Episode 171: Buddhism vs. Evolution with Guest Robert Wright (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Our question for episode 171 is something like what illusions does evolution program us to buy into? And can these be overcome? And we read why Buddhism is True, a brand new book by Robert Wright. For more information, Please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer meditating on what I imagine my three days dead corpse will look like in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:24 Seth: This is Seth Paskin and my CEO is MIA in Austin, Texas.

0:30 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Or is Cambridge in me?

0:35 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey working on Living in the Less Conditioned Life in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:41 Robert: And I'm Robert Wright. I wrote the aforementioned book and I am honored to be on this podcast of which I am a fan.

0:48 Seth: Welcome.

0:49 Robert: Thank you very much. I'm really happy to be here. I feel like somebody's taking me seriously. If I'm on this podcast, then we've

0:56 Seth: done something terribly wrong. For the last nine years, we have

0:59 Mark: long been in conversation with you about having you on, but you fall into that nether region between the big time philosophers who talk about their own books and and whose books get taught in classes and the like. When Massimo was on, we made him talk about Seneca. He didn't talk about his own book. So we had been talking to you about maybe talking about Teilhard de Chardin or something else and that got shuffled around. But bugging us about your new book that was coming up and guilting us about the fact that we hadn't invited you earlier, that worked very well. So there you go.

1:30 Robert: Thank you. Thank you. Publishing a book brings out the latent self promoter in me in very full form. I was hoping to foster the illusion that I had been kind of coy, you guys had begged, but I guess you've kind of blown. I guess you've kind of blown that story. Thank you.

1:48 Mark: There was inner begging. What is the difference between my begging and your begging? We're all one. Come on.

1:53 Robert: That's right. There is no self. Anyway.

1:55 Seth: Oh gosh.

1:56 Mark: We get a lot of requests to do Eastern philosophy. And this is our third Buddhism episode spread out over many, many years. And what I was very excited about when I got to this was which the title did not warn me about was just your background of evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology. That this is not just about. Here's the tenets of Buddhism. There's a little bit of looking up back to primary texts, but A lot of this is. I'm starting with Western Buddhism, which is. I'm not going to argue, like Owen Flanagan did, we had on the show before, about why Buddhism minus the supernatural elements is really still a legitimate thing.

Of course it's a legitimate thing. A lot of people already practice this. We're not going to argue about whether you should buy into the rebirth part of it. I'm just going to. We don't even know what the Buddha believed anyway. There's so many different kinds of Buddhism that really, it's just unapologetically, how can we pick and choose among the various things that have been handed down to us and developed, even some quite a bit more recently, to come up with something that has practical application, that makes philosophical sense, and most importantly, that jibes with the science involved, which, again, what you're most concerned with here is the evolution, evolution psychology part.

3:07 Robert: Right. And although it's true that I'm looking at what you could call Western Buddhism or one version of Western Buddhism, I do think it is authentically connected to the roots of Buddhist philosophy. I mean, that's an argument I make is that in fact, people who are meditating for, you know, just what might seem like superficial therapeutic reasons, stress reduction and so on, you can draw a kind of connection between what they're doing and actual Buddhist philosophy, including radical sounding ideas in Buddhist philosophy. And I defend some of these radical sounding ideas. And you're right that I do it from a standpoint of evolutionary psychology.

3:50 Dylan: I mean, you go so far as to say the Buddhist philosophy is prescient about the conclusions of modern evolutionary psychology regarding the operation of human psychology and the operation of the human brain as borne out.

4:06 Robert: Yeah, I think there's a tendency to kind of sell Buddhism short. I mean, first of all, to think of Eastern philosophy as more radically different from Western philosophy than I think maybe it is. And also to just not appreciate how systematically Buddhist thinkers over the ages have thought about the human mind and how it works. They haven't done it in what we would call a scientific way. They haven't done controlled experiments. In fact, what they've relied on largely as their starting point is introspective data. They've meditated and had these experiences and had reason to believe that maybe the experiences constituted, in some sense, a clearer view of reality than our ordinary consciousness presents us with. And then they built theories of psychology and philosophy on that. And some of the ideas in philosophy and psychology are, I think, more Western than people might appreciate.

5:06 Mark: So Seth, I know, has dabbled in this is sort of among our group, the most invested in Buddhism. Seth, do you want us to kind of give us an opening statement or react to that?

5:15 Seth: Well, there are aspects of Bob's book that recall the episode we did with Owen Flanagan.

5:23 Robert: Owen Flanagan.

5:24 Seth: But there's a point at which Bob, I listened to some. The interviews with you and whatever that you mentioned. Thich Nhat Hanh and my wife. Our house is filled with Pema Chodron and Thich Nhat Hanh books. So we. There's a certain connection, I feel, with at least the authoritative aspects of this. But I think that my experience with Buddhism has been much more on the therapeutic side. And what interests me about the approach that you've taken and this conversation that we're about to have is. So Owen Flanagan's project was very much about trying to talk about how we can meaningfully and with some validity, extract ethical guidelines from Buddhist psychology without bringing in the metaphysical baggage.

And your project, in some sense is you very clearly take on the metaphysical challenge, although in a somewhat different way, and then also address the ethical challenge. So I have just been not a practitioner of meditation, but a practitioner of compassion, I guess I would say. And I struggle personally with the desire and also the sense that I should implement a meditative practice without actually doing so, because I don't have that connection with what the actual benefit and outcome will be, other than as it's articulated experientially from other people.

And I think in your book, you actually have done a really good job of suggesting a way that I can connect with intellectually about implementing a practice.

6:56 Robert: I'm glad to hear it. And I do think that there is a. I think Buddhism thinks that there's a connection between the metaphysics and the ethics. Maybe the simplest way to summarize the view that I think is pretty close to the core of Buddhism is that the reason we suffer and the reason we make other people suffer is that we don't see the world clearly. And if we see the world more clearly, coming closer to the metaphysical truth about things, we will therefore suffer less and we will be better people. We will make other people suffer less. So Buddhism is positing a kind of convergence of truth, happiness and goodness in a certain sense.

And part of that, if you look at two of those three things, they are saying that there is a connection between seeing the metaphysics clearly and becoming a better person. And I was almost surprised by the extent to which I wound up thinking that that's basically right. One quick note, by the way. If you're having trouble convincing yourself to meditate. You might try what I had to do to become a real meditator, which is just go to a one week silent meditation retreat. I would never have gotten into this stuff if I hadn't had that experience. And everyone I know who's done that has found it rewarding, although it's not guaranteed.

But anyway, that's my, that's the advice column. Part of this conversation is go to a meditation retreat.

8:21 Seth: At this point, the best I've been able to accomplish is to try to walk my dogs mindfully.

8:26 Robert: Yeah, well, with my dogs that would not be able to happen.

8:30 Mark: Yeah, I was certainly while reading this, going through and just trying off the cuff. Okay, there's an annoying sound. Let me just sit here and try to make it a not annoying sound. Like, obviously without doing any real meditation, but just a lot of these things, I feel like converting irritating noise into music. Like that's something I'm very familiar with from delving into avant garde music and things and John Cage and all that. But that's not presented as a do this for 30 minutes a day thing. That's a. If you're open minded and you try and you concentrate and you put yourself in a certain mode that you've kind of figured out on your own, there's no direction into how to do this.

But just, yeah, you can hear noise as music or you can externalize pain or, you know, some of these things I either looked into in a very non systematic way either when I was young, or maybe it's just dispositionally. Some people are more stoic about pain and being able to externalize than others. But you know, a lot of this was very familiar and it of course sort of divides itself between giving this idiosyncratic and original, I think account that brings evolutionary psychology and Buddhism together and then is also just a real polemic. You really should start meditating.

Although you're very honest about it, it's not that you had this enlightenment experience and everything has been great from now on. You're very straight up about like, no, it takes constant work. You move forward a little, you move back a little and you don't know, you know, you're relying on the words of others, sometimes explicitly in the book interviews with them to talk about some of the more advanced experiences. So it's a nice little travel journal as well as piece of exposition.

10:05 Robert: I have had nothing like an experience of true enlightenment. But one thing about going to meditation retreats is you can have some pretty deep experiences And I think I've had enough kind of glimpses of the kinds of profound experiences that really adept meditators have that I was able to kind of converse with them in an illuminating way. I had a little sense of what they meant. And the thing you were mentioning about turning noise into music, that's a perfect example of something that I can now kind of do in everyday life if circumstances demand it.

And I don't think I'd have ever been able to do it if I hadn't done it first on a retreat. It's something I recount in the book. There was a bunch of construction noise because they were building something at the retreat center. And these, what you would expect to be annoying, like buzz saw noises, came to be really deeply enjoyable. And that itself illustrates something about a principle of Buddhist philosophy having to do with just the extent to which kinds of judgments we impose on things shape our perception of them and give us what is in some sense, a distorted idea of their intrinsic nature.

I mean, sounds are neither good nor bad by their nature.

11:27 Seth: That kind of leads me into one of the very first things you bring out that I think is interesting is the notion that so typically in philosophy, when we've talked about trying to focus on perception or focus on perceptions as a manifold or as a neutral sense input, there's been this question of trying to identify to what extent perceptions contribute and to what extent our consciousness or something like that contributes. And what I took away from the first part of your book is this idea that perceptions aren't inherently connected to some sort of affect or feeling.

And it's kind of a radical, at least with respect to somebody who grew up in the Western tradition and was like a devotee of phenomenology early on. This idea that what you're trying to untangle when you try to take a phenomenological approach, if you will, to your perception is not the extent to which you're imposing order or structure on them, but the extent to which they are engendering feelings in you. And I think that's a fascinating place to start.

12:45 Robert: Yeah, and this is the one place where I think I may be making an original argument. Of course, as you guys know, having spent time in academia, usually when you think you've made an original argument, it turns out you haven't, and somebody had already said it. But if you look at the Buddhist concept of emptiness, which can be put perhaps a little too simply, but can be put as just meaning that things have no essence, they have no intrinsic kind of essence, you Might say sometimes it's put they have no inherent existence. But actually I should take a detour and say one interesting thing about Buddhism is how philosophical doctrines seem to have originated as experiential apprehensions and then later been articulated philosophically and later had formal defenses of them develop.

Right. I mean, a lot of this is lost in the midst of history, but I think it's a good guess and a lot of people think it's the case that a doctrine like emptiness may have originated with people going, you know, the tree, the rock, they seem so different. But it all seems the same to me now that I've meditated for six months, all day or whatever it was.

13:59 Mark: Well, and was there something in the Hindu tradition, say, that you would point to? Like you talk about how no self, anatman, that was directly a response to the Brahmanic, the Hindu notion of Atman, which is not only the individual self, but it's sort of the God self and we all participate in it. Even though you end up arguing in your book that, well, it could be that when people have mystical experiences in these various traditions, they're actually experiencing one of the same thing. And so there's not as much difference between absolute emptiness, the self is nothing, and the absolute unity of everything.

Even though you end up breaking those down historically, there's a very clear point where the no self doctrine came from in opposition to a pretty weird to our modern light self doctrine. Not just that there's an ego running things or something. Was there something similarly that you know about that that emptiness was reacting to?

14:52 Robert: Well, what I think. And maybe we should take a detour from our detour and say that the emptiness, not self terminology is interesting because you hear emptiness more in Mahayana, not Theravada Buddhism. Those are the two basic kinds of Buddhism. But sometimes those terms get almost interchangeable in the sense that sometimes it is said that one of the three marks of existence is not self. In other words, not self pervades everything. And what is meant there is that I don't have a self and nothing out there that I see has a self. At least that's a common interpretation of the doctrine.

In other words, nothing out there has an essence. And similarly in Mahayana tradition, sometimes you'll hear emptiness to refer both to what I just said. The things out there are actually empty of inherent existence, of essence, and I am empty of a self. Sometimes these the two doctrines of not self in the sense of myself not existing and emptiness in the sense of stuff out there not having an essence are presented as a unified thing, as a single phenomenon in Buddhist tradition. I personally think that's like a bad idea. I think two different things are going on with those two apprehensions.

And if they can be defended, they must be defended separately on different grounds.

16:06 Mark: Yeah. Because it's two different observations within what we're calling phenomenology. But what you experience during meditation or peak experience or whatever.

16:14 Robert: Yeah. So but for convenience, I like to refer to not self as just meaning. Like humans reflecting on themselves and realizing there's no self in there and emptiness to refer to the things that they see out there. So that's the way I use the terms, notwithstanding their kind of conflation.

16:30 Dylan: But one thing that you talk a bit about in the book, and I kept on coming back to just in reading about the not self and also the emptiness doctrine, is the way in which on the one hand, you're denying essences of things. And to me that it requires a little bit of talking about what you mean by essence. And one of the big features that made one want to deny it was the notion that there was some kind of either sort of eternal or enduring character of the person. And maybe there would be some kind of coming into being, going out of being. But what I found a little bit strange about it was it was denying a certain kind of solidity.

Yet at the same time there was a self or an identity or a thing that was. You talk about this a little bit. Something was doing the thinking, so to speak. And this is where that experience of oneness and not self sort of converge. That to me, I experience this kind of flow with other activities where I don't feel the distinct presence of myself except in sort of as a conduit. That's not the same thing to me as not having an essence. And it's also not the same thing as not having a self. You know, a node in a resonance is not the same thing as there not being any resonance.

And I can see how it's very helpful, particularly in terms of the meditation side. And I see it as that nexus in the metaphysics. But at the end it seemed to almost turn on itself. Right. That the way in which you properly understood self was through this notion of not having an essence, but out of which that there was a self that was non essential. Right. That was constantly changing and developing, or is full of. Heraclitus would say something like, it's all motion, all moving around. That's what to me the no essence is juxtaposing against. And that somehow we are understanding essence as being static and doesn't involve becoming.

It's only pure being. And what we're trying to get to in the Buddhist understanding is that there's a lot more flow there. In fact, it's all flow. It's all transitional and becoming. And that notion of being is, in its staticness, wrong.

18:57 Robert: Right, so not self. It's a more complicated doctrine than emptiness, in a way, because I think there are more different ways to describe what it means. And I think those different ways are actually consequentially different. In other words, I mean, I think not self has come to mean different things in the Buddhist tradition. It can mean that the bounds of yourself are an illusion, that really there's more continuity between you and the world than you appreciate. It can mean the intuition that your conscious self is this CEO, it's thinking the thoughts, making the decisions, that that is an illusion.

And by the way, that's, as I emphasize in the book, I think particularly well corroborated by modern psychology, Buddhism's suspicion about the idea that this conscious self is a CEO. And there's also, I mean, if you look at the Buddha's original argument on behalf of not self, a lot of that is about looking at what the parts of the self you normally consider parts of the self, your feelings, your perceptions, your physical body, and actually kind of rational arguing, you know, in a traditional philosophical sense, in a sense that those things don't have the properties that we associate with the self.

So there's various different arguments for the various different conceptions of not self. But certainly one thing that is going on is what you just highlighted. And that is also going on in the traditional Buddhist defenses of the concept of emptiness, the idea that things I see out there don't have essence. And this gets back to what I said about Buddhist philosophy being more Western than people appreciate. In both cases, there's a real emphasis on the pervasiveness of causality. It's almost like taking a scientific worldview more seriously than Westerners take it in a certain sense.

I mean, if you take scientific worldview to be the view that, you know, we can break all of reality down into causes and effects. Well, Buddhism says, well, okay, if you do that, then it's really all flow. I mean, what that implies is that within yourself there is no kind of autonomous generator of action. It's all ultimately in response to conditions, is the Buddhist term that roughly means causes. And of course, now people immediately think of the determinism, free will question, that question per se. Has not gotten a lot of attention in Buddhist philosophy, Just that the question of free will has not come up in so many words.

But it is certainly the case that one big part of what they mean by not self is appreciating the extent to which our behavior is actually governed by forces outside ourselves, no matter how much time we spend ourselves convincing ourselves that we are in charge. And by the way, that is meant to be the beginning of liberation in general. All of these metaphysical ideas are supposed to have a payoff. And just to finish, I mean, appreciating the way the world is pushing your buttons is in concert with meditative practice meant to liberate yourself from the pushing of the buttons.

22:06 Wes: Let's say what the claim that there's no essences means. So chapters 10 and 11, I think. Right, sure.

22:13 Mark: Just to relate this to. We did have a past episode on emptiness from the Mahayana tradition, which takes it much more literally as a metaphysical claim that maybe you could compare to Berkeley or something like that. And just Bob is not concerned with that. That's not what we're talking about here.

22:32 Wes: So I'm looking at the talk about the buzz saw in chapter 10. So it says that all things are without essence, but with qualities that can be seen. The sutra isn't denying the reality of the buzzsaw around the waves that were hitting my ear, qualities I was observing. But it seems to be saying that the essence I normally see beneath the qualities essence of buzz saw is a matter of interpretation. It is something I'm choosing to construct or not from the qualities. Essences don't exist independently of human perception. So that seems to be the philosophical claim there. I mean, I know you're recounting a passage there, but it seems like something you. You've embraced the effective charge that we give to objects.

23:15 Robert: Yeah, I actually defend the idea, but I defend it in kind of Darwinian terms. So the traditional Buddhist defense of emptiness, the idea that things out there don't have essence, has kind of recapitulated part of what we just said about the self. It's like, well, these things are in such ongoing causal relationship. You know, a tree cannot exist without the sunlight and the water, and meanwhile it's expelling these chemicals. So, like, it's all flow. And then there have also been arguments like, so you've got a chariot. You take one wheel away from the chariot.

Is it still a chariot? You go, well, yeah, it's a chariot without a wheel. And you go, well, what if you take this part away and what if you take this part and you go through, and by the end you've taken everything away? And they're still saying, well, in each of those cases, it was still a chariot without that part. But you've listed all the parts. And so they say, well, then, where is the essence? So these are the kinds of arguments you've traditionally gotten. They are metaphysical or ontological arguments for a metaphysical or ontological proposition.

But my argument is a psychological one in defense of these, which is that. And it gets back to the fact that I think originally emptiness was an apprehension that was later defended philosophically. It was like people again seeing things as not projecting such distinct, distinctive identities as they had before all the meditation. And my defense of that is as follows. I think there's good reason to think that when we feel those very distinctive identities, when we in a certain sense perceive essence, a key factor shaping the essence is affect.

In some cases, these are very dramatic. Like, for purposes of illustration, I use Paul Bloom's book How Pleasure Works, where he talks about exotic objects that people pay huge amounts of money for, like JFK's golf clubs or whatever, and how those things seem to them to project an aura, right? Like if you said to the person who won the golf clubs and was holding them like, oh, there's been a mistake. These are actually not his golf clubs. These are just some, you know, some random guy's golf clubs, then they would undergo an affective shift, right?

Their perception of the golf clubs would be drained of a certain affective resonance. I'm arguing in following on psychologists who have made these arguments that in a more subtle way, affect shapes, all kinds of essence. The feeling I have when I come home and look at my home, the feeling I have when I look at my car as opposed to other cars, or the feeling I have when I look at cars generically as opposed to ships. I'm arguing that feeling is the word. It's very, very subtle in some cases, but I'm arguing that feeling is what shapes essence.

So that's a proposition you have to accept if you're going to buy the rest of my argument. And the rest of my argument is that feeling is inherently not a guide to an objectively correct view of anything, because feelings evolved to serve a particular organism's Darwinian interests. Or if you're talking about very generic feelings and reactions, a particular species, Darwinian interest, good feelings, when you saw things that it was in your Darwinian interest to approach, like food mates, you had bad feelings when you saw predators, toxins. So feelings just correspond to our Darwinian interests.

Or we get bigger brains and the feelings get more complicated, like gratitude and so on. But still the basic idea is they have a negative or positive tenor depending on what the relationship of the organism's interest is to the thing. And my point is just like look, if you're looking for the view from nowhere, right, which is a reasonable thing to look for. If you're going to say I want the metaphysical truth about things, that would be the view from nowhere. And feelings are inherently a departure from the view. This is the part that I said, so far as I know is original, you never know.

I'm breaking down the psychological apprehension of essence and arguing that that is not a valid path to the truest possible perception of the thing.

27:30 Wes: So I think there's a history of this type of talk in philosophy, this idea of constructing things, but I think it's usually focused in a more kind of cognitive science way. So for instance, Kant would want to say we construct things by way of our experience, infuses them with causality or infuses them with concepts of number or relation or very, very basic logical categories and categories from the sciences and that those things are necessary even for us to have an experience. So that idea of construction has precedence. I think Euro Kant is unique in the sense of it seems to say that we can do that simply with affect.

So it's simply because something is important to us, we make it into a thing. I might be mischaracterizing you there. And that to be important to us we have to sort of unify it. We have to give it a unity that it doesn't really have. I think a hard headed naturalist might come along and say, well, human beings, right, we're hardwired actually to be afraid of snakes and spiders. If I understand the neuroscience and hard headed naturalists might come along and say, well, if to be afraid of spiders there actually have to be spiders and to be afraid of spiders we actually have to be able to perceive spiders by way of non affective cognitive constructs.

And then the affect. Then we charge that I think they might have trouble seeing how an affect could allow us to form abstract categories and a typology for spiders and things like that. Is affect sophisticated enough to do all things that we do cognitively as far as giving structure to the world?

29:04 Robert: Oh, I don't think it is by itself, first of all constructing a model of three dimensional reality when you visually perceive things. And that's a prerequisite for assigning any kind of affective Resonance to anything, for sure. And by the way, when I said, I think this may be original, I didn't mean like, in contrast to other Western philosophers, descriptions of how we construct things. I have no idea where it fits there. I'm talking about as a defense of the Buddhist idea of emptiness, as an argument for a reason to think of emptiness as a truer apprehension of the world.

Because when you attain this perspective, and I talk in the book to some people who, I have reason to believe that that's actually the way they go around viewing the world. These are people who have meditated for like billions of hours or whatever, but they, on an everyday basis, there was some uniformity in what these different people said. Things don't project their identities as strongly. And when I interrogated them, they said, yes, I feel less strongly about those things. You're definitely right that constructing reality is about much more than feeling.

I think the role of feeling is underappreciated now in psychology. It's become more and more appreciated in recent decades. There's more and more emphasis on how finely intertwined affect and cognition are, whereas they used to be thought of as almost like separate departments. And this just makes perfect sense from a Darwinian point of view because feelings are all about assigning value to things as natural selection wants us to value them. So assigning value to things based on the way our ancestors interacted with them or with things like them, I mean, it all gets very complicated because of course, there weren't golf clubs in the ancestral environment.

30:48 Dylan: I do think it's worth pointing out that even from a Darwinian perspective, right. There may be things that are clearly selected for from a preservation of species kind of perspective. Right. So feelings of attraction associated with mating and generating progeny, the kind of combination of hormones and feelings and all that stuff that go into that, that all makes sense. But it may also well be that there are secondary effects of those mechanisms that aren't, strictly speaking, selective from a species perspective, but have consequences in our own psychology and our own activities that don't have a role in selective pressure but do have their own kind of existence.

Right. It doesn't have to be that every trait that a creature has, and certainly it wouldn't have to be that every feeling that a human being has has a direct evolutionary purpose or consequence. Evolution isn't hyper efficient in that respect.

31:59 Seth: Yeah.

32:00 Mark: Can you have emotions that are free riders basically, or.

32:02 Dylan: Yes. Just like you can have organs that are free riders and you can have organisms that are free riders.

32:08 Mark: Right.

32:08 Dylan: Argument in evolution isn't that everything is super optimized by, so that everything has an explicit role, especially that it is serving a selective purpose. It may be sometimes that things didn't have a selective purpose and then ultimately that weren't selected against that just were free riding along. And then maybe those things do end up getting selected right, Having a selective purpose. And other things turn away from having selective purpose. We want to be a little bit careful about attributing every kind of experience in our psychology to primordial human nature.

32:44 Wes: So specific emotions, for instance, rather than simply serving some obvious evolutionary purpose, could just be a byproduct of what it means to have a human kind of consciousness, to be a self conscious being. It could be implicit in the structure of such a thing. And so consciousness, something on a grosser level like human self consciousness, might be the thing that's evolutionarily selected for. And then there are structures within that that ride along with it. And some of those things, like envy for instance, might actually be by itself negative from an evolutionary point of view. Not actually constructive, but implicit structurally related to something larger. That overall, when you sum up all the parts, has an evolutionary advantage. So that's a debate and it's not something people agree about, but it's worth mentioning.

33:37 Robert: I'm certainly not saying that everything we do is adaptive, although I would say that the most glaring examples of maladaptive behavior and maladaptive feelings that drive the behavior are a result of our being in an environment so different from the one we were designed for, like road rage or something where you can certainly come up with a plausible explanation for something like rage. And by the way, I don't think envy's a huge challenge to come up with a conjectural Darwinian explanation. Guy has mate you would like to have. You can see how natural selection might want to inspire feelings that would lead you to try to do something to change whose mate that was.

Like road rage. There's reason to believe this made sense as a way to convey in the ancestral environment rage that you are not to be trifled with. Somebody messes with you, tries to take your possessions, your mate or something. You show that even if you're going to lose the fight you have that person paid a price. So that makes sense. Then you take it into the modern environment and it's crazy.

34:35 Wes: I don't buy these explanations. I don't think they're actually plausible. So for instance, envy, and this gets into the way in which they're conjectural. It's enough to desire the mate and have the courage to try and take it away from the other person. The envy itself, which is a pretty crippling kind of feeling by the way, it doesn't usually actually produce any sort of constructive behavior, is harder to explain into those terms. But I only mention that not to nitpick, but just to show people the kinds of debates that we could have about that sort of thing.

But then in the question of road rage, and I think this is important to your book overall because we talk a lot about emotions. But then there are things that scientists like to call social emotions. Road rage takes a different level of explanation because it's related to what we think of as status. If a moose runs out into the road and gets in the way of our car, despite other than being afraid and coming to a screeching halt, we don't give it the finger, we don't get outraged. Maybe in a state of, yeah, irrationality you might. We cannot get as angry at a moose as we could at a human being because we have certain expectations about what other human beings ought to do.

And we have those expectations because our existence as self conscious beings is intimately tied to the fantasy of the way others see us. So other consciousnesses, developmentally in the beginning, we have to internalize the mirror of a early caretaker who sees us seeing ourselves, which is essential to us existing as self conscious beings requires internalizing that sort of mirror. So when we go out into the world and we get a kind of mirror that we don't like, we can be enraged at that. An animal, a moose, can't be a mirror for us. So it can't be the sort of mirror that disrespects us and represents an existential threat by way of that disrespect.

And then the other level of explanation here is that, and this is Rousseau's idea, there isn't anything constructive about all this status and power stuff. That itself is not selected for. It is a nasty byproduct actually of empathy. For Rousseau, it's the dark side of empathy, which is that not only can we understand other people's feelings and have a theory of mind about them and feel pain when they feel pain, but we can develop expectations towards their having empathy towards us and feel disrespected and enraged when they don't meet that expectation.

So the idea here is that if you have a theory of social recognition that is intimately tied to the development of self consciousness and things like status consciousness, which I think is what you need to explain road rage are just byproducts of what it means to be a self conscious being. That may all be wrong. But again, that's just an example of explaining things as sort of structural necessities on other things that might be selected for rather than saying that at that fine grain level those things are selected for.

37:36 Mark: Let me just turn it into a general question to Bob because I know you're the expert in terms of your past books which we did not read, were all about this, were about constructing these evolutionary explanations is yes, I think you can very easily come up with a story like you do for road rage or for envy or something. And I'm not at all disputing the general Darwinian picture that yeah, whatever we have either was directly selected for or it was a free rider for something that was selected for. That there's some historical story of what happened.

But to be more specific about that, I've heard the allegation that oh, these evolutionary stories are, they're like just so stories that you're kind of making up some history. And a response to that has been, well, we're not saying exactly how it evolved. It's just as a functional explanation, this is the function that road rage would serve. So why not? Is there any sort of methodological consideration that would make us hesitate to apply one of these evolutionary explanations to point whether it would be a free ride or something directly selected for?

38:41 Robert: Let me just say about evolutionary psychology broadly, you know, a lot of these things are kind of just so stories explaining anything in evolutionary terms is more challenging than say certain kinds of things in physics and other sciences because the history has already happened and we can't make it happen again and watch it. So theories about why things evolved are hard to test. In some cases there are better tests than others. And in my book the Moral Animal, I kind of went through and talked about the specific logic behind different claims.

And I kind of acknowledge that some of them are just not much more than conjecture. Some of them have evidence, more considerable evidence on their side, but that's just kind of the nature of the beast. And my view is that in any science what you ask yourself is if you're trying to explain something like if you see an emotion that's universal, it's found in all cultures and you say, well maybe then there has some genetic basis, well, what would the evolutionary explanation for that be? My view is the best theory at any given point is just the best theory, period.

And that's all it is in physics. By the way, I don't think you ever proved theories in physics, they could be shown to be wrong at some day in the future. So I don't think we want to turn this into a seminar in evolutionary psychology per se.

39:59 Mark: No, we couldn't resist picking your brain a little about this of such central importance.

40:03 Robert: For me, the main thing about evolution is Buddhism claims we don't by nature see the world clearly. We are prone to recurring suffering, and in particular, you might say, unsatisfactoriness. I mean, some people think that the word dukkha, which is typically translated as suffering, could also be translated as just unsatisfactoriness. We're always discontented, so we don't see the world clearly. We suffer, we're discontented recurringly. And then Buddhism posits a connection between those two and says that if you saw the world more clearly, you could do something about the suffering.

And I just want to say, first of all, two things I came to appreciate while writing the Moral Animal was natural selection didn't design us to be enduringly happy. In fact, you can see why if gratification did not evaporate, that would be a bad thing from natural selection's point of view, right? You just eat a meal or have sex and then just lie there going, this feels great. No, I mean, naturally, natural selection would design animals that are continuously motivated to do better to do more by natural selections lights. And I don't think we should accept natural selections lights.

Of course, I don't think, like genetic proliferation should be the be all and end all, and we should reflect on all that and bring our own values to bear. But the other thing natural selection doesn't care about is, strictly speaking, is the accuracy of our perceptions. Okay? Now, of course, in many ways, our perceptions are accurate. You want to be able to see the big boulder or you'll stumble over it. At the same time, it's easy to show that in some cases, inaccuracy of perception is favored by natural selection. I mean, people have a tendency, for example, if there's a large object moving toward them, to overestimate the speed at which it's moving.

And again, we don't know why that is, but a reasonable conjecture is that you know, better safe than sorry, right? It makes sense from the organism's point of view to err on the side of caution. And so too with things like fear and anxiety. It's like if you're walking through territory you know to be snake infested, every little sound is going to make you briefly maybe feel fear, maybe even think you see a snake that Isn't a snake. Whatever. It gets much more consequential morally with cognitive biases that we bring to bear on people based on whether we consider them allies or enemies.

And this is one of the main reasons I wrote the book, is because I think it's these kinds of illusions that are most dangerous and most likely to lead to global catastrophe. And I think you see them unfolding right now in all kinds of tribalism, Ideological tribalism in America, sectarian tribalism abroad. These boil down to illusions we have about people, evaluative illusions, and specific cognitive biases that are kind of interesting to look at based on where they fit into our social scheme. So you have natural selection being, strictly speaking, indifferent to our happiness and the clarity of our perception, and being willing to subordinate either of those to its ultimate priority of genetic proliferation.

You can see that kind of corresponding to Buddhism. And by the way, I think both of these problems, inaccuracy of perception and suffering, are exacerbated by our living in an environment very different from the one we were designed for. So you get thrown into these situations we weren't designed for, like addressing a huge crowd you don't know. And so people get public speaking anxiety and so on. I just want to emphasize these two. Take home lessons from evolutionary theory. We probably were built in some ways not to see the world clearly. We were built to suffer.

And I think then Buddhism's additional claim that there's a connection between the two and that there's a way to address the problem through meditative practice. Those things I'm willing to defend as well.

43:53 Wes: Yeah, the overall idea, and this is much like the idea in stoicism, there's so much overlap here. I'm sure you're aware of Massimo Pigliucci.

44:00 Robert: I've had a couple of their online dialogues with Massimo. Yeah, yeah.

44:04 Wes: There's so much crossover, and it's really interesting. But the idea is that we imbue our everyday, ordinary suffering with a significance it doesn't have. And so we enhance it. We make it worse than it really is. And these sorts of practices like stoic practice or Buddhist meditative practice, the point of that is to unravel that significance, subtract it so that we don't suffer in that extra way.

44:34 Robert: That's certainly part of the idea of Buddhism.

44:39 Wes: I think what you're doing here is you're explaining how the cause of us imbuing things with that. So for stoicism, it's just we look at things in the outside world as metaphysically good or metaphysically evil when they're just not. There's nothing good or evil in the world. The only thing that could be good or evil is our own state of mind, our own virtuousness or lack of virtue. In your case, you're explaining it in terms of we imbue our suffering with significance it doesn't have because of the way our brains are designed.

45:10 Robert: Evolutionarily, I guess it's not obvious to me that it would have to be the case that we were capable of separating painful stimuli from actual perceived suffering. But Buddhist practice does seem to be able to do that. And I have some experience with that. I mean, again, these are things that are easier to do on retreat than in everyday practice. But to some extent in everyday practice on retreat, I've done things like I had an abscessed tooth develop once on retreat, and it was incredibly painful. And so I'd meditate and then like, I would drink this liquid that had been creating pain during the retreat.

But I noticed that a certain attitude toward it took a lot of the pain away. So too, with anxiety, you can, like, experience anxiety in a way that it ceases to make you suffer. And I've done that. And I just want to emphasize what a radical idea this is coming out of Buddhism, that we can take the very feelings whose valence I would have thought just programmed into us. I mean, I would have just thought like feelings that natural selection once. In quotes. Of course, once is in quotes, since natural selection is not a conscious designer. But I would have thought feelings that natural selection wants us to be averse to, wants us to feel as painful, might just have that inherent property.

There's no way around it. But meditative discipline actually gives you the option of defying natural selection at the most fundamental level and just say no. These feelings that have been painful throughout the history of our species, from a certain perspective, can be seen as not painful. That's amazing.

46:48 Wes: So let me just say one thing about that. So most animals write. I don't think they can imbue their suffering with an extra significance in the way we can.

46:56 Robert: I have no idea what it's like to be a non human animal, a bat, or any other kind of non human animal, but it's a good guess that we're adding narratives.

47:04 Wes: There's no need for meditative practice for a bear, right? Or do they share our evolutionary fate in that sense of being programmed to?

47:13 Mark: I would think they would be subject

47:14 Robert: to the same delusions, like false positives, for example. So they feel fear more often than it turns out to be warranted.

47:22 Wes: But they can't be neurotically, for the most part, miserable like human beings. And they don't need that misery. Which is really a reason why a lot of people get into meditation, right? It's not that the worst suffering in life isn't having toothaches and things like that. The worst suffering is social suffering. I think this is why I brought up the question of status and self consciousness. I think it's the types of suffering that involve our relationships to other human beings. That's what we really suffer from. And we can connect that to ordinary pleasures.

So for instance, if we're not getting as much sexual gratification as we want, that's a certain type of suffering. But it's not nearly as bad as a type of suffering of the kind of inner monologue where I say I'm such a loser, where I humiliate myself and give myself a lower status than I might otherwise have because of that suffering. That's the extra level of suffering that we add to things. And so that's the way I would explain the way we imbue things with extra significance so that we suffer more. So stoicism, I think is actually one way of approaching that very thing.

Because to say that things are absolutely good or absolutely bad in the world, I think that kind of viewpoint is inherently related to, again, to these social emotions and thoughts of the way other people perceive us. Or it's the same thing in psychodynamic therapy. For Freud said the whole point is to transform neurotic misery into common unhappiness. Not getting sex, it's an ordinary common unhappiness. It's not as excruciating as the sort of meta suffering underneath that. And I think a meditative practice, stoic or Buddhism or some other sort of therapeutic tradition, that's what they try and do.

They try and get you to feel your suffering as it is without the extra meta level interpretation on that. But my point is just that that meta level interpretation is social. It involves the existence of our self consciousness, a hierarchical social society and all the rest of that stuff.

49:15 Robert: I guess it is. I'm not sure when on those times when I've succeeded in kind of distancing myself from just raw physical pain like back pain or toothache. I'm not sure that the social thing was so important. But I certainly agree. We are a species that tells stories about ourselves. And here you come back to the idea of not self. I would argue that this is a function of the way we Evolved that we are inclined to present ourselves to society in some sort of coherent way. I am the kind of person who does this. This is the reason you should respect me.

Because we have to tell stories to others about ourselves or at least project coherent narratives about ourselves. We have stories about ourselves. And you could construe Buddhism as saying story is the right word because there really is no persistent you, right? There's no thing that really is the same today and tomorrow and from this hour to that hour. You admitted this behavior yesterday and that one. No, just like drop the story thing because there's less solidity in there to begin with.

50:20 Wes: See, what I think is helpful there though, is if there's no self, then suffering can't be a blow to one's pride. It can't be a threat to.

50:28 Robert: There's nothing to be offended or threatened.

50:30 Wes: There's suffering as suffering as just this thing that just is itself. And then there's suffering felt as a threat to the self. And there's a meta level judgment, I should not be feeling this, which is predicated on this idea that I have a self whose integrity is threatened by the suffering and whose essence is incompatible with suffering and things like that.

50:53 Robert: And I should not be feeling this as just a subset of larger phenomena of this feels bad. And again, you know, Buddhism offers you a way to take things that traditionally have felt bad or that you think for some reason should feel bad and make them not feel bad. It's not trivially easy. I don't mean that at all. Daily meditation practice is a hard thing to sustain. The gains can be meager and so on. But this to me is what's interesting about Buddhism is what a fundamental assault it is on the very machinery by which natural selection tries to govern animals.