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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
Speaker 1 0:00
When we take seriously ways in which we are surrounded by by others, and engaging with others and engaging with the world and engaging in technology, the boundaries around me or you get looser and looser and harder to draw.
PJ 0:22
A Hello and welcome to chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ weary, and I'm here today with Dr Anthony chimero, and we're here to talk about his book, intertwined creatures, the embodied cognitive science of self and other. He is the University Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Cincinnati. Dr shamero, wonderful to have you on today. Thank you. Thank you so. Dr shamero, just to start us off, you know, aside from just getting this awesome cover, why? Why this book? Why write this book?
Speaker 1 1:00
Sure. Well, the awesome cover is by my wife, by the way, that was part of her her painting thesis. So So I especially like the book because of that. So why this book? The Law, the kind of long term story is that when I was in graduate school in the late 1990s my PhD advisor who recently died, Brian Cantwell Smith and I had a conversation where he said, you know, feminist issues are the most important issues in philosophy. Why aren't we working on them? And, you know, he was a computer scientist, an AI researcher, and I was doing analytic style philosophy of mind, so we both kind of wanted to help and couldn't figure out quite how. And now it's, you know, 29 years later or so, and I finally, after, you know, the teens, had a sense of how I could, how I could say something connecting the cognitive science of interpersonal interactions to feminist issues,
PJ 2:03
and you set that up by starting with Chomsky so and you take a lot from Dennett in response. Can you talk? Can you kind of set up the the issues, like you do in the book, so it can kind of give us the lay of the land. And I'd love to end with where, how you get from there to going from Chomsky and Dennett to here's how cognitive science connects to feminism or feminist issues.
Speaker 1 2:35
Yeah, good. So honestly, the Chomsky framing was the idea of my editor, Wendy Lochner, who said that I should, it would be, it would be a good idea to pitch this as a response to a very popular book by Chomsky, so that, I mean, I don't have, I mean, I have strong feelings about Chomsky, but I don't have any kind of, you know, I wasn't thinking that This was about Chomsky when I started it getting from Dennett was then it was my undergrad advisor, and I it took me several years of grad school to realize that he wasn't right about everything, and it was no and I think really, what made me interested in This is just serendipity. I had a distribution requirement in grad school, and I had to take feminist political theory, and I found it so compelling, as I said, so much so that I considered, how could I participate in these kinds of dialogs? So really, it was just ongoing frustration with the way the kind of philosophy I was trained to do, which is the analytic style, the way that that style of philosophy kind of pushes politics to the side, pushes activism to the side. And I think that, you know, we have enough details about how embodiment works, about how social interaction works, to kind of make some strong claims about about what people are, and how this relates to feminist issues, And also people like Deleuze watery,
PJ 4:18
yeah, and so. So, so how do, how do you get to the the feminist issues, I assume that's largely built through, like the embodied side of this, right? This idea of how any you kind of set it up later on in the book, I think it was later on the book against AI, right? How AI's are blanks. Can you talk about that kind of back and forth you make between the human self and these kind of AI blanks, as I think you call it, blanks, not even blank spaces. It's just blanks.
Speaker 1 5:00
Yeah, and that's actually stolen from from a movie, the end of the world, or the World's End? I'm not sure which I forget which
Speaker 2 5:09
it is, but the world's end because it's the name of the pub, yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 5:15
And so in that movie, the characters go back to their hometown and try to complete a bar crawl that they fail to complete. This is you've seen the movie, probably, but
Unknown Speaker 5:29
I love Edgar Wright, so, yeah.
Speaker 1 5:32
So, so as they're back in their hometown trying to make it through all of these bars, they come to realize that lots of the town's residents, maybe all of them, are actually just machines with empty skulls with a little blue goop in them, and so they start calling them blanks. And I guess one of the things that I'm trying to kind of get across is that if you understand what a person is correctly, you there's no possibility that anyone around you is a blank. And you know, you mentioned Dana. He used to talk about this with respect to consciousness. He would say, you know, the narrative in philosophy is so I don't know that anybody but me is actually not a zombie, conscious having experiences at all. So and then it says, Why don't you try saying that to your wife or your best friend? I don't know really, that you're having experiences right? And I think that once you understand that being a person the right way. I think that that question can't come up. And that's what I try to do throughout the book. I use the World's End framing device because it's kind of funny,
PJ 6:51
yeah, oh, and it is. And so you talk about, I think part of you know what Dennis mentioning is, like, that's the kind of question, and this ties into your what you're saying about political activism. I don't want to make sure I'm tracking with you here, saying, Well, I don't know if any other, anyone else is really having the same experience I am. And he's like, why don't you say it to your wife? He's like, that's the kind of question that separates philosophy from real life and from practical application, which is also part of what you're you're like, No, no. At the end of the book, you're like. We should be searching for truth and we should be promoting positive social change. I want to make sure I said that, right? So am I? Am I tracking with you? Like that, that connection.
Speaker 1 7:38
There you are. And again. So Dan Bennett died a few years ago, and I'm still kind of messed up about it. He was always really supportive and great to me, but he his view is that there isn't a kind of special philosophical terrain. Every philosophical question is actually about real life, and the idea that other people are blanks, not having experiences, not reasoning, not engaging, not thinking, not feeling, that idea is seems insane in everyday life. And you know, philosophers have somehow talked themselves into it. It it has a name, the problem of other minds, which is, how do I know that anybody but me has a mind? And philosophers have talked themselves into saying, Well, this is, in principle, insurmountable, but practically we can make assumptions. I mean, I'm trying to kind of diffuse that by saying, if you think that only you are having experiences you don't understand what you are,
PJ 8:44
yes, and that's I think I wanted to make sure to tie it into your later point about promoting, you know, social change, about adding political activism. But I think the real question that we're leading up to now is, what is a person then?
Speaker 1 9:01
Yeah, so, so easy, easy question, right? Yeah, traditionally, traditional, philosophically, a person is a mind or a soul initially, so they are inside of a body, hidden only sparsely connected to outside of the body through our feeble senses. And the feminist critique of that idea, starting in the 1970s and 80s, and reaching a kind of boiling point in the 1990s is that that's just not what we are. And the idea in the feminist research is to look at how do mothers and infants interact? Are they? Are there really two experiences happening when a mother is, you know, feeding an infant and and the answer that they come up with is no, and they think that this is a big deal. They think that what it means is that kind of Western tradition has. Has a bad understanding of what it is to be a person, because they lock them on the inside and separate them cleanly from others. And the philosophical background I try to give and the experimental evidence I try to provide is aimed at showing that that is not it's not clean, right? You and others are overlapping, and I use afraid yourself is intertwined with others,
PJ 10:27
yes, and kind of as an example, and I would love one. I want to make sure this example works, so hopefully this isn't a dud of a question, but you talk about the views, talking about the minimal self versus the narrative self. And the art is like, there just is no minimal self. I think I've been reading. I read Charles Taylor's the language animal, and he talks about this. I have a three year old daughter. When she first started talking, she would say, you know, we told her she was pretty, so of course, that's what got stuck in her head. And she would say, she wouldn't say, I'm pretty. She would say, when she first started talking, she would say, Frankie's pretty, because she, and that's, I think that's a kind of a crucial point, that the first story she's telling herself is the story told from our perspective, right? And that's part of that identity shaping, is that, am I on track with you there
Speaker 1 11:27
that is on track and and I mean, for a three year olds a little different, but for a Yes, three week old, there are no experiences that are not with a caregiver that are not shared with caregiver. And kind of part of what we do during development is we kind of form into a kind of semi autonomous unit, but only semi autonomous, not autonomous. And I think that the kind of traditional philosophical idea is that no you're fully autonomous, you're fully separate from others. You can take care of yourself. You are you without anybody else around you. And again, sorry, I keep thinking of Dan Dennett,
Unknown Speaker 12:12
yeah, no worries. He,
Speaker 1 12:15
he used to talk about, you know, look, if, if you think about Robin Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe or or, you know, you know, children raised in by wolves, you know, he would say that they don't have minds the way you and I do, because they're not engaged with other people. I mean, they're not engaged with technology like my eyeglasses are technology, right? And a lot of what I do, I couldn't do without them. So the idea is that when we take seriously the ways in which we are surrounded by by others, and engaging with others and engaging with the world and engaging in technology, the boundaries around me or you get looser and looser and harder to draw.
PJ 13:11
Yes, and even the Robinson Crusoe example, everything that he is has a history that that narrative, right, like anything that you would call his mind, is been shaped and formed already. He he's an adult. And again, I It's interesting to see the parallels between your book and what I read in in Taylor, but I think it's pronounced condiak, his account of language is two. He's like, What if you had two babies who grew up? How would language form from that? And you see this with, you know, you start by critiquing Descartes. And one of the earliest critiques of Descartes was Vico, and he's like, this doesn't work with kids, right? It's like, and that's what you look at Condi acts. It's like, what do you mean two babies in the desert are doing language. It's like, like, they're the two babies, not to be too graphic, but the two babies are going to die, right? That's, yeah, oh yeah. Like, this idea, and it's such a and I think that's, and I love that, like, that's the feminist critique, because it's like, you guys don't spend any time with babies, right? It's like, it's so it's such armchair philosophizing.
Speaker 1 14:27
Yeah, that's right. That is exactly right. And, and at one point in the book, I kind of draw on some evidence about, you know, innocent development, and citing a bunch of you know, young women philosophers like Miriam casello and Anna chaunessa chownica, I kind of say, you know, look, we all begin our lives like in someone else, right? And your first experiences are co experiences, right? And so I think. There's a deep way in which, as we get educated in our Western culture, we come to forget how much we are kind of fundamentally with others,
PJ 15:12
which, of course, and I think you mentioned this kind of the end talking about you walk into a lecture hall in Tokyo or in Sacramento, you walk in differently, right? And so, and some of this shows up, and I want to make sure I understand this. This goes to social construction, this idea that other cultures are more communal than basically Western culture, and it is this kind of Cartesian difference, is that, is that a right reading of how you're seeing this,
Speaker 1 15:47
that is exactly the right reading. And you know what's one of the things that's interesting is that this is kind of what I was trying to get across when I made that point, is that when you walk into a room as the instructor, yeah, none of the seats in the back look attractive. When you walk in as a student, seats in the front don't look attractive, right? And it's just you don't even, you don't even notice. You could sit in them a lot of the time. You're just like, Okay, those are my those are my choices, and that's totally culturally determined, because, you know, we have the same kind of physiology and anatomy, and we could sit in in all the chairs, just not the ones, not the ones that social constraints kind of push us away from,
PJ 16:38
if you don't mind, to take us in a little bit of a different direction you and this is where I think maybe it starts getting to the math. So the dynamical systems you use that to kind of incorporate both phenomenological, ecological and inactive views of the brain, if I'm saying that correctly. And so, what is it? What are dynamical systems, and how do they? How can they appropriate or help us to make these views cohesive?
Speaker 1 17:14
Sure, let me start pretty far back. Sure. One of the things we think is that if I know, have a theory of what a person is, or what a mind is, or what being rational is, I should be able to explain it to my grandmother, and she should understand, right? And part of the point of you know the 20 late 19th, late 20th and 21st Century cognitive science is that actually humans are really complicated, and we're going to have to use our kind of strongest, best explanatory theories to make sense of them. And it might be that, you know, unless your grandmother's computer scientist or a physicist or a mathematician, she's not going to understand so a dynamic system, right? Is, is a set of variables that change together over time according to some law that is extremely broad and extremely vague. The idea is, anything you can model with calculus is a dynamic system, anything that changes over time and and the real root of all of this is work in the 1950s and 60s, about far from equilibrium thermodynamics. And I apologize I'm not making this easier to understand, but it's really where it comes from. What people started to understand is that the laws of physics aren't going to explain to us what it is to be a living thing. So we have to kind of understand and the kind of key feature of living things is that we're not at equilibrium with our environments. You know, I'm I have a different chemical concentration, I'm warmer than the environment, all of those things. So we're not at equilibrium. And in the 1950s and 60s, people started developing developing mathematical tools to make sense of non equilibrium systems, like like all living things are non equilibrium systems. And and that gets brought into neuroscience and the cognitive sciences in the 1970s and 80s, initially, and, you know, has kind of flowered since then as a kind of approach to understand what it is to be a person. And the idea about a dynamical system is it's anything that you can model using calculus, and calculus doesn't care whether one of the variables is inside your body and one of the variables is outside of your body, right? It's just a matter of how these two things change together over time, and I one. I think, is that that's a really good way to understand scientifically the kind of fuzzy, bounded self that I was describing earlier. Because if dynamic systems is the best explanation of how I say I don't know, catch a frisbee, then the variables that are relevant there are both inside my body and outside my body, right? So where you can't draw, you can't say that, Oh, the Frisbee catching happens with just right here. It happens in the environment between here and there as well.
PJ 20:36
And is this where we one. One of the terms I think comes up here is self regulating, right? That's why the we are separate from the environment in some sense, in terms of equations. It's not but then we have equations that are inside and outside, and though, if those equations to work have to be together, then they are coupled. Am I you that's coupled? Out of my depth.
Speaker 1 21:03
Yeah, right word. And I usually, I think I meant self organization. I talk a lot about
Unknown Speaker 21:10
that means self organ. That's kind of a
Speaker 1 21:13
that's a signature of far from equilibrium systems. But I mean, I want to take what we're saying a little further even. Is that, you know, if we're trying to explain my mind, my cognition, my thinking using dynamical systems, there can be variables in me, but also variables in you, right? So that is, if it's making the fuzz boundary fuzzy, it can make it fuzzy enough to include other individuals. And basically, you know, the way the narrative I say in the book is that it took the cognitive sciences 25 years longer than it took feminist philosophers to understand this. Understand that we are not separate from the world and from one another. And of course, not all cognitive scientists believe this. Just put it out.
PJ 22:08
Philosophy of mind is contentious. Cognitive Science is contentious. I don't know. So. And can you talk a little bit more about self organizing and kind of how that happens. And I think it's interesting, because everything you're talking about at the cognitive science and at the calculus level, like lot of big words, but at a common everyday sense, it's like, yeah, a lot of my actions are determined by variables outside me, right? Like, that's like, such a common sense idea. Can you talk about the self organization part of it?
Speaker 1 22:48
Sure, so, so, um, the kind of philosophical understanding of laws and causes make it so that lots of things in our everyday environment seem impossible. So for example, the example I like to use is that when you flush a toilet, the water molecules make this nice helical Whirlpool pattern on the way out. But nothing, none of the water molecules have decided to do that. It's just the energetic constraints on the system make it so that that is the easiest way to get the water down closer to the center of the Earth more quickly. So this kind of organization that we can see arises without a leader or kind of conscious, conscious commitment to it, right? That is the water molecules don't all say, Yeah, okay, we're all going to go like this, right? That's not how it works. So that's a really mundane example of a self organizing system. And the idea is that the whirlpool in your toilet exists because of constraints on the water and the water in the tank and all of these things acting together to not make that nice pattern. And the kind of bringing of dynamic systems into the cognitive sciences arises from the idea that maybe our actions are also self organizing. So that is, you know, when I think about what I do, maybe there's not always someone directing the action. There's just kind of the constraints of the environment and the constraints of my physical body acting together in order to make something happen. Yeah, yeah.
PJ 24:45
So there's the water in the tank, and forgive me, this is probably because I homeschool, attend an eight year old, but it's also the shape of the bowl, right? That's one of the constraints. Okay? I. I got fastened on the toilet bowl metaphor. I was like, Oh, this is something I could explain to my kids. No, what's a constraint that we see in social behavior? And I think this gets into a bigger discussion about, do groups have moods, feelings and thoughts, right? We talk that way. And so what are some constraints on social, social action. What would be an example of that
Speaker 1 25:27
good you know, the example that people who study this joint action it's called, is they use all the time is carrying a sofa with someone else, right? So in real time, the sofa and the other person and the stairway you're trying to get down, and the walls along the side of the stairway are kind of forcing your behavior into certain very narrow ranges, right? So there's a very simple social action, moving a sofa, not always simple, but you know, we've all we've all done it, moving a sofa, which kind of implies that the thing that is organizing the behavior is not just me and it's not just the other person, it's us simultaneously. And the sofa and the stairs are organizing the behavior are the kind of right story to tell about why the behavior is the way it is. So the other the other way, way I like to talk about this, and this is really Alvin no way is the person who first put it this way, is that, you know, we don't experience the world as others by like, slurping information about them inside of us. It's more like when we experience the world. It's more like we're dancing with it, right? And when you know you're dancing with someone, unless it's a scripted dance, you are kind of constantly being constrained by both the music and the other person, and so much so that it's hard to say who decided we would do X when we were dancing, we just suddenly were spontaneously doing it. And so that's the kind of self organization that is more macro as far as things like moods and emotions. Going back to Heidegger, Heidegger argued that moods are always public. It's not my mood, it's our mood always. And I think that that is also true of so moods are kind of long term things, right? You're in a mood all day, yeah? And, and that, being in that mood kind of constrains the moment to moment things that you do, including having emotions. A guy who I know, who's at Rutgers University named Rob Eisenhower, did his dissertation by basically saying, Okay, I understand that personality traits are long term, moods are medium term and emotions are short term, and those three scales interact in a deep way, so that, you know, the emotions collectively make up the mood, but the mood also kind of determines the emotions, right? And the personality is even longer and and so, you know, Rob just started pestering people throughout the day and asking them about their moods and feelings and emotions, and then used a dynamical systems model to make sense of the interactions among them. So yeah, well, I think that we feel sad when we're having an argument, or angry when we're having an argument, and, you know, happy wets, when at the positive events like, I think that's, I think the kind of feeling at basis is collective. And, you know, we can abstract away, and we can kind of take some of it with us when we leave that situation and feel happy by ourselves, but you know, the emotions are at least, at least in the most basic cases, typically shared,
PJ 29:10
and correct me if I'm wrong. But this is where some of the feminism comes in, is that the emotions are shared, but they're also hierarchical, and so that's where one person can be angry and one person can be sad, and we'd label it differently, but it's part of a shared system. Is that a right way to think about it?
Speaker 1 29:30
That is the right way to think about it? Yeah. And so you used the word coupling before. One of the things about coupling is it can be antagonistic, right? You know you're boxing with someone. You're coupled to them very strongly, but you're not doing the same things at the same time, right? And I think that you know when you belittle someone, not you, when one belittle I'll try. Um, when one belittles someone, there is a kind of antagonistic coupling between them and the person that they are talking with,
PJ 30:11
and depending on the other person, there's different reactions to that and that that's happened over time from cultural like, how do you understand belittling coming from a New Englander family that's like, oh, this person likes me. You know that's, there's a different a different response. Sometimes it's like, oh, wait, they were serious about that. Whoops. But now this interesting to me, because you're talking about, we were talking about long term moods, and I'm currently reading. I wish I didn't realize I had it with me, and I'm gonna, I don't know how to pronounce the author's name, but Thomas, and it's about the it's a it's a novel. This is completely spitballing So, but it's, it's really fascinating to me. It's a novel by an Indian author about partition and about the riots and the violence that followed between Hindus and Muslims. And the mood of the book, it captures the mood, but then it also creates the mood can be, I can I can feel it right. And so what we've had in the past, from a Cartesian worldview, if I'm understanding you correctly, is this kind of like, this slurping, I'm sorry that really took me out. He said surfing. But you have like, this, like, Oh, I'm like, you get like, Schleiermacher saying he's like, divining the other person's intentions. There's kind of this mystical thing. And it's like, no, the book itself becomes a social constraint, and it both captures and it creates. Is that like it creates the mood? Is that a way to think about it would work as a social constraint?
Speaker 1 32:09
I mean, you've probably done reading groups with friends, right? In those cases, the conversation is constrained by your everyone's history before they showed up, if they've done the reading, yeah. So, yeah, literature, of course, can can do this. But you know the, and that's any art form, can do it really, any conversation, can do it as well. I mean, you know the kind of backing and forcing between other people can both make up a shared mood, but also then, in making up the shared mood be constrained by the fact that we're grumpy right now, therefore everything I do is going to be kind of grumpy, and everything you do is going to be kind of grumpy, and the grumpiness is kind of neither mine nor yours. It's shared between us,
PJ 33:02
or it's something I will have to feel like I have to work on. If I if someone else has got you're like, Oh, I either have to end, you know, like it's something you have to respond to. Even choosing not to respond is, um,
PJ 33:23
thanks. So I want to be respectful your time. I think we're doing okay, but
Speaker 1 33:27
as I said, I have time we started late, and I have time this afternoon. Yeah, no, I
PJ 33:32
appreciate it. I am, but I there's a big section, or this big idea about how you instead of focusing on one answer to kind of philosophy of mind or cognitive science is looking at kind of now, now I'm worried I didn't write it right. But interaction dominant neural network dynamics and computation models for for our answers to these sorts of things. And I hear that even you're giving explanatory and you're talking about, like, feminist philosophy, and then there's math over here, and there's, I think you said, Rob Eisenhower, who is going around in, like, literally, like, calculating everyone's moods throughout the day. What are when you talk about your philosophical method, what is the value of using this plurality approach, and why? Why should we do that?
Speaker 1 34:33
Yeah, good. So I'm a very weird academic in that, you know, all of my degrees were in philosophy and, you know, artificial intelligence, and then I became a psychology professor, and now my job is like both philosophy and psychology, but, you know, it's always a kind of bringing to bear of experimental. Insights on humans to both philosophical questions and cultural questions. So the easiest way to understand what I try to do is I in the book, is I say, Okay, there's this coherent understanding philosophically of humans as intertwined with others. There's also empirical evidence that that is true, therefore, how do we answer some traditional philosophical problems from the idea that is philosophically sound and empirically founded, that we are not really separate from one another? Now I don't remember what your question was, but I talked a lot.
PJ 35:43
No, well, and so you, you'd said at the beginning that we have answers to a lot of this, empirical answers and solid philosophical arguments. And you said from there, we should be able to both. Aim at the truth and promote positive social change. And so from the for you know, and I'm not in a place to evaluate all your arguments, because I can't do the math, but when we talk about these kind of hard earned, solid answers. How does translate into prom promoting positive social change, good.
Speaker 1 36:31
So one of the things that I kind of believe really deep down is that, you know, people talk about in science that will you have esthetic reasons for preferring one theory to another it's more elegant or has fewer variables, or, you know, so I think we can also have moral theories for For for preferring one scientific approach over another. And if you think about a kind of Cartesian Chomskyan nativist approach, it's not a very kind understanding of what a person is. And I think that the evidence doesn't force you to that view. So if you have that view, it's because you're morally dubious. So I really think that, like I think that you should use the ideas of kind of social good, when you can choose among theories to believe. You should believe the one that makes us kinder to one another, that makes us understand one another better. That makes us care for one another more. So you know, again, moral considerations should affect what we believe to be true about one another, especially when the evidence doesn't nail it down. So we have no choice but to leave believe a particular thing. So when there's a choice, you should in addition to choosing the more esthetically appealing theory, you should also choose the one that's kindest.
PJ 38:13
And how does the model, how does this intertwined picture of the human make us Kinder good.
Speaker 1 38:26
So one of the things it does is it makes us value parenting differently, right? It makes us understand that this activity that you do when you are making another person into a kind of full fledged human member of society, when you're doing that, you're doing like probably the most important activity, and also what this enables is, it enables us to kind of push back against ideas. From history that women are some are somehow incomplete people or defective people, because they have those weird bodies that are connected to the moon in that weird way and and the idea is that, you know, we're all people, but having a woman's body messes that up, somehow makes you too emotional, too connected to others. And I guess what I want to suggest is that we are nicer to one another if we have that as the default, the default is that we are emotionally and connected to one another's connected to our environment, not Islands in the Stream, as Dolly Parton would say,
PJ 39:44
and I think too, that children are the clearest. We kind of dwell on that at the beginning, but understanding our own health in terms of our Community Health is that. Would that be another
Unknown Speaker 39:56
Yes, yeah.
PJ 39:59
It. Yeah. Do you have any practical applications for seeing like things that we often miss, that are important for our individual health, seeing it in community health in an American culture or Western
Speaker 1 40:14
culture, good so, you know, just think about, you know, there's right now the current government is eliminating as many environmental regulations as they can. And the reason that they can feel okay doing that, I don't, I don't know how they can actually, but one of the reasons they can feel okay doing that maybe, is that they think of, well, you know, humans, a person, is a separate thing, like a soul, and it's accidentally attached to a body and accidentally attached to the world. Therefore, the world doesn't, you know, the state of the world doesn't matter that much for humanity. And so, you know, thinking about the deep interconnectedness of ourselves and others in the environment. Kind of will lead us to will lead us to be less like the current administration and to understand being a person as inseparable from healthy social relations and a healthy environment. So you know, all the ultimately, if you just invert everything the current government is doing, that's the changes that I think we ought to ought to see.
PJ 41:38
And how do you see your promotion of positive social change, how do you see that specifically hampered by a lot of current or historical practices and methods in the disciplines of philosophy and psychology?
Speaker 1 42:00
Yeah, good. So the going back to at least Descartes, right, the idea that I, me as a thinking thing, is completely independent of the environment, and only accidentally attest to the environment, and only able to, only able to experience the environment thanks to the graces of God, right? All of that is a kind of recipe for understanding what a person is that pulls them out of social interactions, that pulls them out of engagement with others. And you know, what I try to argue is that when you look at real time individual multiple individual interactions, they suggest that there's an integrity, integrity to the to the relationship that is similar to the integrity of within the individual bodies. And that's that's kind of that's what the dynamic systems approach does, is it allows us to say, Okay, here's how human bodies work, here's the equation, here are the variables. Okay, now let's look at multiple human bodies engaging in something, oh, wait, we can use the same equations and the same variables and find the same kind of statistical outputs of multi person systems, as we do with an individual human body.
PJ 43:27
And we've said social a lot, but yeah, you mentioned briefly, like, ecological concerns. And when you we talked about, you said there's the removal of environmental regulations. And so this intertwined view is first and foremost, it shows up in the social but it also shows up in with our relationship to nature. Is that a kind of a natural consequence of this?
Speaker 1 43:51
Yeah, I think so. You know, the kind of the lack of separateness has been a kind of always a part of the environmental movement, right? So, so, and, of course, like I can go sit by myself and think, right? But my ability to do that depends on a lot of background that is deeply connected to others and and the natural world and the technological environment. So again, the foundations of my abilities to kind of separate myself from the situation and think about it carefully, is in all of these interactions with others and with nature and with technology,
PJ 44:37
yeah, and even it's something that I had severe gut health problems early in my 20s and, well, I figured it out we're good. But part of what was come out of that is this understanding too. I think it's somewhere like two to eight pounds of your body weight is microorganisms that. That not only are like, not harmful to you, they are necessary for your health, right? And so, and they don't share your DNA. And so that kind of, right? It's like, and they come from, they come in and out from the surrounding environment. And this becomes obvious too, when you talk about breathing. Well, you talk about eating, right? And these are all things we take for granted until we have environmental issues. I had Dr Rebecca Levon, and she talked about, she does Critical Physical Geography, and she grew up in LA before the Clean Air Act, and they had issues with recess because the kids were struggling breathing right, right, because the smog was so bad. This is something we see in China and that sort of thing. And so it's very like, you can't think if you can't breathe right? Like it's, there's there's like, a, was it laszlo's pyramid? Is that? I mean, does this, all this is, I think, all connecting, right?
Speaker 1 46:03
Yeah. I mean, and the idea from the Cartesian perspective, from, you know, the 1600s is that, you sorry, you can't, you can be a thing separate from all of that. And I you know that is breathing actually isn't required for for a soul. It's required for this machine, like human body, but not for the soul, right? And that's why we can understand this, like the soul, as being separate from everything. And this kind of, I just feel like, again, it's a morally bad understanding of humans, we have a choice. And if we choose to understand one another in terms of, you know, caregiver, infant interactions as the kind of foundation of what we are, then we look we and things look a lot different than if we understand ourselves as disembodied souls.
PJ 47:02
Now we've talked a little bit about Edgar Wright and I did you had the Jeff VanderMeer quote, I have to confess, sometimes I get a little lost at Jeff vandermeers writing. How has that influenced your work? Or where do you see the parallels between vandemere work in your own good.
Speaker 1 47:23
So I mean, if you look at the area x, now four books, not a trilogy anymore. If you look at those, you see a kind of riotous changes in nature and animals and humans all simultaneously, right? You can't go into area X without being profoundly different than you were when you entered it. And I guess I feel like that kind of that kind of imagined environment makes the sorts of points that I'm trying to make in a literary realm instead of in in a philosophical realm. But that quote is from the ambergris trilogy, which I've
Unknown Speaker 48:12
not read. Yeah, yeah, it's good. Of course, it's but, but so that
Speaker 1 48:23
that trilogy wasn't as profoundly impactful, I just came across that sentence when I was writing the section, and it said, that's what I'm trying to say. And the idea, what's the sentence? The sentence is that what we really are are a bunch of connected strings where there's no puppeteer.
PJ 48:46
Yes, wait, nope, that's the I should have written down the page. And that was, that was my fault. The is it part two? I'm looking apologies. I should have written that down. I really like the quote, and you know, it's a reminder to yes, if you don't mind, I can read it. 53 every human being is a puppet on strings, but the puppet half controls the strings, and the strings do not ascend to some anonymous maker, but are glistening, golden strands that connect one puppet to another. Each strand is sensitive to the vibrations of every other strand. Every vibration sings not only in the puppets heart, but in the hearts of many other puppets. So that, if you listen carefully, you can hear the strum of many hearts singing together. Yeah, can see why you picked it. It's it's a phenomenal sentence. It is the one
Speaker 1 49:43
of the things I should bring up is that, like this dynamical approach I'm promoting, and have been, you know, doing as a scientist and as a philosopher for a long time now, is not like hippie Kumbaya. All kinds of social interactions include couplings with others or deeply connected to one another, and that isn't always positive, right? So again, you know you might be someone might rob you, yeah, right, when someone robs you, they are. You're having a social interaction with them, but it's not positive from your point of view and probably not positive from their point of view either. I don't know if you ever robbed anyone. I'm sorry.
Unknown Speaker 50:29
You know, it's not, it's on my bucket list, but,
Speaker 1 50:35
but yeah, so the point, even, despite that quote, you know, there's a lot of room for a lot of, like, shitty social coordination dynamics.
PJ 50:45
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's what part of the reason, like, as you were describing the mood, and I was talking about the the novel I'm reading about Hindu and Muslim violence, and it was, I was like, that's a great example of a shitty situation, right? You're like, and everyone, all these characters, are trying to stop it from happening. Not all of them, but many of them are. And it just like they just can't stop it. It just kind of like the equation works out a certain way. And it works out at that kind of broader social, like that, inter the web level of things. Dr shamero, one I want to say thank you for coming on. Besides buying and reading your excellent book with incredible cover art by your wife, I'm so glad I made a big deal about the cover. I did not know that that's awesome. But besides buying and reading and intertwined creatures, what is something that you would tell someone who's listened for the last hour to either think about or do in response over the next week? I mean, obviously you would hope that this would last longer than that, but just in an immediate response, what's something someone can meditate on or do in response.
Speaker 1 52:03
Well, I mean, I guess I would say that you should try to be more aware of what it's like to be with others. Notice the kind of push and pull the golden threads as it were in social interactions. Try to try to attend to them and notice that what I'm saying now is not just me saying it. It's our conversation constraining me to say the sorts of things that I'm saying that you know, it's, it's diffused over over a zoom call. But nonetheless, I think you we are having that same effect on one another, until kind of notice, notice the kind of possibilities that arise when you're interacting with one another and not when you're by yourself.
PJ 52:50
Dr shamero, absolute joy having you on today. Thank you. Appreciate it.
Speaker 1 52:55
Thank you. I really appreciate it. And I just want to say that thank you for for actually reading the book. A lot of these, a lot of times, People don't in situations you're very welcome. You Thank.
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