need to make sure that this is what actually happens.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_01: Because also, hyper-adaptive environments could just be used to facilitate hyper-targeted advertising.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_00: Which we already have going on, you know?
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's what they're using it for.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: But there's other kind of aspects of technology as well.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like,
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think one thing that I wanted to talk about last time on the podcast that we didn't,
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think we really got into it,
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_01: was
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_01: the capacity of adaptive kind of ambient technology to introduce more uncertainty
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_01: into the environment rather than less.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe we touched on this a little bit,
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_01: but this really speaks to what we were saying about the potential disconnect
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: between subjective well-being and meaning,
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: where
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_01: we know very well from Mark and Julian's work on happiness and addiction and all of
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: these things that we can get stuck in these very suboptimal routines.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_01: Mark and Julian call them bad boots and Eric Rietveld as well call them bad bootstraps.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_01: And in my work with Inez that was published,
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: preventative mental health care approach for ambient smart environments,
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: sometimes like these very like ingrained patterns of behavior,
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_01: these habitual routines can be really actually over the long term be quite bad for us.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: They might be like in the short term,
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: they might be good for our subjective well-being,
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_01: but they're actually quite bad for us.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: And it can be really hard to break these.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: So like addiction is like
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_01: prime example so addiction is basically like if you take this inactive view it's
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_01: this certain form of agent environment dynamic where the you know this kind of
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_01: behavioral loop becomes stuck and breaking that is like famously difficult um and
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_01: so i think i think adaptive technology can play a really key role here which is
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: more analogous to i know inez has done work with uh robert carhart harris and jonas
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: mago on the role of psychedelics
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_01: where the therapeutic role of psychedelics is to disrupt heavy ingrained attractor
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_01: patterns in neural activity.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think there's something analogous here where rather than just like brain activity,
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_01: we're talking about agent environment activity.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_01: And actually,
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_01: if you have an environment that is deliberately trying to disrupt these kind of
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: suboptimal habitual patterns of behavior,
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_01: there's a real potential for that to support meaningful practices as well.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, exactly.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: There's so many things there to jump on.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: But like that idea of, I've heard Mark talk about it with psychedelics where it's like heating up.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: your cognition so it gets a bit gooey and then you can cool it down into a
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: different shape than it was before almost yeah there's different kind of analogies
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: here like the yeah so heating up the idea you know if you think about a blacksmith
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: trying to shape metal like if you've got a lump of metal in a bad shape and you
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_01: want to make it something beautiful like you have to heat it up you can't just
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: can't push it into shape when it's cold and the heating up here is essentially like
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_01: a metaphorical
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_01: uh term for uh the flattening of probability distributions in the chat maybe go
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_01: into that a little bit more yeah how would that work so if you have like very
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: strong expectations then yes we know from active inference that you're more likely
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_01: to enact those expectations but what you want to do is
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_01: um in in flattening those probability distributions you essentially open up um kind
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_00: of likelihood of diversity of outcome so is that like you have almost like
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_00: unconscious high priors or hyper priors that become you have available again that
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: you can kind of renegotiate in the generative model that are kind of weight very
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_01: highly so you know you have like yeah
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: you know particularly in your self model right so you might have expectations if
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_01: you are an anxious depressed person you might have you know like
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_01: i'm i'm kind of useless i have no friends like going outside makes me anxious um i
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_01: do badly in social situations and they could have like very high probability
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: weightings right so they could be sort of like 0.8 0.9 you know like very strong
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_01: priors and so the evidence required to update those beliefs is like the standard is
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_01: super high right you're very unlikely to kind of
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: very unlikely to be able to sample the world in such a way that you're going to
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_01: update and change those beliefs because the priors are so strong yes but if you can
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_01: find a way to flatten those distributions and kind of turn down those priors then
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_01: the evidential i don't know i'm probably using the wrong technical language here
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_01: i'm kind of brushing up against my technical expertise but like the evidential
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_01: bound required to update those beliefs is lowered
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_01: So this is why Inej talks about, and Adam Saffron as well, I should say.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's lots of people doing work on this.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to kind of not give credit where it's due.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_01: But so when we talk about psychedelics as heating up the generative model,
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_01: we're essentially talking about the flattening of those probabilities and turning
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_01: down those priors.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_01: But then you have this importance of set and setting and kind of...
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_01: what evidence are you feeding to this generative model while it's in this heated state?
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Adam Safran has this wonderful kind of image that I've heard him use where he says it's
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's no good blasting people to the moon if you don't know where they're going to come down, right?
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_01: If you're going to strap someone to a rocket and give them a big dose of psychedelics,
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_01: you have to know how and why and when they're coming down and shape that metal.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's no good just heating up the metal and then hoping it turns into a sword, right?
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_01: You have to be a skilled blacksmith.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it's that hammer and anvil skill that I think is very, very crucial.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_01: yeah and the same would be true kind of we're talking about a different kind of
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_01: level of analysis here with agent environment dynamics rather than just kind of
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_01: internal neural dynamics but i think the same is true yeah i mean it's fairly easy
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: to imagine ways that the environment can kind of like heat up that relationship and
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_01: and make different outcomes more likely and
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_01: and also the environment can maybe adapt itself to facilitating certain outcomes as
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_00: well there's something yeah because like it sounds to me like the those kind of
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_00: highly weighted expectations things like you know i have i have no friends or
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_00: people don't like me or something like this and that that becomes obviously like a
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_00: self-fulfilling prophecy it's like in cbt and stuff like that they try and work on
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_00: that in terms of reframing kind of getting you know de-weighting them that that's
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_00: that's one like talk therapy version but
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_00: that there's this like really powerful way to heat up
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: the system where you create an opportunity to renegotiate a lot of them obviously
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_00: that can drive people insane and there's like it's very dangerous it's not you know
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_00: something you should just jump into and be like hey i'm gonna heat up my you know
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_01: yeah all my condition and see what happens um adam saffron uses is uh yeah he says
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_01: like you want to ensure that you're deleting certain kind of beliefs but you don't
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_01: want to delete the operating system yeah yeah
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, man.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I've been close to doing that on the laptop, thankfully, but not my own brain.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_00: That would be not good.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_00: But that is really interesting because,
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean,
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_00: it's a bit of a jump here,
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_00: but I mean,
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_00: your work on social media and the warping of the generative model,
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: because that seems to be the same thing,
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_00: but in the opposite way.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's like you can warp a person's generative model by giving them this feedback in
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_00: terms of,
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_00: so like Snapchat surgery is the example.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_00: in a lot of your work and that's like creating those prediction errors so it's like
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_00: if you could there is technological ways that this changes the generative model and
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_00: if you had you know this cooling down or positive account of a better generative
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_00: model that you could use the same kind of process to you know
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_00: for people to have rapid change um yeah i think that's right i don't know if that
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_00: makes sense but yeah it's a bit of a leap but i'm just seeing does that work for
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_01: you and is there a connection yes i have to think about it quite carefully i think
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_01: um in the case of social media what's happening is
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_01: You're not necessarily,
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_01: in the case of psychedelics,
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_01: you're kind of using a direct pharmacological intervention to change,
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_01: kind of intervene in the generative model in ways that kind of go a little bit
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_01: beyond what I'm able to describe.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_01: You're directly acting on brain chemistry in ways that are kind of allowing for
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_01: this kind of change to happen.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_01: In the case of technology and the environment,
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's more like these platforms are so effective at relentlessly delivering
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_01: quite plausible evidence that they're changing the generative model that way.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_01: So it's that they're engaging you in a kind of action perception loop,
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_01: which is,
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_01: for various reasons,
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_01: so effective at altering those priors.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_01: So you might have quite a healthy...
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_01: aspect to your self model where you think yeah I look pretty good like I'm you know
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_01: I look healthy I'm in good shape or you know whatever and then you go about the
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_01: world and that prior holds you know fairly stable if you're then to engage with a
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_01: certain kind of social media and the features of gamification mean that you find
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_01: that you know you want to keep engaging and you're engaging like quite a lot more
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_01: than you maybe should be and the evidence that it's pumping towards you is kind of
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_01: divergent from reality in a certain way where
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_01: all you're seeing is people who are probably on steroids or probably photoshopped
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_01: or at least kind of curated lighting and oil to look incredible.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_01: Over time,
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_01: that could have a kind of sandpaper effect on your prior,
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_01: where you start to,
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_01: you start to,
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_01: that distribution gets flattened and you start to think,
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_01: well,
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_01: actually,
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_01: like I don't look that good.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_01: And then you, as you mentioned before, these things can become like self-fulfilling prophecies.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_01: You start to sample the world in ways that confirm things.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_01: that belief you know you start maybe start looking at other people in the gym that
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_01: you've not noticed before you start comparing yourself to other people you know you
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_01: start comparing the weight that you're moving to these people on youtube that are
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_01: you know all juice to the gills as they say and all of a sudden you
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_01: all of a sudden your kind of self-model is like uh very different than it was
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_01: before because i guess yeah it's not so much that the model itself has been heated
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_01: up and then new evidence has been introduced it's just that new evidence has been
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_01: introduced so relentlessly and effectively that your your model has not been able
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_00: to withstand it yeah yeah okay that that makes more sense um that there's because
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_00: the pharmacological intervention because i do that's a
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_00: I have this Terence McKenna quote in my head that he said that the drugs of the
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_00: future will be computers and the computers of the future will be drugs.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that there is,
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_00: that that technology is operating pharmacologically,
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_00: but at a distance,
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_00: like it still has,
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_00: because if you think about behavioral addiction,
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_00: like that is,
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_00: it's activating the same stuff as a substance addiction,
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_00: but it's symbolic.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm inclined to just go all the way down and say,
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_01: there's no real principle distinction between pharmacology and behavioural,
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_01: like,
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_01: substance addiction and behavioural addictions.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like,
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_01: it's the same dynamic,
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_01: it's the same,
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_01: like,
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_01: it's the same thing is happening in both cases where,
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_01: it's the same neuromodulators,
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_01: it's the same reward systems,
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_01: it's the same kind of dysfunctioning learning relationship with the environment.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_01: um and i think like the distinction between drugs and behaviors for me at least
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_01: almost entirely collapses in terms of what's interesting about addiction i mean
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_01: obviously there are specifics that need to be taken into account when it comes to
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_01: certain substances so for example you know if someone drags you away from playing
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_01: you know if you're
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_01: cripplingly addicted to World of Warcraft and then somebody takes you away from it,
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_01: you're not going to die.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas putting alcohol in cold turkey for various chemical,
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_01: physiological reasons,
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_01: you should be very careful when abstaining from alcohol if you've been drinking
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_01: heavily for a long time.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_01: So there are certain chemical realities that come with substances.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_01: But I think when you kind of zoom out and you're trying to understand what addiction actually is,
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_01: i don't think what's interesting about addiction resides on the level of like the
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_00: stimulus yes yeah and i mean because they talk about addiction as the opposite of
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_00: meaning in a sense like addiction as a kind of short-term pleasure seeking to make
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_00: up for a lack of meaning or even like in the case of like video games addiction
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_00: like you're improving in the game world so you're getting good positive feedback
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_00: you're great at world of warcraft but you got no friends and you know
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: things aren't progressing in your life I think that's what defines like
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_01: fundamentally defines addiction I kind of follow Mark Miller's work there where
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_01: it's a particular kind of dynamic between an agent and the environment where you
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_01: get this like collapse in terms of temporality and scope of an agent's concerns
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_01: where it just becomes you know the consumption of a stimulus which the agent has
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_01: learned minimizes prediction error for various reasons and it's
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_01: vulnerability in other areas makes agents more susceptible to that you know if you
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_01: know heroin is very very good at taking away the experience of subjective level
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_01: subject level anguish say everything else is very hard and taking the drug is very
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_01: easy then that's where there's this danger arises i think the certain behavioral
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_01: addictions are really interesting like you know that
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_01: you mentioned just before you start to break up about video games and kind of video
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_01: games provide this arena for kind of like skilled edge of skills,
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_01: capability sort of interaction with a game world.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_01: And something I've always been interested in is the relationship in terms of like
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_01: prediction error minimization and free energy minimization is how do you,
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_01: how should we think about that in,
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_01: in the context of like a virtual arena?
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_01: It seems like I,
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_01: kind of again like going slightly speculative because i've not really thought about
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_01: it but i used to want there was a paper in my head back in my first year that i
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_01: wanted to write that was about this kind of uh dual um the potential for a kind of
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_01: dual prediction error minimization where you have an agent is existing in like the
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_01: quote you know a physical world where you know the the brain is still um
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_01: it's still kind of operating like interceptive prediction error minimization.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's still, still regulating the body's internal states.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um,
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_01: but the,
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_01: whatever task is taking place,
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_01: like the actual engagement with the environment is taking place in a virtual world.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't,
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_01: yeah,
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure there's some interesting stuff to say there,
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_00: but I,
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_00: yeah,
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think the take home,
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's very relevant to what we're talking about in terms of like,
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_00: that we do have this virtual world that people are trying to deal with.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_00: And because it's linked in with the economic,
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_00: the political,
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_00: the social so much,
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_00: it's almost like your success on the platform can lead to success in the real world
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_00: in a very confusing way.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_01: yeah i mean one thing i thought about i've spoken to dave charmers about this um in
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_01: kind of relation to his book uh reality plus on on kind of like philosophy of
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_01: reality i went to a really wonderful summer school that that dave was at and um
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_01: thinking about uh meaning in relation to virtual worlds and whether it's possible
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_01: to find meaning within virtual reality or whether there's something kind of
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_01: meaning is like necessarily fundamentally rooted in an offline world you know how
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_01: like aesthetic experiences transfer into you know like
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_01: dave has this very well-argued position where like virtual objects are real objects
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_01: like this i think it's virtual realism where there's no kind of there's no real
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_01: distinction in terms of like the things me and you are interested in in this
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_01: conversation between like virtual objects and non-virtual objects whereas my
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_01: instinct is it runs in the opposite direction i think if yeah they're 2d anyway
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_00: that much so far anyway i don't know
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_00: there seems to be but that's like it's so anti-platonic as well because obviously
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_00: plato has this ontology where the image is the lowest level of reality it's like
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_00: yeah well it's not pure illusion but it's an appearance so it's between reality and
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_00: illusion like the people in the cave live in a world of images pretty much and so
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_00: you're supposed to go on this journey out of the cave in order to get to the real
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_00: forms which are more like i don't know aspects of reality but it's interesting that
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_00: the images because I do think I feel like I don't know it's like they're like
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_00: processed foods or something like that when we re-represent information in such a
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_00: way we lose something it's not clear what we lose I don't know in beaming images
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_00: around
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard for people in that imagistic world to have a full sense of meaning.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, my academic journey began when I was an undergrad.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_01: I majored in English literature and my primary area of interest was romantic poetry.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I have this...
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_01: I have this very romantic with a capital R kind of bone in my body where a part of
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_01: me is really repulsed by notions of finding meaning in virtual digital environments.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_01: But at the same time, I'm aware that it's difficult to give a really cogent, forceful argument for that.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's more difficult than...
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_01: than I certainly thought at the beginning.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I think if you,
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_01: even if you take kind of like the John Verveke definition of meaning,
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_01: like it's easy to imagine kind of projects that could unfold in virtual reality
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_01: that you care about beyond your own existence.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_01: There doesn't seem to be any principle the reason
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_01: why we can't find belonging and connectedness in online communities and virtual
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_01: worlds i mean people like as a matter of fact people do find and connectedness in
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_01: in online worlds but uh yeah i think all of this is worthy of much kind of like
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_01: deeper more sustained investigation
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_00: For sure.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose because we're kind of making the argument of we're like technological,
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_00: they're not specifically virtual,
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_00: but like ambient smart environments are kind of technologically mediated
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_00: environments in a sense.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a like 3D spatial web kind of metaverse thing, which I was interested in, to be honest.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_00: I thought that could be,
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_00: would be better than like a 2D internet because people actually interact in a more
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_00: embodied way.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, if it's run by
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_00: facebook and there's you know embodied 3d ads everywhere it wouldn't be great but
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_00: then yeah it's in your brain
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_00: yeah i don't yeah because i guess the technology mediated thing i think there could
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_00: be interventions for meaning that are technologically mediated well for sure yeah i
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_01: mean even even i mean even meaning and it's like i mean if you're talking about
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_01: technology more broadly construed sort of like the design of material space clearly
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_01: facilitates meaningful practices um you know acts of devotion that take place that
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_01: are scaffolded with by specific environments and artifacts and tools you know we
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_01: have
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_01: all throughout history manufactured material artifacts that are kind of like the
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_01: basis for devotional spiritual practice and I don't think there's again maybe not
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_01: too much of a kind of like sharp principle distinction between these things and
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_01: emerging
• 1:04:37
  SPEAKER_01: technologies i i just think we have to be very mindful of like the specifics of
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_01: this technology in terms of you know one of the things i've been interested in
• 1:04:46
  SPEAKER_01: recently is the relationship between adaptive highly adaptive technology and agency
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_01: um the ways in which highly adaptive technology can scaffold agency and diminish
• 1:04:57
  SPEAKER_01: agency so i think the specifics are really important um
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I would say a lot of my work has been quite suspicious of technology.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_01: Some of it's very optimistic.
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_01: I would say in principle,
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm quite optimistic about at least kind of like the theoretical possibility of
• 1:05:15
  SPEAKER_01: building technological systems that are very good for living meaningful lives,
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_01: living connected lives,
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_01: finding belonging.
• 1:05:26
  SPEAKER_01: um and also allowing us to kind of live wisely as well you know like live more
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_01: mindfully there's no reason that we can't build these kinds of systems whether we
• 1:05:35
  SPEAKER_01: will or not different question whether the business incentives are are there yeah
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_01: that's always the shadow that looms over these things you know i mean and it's it's
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_01: it's not it's kind of non-trivial that john has identified some of those aspects as
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_01: like antithetical to meaning you know like
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_01: capitalism commerce advertising marketing like a lot of these things are just kind
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_01: of like direct opposite of what we talk about when we talk about meaning you know
• 1:06:03
  SPEAKER_01: we want yeah we want design strategies that are sort of like or design philosophies
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_01: that are sincere and and uh and transparent yeah and also rooted in a philosophy
• 1:06:13
  SPEAKER_00: really of some like it seems to be like because i think the business incentives
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_00: drive a lot of it but also there's a kind of ambiguity about you know what
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_00: what are the normative principles of good technology building, of good design?
• 1:06:27
  SPEAKER_00: And there's some stuff around it,
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_00: but like what you mentioned about adaptive technology and agency is like,
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_00: there's been so much confusion around agency and questions of free will and control.
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that kind of vagueness has really, I think, impacted like building these better technologies.
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, do you see active inference as like kind of plugging that gap?
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_00: I know you talk about it as principles of good technology.
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
• 1:06:53
  SPEAKER_01: I think active inference,
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_01: what I would say is I think active inference and predictive processing are very
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_01: good frameworks for thinking through these problems.
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_01: I wouldn't go as far as to say active inference is going to solve our issues with technology,
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_01: but I think if you want to understand how technology impacts us and our capacity to
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_01: be well and
• 1:07:16
  SPEAKER_01: to experience subjective well-being how technology might put us in danger of
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_01: experiencing symptoms of psychopathology how technology can cause certain kinds of
• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_01: harm and how technology and then beyond that how technology might scaffold these
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_01: like more philosophically weighty notions of meaning and connectedness and purpose
• 1:07:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think predictive processing is a brilliant framework for thinking about these
• 1:07:45
  SPEAKER_01: things and
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_01: I know on the last episode of the podcast,
• 1:07:48
  SPEAKER_01: we talked about why predictive processing is kind of framework that,
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_01: that we work through.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so yeah, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's the right framework.
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there's nothing about predictive processing itself.
• 1:08:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's going to be other than being like a great tool for analysis and exploration.
• 1:08:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um,
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I forget what the question was before that.
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_00: well,
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_00: it was,
• 1:08:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean,
• 1:08:13
  SPEAKER_00: it's exactly the point,
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_00: really,
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_00: that it provides an account of agency and sentient behavior that can be used normatively.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think it adds something to philosophy of technology generally.
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm really... There are people that within philosophy are working on these kinds of questions.
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_01: So in particular, Shannon Fowler of the University of Edinburgh has a book on technology and the virtues.
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_01: She has a new book out on AI as well, which I've not yet read, but...
• 1:08:45
  SPEAKER_01: the book on technology and the virtues is really sort of germane to what we've been
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_01: talking about in terms of cultivation of character traits because it's essentially
• 1:08:54
  SPEAKER_01: like a virtue ethics grounded approach to living well with technology i don't think
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_01: she really says a great deal about like design of technology it's more about how to
• 1:09:05
  SPEAKER_01: live with the technology that we have um also there's um
• 1:09:10
  SPEAKER_01: a really nice little book by Mark.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm not sure where Mark is now, but it's called self-improvement technology and self-improvement.
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_01: And it's about, um,
• 1:09:23
  SPEAKER_01: moving away from technology that kind of abstracts and gamifies important aspects of our life.
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I think this is like predictive processing can add some kind of cognitive
• 1:09:34
  SPEAKER_01: science like teeth to this kind of argument.
• 1:09:38
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I think Mark's absolutely right.
• 1:09:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think he identifies like gamification of certain.
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, one of the examples he uses is like fitness and physical health.
• 1:09:48
  SPEAKER_01: And how the technology we're building kind of turns that into an abstraction of
• 1:09:54
  SPEAKER_01: like various data points and measurements and statistics.
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_01: It makes me think of when I read that book,
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_01: it made me,
• 1:10:03
  SPEAKER_01: I saw Mark give a talk actually,
• 1:10:04
  SPEAKER_01: and I spoke to him about,
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_01: are you familiar with Goodhart's law?
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, I've never heard of it.
• 1:10:09
  SPEAKER_01: Goodhart's law states that when a measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure.
• 1:10:15
  SPEAKER_01: When a measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure.
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_01: You have like a really good example to kind of grasp this is standardized testing in schools.
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_01: So
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_01: Imagine you're a teacher that's like you're trying to teach kids like English literature.
• 1:10:29
  SPEAKER_01: And in order to measure how well they've learned, you devise a test.
• 1:10:34
  SPEAKER_01: But what Goodhart's law states is that over time,
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_01: it's very likely that the teacher will just simply start to teach the kids how to
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_01: do well at the test.
• 1:10:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so what was originally a kind of, like, neutral measure becomes the aim.
• 1:10:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so the idea then is that it kind of ceases to measure what it was originally
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_01: intended to measure in the first place.
• 1:10:57
  SPEAKER_01: And, like,
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_01: a lot of this is happening with a lot of like technology like kind of fit bits and
• 1:11:02
  SPEAKER_01: various habit trackers and yeah new trackers and things like this and it's so one
• 1:11:08
  SPEAKER_01: one of the questions is how do you avoid this kind of abstraction yes and how do
• 1:11:12
  SPEAKER_00: you i mean because that's like again like what should the metrics be is really i
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_00: think what the question like what are we what's the target and then how do you
• 1:11:21
  SPEAKER_00: actually measure because like i've been thinking about autonomy a lot
• 1:11:24
  SPEAKER_00: And if you could come up with a metric for autonomy,
• 1:11:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think based on a lot of active inference,
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_00: you could have some sort of account.
• 1:11:30
  SPEAKER_00: But then it's like,
• 1:11:31
  SPEAKER_00: even if you program that,
• 1:11:34
  SPEAKER_00: how people will gamify the system,
• 1:11:36
  SPEAKER_00: people will try and...
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_00: It becomes...
• 1:11:40
  SPEAKER_00: it's almost like you know is measuring everything i yeah i don't know yeah yeah
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_00: people love metrics like i i love my love metrics but some things you know should
• 1:11:49
  SPEAKER_01: they be measured it might be that that's just um yeah it might be that in terms of
• 1:11:57
  SPEAKER_01: kind of technology that allows us to kind of be well maybe measuring everything and
• 1:12:01
  SPEAKER_01: turning everything into kind of data is the sort of strategic error as far as
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_00: as far as that's concerned you're saying measuring and getting data won't make me
• 1:12:12
  SPEAKER_00: happy there's no way well my suspicion is not i mean i don't know maybe but i know
• 1:12:17
  SPEAKER_01: him yeah it doesn't it you know i've had i've kind of done experiments with this
• 1:12:23
  SPEAKER_01: where i've used various like trackers and journaling techniques and all kinds of
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_01: ways of like measuring certain things in my life and tracking things and
• 1:12:32
  SPEAKER_01: seeing how things are going and cross-referencing certain streams of data to find
• 1:12:37
  SPEAKER_01: trends and uh yeah it doesn't seem to be the route to to a happy life like life
• 1:12:46
  SPEAKER_01: it's not life is just not an optimization problem in that way you know and i think
• 1:12:51
  SPEAKER_01: we have to be really definitive about how technology can kind of
• 1:12:55
  SPEAKER_01: probably play a slightly more background role in scaffolding the things we care
• 1:13:00
  SPEAKER_01: about while not just turning them into bloodless abstraction.
• 1:13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think that's a great word to end it on, Ben.
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much for your time.
• 1:13:10
  SPEAKER_00: Always fascinating talking to you.
• 1:13:12
  SPEAKER_00: I really, really enjoyed that.
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thank you.