Ep. 326: Guest Michael Tomasello on the Evolution of Agency (Part One)

0:07 Wes: You are listening to Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 325 is something like, how did agency evolve? And today we'll talk to Michael Tomasello about his book the Evolution of agency, published in 2022. This is Wes Alwan, not just an I and a me, but part of the collective we that is Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:34 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:37 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in conversation with my homunculus, but not in a bad way, in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:44 Christopher: This is Christopher Heath, jointly self regulating in Los Angeles, California.

0:50 Mike: This is Mike Tomasello in Durham, North Carolina.

0:53 Wes: Welcome, Mike. Thank you very much for coming on. Yes, we recently did an episode on your book Constructing a Language.

1:00 Mike: That's a while back, but okay.

1:02 Wes: Yeah, yeah. Chris and I have delved into a lot of your work, a lot of your books, and I've found it absolutely fascinating and really informative. We're used to reading philosophy and so we're weaker on this type of subject matter. And so for instance, when addressing a question like that of agency, I think we're used to talking about it at a much more abstract level. Right. So if this were a typical episode, I think we'd begin by talking about the way philosophers typically define agency, which is as something to do with intentional action, which means being able to formulate a goal and then maybe a practical syllogism or some sort of that says how I'm going to obtain that goal and cash things out.

In those terms. I found it really helpful to think about agency in terms of the evolution of agency, agency from more primitive life forms up through mammals and apes and human beings. So I really enjoyed this book and I think it's important for anyone who wants to understand agency and the structure of agency to think about this sort of evolution.

2:11 Dylan: I loved it in that vein. Would of course, in order to talk about agency in terms of evolution, you have to come up with a way of talking about agency that could evolve and the formulation from the beginning as it being fundamentally a feedback mechanism or underpinned by a feedback mechanism that then can have different features that are the distillation or the formulated higher level functioning of that feedback mechanism and being able to talk about its attributes and its inputs and outputs. And the results of those to me made much more clear actually what we're talking about when we're talking about agency for one thing.

And then for me, what was very exciting was the way in which you really engage a problem that I think is central in philosophy, which is the problem of, like, the world is full of all kinds of signals. How do we interact with those and turn them into things or turn them in and there's some kind of magic happening. And what you really, I think in a way, focusing on agency. But to me, it becomes we don't do that. We don't process the whole world all at once, all at the same time. Right? We're doing something that's fundamentally making go, no go decisions originally and about very local conditions that involve predicting something about what will happen that grows in sophistication.

So at some level, there's a feedback mechanism that amounts to the scope of our attention and that the inputs of that is really. That's the universe and that the way in which those elements get pulled in, it's no longer the buzzing, amazing, you know, completely infinite universe that we have to distill down. So this book to me makes more rich and more particular very, very poignant philosophical discussions that I've been part of.

4:08 Mike: Thank you very much. That was one of my goals is. I don't know if I quoted in this book or not, I don't recall. But I quote in some places all the way back to Aristotle saying that when you study things in their simplest and earliest forms, everything is a little bit clearer. And then you can add in these complexities and whatnot.

4:25 Dylan: You also open on your. When you describe your feedback control model of agency, you open with a quote from Peirce, who's like pragmatism. We have a kind of ongoing discussion about whether pragmatism is philosophy.

4:40 Mike: George Herbert Mead called himself a social psychologist. And William James is considered the father of American psychology. So they're kind of both. Peirce was a philosophy philosopher. I would say, no way about it. And Dewey was a psychologist also. So I think that, you know, the American pragmatists were all the Enlightenment philosophers were mainly, you know, just spellbound by Newton and by the physical world. The pragmatists were the first ones who took evolution seriously. But they had an impoverished psychology and they were themselves.

Psychologists dash philosophers because, I mean, George Herbert Mead calls himself a social behaviorist, and behaviorist is a linear. I used to have someone who told me that the way you can tell where somebody's coming from theoretically is find out who are their theoretical enemies and who are they arguing against. And part of this is behaviorism, which has long been dead in the cognitive sciences in general. But in animal behavior, you still get talk like that about stimulating responses and reinforcement and all of that. So the pragmatist had something more in the direction of a kind of a control system or something like that, I think would have helped them a lot to formulate some of these ideas about what really matters is the practical consequences of things and actions and how they relate to your actions and your agentive decision making.

6:08 Christopher: Yeah, I mean, like, for me, I read a lot of Dewey into this particular book. Just his relation of knowledge and action being sort of inseparable in a certain way. And even the way later in the book where you start talking about, you know, quote, objective reality and how humans participating in this sort of joint attention and then getting from that sort of communicative objective facts about and giving us that sort of experiential niche reminded me a lot of Peirce's and Dewey's sort of emphasis on communities of inquirers being how we're going to get something like knowledge rather than it being like radically individualistic, like someone like Descartes or something. So I really enjoy that element of the book too.

6:51 Mike: Yeah. And that's the part where in other places, you know, I have emphasized this. This is really sort of trying to go back and see how we get to this collective, joint and collective stuff. But that's the part that if you read any other stuff, you know, is what I think is the uniquely human part. And so one of the things I was trying to do was to ground that in the evolution of agency. Thinking about this shared intentionality is the sort of cognitive side of things, and shared agency is actually the behavioral action side of it that form our joint goals and whatnot. And then we need certain cognitive capacities to do that. And that gives us things like normativity and objectivity and stuff, which I know that there are a lot of philosophers who think those things are not compatible, the sort of natural world and the normative world and whatnot.

7:42 Mark: But.

7:43 Mike: Well, I mean, it had to come from somewhere is all I can say.

7:46 Dylan: Yeah.

7:47 Mike: I spent a semester at University of Pittsburgh in the Philosophy of Science unit there and had a lot of talks with Bob Brandom. We had some interesting discussions, but couldn't ever quite have a meeting of the minds on that issue.

8:00 Seth: One of the friends of the podcast is somebody from St. John's College named Eva Brann, and she wrote a book on the history of will. It was a more of like a Foucaultian genealogy of the will, if you will. And it's interesting to contrast that study with this one when you're thinking about our intellectual development of the concept of agency from the perspective as us being moral agents, I guess you could say, like in other words, as Wes was saying, philosophically, that's about the extent to which we have a grasp in it. And so what you've provided is something quite different, similarly to what you did in the book on language, which was fantastic and we really enjoyed talking about. But I appreciated that.

8:44 Wes: Yeah, I think it's very helpful in understanding normativity to think about it the way you might have put it, which is as involving this collective agency. And so that for instance, when one individual in a collaboration is protesting, they see themselves not just as protesting on behalf of themselves, but the protest in a way is coming from the we. And they're a representative of the we in that role of protest. Which explains, you know, this is a very important subject in philosophy, how the normative is possible. It's not just about having one's own particular preference and being bothered by someone else's doing.

It's conceived of as a universal norm. And the norm has to be conceived of as legitimate and applying to everyone. And so this, this is the first time I've seen this particular kind of psychological account. And it's even more interesting in light of the fact that you've built this up in terms of more primitive levels of self regulation. So this is a kind of self regulatory activity on the part of the collective agency. But we see this in more primitive forms and the, you know, and the more primitive forms of agency that you

9:58 Mike: describe, that's where the philosophy comes to my aid is, is if you look at almost all of the people studying the evolution of cooperation or morality or something, they don't really understand normativity. These are biologists, they don't really understand the unique features of the normative. And so they base everything on reciprocity. Well, reciprocity is still instrumental. I'm helping you because I'm anticipating help in return. And a lot of it is built on reputation, secondary reciprocity and reputation. But reputation is what they think of me.

And again, that's instrumental that I don't want them to punish me, I don't want them to think bad of me. It'll turn out why. But the we. And actually one of the inspirations for this way of thinking about it is Rousseau and his political theory about the consent of the governed. That there's, he calls it the collective will, but that the individuals have to say it's a bad thing when people steal and we don't like it. And when I myself steal, well, gosh, I gotta admit, you know, one shouldn't do that. I'm part of the we and the me at the same time.

And that's where the normativity is this. Not just the herd, the group versus myself. It's me as part of the group, we as parts of myself. And as I say, I got part of that from this. From this political idea of the collective will and the consent of the governed that we all agree these should be the rules, even when they inconveniently apply to ourselves.

11:31 Seth: What's nuanced about the way you put it and what you're doing here is as I was talking about this history of the will that Eva wrote, it's almost talking about agency from the perspective of individual agent. It's the idea, it's still locked into that notion that we're somehow these Cartesian or transcendental ego type actors who are isolated from the world and the collective will. In what you just described with, like Rousseau and some other philosophers, that will comes out of a notion of, again, an interaction between rational actors that are somehow coming to some kind of a consensus and agreement, whether it's explicit or implicit.

What I think is interesting about your approach, though, is you have discussed, because it's evolutionary, there's this strong connection to environment. And so there's an element of place and kind of what we would talk about in Heideggerian terms, right? Like there's an element of world. We're not doing this in the abstract. It's not just me and you coming up to some kind of terms. We're doing it in the context of a world which has an environment to which we are very intimately connected. And in fact, just in the same sense that in your book on language, we have to posit that there's mental states, right, that other people have.

In a sense. You talk about us having to posit causality and some sort of structure, regulatory sense in which the world operates. And that's a critical part of bringing together our ability to act in there. And that, I think, is a more sophisticated and nuanced way of looking at it than what, again, I feel like this history of philosophy has brought in the rational moral agent which is somehow isolated from the rest of things.

13:08 Dylan: Because I don't know that most people will have read the book yet. On the podcast, I just mentioned the feedback model. Maybe, Mike, you could just give a quick summary of what the underlying model of agency that you have.

13:24 Mike: When I went to graduate school, it was all behaviorism and it was all stimulus, response, kind of linear causal model. It's like the physical world. It's like an efficient cause. The stimulus causes the response. And I had an advisor who was into cybernetics and Norbert Wiener and Ross Ashby and the sort of cybernetic idea, this model of like a circular causality, like a thermostat is always the classic example where the organism has a goal and they actively pursue it. They don't wait to be prodded by a stimulus. We're always actively pursuing one goal or another.

And then we look and see how we're doing. We get feedback from our actions on the environment. And when they match the goal, then we've done what we need to do. And when they haven't matched the goal, we still have more work to do. And so this kind of circular causality seemed to me to be the sort of basic structure and organization of intentional action, goal directed action, and that I absolutely anticipated. There are many philosophers who would think, you know, oh gosh, this is a mechanism, you know, you've reduced agency to a mechanism and stuff.

But I try to say very clearly what I'm talking about is an organizational pattern and that this organization is what's important and intelligent action in humans always. This is a radical claim, but I would say it always has this same form. So I give an example of, let's say you're complaining all the time about a traffic light, that you're sitting there forever when there are no cars coming the other way. And it's just very inefficient and all that. And then all of a sudden one day, oh my gosh, it's working really efficiently. When cars start piling up in one place, they go through, and when there are no cars coming, it doesn't switch from the other direction.

It doesn't switch to red at all on your side. So what could possibly have happened? And I'm arguing the only thing that could possibly have happened is they modified the traffic light to have some kind of a goal state. Like equal numbers of cars on each of the four entryways and a camera to see what's happening. And they see if the world matches their goal state or not, and then adjust in appropriate ways when it does or when it doesn't. It's just the structure. It's not the fact that it's a thermostat or a traffic light or a computer or anything.

It's just the organizational structure of a goal state, which is like, you could call it the most Primitive normative standard, instrumental normativity, not social, moral normativity, but instrumental normativity, a goal standard. And then you have actions for making the world align with your goal standard and perception to see how you're doing. So it's that organization that I wanted to really emphasize and that all creatures that we think of as kind of intelligently acting in the world are organized in this way. And I guess one of the philosophical points that, you know, I know you can't sort of solve the problem of free will by just waving your hands magically at a thermostat or something, but I want to say that natural selection selected for an organization, a behavioral organization, this kind of feedback organization that enabled, allowed or enabled the organism to make its own decisions in some circumstances, not every circumstance, whatever.

And so I give the example of a squirrel who wants to cache a nut. He's got to tuck it away for the winter, and he's looking at a landscape, and yes, he is biologically hardwired to cache that nut. But natural selection can't anticipate that particular landscape. And so the critter has to decide, do I hide it, do I cache it here or do I cache it there? You can make sense of the sort of notion of agentive decision making by putting it in the context of. It's always in the framework of evolved motivations. The squirrel didn't choose to be motivated to eat nuts.

The squirrel is born being motivated to eat nuts. But there are these degrees of freedom in some of their behaviors where the individual agent can make decisions toward that end. So you were saying a moment ago about nuance. I would say this is a kind of a nuanced view of sort of what some people talk about as freedom of the will. I would call it more like freedom of choice. And obviously in humans, morality wouldn't make sense without agentive decision making, freedom of choice. But I'm saying even in smaller creatures in a very constricted domain, they're making free choices.

18:13 Dylan: Also in this feedback model, in the way you just described it with the squirrel, it also makes sense to me that you would be able to have selection working on it, right? Because there's a definition of success, right? The squirrels that are better at doing it were the ones that are going to survive, or the lizards that are better at honing in on, even in that sort of more limited agent, go, no go kind of activity, right? It's the ones that are going to be able to be as flexible as their substrate allows for them to get the. The Nutrients for surviving and choose where to lay their eggs and all that stuff in order for them to survive as individuals and therefore for the species to survive.

And you'll select the individuals out that are most. This part of thinking was on my mind a lot because you do talk about selection a little bit in the book, but you often talk about adaptation and the species is doing that. And I was wanting to hear a little bit more about how selection was working, right, because the adaptation of the species is of course a kind of reaction or a way we talk about the selection process. Right? Selection results in adaptation, but the species isn't doing anything right. The species is in evolving, gathering or changing in its composition of individuals so as to have different functional capabilities.

And one of the powerful things to me is that in the four lanes that you have of different levels of agency is you have essentially the waypoints and maybe not the full account for how you get from one waypoint to another, but something that's plausible that as you got better a missing piece might be how does selection drive you to drive an organism as a species in a more sophisticated versions of that? To get to in general, you have

20:12 Mike: to have a new ecology, a new problem. That's why I'm saying that like let's go to mammals, from the earliest vertebrates to mammals. All of a sudden mammals are living in social groups and there's a reason for that having to do with protection from predators or whatever. That's the standard textbook example for why living in social groups. But now that creates a new problem which is, you know, I'm ready to go get my normal food, but some other guy got it first because he could see things better or act faster or make a quicker decision or whatever.

And so I'm sunk. So it's a new world, it's this new competitive world that early vertebrates were not social creatures. They laid eggs and went around sort of mostly individually. And so the evolution, natural selection driving these changes has to do with who can function best in this new environment. It gives it a little more perspective. If you think back, are there creatures that aren't agentive? There's where you can really get into philosophical discussion about what exactly you mean by agentive. But in my limited meaning, I actually use the term psychologically agentive, meaning organized like a control system.

But if you take like some of these single celled organisms, you know, they go around essentially swimming in bacteria and they sort of ingest it or whatever I call it open mouth feeding, right? You don't need to make decisions because you're living in food and you reproduce by splitting or whatever. So you can call those agents because they're active and whatever. And I won't quibble one way or the other, but psychological agents are making decisions. That's not, I don't think, necessarily characteristic of all life. It's characteristic of certain forms of life where they live in a lot of uncertainty.

And so natural selection can't predict this uncertainty. And so the individual has to be equipped to deal with that uncertainty by making individual decisions in the world, in the moment.

22:03 Wes: And in particular, the uncertainty that they're dealing with is the fact that their environment is constituted in part by other creatures with their behaviors. It's a product of the social, which is really.

22:15 Mike: Yes. And that's from the mammals on. That's all the mammals down the human line. And then humans have to cooperate. And that's now a completely different thing than just competing. When you're competing with other creatures, like squirrels are competing with other squirrels to get the food, but you just got to get there fastest and whatever, maybe you have to win a fight now and then, but humans have to cooperate. So I have to get you to be motivated in the same way I am. I have to adjust my actions for you. I don't know how much you guys know about, you know, game theory and coordination problems.

And coordination problems have this structure to them where I have to expect you to expect me to do whatever. That's all the way back to the originator of coordination games. And so that's a different form of social interaction that requires a different set of cognitive skills. And that's where I borrowed again from the philosophers of action like Michael Bratman and Margaret Gilbert. I borrowed this notion of shared intentionality. That is what we have to have to deal with effectively with cooperative partners in situations of interdependence where we need one another to get something done.

And I actually was talking about some of this stuff in a seminar in France, and somebody raised their hand, said, sartre said it all before, Hell is other people. I said, okay, that's a way to kind of encapsulate the problem of cooperation all in right there.

23:43 Wes: Should we look at the different levels of agency? I mean, we've kind of alluded to them, but we haven't given a systematic overview, a thermostat.

23:51 Mike: You know, it's all about self regulation. Self regulation, meaning that, you know, you're going to up operate when the environment doesn't match your goal and you're going to monitor the environment to see when it matches your goal and when it doesn't. You know, it just occurred to me in, in psychology and, you know, this notion of executive function is very, very big and important now that I can sort of monitor that whole process one level up. And so when you take a squirrel, for example, I can look out my window here and I see a squirrel on the branch and he looks like he might want to jump to the other.

He might want to jump, but he doesn't and he ends up crawling down and crawling out the other branch or something. So what he's doing is he's not just acting and perceiving the results of his action. He's simulating what he might do, what he could do. He's imagining or simulating whatever. I think it's basically offline perception. I don't think it's anything mystical or whatever. It's offline perception there. What might I do and what might be the outcome of that, based on my past experience, maybe based on some heuristics, whatever it might be.

And so you need an executive, I'm calling an executive tier, an executive tier of functioning to operate in that way. I don't think lizards operate in that way. I think the early vertebrates, as represented by modern day lizards, are making go no go decisions about actions and their results, and they're perceiving the environment, whatever, but they're not monitoring their decision making to see when they're uncertain and when they're not uncertain and so forth. And so I call the earliest vertebrates, as represented by modern day lizards, goal directed agents, because they are goal directed agents.

And I call the squirrels. I know that again, in philosophy all this terminology is contested, but I call them intentional agents. And I don't mean Brentano intentions, I mean intentional, meaning that I have a plan to a goal. I have a plan. I simulate the plan. Does it work or doesn't it work? Before I actually act? I think before I act would be the simple way of saying it. I make a plan before I act. I assess the plan before I enact it. And then I really struggled with what the terminology should be for when we get to great apes. And this may be all primates, but the data on other primates, not great apes, but other monkeys, is not clear enough.

So I just decided to go with what I believe is clear empirically, which is great apes. And I call them rational agents on one meaning of the term rational. So the thin definition of rational comes from economics, where it's just like you pursue your selfish interests in an intelligent way. And I mean much more than that. But I don't mean rational consulting normative standards of evidence and whatnot. So I don't mean rational in that way. What I mean by rational is simply again, a reflective decision making and the ability to think about your thinking as it were, before you act.

So we have a study where chimpanzees express their belief about where something is by reaching for it, but we don't let them have it. And then they get other evidence that oh, actually it's somewhere else. And so they revise their belief and say, oh, I think he's here. But more than that, they actually have to go to some trouble to look and check where it is so they know they need more information. So they are metacognitively monitoring the information available for the decision to see if it's adequate and if it's not, they're doing appropriate things to get the right information.

And I think metacognitive monitoring also is part and parcel of understanding causal forces in the external world and the intentionality of others. So attributing your own manner of functioning which you are observing from the metacognitive level and attributing that to other beings in a sort of theory of mindy way and to the world in a. In a causality way. And I understand that that way of looking at causality is counterintuitive to some people, or at least not very plausible to people. But there have been all the way back to Thomas Reid commenting on Hume's analysis of causality through one of my personal favorites, the much neglected Collingwood whom I quote and Piaget in Psychology and some a philosopher that I don't know of, except through Piaget, Maine de Biran also have this notion that the only notion I have of force is my own pushing, right?

So Hume says, I just see one billiard ball hit another one. Where's the notion of force coming from? And the idea is, well, it's an analogy from my own pushing of things. I feel my own force. That you need to metacognitively monitor your own actions and your own and the feeling of force when you act and then somehow attribute it to others. So that's all part of what I'm calling rational. I see the reasons and causes for things and that comes through my metacognitive monitoring. So that's goal directed agents, intentional agents and rational agents in a specific meaning of rational.

That's part of my whole reason for writing this book was to connect it up to the shared intentionality and the normative agency and collective agency, shared agency that I have done most of my work on. And to show that it's just an outgrowth of those. Now we're talking about a plural agent. And the individual has to be adapted in certain ways or the individual has to have gone in certain ways to function effectively in those. And that's both cognitively and socially. Slash morally in terms of cooperation. Humans have all the other ones at the same time at certain levels.

I think if we're just, you know, running through the forest, you know, we. We are probably operating in a way very similar to other mammals. But then a lot of our human activity is with reference to our cooperative partners or to our cultural group or something, or something more shared. And so that's the last level on

29:59 Wes: the way to humans, the stuff about apes as rational agents. And yeah, that looks odd on first blush when you see that as a chapter title. It all makes sense, of course, as you. As you read on. But the account of how it is that apes come to understand causality in a way that other mammals don't is really interesting. Right? So I think, according to your account, other mammals understand causality in terms of their own agency, the effects of their own actions on the world. But apes get farther than that by being able, in a way, to project that concept.

And there's an account where that may be mediated an extent, to some extent by tool use, where the tools become extensions of their own agency. And then you come to understand that external objects are acting on each other in the way that I am acting on the world. And then likewise, you can understand intentional. Other intentional agents is acting on the world independently of you as well. So I thought that's a very helpful account in understanding. It's one thing to think about causality, right, as a Kantian category and a fundamental part of our experience.

It's another to think about, well, how does that category, that cognitive ability to comprehend causality, how does that evolve and what does that look like in more primitive form in other organisms? I think it tells you a lot about what it is. And then the other aspect of this, and this goes for both ape rationality and understanding of external causal events and for shared agency, is the evolution, biological evolution as a factor. It's. It's hard to understand these capacities except in terms of for me. And the same thing goes for language.

It's really hard to understand what language is and what agency is and what shared agency is without thinking of it in terms of it being an evolved capacity. I can't articulate exactly why that's so helpful to me. Otherwise something like normativity is kind of just a mystery.

32:00 Dylan: You're just a scientist at heart there Wes, because you're just wanting to understand how something came to be from its first principles and with a kind of. Not just the individual pieces but actually by kind of causal way. Right. Evolution would give you a way to say how did I get from here to there? So that I got to this sophisticated normative way. Otherwise you just say well normativity just came out of thin air.

32:28 Mike: Storytelling like that has a long and illustrious history in philosophy. Right. And I don't know about the early Greeks, but people like Rousseau told his story and Hobbes and in the modern context Sellars had his myth of Jones and.

32:42 Dylan: Yeah. So that storytelling, I thought of Plato's articulation of the soul in the Republic has the two horses and then the driver of the. Of the horses. And there's components of that here in the different levels of agency that we're talking about. The sort of bare willing and the sort of ego that's controlling that and stuff like that. So you're absolutely right.

33:05 Mike: I was also responding to this notion when you were. You're saying that Wes was a scientist at heart by wanting to see it built up from its component parts in real life is that, you know, a lot of. Of philosophy is about trying to understand things in terms of their component part, their conceptual analysis and all of that. And one way of doing conceptual analysis is put it in a historical framework, even if it's. I think Hobbes and Rousseau probably knew their stories weren't like accurate but they wanted to illustrate how you could get from a non social being. Right on. And so forth. And the myth of Jones the same way even Grice does something somewhat similar in some of his more obscure things is trying to build up from simpler parts. So I think it's a. I want to ground that story in empirical data which we now are able to do to some degree in a way that so. And Hobbes couldn't do.

33:58 Seth: But no, I think that's, that's exactly the. What I was hearing in the conversation is like there's an empirical component. And Wes has been adamant over the history of the 14 years we've been doing this that he did not want to be an empirical type scientist.

34:12 Mike: I see

34:14 Wes: that's not exactly true.

34:17 Dylan: The other part is that I'm a physicist.

34:20 Seth: Yeah. Which also by the way doesn't mean that you want to understand the biological, the evolutionary aspect of a theory like you don't study. We've talked about this, Dylan, where physicists don't study the history of physics. They're not interested in the bad ideas or the wrong ideas. But it's the notion, and this is what is very difficult, is the philosophers you're talking about, Mike, and the ones that we're used to studying didn't have access. There was no empirical science to support, and so storytelling was part of it. And then as you get the division of sciences, if you will, and the Wissenschaft that come in, and then you've got sociology and biology and chemistry and physics and all that kind of stuff, like his specialization.

It's hard to be a philosopher and also stay in touch with that sort of thing. And again, not to be too much of a fanboy, but as kind of a shout out to you and to promote what you're doing, you obviously have enough of an association with the conceptual frameworks of some of these philosophical thinkers. And as you said, you've now got access to some empirical tools. Not just empirical tools, but empirical tools that you can use in the context of this biological evolution. So you can go test chimpanzees and apes and other sorts of things. Not everybody who has your empirical skill set may have access to those.

Those environments to be able to do those things. And you're putting this whole thing together to try to trace a story. It's like it's the genealogy and it's the story and this history, and you're plugging in the empirical components and tying it all together, and it makes for a very compelling story for somebody who has no idea whether your sample size is large enough or anything like that. But I think you're doing something really unique and interesting, and it's of tremendous value to all of us, whatever discipline we're in.

36:07 Mike: Gosh, thank you. But I will say that I don't know exactly where it came from, but especially with humans having to have this social, cooperative, normative, sort of cultural way of life. If you look in traditional cognitive science, you don't find anything helpful. Nothing. They're all information processors and, you know, computation and representation and computation and language of thought, and there's. There's nothing. And people tell me that where it is. You mentioned Heidegger before is. And. And some of those guys, but I'm really sorry, but I can't understand the word.

They say. I tried to be Heidegger and all of them, and I just don't. I Grew up in sc, not in philosophy. And so I can read many of the philosophers, but those guys, I just, I, I can't, I just don't get anything out of it. So anyway, I, I understand that they probably had a lot of this, you know, living in the world and the sort of social, cultural constitution of a lot of aspects of the world. I had to come to philosophy to find people who were talking about that. And I'll tell you a funny story where Michael Bratman is the one that really was the one that sort of clicked for me when I read his stuff.

And then we had done some experiments trying to show that this shared agency, shared intentionality stuff, that little babies, little incompetent, little 2 and 3 year olds were doing these things and these adult very smart and competent chimpanzees were not doing. And that maybe this was a key to the dividing line between humans and other apes. And so I'm telling you, Michael Bratman on a train going from Florence to Siena in Italy to a conference on collective intentionality. And I'm telling him this, and he goes, I never knew my stuff was so important.

I knew it was right, but I didn't know it was so important.

38:02 Wes: So yeah, it seems like you have some criticisms of not just the behaviorist way of talking that seems to persist even, even though behaviorism has been rejected in terms of stimulus and response, but evolutionary psychology, which insofar as it's focused on these very modular capabilities that are supposed to have been selected for. So you mentioned that in fact there's a hierarchy of feedback control systems and that there can be these sort of trickle down effects. I think this is one of the more fascinating parts of the account to me because it turns out that lower level behavioral changes can be driven by changes in the activity of the organism. So if a certain food becomes scarce,

38:47 Mike: I'm so happy you picked up on that.

38:49 Wes: And the organism needs to start climbing a tree to get a new food source, even though it may not be that good at that, or there's only a few of them that can do it well, and then you have a selection pressure that actually produces tree climbers. So that agency drives adaptation, drives evolutionary change, which is absolutely amazing.

39:06 Mike: And then among those who did manage through their own agency to climb the tree, if among those some of them get longer claws, they do even better. So they're in a new context that sets the low level adaptations, that sets the context for the selection of the low level adaptation. So that is a really important point. And you know One of the places I got that from is Karl Popper in the Objective Knowledge book. He has an example of something about flying planes or something. I forgot what it is now, but that how the higher level sort of control systems determine what the lower level ones have to do.

Right. And you know, if I'm, if I'm going to go to my friend's house, that determines, you know, that I put one leg in front of the other in a certain direction and so forth. So you have to have that hierarchy and then you get what is directed evolution. That is, it's directed in the sense that the higher level ones are setting the context for the selection of the lower level ones within the organism. So I'm really glad you picked up on that because that's I think a really important way that the agency of the organism contributes to the evolutionary process itself.

40:17 Dylan: But doesn't that in some ways I hesitate to call it a feedback mechanism. Exactly right. Because the. There isn't the same kind of goal orientedness. Right. I don't think there is. I mean, unless you want to make it teleological, you want to make natural selection teleological aims. It's not feedback in that way. But there's something to just say about what the environment is for the possibility of selection that you're talking about. So I want to not call it feedback, but it's something in that sort of neighborhood. Right. And maybe that's the right word. The environment for the possibility of selection is being affected by the agency of the individual entities that are members of the species. So the environmental landscape for possible speciation is being affected by the agency of the individuals within the species.

41:10 Wes: Maybe this is a point to talk about experiential niche.

41:14 Dylan: Yes, Michael already figured, already said it. I just forgot what it was.

41:19 Wes: Okay.

41:20 Mike: This is a point that I have not really elaborated. It's in the book. But you have to sort of be attuned and read carefully. Which I want to gratefully say, it seems to me like you all have read it very carefully, is that when you have the classic, you know, philosophical question of realism and idealism and all that sort of thing. To me, the evolution, if you really take an evolutionary perspective, it kind of puts a whole different twist on it that the thermostat senses only heat and cold. I mean, it's got a little coil, metal coil or whatever, because that's all it needs to do, what it needs to do.

A worm doesn't have any visual access to things. It feels things, it smells things or whatever. It does absorbs chemicals in its skin, because that's what it needs to do to get its job done. There's a quote there from George Herbert Mead about the. In a way, the organism determines its environment by its sensitivity to certain aspects of it and not other aspects. So we tend to think that we humans have access to the real world, okay. And all these other creatures have access to only parts of it or aspects of it or something like that. But that's just species, right.

We have our own way of viewing the world. Okay. I'm perfectly happy to say quantitatively, we see more aspects or more complex aspects or all that. But where does this notion of veridicality come in? To me, it only comes in from the fact that through this collective intentionality, we construct this notion of an objective world that is common to everyone. If you look at Charles Peirce, he says the truth is the end of inquiry, where everybody agrees. That's where we all come to a consensus and fix our beliefs in the same way. And again, this sort of Davidsonian idea of the triangle, you know, that I only know I can be wrong because there you are looking at the same thing I am at the same time saying something different about it.

So I think that you have to just think of each species as having its own experiential niche, determined by what it needs to get done in the world. It's agentive decision making and agentive action. And humans have this really special version because they've got to do this mind reading and collaboration and coordination and communication with other individuals. And in that coordination, we have to come to agreement about the way the world is. We have to agree to the reasons why we think it's the truth and so forth. But I do think they have a naturalistic explanation.

43:50 Christopher: It's interesting that that sort of how we evolve, that capacity we have of that communicative joint attention. It helps me understand that Peircean notion of truth being sort of the consequent of convergent opinion.

44:07 Mike: Yes.

44:08 Christopher: Amongst the species. Yeah. And so. And it does have that kind of truth is having things in common. It's fun to be able to articulate an evolutionary reason for why that might be the case, or a better way to articulate why that might be the case.

44:20 Mike: His obsession with triads is vindicated.

44:23 Wes: So, Michael, we are coming to the end of the hour.

44:26 Mike: Ah, yes. Okay. Well, I want to thank you all because we write books, hoping people will read them. And especially, although unfortunately fairly rare, people read them carefully. And I think you all have. And it's impressive And I'm grateful for it. Thank you.

44:42 Wes: Thank you for coming on. We really enjoyed it.

44:45 Dylan: Thank you for listening to part one of the Partially Examined Life. If you want the rest of this episode right now, please join the Partial examined life@ partialexaminedlife.com or on Patreon or on Apple Podcasts. Good night.