Episode 21 - The Myth of the Desert Island Self
Darron and Jeff talk about the idea of self and how the ongoing experience we have of a stable self that moves through time is actually more of an ongoing active construct of our brains than we generally realize. They discuss their “desert island” favorites lists and use this as a jumping off point for examining what preferences say about ourselves, how these favorites are mediated by culture, the different aspects of self, how the evolution of self is culturally adaptive, how our narrative and social selves interact, and to what degree we control any of this. All along they bring in many ideas and thinkers from previous episodes in an attempt to synthesize a deeper understanding of the nature of the self.
Notes:
2:47 - Jeff’s 5 old desert island “favorite” books: Visions of Gerard by Jack Kerouac, Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins, Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Immortality by Milan Kundera, and The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
3:29 - Darron’s 5 favorite movies: The Big Lebowski, Goodfellas, The Shawshank Redemption, The Empire Strikes Back, The Goonies
4:45 - Darron’s top 5 albums (plus one): OK Computer by Radiohead, Bringing It All Back Home by Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco, Kid A by Radiohead, and Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses
5:20 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 19 - How We Learn Like A Scout: Critically Thinking About Critical Thinking from October 2021
5:57 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 08 - System 2, Superman, & Simulacra: Jeff's Amateur Philosophy from December 2020
6:22 - Originally published in 2007, Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson describes cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias and other cognitive biases, as well as various memory biases, and then uses these psychological ideas to illustrate how people justify and rationalize their behavior. It describes a positive feedback loop of action and self-deception by which slight differences between people's attitudes can become increasingly polarized and how memory distortions influence our present thoughts and beliefs about everything, especially our own selves. Ideas from this book were discussed in a number of previous episodes, most notably Episode 12 - A New Enlightenment and Episdode 13 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics Part 2
8:18 - “Memory says, 'I did that.' Pride replies, 'I could not have done that.' Eventually, memory yields.” -Friedrich Nietzsche
8:36 - See “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” by philosopher Wilfird Sellars - from the Wikipedia entry on Sellars: “In his "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" (1962), Sellars distinguishes between the "manifest image" and the "scientific image" of the world.The manifest image includes intentions, thoughts, and appearances. Sellars allows that the manifest image may be refined through 'correlational induction', but he rules out appeal to imperceptible entities.The scientific image describes the world in terms of the theoretical physical sciences. It includes notions such as causality and theories about particles and forces. The two images sometimes complement one another, and sometimes conflict. For example, the manifest image includes practical or moral claims, whereas the scientific image does not. There is conflict, e.g. where science tells us that apparently solid objects are mostly empty space. Sellars favors a synoptic vision, wherein the scientific image takes ultimate precedence in cases of conflict, at least with respect to empirical descriptions and explanations.”
10:30 - See “Our Two Selves: Experiencing and Remembering” (Huffington Post, 2012), “Living, and thinking about it: two perspectives on life” by Daniel Kahneman and Jason Riis (Chapter 11 from The Science of Well-Being, 2005), and watch Kahneman’s TED Talk: The riddle of experience vs. memory from 2010
11:22 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 20 - Reflections on a Year of Beautiful Illusions from November 2021
11:54 - Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
12:47 - In Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett says “You can invest a little time and energy to learn new ideas. You can curate new experiences. You can try new activities. Everything you learn today seeds your brain to predict differently tomorrow…It’s also possible to change predictions to cultivate empathy for other people and act differently in the future…that is a form of free will, or at least something we can arguably call free will. We can choose what we expose ourselves to.”
14:25 - See “The Real Problem” by Anil Seth (Aeon, 2016)
19:17 - The Dark Side of the Moon album by Pink Floyd (1973)
21:42 - The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich
26:30 - For more on gene-culture coevolution see “Gene-culture coevolution in the age of genomics” (Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, 2010), “Gene–culture coevolution and the nature of human sociality” (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2011), and the “Dual inheritance theory” Wikipedia entry
27:29 - See the “Fitness (biology)” Wikipedia entry
29:22 - Psychologist Jonathan Haidt characterizes the human mind as a partnership between separate but connected entities using the metaphor of the rider and the elephant - the rider represents all that is conscious and is the director of actions and executor of thought and long term goals, while the elephant represents all that is automatic, and often acts independently of conscious thought. He first introduced the metaphor in his 2006 book book, The Happiness Hypothesis and also use it extensively in his 2013 book The Righteous Mind
31:04 - See “Gossip drives social bonding and helps people learn” (Commentary in PNAS, 2021) based on “Gossip drives vicarious learning and facilitates social connection” (Current Biology, 2021)
36:04 - Cooleyhighharmony album by Boyz II Men (1991)
36:20 - “U Can’t Touch This” by MC Hammer (YouTube)
37:00 - According to the Ultimate Classic Rock website, Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses was slow to break through “partially because a string of retailers refused to carry the album. Blame a gruesome original cover image, based on a Robert Williams painting of the same name, that depicts the interruption of a robot rape by an avenging metal angel” See “The History of Guns N’ Roses Controversy-Courting ‘Appetite for Destruction’ Cover” (2017)
37:45 - The Nylon Curtain album by Billy Joel (1982)
37:51 - Sports album by Huey Lewis & The News (1983)
38:55 - “You Won’t Remember the Pandemic the Way You Think You Will” (The Atlantic, 2021)
41:06 - Robyn Fivush is psychology professor and researcher at Emory University whose research is focused on early memory with an emphasis on the social construction of autobiographical memory and the relations among memory, narrative, identity, trauma, and coping (see Google Scholar link)
51:24 - The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't by Julia Galef is discussed in Beautiful Illusions Episode 19 - How We Learn Like A Scout: Critically Thinking About Critical Thinking from October 2021
53:20 - See “Soldier Mindset / Scout Mindset” comparison table
53:29 - In The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't author Julia Galef centers her argument around the central metaphor of the soldier and the scout, which each representing a mindset comprising various attributes. According to Galef soldier mindset is characterized by reasoning as defensive combat with the goal of fortifying your own position (or attacking opponents positions) by seeking out evidence that bolsters and defends your beliefs whereas scout mindset is characterized by reasoning that is more akin to mapmaking, where evidence is sought to increase the accuracy of the map regardless of personal prior thoughts and beliefs. The soldier decides what to believe by asking “Can I believe this?” or “Must I believe this?” depending on their motives whereas the scout decides what to believe by asking “Is this true?” Galef points out that most of our intuitive unconscious, fast, cognition leads to soldier mindset, and while we can’t eliminate these innate and evolved brain functions we can recognize them and through various techniques and trained thought patterns attempt to use the slower, more deliberative aspects of cognition to get a clearer picture of reality. Jeff and Darron discussed Galef’s ideas more extensively in Episode 19 - How We Learn Like A Scout: Critically Thinking About Critical Thinking
57:38 - Listen to Mindscape Episode 169 - C. Thi Nguyen on Games, Art, Values, and Agency which is an interview with C. Thi Nguyen who is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah
58:48 - The line “it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only” comes from the song “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m only bleeding)” by Bob Dylan
59:09 - In the 2019 pseudo documentary “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story” Bob Dylan says “Life isn’t about finding yourself—or about finding anything, Life is about creating yourself.”
1:05:53 - In Act 2, Scene 2 of Hamlet by William Shakespeare the titular character, speaking of the country of Denmark, says “Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.”
1:07:32 - Listen the Brain Science podcast where host Ginger Campbell, MD, explores how recent discoveries in neuroscience are unraveling the mystery of how our brain makes us human.
1:07:34 - The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains by Joseph E. LeDoux
1:10:15 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 12 - A New Enlightenment: The Age of Cognitivism from March 2020
1:10:23 - The Origins of Creativity by E.O. Wilson
1:11:59 - Jeff’s current 5 desert island books: Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich, and Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain byLisa Feldman Barrett