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

0:08 Wes: Welcome to part two of our discussion of Michael Tomasello's the Evolution of Agency. In the first part we had him on for a one hour discussion and now we are going to continue. Just among the three of us, Seth had to drop. There's a point in the book where he talks about head switching. Do you remember that with the squirrels when they're trying to decide what they are going to do, Are they going to scramble down the tree or jump to another tree? And I've seen this behavior in my cat. So I was deliberated a lot about whether to tell this anecdote.

But I was living in a house where I had to keep the door to my room closed and my cat wanted to be in the room a little bit to get treats from me. But in general she didn't like being in a room with a locked door. It bothered her. And so she would go to the door and want to get out. If I gave her all the treats she wanted, she would immediately go to the door and beg to get out. If I didn't give her, if I gave her just a small amount, she would hang out even for hours waiting for the rest of them before she decided to go. But if I hit this kind of sweet spot, she would get indecisive.

So she'd go stand at the door and I'd open the door for her. And then she'd sit on the threshold and she'd look back into my room and she'd look out again. And she would do that several times. This head switching thing, like thinking about do I want to stay for more treats or do I want to go and be free. And eventually she would often just, she'd give me this look, look right in my face and then run back into the room and I'd close the door. I'd always thought that's just amazing that a cat can be making decisions at that kind of level. I thought it was fascinating that scientists had actually noticed this in other mammals and considered that evidence of a decision making ability, or as Tomasello puts it, this ability to simulate, to have a goal in mind of some sort or even competing goals, as in the case of my cat.

And then to simulate possible action plans based on that and evaluate the relative values of different goals and the risks and likely success of certain plans. And then finally to make a decision after going through that deliberative process. I think a lot of people will object in many cases to Tomasello's use of very liberal use of the word agency in this book. And again, calling apes rational and all that stuff. But I myself, it seems spot on. I don't know what you guys thought

2:33 Dylan: about that, but I do think he's spot on. I think it's really powerful. And the more. And it's one of these things that the more I think about it, the more powerful it is. Because what he's doing in a very, very helpful way is articulates rationality. I completely understand why. And I like the fact that he classified the great apes as rational because he did it in a very principled way. And the articulation that he makes of different levels of cognition, just as a practical matter, it becomes so helpful because you have a way of speaking about something that's multi layered, like, well, what do you mean by consciousness?

Well, clearly the cat's conscious, but no, it's not conscious. I mean his way of talking about agency, which is maybe we can talk a little bit about how it might be actually a kind of proxy for what we usually mean by consciousness, but it is layered in a way that allows you to talk about different levels of behavior in a hierarchy that is sensible so that you can make distinctions that are helpful. How is the figuring out that seems manifest for a squirrel or a dog or a cat that we just witness? We just witness them going from one place to another and taking in some information and making what is sort of plainly looks like a decision.

Right. The squirrel goes up, it sees something and wants to get to it and it decides to jump or decides not to jump. Right. And decides to try to go after it a different way. And he has, in the way he's articulated levels of agency, he has provided a, to me, a very clear and articulate way to talk about those different levels of agency. Where they came from, but also what they're resulting in, what kinds of actions are resulting in the level of agency that a given organism is at, or a level of agency that we're acting in ourselves. And what inputs are being processed and what is the distinctive feature of the mental activity, the psychology that's going on that is characterizing that agency.

4:45 Christopher: I agree. I think the specificity that he provides for how we might talk about these cognitive abilities of the various animals along our or even prior to animals just giving that evolutionary spectrum that we can go with him down, I think is really important, especially in, in my experience in philosophy, a lot of there's some resistance, of course, to give animal, non human animal cognition similar traits to us, or it's important to distinguish them in some way for a lot of philosophers. And so it just feels very satisfying to be able to step by step, even if it's sort of a heuristic in some way and maybe not.

It's kind of mostly what's going on, or at least to some extent what's going on. Seeing the different levels like a goal directed behavior, and then being able to executively differentiate between which plan is best for the goal and then even further going to that reflective level of being able to reflect on your plans. It's almost like you judge and then now you're judging your judgments. It's cool to have a way to talk about what it might look like for different animals to have, I don't want to say more complexity, but just a different cognitive constitution such that they can solve problems in different ways, if that makes sense.

5:58 Dylan: It does make sense. And then I would also want to throw in the kind of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny kind of thing which he leans on, especially when talking about. There's a reason why you would talk about these different levels in evolution. And one of them is this stack up effect that the higher levels of the hierarchy have embodied in them the agency components, the agency feedback mechanisms that are of the lower levels. So the intentional agent has as part of its fundamental composition and it's the manifestation of its agency, the go no go feedback mechanism.

It's hierarchically more sophisticated versions of the feedback mechanism. And you add sophistication to the experiential niche that selects for the different psychological attributes that are manifest. And you get survival of those organisms that capitalize on those that new environment, that new experimental experiential niche. And so in humans, right, he doesn't talk about this, but you're going to very quickly want to talk about the different levels of agency that humans would have access to all of those levels of agency and the ways in which we are constrained or maybe even indifferently, when we have certain of our own capabilities psychologically constrained, that we get constrained to a certain level of agency.

Right. So when on the one hand there may be circumstances in which we are very influenced by our go no go functioning of our psychology, but it also may be that we have our experiential Psychology reduced in flexibility by physical problems. You know, we're too hungry, we're too tired, we're on too many drugs. We're, you know, compromised in various ways that also reduce the scope of our agency, the possibilities of our agency. And to me, that opens up a whole interesting way to talk about the way in which we function as human beings and what would mean to be a healthy human being if we think of it scaled along different levels of agency.

Yeah.

8:17 Wes: So let's say a little bit more about the go, no go level. And Dylan, I think, as you're suggesting, that we kind of have all these levels layered on top of us. We have all these layers layered. We have all these layers at once in us, and so we can regress to the more primitive levels. And so on his account, he associates the go no go executive decisions with reptiles. He starts out with C. Elegans, this worm, which, interestingly enough, I think they. It's the only animal for which we have completely mapped every cell in their body, including the nervous system.

And I think there's only a thousand cells or something like that. I forget that if that's in the nervous system or the whole worm. But in any case, you know, that's an example of an organism that is driven by a stimulus response. And I remember doing this, whether it was in high school or in college, maybe at St. John's where we have these worms under a microscope and we're prodding them with a. A needle or something and watching them react. And it's amazing what you can do. I guess it's just 302 neurons is what they, what they have. It's amazing the sophistication of behavior that can happen with just 302 neurons, including learning the locations of food and complex mating behaviors and things like that.

But unlike reptiles, they don't, according to Tomasello, have goal states in mind. So they don't have something like a reference value that they are trying to reach at any given time, like the thermostat and air conditioning system.

9:49 Dylan: They don't have a feedback mechanism. They have merely a causal mechanism. Right. So they're a step above, say, bacteria or an electron, right. Where they're just in an environment where they're reacting to it. And our bacteria has systems, but it's basically open mouth feeding was the way Michael put it. And then they are drifting around in their environment and the density of the elements in their environment dictate whether they thrive or don't thrive.

10:21 Wes: They'll coil up if you hit them with A needle. The point I'm trying to get at is that reptiles, for Tomasello, are the first example of a quote unquote agent of organism. And it's this ability to inhibit a behavior in a certain circumstance that earns them that title of being agentive. Having a certain. Some kind of executive level decision making. So they can be in the middle of going for prey. And if a predator comes about, they can inhibit that particular response to the world. They don't just have to go for the prey because that's what's in their environment.

Although reptiles do have a lot of, you know, according to Tomasello, behaviors that look a lot like stimulus response. They're not entirely that way. But they do have some agentive behavior where they can do so. For instance, freeze when a. When a predator comes, even if they're in the middle of trying to take prey and they have goals, they have these reference values they're trying to reach, right? If they're hungry and want to satisfy that hunger. The implication here is that they even have some sort of imagination, right? Because a goal is just this imagined perceptual state that I want to acquire.

I want to get a certain feeling, for instance. And he describes one experiment where I think a reptile will know it can arrest its natural instinct to try to get food that goes straight to food. It learns it has to go around a transparent tube to get the food. Even though it's instinct, right? Would just be to go straight for what it sees. So in any case. So that's the most primitive level of agency. And then the movement from there is to ancient mammals, which are. Which squirrels are representative of where you have this ability to. So imagination gets more robust, let's say.

So you're not just imagining a goal state that you want to acquire. You are imagining possible plans of action, for instance. And I already described this in the first part of the episode. But you know, and evaluating consequences and what's more likely and what do I want more and all that stuff. And then the other part of this he mentions is just flexible motivations. So what we think of as, you know, when we talk about emotions like fear and we wonder why that's even necessary, right? Why do we need pain and fear and all these other. I mean, I think Hume wrote a whole essay on this.

Why can't that just all be at the level of unconscious action, right? Why can't the body take care of itself without inducing those emotional states in us? The idea is that they're flexible. What they really represent is action. Tendencies that we don't have to act on. So fear is there as an action tendency as part of our subjective milieu, let's say our subjective environment. And then there's lots of other motivations and feelings and things, and they all get mixed up into this soup. And ultimately how do we get action out of all that? Well, we need a decision.

We need some kind of agency.

13:26 Dylan: Yeah, I think that's a nice way to formulate it. Right. And you can also see how the various levels of disorder or intensity could be disorder, but it also just intensity with regards to that environment, that sort of emotional environment would bias the decision making.

13:42 Wes: Right.

13:43 Dylan: Something that was really, really intensely causing intense fear would press the pedal on activity. So there's less and less and less decision making going on. Right. And much, much more kind of go, no go activity going on.

14:00 Wes: Well, he describes as, you know, with apes, you have different risk tolerances. And so you can, for instance, if the reward is large enough, you can get an ape to do something it's afraid, normally afraid of doing. But if the reward is too small relative to that risk, the fear will win.

14:17 Dylan: Your cat description is very similar to this. Right.

14:20 Christopher: It's a risk reward situation. Similar to, is it worth me getting locked in this house to get more treats?

14:26 Wes: So the other part of this in mammals that he describes, I'm in chapter four here, just is this what he calls cognitive control? So which is, you know, reptiles, there's an element of that because that's what inhibition is. That's what go no go is that. That is kind of expanded in mammals to. So for instance, it can anticipate obstacles. It doesn't have to wait for a predator to show up and then freeze in its planning. It can actually anticipate obstacles or errors it might make and then inhibit the action proactively, just not do the thing that might not get a good result.

So he goes, Tomasello calls it proactive inhibition. And then there's instrumental learning. So this is unlike the type of learning that you'd get with just mere stimulus response. Right. Because there is a form of learning in the C. Elegans, rather instrumental learning. So understanding causal relation between what you're doing and what's happening in the world, which reptiles, I think, on his account, are not really doing. So you monitor your own actions. I think this is why he's calling it an executive tier. You know, there's an action perception level and then you have another tier above that from which you are looking down in a way and saying, okay, this is what I did.

And here's the environmental effect that it had. And I, you know, next time I'm going to do that again or not do that again or maybe tweak it or whatever.

15:50 Christopher: And it's not just associative. Right? That would be the emphasis here is the mammal is learning that they can affect the world. It's a cause, they're causing the effects. It's not just like associating this experience with this experience. And it really does emphasize that they understand as the cause of the effect

16:09 Dylan: that opens up to the way Tomasello talks about it is a new type of experience for them. They experience causality. That becomes a new thing in their psychology.

16:20 Wes: And there are new selective pressures associated with that. I was going to say this to Tomasello, but we ran out of time, which is that his description of an experiential niche. If you live in a niche where the world is causal in the sense that it is for great apes, which is to say they understand not just their own causality, but the causality of others and the causality of inanimate objects. That type of experience of the world creates different selective pressures on you because your behaviors in response to those experiences are create their own pressures.

As we described with the trickle down evolution. You do different things, it creates different selective pressures. Yeah, you do different things because you have different experiences and then different selective pressures. So that, that's quite amazing to understand that the environment is not just the. It's perspectival in a way or subjective. What constitutes an environment is closely wedded to the cognitive capacities of the organism placed in that environment.

17:17 Dylan: At the end of chapter four, he has a kind of. It's not exactly an offhand comment, but it's kind of a side comment about consciousness. And we didn't talk about this that much. I brought it up that attention was consciousness. But he makes this claim, he makes this argument, you know, starts off the last paragraph that consciousness is mysterious and and he goes on this much is clear and that it's no more and no less mysterious than attention to the external world. The nature of consciousness then is essentially a question about executive tier attention to the perception action tier of psychological functioning.

And thus to understand attention is to understand the most basic mechanism generating conscious experience. And then he ends. The most essential points are this. One, basic sentience is in the sense of attention to and experience of the outside world is for agents a psychological primitive. And two, basic consciousness involves the organism attending to its own goals, actions and experience from its executive Tier of functioning.

18:21 Wes: So yeah, so he's associating sentience with reptiles where there are perceptions of the external world and comparison of comparisons of

18:30 Dylan: those two and make go, no go actions, right.

18:33 Wes: And then consciousness, which is. So reptiles live in this action perception plane or tier. And then with mammals, once you get the ability to reflect on or attend to not just the external world, but what you're doing in terms of actions and perceptions and how they're related, you get consciousness on his terms. I think it's a useful distinction. I think someone might want to say, oh well, reptiles are conscious and I'd be fine with that. But I think it's this distinction, regardless of the semantics, it's a useful distinction to make.

19:08 Christopher: His reasoning for that is the executive tier. It's more than just inhibition and sort of slightly affecting the no go responses. It's this executive tier gives you this sort of pseudo individuality as an agent. But for example, your cat's obviously thinking, what do I do here? Do I weigh this opportunity versus this opportunity? But of course the cat isn't going like man, am I indecisive. Why can't, you know, they don't have that disposition quite yet, that reflective disposition, which will come later, I think with apes, but maybe not to that extent. But one of the questions I had for you guys is just when a squirrel or your cat is engaging in this kind of behavior where they're sort of weighing plans or weighing. Do they have a process in their head that is when they're planning, is it imagistic or is it.

19:53 Wes: I think that's what Tomasello was saying at various points he seemed to suggest that, yeah, this is basically their. It's almost like a fantasy, almost. Or they're running through some kind of images. It's certainly not like. Yeah, offline perception. Exactly. Yep. I think he uses the word.

20:07 Dylan: Yeah, it's got to be something like that.

20:10 Wes: Yeah, of course we know that having an imagination is quite different than hallucinating. And so offline perception might not be the exactly the right phrase. If it's. If the suggestion is that they can actually have something like the actual experience. It's the imagination is a much fuzzier thing. But certainly obviously it's going to be non. It's going to be non linguistic. My cat isn't going to sit there, you know, I might sit there thinking, I might think, do I want to go back in the room and get more treats? Do I want to go out? And this is part of what's fascinating to me. Is that I don't need the words to do that. The cat can do that without words.

20:46 Dylan: But what you do need is memory. Right. Something that's going on is in that imagistic or the decision making and the offline playing through that a squirrel is doing. It's leveraging memory in some way, right?

21:01 Christopher: Yeah, it has to be. Yeah, yeah. Information that it's kept and is able to bring up again, if you will reimagine the memory or whatever it's.

21:09 Dylan: So how memory is forming a fundamental. And what level of sophistication of memory is required for each level of agency? I think is going to be an interesting question. A lizard also has memory, but one question would be, is, is the level of memory that they have access to a different level than a mammal and is that somehow also part of a fundamental requirement for their level of agency?

21:38 Wes: The worm. Right. Has memory as well.

21:40 Dylan: Well, just less sophisticated. And he doesn't go into the levels of sophistication or the hierarchies of memory and the characteristics. But I would think that there's some articulation whether it's perfectly parallel to this four level version or whether there are multiple different levels or whatever it is. There's going to be a hierarchy of memory functions.

22:02 Mike: Yeah.

22:03 Christopher: And how we can simulate them as well.

22:06 Wes: He does talk about this in terms of learning. So reptiles, he says, can learn what stimulus to respond to rather than just how to respond to a particular stimulus, which is what C. Elegans does. So which is behaviorist discrimination learning, which what's going to be most. It can remember where a food source is. Right. So it can know that there's a rewarding stimulus over here. So I'm going to. I'm going to go there, I'm going to go there to get it. But reptiles are not just learning where to go to get their satisfaction. They learn how to modify their own behavior.

22:46 Dylan: Yeah. And maybe even different levels of signals. Right.

22:49 Wes: So for instance, they're capable of reversal learning, which is to say you can get reptiles to associate, what is it? A certain geometric shape within a reward. They can pick out a triangle versus a circle or something and then you switch it on them and now the circle gets you the reward and the triangle doesn't. They can do those reversals.

so we get into more detail about if we're Done with the mammals about the apes as rational? Yeah, yeah.

26:26 Christopher: I think it's smart to talk about the apes next.

26:28 Wes: You know, we did say a bit about causality and the relationship to causality. I think we said quite a lot. But what else is there to discuss with the apes? Right. So they understand, you know, as we said in the first part, causal and intentional relations among external entities. It's not just about, as with mammals in general, their own causal effects on the world. They can do lots of fancy things like make backward inferences from effect to cause. So for instance, an ape can, if you shake a cup and it's. There's no noise when it's shaken, they can infer that there's no food inside.

They can understand that that rectangular blocks are supposed to. You should be able to build properly with them without the structure falling down. So there's a flaw that the experimenters intentionally put into them to make them tumble over. They'll examine the bottom of the block. They know that if there's a balance beam and one side is weighed down because something is on it, that that means that there is something on the other side. Right. They can infer that if you have a task in which they need to get a reward, they have to tell which container it's in.

They can pick up the different containers to feel which one is heavy. We'll choose the heavy one as having something in it. So they can do all this fancy causal stuff that you don't see in other mammals.

27:44 Christopher: Basically. He talks about monitoring and controlling their uncertainty is the big difference between them and their mammals and their problem solving. Yeah. Page 79. He sort of articulates what you said as well. Yeah. Perhaps the greatest difference in mammals and great apes decision making comes in the way that individuals monitor and control their uncertainty. He says, recall that individual rats can decide to avoid an uncertain option with a potentially big reward and opt for a safer option with a lower reward. Apes do this too, but they also do something more.

They not only executively monitor their uncertainty, but also reflectively monitor and control the decision making process itself. They do this by seeking to identify the cause of the uncertainty and doing something about it if they can. That's a good articulation of in what ways their psychological organization is importantly different.

28:35 Dylan: This is the second level executive tier. Right.

28:38 Wes: He gives an example of an experiment in which that requires the ape to figure out why it's feeling uncertain and then to do something about it. So they see the process of food being hidden inside several tubes. And when they witness that hiding process, they know which tube to go to and they'll select that tube immediately. When they don't witness the hiding process, then they will look in all the tubes to discover which tube the food is in before selecting. I guess they only have one chance, right? They have to get it right the first time. So they know when they don't know is what he's saying and or at least they know when they're not certain of something, which leads them to essentially reflect on the decision making process itself and to say, okay, what do I need to, to properly make this decision?

Like, I need more information to make this decision. Instead of just making a decision, they can have this kind of reflective examination of the decision making process itself, which apparently mammals, other mammals cannot do. This whole thing where they can diagnose that they need more information to do something. So even capuchin monkeys, they'll always look for the food before they choose. Even if they've seen the hiding process, they don't make this distinction between having enough information and not having enough information. So the way he puts it, seeking information to facilitate better decision making means not only that great apes are reflectively monitoring and controlling the decision making process, but also that they're employing a kind of computational rationality in the sense that they must decide if the potentially available information is worth the effort needed to gather.

30:16 Dylan: Page 81 has a really nice kind of summary of this kind of stuff and points out that in testing chimpanzees in the same way as you would test children, that chimpanzees perform about as skillfully as 3 year olds, but not as skillfully as 6 year olds. And he gives this nice list on 81 that the apes are able to inhibit taking a closer, smaller reward to pursue a larger, more distant reward. So they're doing spatial discounting. They inhibit a previously successful action in favor of a new one demanded by a changed situation. So they're updating their strategy.

They persist to a goal through failures and in the face of temptations to do something different. So they have behavioral persistence and they concentrate through distractions in the face of temptations to attend to something else. They have attentional focus, thought. The categorization of those kinds of cognitive executive tier, second order tier functions was

31:18 Christopher: also one of the sort of consequences of this sort of new reflective tier. He talks about being able to attribute your own experience to others, which was huge. One of the experiments he talks about was, I believe was like one chimpanzee had a box that had like a screen over it and he could see through it. And then the box was reoriented and such that it was opaque to him. But that chimpanzee seemed to know that the other chimpanzee on the other side could actually see through it. Now, so for that to make sense, the chimpanzee must have attributed his own experience to the other chimpanzee, like, oh, he's in a position where he can see it, because I was in that position and I could. To me, that's just really fascinating as like something that is a consequence of this reflective capacity, being able to take someone else's perspective, or at least a proto version of it.

32:07 Wes: This attribution of mental states to others, you know, say is unique to primates. Now, we know they can't do joint attention, right? We know they can't do the perspectival stuff that he's going to attribute to humans in the next chapter, but they can do this. You know, they do have this idea that others have mental states and that they may or may not perceive things. And so, for instance, right, a chimp around a higher status chimp who wants some food and knows that if the higher status chimp, the higher ranked chimp sees him, he's not going to be able to have that food, can take note of the fact of whether that chimp sees the food and perhaps will take a circuitous or concealed route to that food.

So they're aware of other minds in that sense, and they are aware that other intentional agents in their environment, other chimps are. They're aware that they're causal actors and that they're intentional agents.

33:03 Christopher: So anyway, yeah, and then a little later on, he talks a little bit about how it is the case that they can sort of. They have this process where they attribute mental states to other agents. And he talks about why that would make sense or why it would be clear is because you're all the individuals of the same species. We all sort of either look the same or we associate others with us and things like that. But how we move from inanimate objects to having this sort of relationship of causality with the world is something that they develop as well. And he, I think he has. He talks about. There's an idea that bridging that gap is just tool use. Being able to use that kind of logical thinking, in a sense, to know that if you drop a big rock on this termite mound, it's going to destroy the termite mound, such that you're going to be able to eat Those termites.

33:48 Wes: Right. There's got to be some way to move from this idea that I do something and there's an effect to things out there. Independent of me are causes and effects. And tools represent this intermediate realm where it's me doing something, but it's also something else doing something. And that, Tomasello is speculating that then is the stepping stone to being able to comprehend the world as inanimate, external objects, as causal, which is again fascinating.

34:18 Dylan: I meant to ask him this and I wondered a little bit about causality and what the difference is for other kinds of activities of other non apes and their use of instruments, or I guess called their use of causality. This feels like they must understand causality in some way. Dogs will open doors. They'll learn how to turn a handle, a lever at least. They don't have opposable thumbs, but they'll be able to turn a handle to open a door. I'm going to bring up a bird. And he explicitly talks about the fact that he doesn't really go down. He excludes birds and bees and other animals for the reasons of just trying to go through a direct evolutionary change for human beings.

And so birds will go and they'll drop shellfish onto rocks in order to break them apart in order to get to the meat inside. And so I just was wondering, I was just trying to think about, is Tomasello going a little bit too far to say that only apes understand causality or is it a little bit like rationality that there's a particular form of causality that is being understood or a way it's being understood, that is. I mean, we don't want to say that lizards understand causality because they do go no go decisions.

35:42 Christopher: Well, I thought he said that mammals do. I thought on page 86, for example.

35:47 Wes: Yeah.

35:47 Christopher: Recall that he referenced an experiment that Dickinson presented. Evidence that rats do not just associate their act with its result, but also understand that their act caused the result. So they know they can cause things themselves.

36:01 Dylan: Look at you, Chris.

36:02 Wes: You just.

36:03 Dylan: You pointed exactly the section that should answer my question.

36:05 Wes: Yeah. So mammals understand their own the fact that they have causal effects on the world when they do things, but they don't, unlike apes, according to Tomasello. I don't. Is there evidence against this? I don't know. But you know, they don't, according to Tomasello, understand causality between inanimate external objects or between other external intentional agents. So there's not a causal intentional world out there for them. It's just them and their effect. On the world.

36:37 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

36:37 Christopher: I wonder if a dog would be able to. Let's say we have a rudimentary system set up where you'd have a dog knock a broom over and the broom would fall on the door handle and the door would open. The dog might just think, when I hit the broom, it opened, the door opens. He might not think that the broom handle is causing the doorknob to go down. You know what I mean? That's like maybe one level removed. So the gap would be like they understand internally generated causality but not external causality amongst other inanimate objects, I think, is the way he puts it. I don't know to what extent that's true, but it's a little bit different than them not understanding causality at all. It's just they only understand almost their own or themselves as the only producer of this kind of causal effect.

37:17 Wes: I mean, I think we'd have to think in terms of experiments that chimps can solve problems that chimps can solve that dogs can't, for instance. So can a dog do the equivalent of. You know, obviously they can't pick up the containers to see which one is heavy, to know that the. Which one the treat is in. But could they do some sort of equivalent by nudging the container? I don't know.

37:38 Christopher: Would they just check them all? Yeah.

37:40 Dylan: Yeah.

37:41 Wes: So should we move on to ancient humans? Are we ready for ancient humans for this evolution, this next evolutionary step to shared agency?

37:51 Christopher: Yeah, I just. I mean, I really liked this chapter a lot. I thought the emphasis on the sort of feedback system here was communal in a way, where we have this, me, we and I. Which is a weird way to put it, kind of feedback loop. I just thought that was really cool. Like I said, I thought of Dewey a lot reading this final chapter and the way in which we would have, like, competent inquiry in a group would be how we learn and how we have knowledge and why that would be passed down and things like that. I did. I wanted to say too, I thought something very interesting was like, on page 103, which is, I guess, jumping a little bit ahead.

He does mention that great apes have not evolved recursively perspectival representations, which is something that we have given our cooperative rationality. And I wanted to ask him about that, to elaborate a little bit more, because he does, in this book, talk a little bit about how recursive thinking and recursive perspective taking is an important element to our species that makes us unique, which is very similar to what Chomsky says about. About innate recursion and computational thinking and stuff.

39:04 Wes: Here's his example. This is the whole Princess Bride. I was going to make a joke about the Princess Bride when I was talking about this in the first part where he couldn't remember the Nobel Prize winner. But since the process of mental coordination and cooperative communication required individuals to take the perspective of. On their own perspective recursively. So I just. I not only have to take the perspective of the other into account, but I have to take their perspective of me. Yeah, of me. So he attend. Intends for me to attend to that as a potential weapon.

You know, if we're out coordinating some. Some activity. It's this kind of infinite hall of mirrors. But that's necessary to this concept of a shared social agency. I mean, he starts out the chapter. He compares this idea of a socially shared agency, which I think we have to take very seriously. It might. Might sound kind of a bit woo to. To start talking about collective agencies or maybe Hegelian or something. But I do think we, in terms of his definition of agency as a feedback control system, we have to take seriously the idea that this is a socially constituted feedback control system and it exists so that we can pursue goals that we can't simply pursue on our own.

We can do things as collective agencies that we cannot do on our own. And this recapitulates, according to Tomasello, other biological advances, say with chromosomes or a multicellular organism, right, where single cells come together, in a sense, into a quote, unquote, collective agency, sexual reproduction. So I like those comparisons. You know, he cashes this out in terms of, we're going to get kind of two elements to this account in this chapter. One is just joint agency and collaboration. So we might think of just as pairs of individuals.

And then the second part is about culture. So in this section on early human joint agency and collaboration, we get a comparison to chimpanzees, who, if you've seen one of these documentaries on Netflix, you think, okay, well, they definitely hunt collaboratively and so do lions, right? They are collaborating in their hunt. They seem to be, but it turns out that they're actually not. They're actually not collaborating, which is amazing to learn. They're just acting opportunistically. Yes, they are predicting, you know, if a lion goes. When lions go out to hunt together, they are using their predictions about what other lions might do and then the prey in response to those lines to position themselves.

That's why it looks collaborative. But really they are just out for themselves. They're using others, as Tomasello puts it, as social tools in the hunt. And that is what chimpanzees do as well. They are, to the extent that it looks like they're collaborating, they're actually just using other people as social tools. And there's really an advanced set of cognitive capacities for which there has to be, you know, to be specifically evolved and have a, you know, substrate and the brain, you know, Right. Biological capacity has to be there simply not there in chimpanzees.

So those capacities have to be there for collaboration as we know it. Collaboration in the real sense to even be possible.

42:13 Dylan: So I confess I didn't completely understand the sign of this difference. Right, so what you just said is exactly what Tomasello says is that what appears to be socially generated cooperative action of lions in the hunt, or wolves in the hunt, or chimpanzees out getting food is not. It's really individual actions that all happen to be together. Right. Maybe it's the same way in which birds fly in a flock. They form a pattern together, but every bird is doing its own thing. It's not actually behaving socially. And so what isn't completely clear to me now, and maybe it's just I'm not remembering it, is what's the sign of that distinction? And maybe that's like, what test am I going to do of wolves or apes versus humans that's going to tell me that we're doing something that they're not or they're not doing something that we want to call social?

43:16 Wes: Well, he cashes this out in terms of cognitive abilities, Right? So he's going to associate real cooperation with joint agency with a partner. And the first criterion for that is the ability to form a joint goal and make a joint decision, and then along the way to jointly attend the relevant situations. Right. So, you know, if at some point in the hunt, the lion, one lion pointed at something to the other, he's

43:43 Dylan: like, look over here.

43:45 Wes: That would be real cooperation. That would be real collaboration. But they can't do that. This ability to collaborate for Tomasello, is very closely associated with the ability to communicate and in particular to share their attention, which is to say, to have joint attention to particular objects.

44:04 Christopher: It can be difficult to sort of discern those things. But I do like to think about it like the lions all have the same goal, but humans have a shared goal. And there's a bit of a difference between sharing a goal and then each member of the group having the same goal.

44:21 Wes: They have analogous goals. I mean, are they the same goal because it's their own goal.

44:26 Mike: You're right.

44:27 Wes: I mean, it's the same goal, except that it's for them. It's my goal to get the deer or whatever it is for me. But to have the same goal in the sense of the goal that we would have in a collaboration, in a joint agency is we are going to get the deer for us, for we, for the group, and then we're going to share the spoils. Right? The spoils aren't just for me.

44:49 Dylan: And then whatever appears to be sharing is really based upon the hierarchy of the. The organization. Right. So which lion goes in for the food and which other lions in the pride that lion knocks away or chases off depends upon the relative hierarchy within their group, which is all still based upon their own individual activity. Their own individual is not genuinely a shared goal.

45:15 Christopher: So, yeah, there's no predisposition for sharing amongst the lions. If you don't happen to get any of the kill, no one would care, for example, they would just be like, you didn't get in there quick enough. Whereas we have cashing that out experimentally. Obviously he does it with the chimpanzees, where he has two chimpanzees work together and if one chimp gets access to the food early, they'll just eat all the food and that's it.

45:34 Wes: Whereas you'll see collaborating.

45:36 Christopher: Yeah. Young children will go, at least feel some responsibility to share some of it because they work together towards a goal and that's just sort of.

45:43 Wes: It's an entirely different goal on those two sorts of circumstances. So the way, you know, when the children are. Have to work together to pull the device towards themselves, right. One has, has a hand on each rope on the side of. Of something that they have to pull together to get the reward. They are thinking of that in terms of we are doing this and we are going to get the reward. In the chimp situation, it's just, I mean, obviously they're not saying I'm doing this, but, you know, if they could, it's, I'm doing this and I'm going to get the reward.

And here's this other environmental element over here, the other chimp, and they're a social tool for me to work on this particular goal that I have for my. They don't even have the capacity. It's not just that they're selfish bastards, although they are. It's just their brain doesn't even have the wiring for that to be possible. For them to think of us as Doing this together, which is amazing.

46:32 Dylan: You know, it is amazing.

46:34 Wes: It's tragic in a way. I don't know if it's more tragic for us or for them.

46:37 Dylan: But what becomes tragic, right, is thinking about, again, this sort of ontogeny, capitulating phylogeny, right? The way in which, as a human beings have stacked up all of these levels of agency. Right. But you can. Seems to be very, very natural that you immediately want to say, well, when our ability to act in this socially normative way, our agency gets constrained either through some kind of constraint on our cognitive ability at that time, that it seems kind of tragic that someone is incapable of acting cooperatively.

47:16 Wes: Dylan, you're pointing to an important part of this. It's not just the cognitive capacity. So for instance, to communicate. It's not just straightforwardly about cognitive capacities. It's about motivation, emotion. It's about ultimately, it's about normative emotions, which is. It's again, really interesting how all these things interlock. So you really can't do collaborations unless partners of the collaboration know how to communicatively protest the misbehavior of the other partner and to be motivated to do that. So, as Tomasello points out, very young children do this.

They will call out cheaters. They will use words like must, ought, should, all of that normative stuff. And again, you know, I mentioned this in the part one, but when they do those protests, they are thinking about that protest as coming from the shared agency, from the we-ness. It's not just, oh, you inconvenienced me by doing this. I want the candy. And how dare you screw up my individual project to get the candy. It's that we agreed to do this together and share the candy. And what are you doing? Why are you messing up? And it even. That even comes to leave, taking.

Why are you. What, you're not doing this activity anymore. You didn't take leave. So that's hardwired into very young children, that attitude, normativity, the capacity for morality. That is an evolved capacity with a biological basis in the brain. All right, well, as a final word, I say, you know, we didn't get that much into the cultural stuff because that's the next step, right? There's individual collaboration and then there's. And the normativity that happens at the individual level. You shouldn't have done that. This is the shared goal that we have together.

And then there's the formation of even larger units as. As cultures and the desire to conform to cultural norms and the conception of a cultural Unit as itself, this shared agency of which I am a part and which I'm beholden to. And you know, according to Tomasello, that different cultural groups become themselves units of natural selection because the groups that do better have more cohesion, more collaboration, more solidarity. So you get this competition at the group level that drives these increasing capacities for collaboration and joint agency at the individual level.

So I'll just say, once again, I love the book and it's just so helpful and informative when it comes to so many things that we've talked about, agency, normativity, all that stuff.

50:01 Dylan: I enjoyed and found it more informative and stimulating reading this book than a lot of things that I've read in years. This sounds kind of grandiose, but to me, this book is the first time I've ever had the experience of contemporaneously with it being published, reading a book that I thought, you know what this is going to be like? William James Psychology. This is going to be the kind of book that you would be right to read a long time from now. In a way, it's crystallizing for you to understand things that you didn't understand before.

50:33 Wes: Yeah, I had the same experience. It feels like these are a lot of very important insights and if these are new to him, then, yeah, a very important book. I don't know what.

50:44 Dylan: Well, time will tell on that, but that's what it felt like.

50:47 Wes: And it's a little unclear to me how novel all of them are or if he's just synthesizing a bunch of stuff. But yeah, you couldn't overstate the information importance of these insights unless we're just not in the know or something like that.

50:58 Seth: But.

50:58 Wes: Sorry, go ahead.

50:59 Dylan: Yeah, and also how much they. They really ought to affect the way in which we talk about cognition in general.

51:07 Christopher: I had a similar experience to you guys. I, you know, I went to this book thinking it would be rather narrow in its implications for what I was going to think about. And I was pleasantly surprised that that's not the case at all. I mean, it made me. I. There was all sorts of things from even just going on a tangent after reading about experiential niches, I went and read one of the papers he linked. I mean, this book, while it does cover a way to talk about agency in a. I don't want to say deterministic sort of framework, but it is, it's much easier to talk about or have discussions about free will when we get into the specifics like this. What cognitive faculties are you referring to. And so I found that very enlightening. And I feel like I have a new set of tools to have that discussion with people. But more than just the free will discussion.

51:45 Dylan: Yeah.

51:45 Christopher: I mean, I thought about how we might come to objective facts, quote unquote. Like Wes was talking about normativity. I mean, just the implications for how we might understand our moral behavior and where that normativity comes from. And we have this kind of picture that he paints for us, which I found really enlightening. It was a really, really great book and it touched on much more than just agency, although the stuff on agency was great as well. I really, really enjoyed it.

52:10 Wes: Everyone should read it. Yep, true. Including you, Mark, if you're listening.

52:14 Christopher: Yeah, for real.

52:16 Wes: Mark said he's looking forward to hearing our conversation. I think we forgot to mention that Mark wasn't wasn't able to make it. That's okay.

52:23 Christopher: It'll be very apparent,

52:26 Wes: hopefully.

52:28 Mark: And now this is Mark interjecting during my editing pass as they did not announce what the reading is for next time, which is two essays by Harry Frankfurt, who passed away this year. His very famous On Bullshit, Originally published in 1986. And then we read a more positive essay to see what the alternative to bullshit is. The importance of what we care about from 1982. You should reach out to us pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com to tell us what you'd like us to cover. Follow us on Facebook, on X, on Instagram, comment on the blog post@partiallyexaminedlife.com keep an eye on our YouTube channel as I've been releasing more zoom video of some of our podcasts.

The Close Reads the pretty much pop the philosophy versus Improv so you can see what the hosts look like. We're not actually trying to do this on Pel, at least not normally, as these episodes require too much deliberation. You do not want to hear it unedited. And speaking of close reads, Wes and I have recorded recently on Epictetus. We just recorded On Forms in Plato's Republic. Some of that will be released pretty soon. We read the entirety in three sessions of the latter Grice paper discussed at the end of the last episode. If you want to sink into that, go to patreon.com close reads Philosophy and again, quite a few episodes of that are for free up on YouTube.

Thanks for listening.

53:53 Dylan: Good night everybody.

53:54 Christopher: Yeah, yeah. Thanks a lot guys. Again. Good night.

53:56 Dylan: See y'.

53:57 Mark: All.

54:01 Mike: Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile.

54:03 Wes: Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for 15amonth is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made 15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment

54:23 Unknown speaker: of $45 for 3 months, $90 for 6 months or $180 for a 12 month plan required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms.

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