Altruism and Empathy

00:00:08 all right there we go thanks okay we're we're going to call this meeting to order i'm rob penzer i'm the associate director of the helix center and welcome to the last round table for uh for this academic year i wanted to make some announcements about upcoming programs for the following year uh future topics include women and science climate change and global paralysis nationalism and fanaticism uh limitation infinity

00:00:40 complexity and emergence immortality the sublime meditation mystery and the unknown free will genes computers and medicine epigenetics memory consciousness understanding genius i want to make special note of an event on saturday october 12th and sunday october 13th the helix center in conjunction with the algama foundation of switzerland

00:01:11 will be hosting an international gathering of scholars drawn from the arts and sciences to explore the significance of the work of abe warburg for art neuroscience and psychoanalysis we will re-examine his work through the compound lenses of current knowledge of dynamic memory the freudian unconscious and historical scholarship with a focus on four areas neurostatics memory and unconscious psychosis and creativity biswanger and warburg and classical and renaissance art participants include historian

00:01:41 christopher johnson author of memory metaphor and av warburg's atlas of images historian and psychoanalyst peter lowenberg art historians david friedberg and thomas decosta kaufman philosopher and art historian georges di obama philosopher andrea pinotti warburg institute historian francois cuivaggia neuroscientists christina albarini anjon chatterjee and vittorio gelesie whose name you may know from the discovery of neurons pierre magistrati the algama

00:02:12 foundation co-founder novelist and essayist siri hustved and psychoanal psychoanalysts francois ansermay and edna session so now i'd like to introduce today's roundtable participants stephanie brown is associate professor of preventive medicine at suny stony brook and an adjunct assistant professor at the institute for social research at the university of michigan dr brown's current research focuses on the neural affective mechanisms underlying altruistic and pro-social

00:02:43 behavior she examines the role that other focused motivational states play in stress regulation the implications of helping induce stress regulation for physical health and longevity and the contribution of other focused motivational states and behaviors to the darker side of human experience including depression suicidality and ptsd these lines of research are designed to shed light into the mechanisms underlying a caregiving motivational system including its evolutionary origins and its implications for compassionate care

00:03:13 medicine economic behavior ethnic and international conflict and other political attitudes and behaviors lisa cataldo is associate professor of pastoral care and counseling at the fordham university graduate school of religion and religious education where she directs the clinical program and teaches courses in clinical practice professional ethics psychology and religion and trauma she's a licensed psychoanalyst and is a supervisor and faculty member at the national institute for the psychotherapies and the stephen a mitchell center for relational studies

00:03:44 as a psychoanalyst and student of many of the world's religions dr cataldo's research explores the intersection of psychoanalytic psychology and religion spirituality including issues of intersubjectivity multiplicity and identity as they relate to religious or spiritual life most recently her work has focused on the effects of early trauma and dissociation on the development of god images and the life of faith her writing and research are focused on practice with the aim of helping clinicians understand the religious or spiritual lives of patients and the ways to approach these issues in the therapeutic setting

00:04:15 allen leslie is professor of psychology and cognitive science at rutgers university where he directs the cognitive development laboratory a fellow of the association for psychological science and the american academy of arts and sciences professor leslie investigates the developmental neurocognitive mechanisms and domain specialized learning involved in abstract ideation emerging early in life such as cause and effect enduring object one two three social agent believing pretending desiring purpose and moral transgression one of

00:04:46 the principal authors of the research that discovered the theory of mind impairment in autism he also continues to study children with autistic spectrum disorders wynn schwartz is clinical psychologist and research psychoanalyst on the core faculty of the massachusetts school of professional psychology and on the faculties of harvard medical school and the harvard extension school he is a co-editor of advances in descriptive psychology he has been a professor at wellesley college and has taught at the boston psychoanalytic society and institute and the massachusetts institute of psychoanalysis his empirical research

00:05:18 has focused on dreaming memory and problem representation non-hypnosis and episodic memory as a student of descriptive psychology dr schwartz has been especially interested in theory-free pre-empirical formulations of action and responsibility the concept of hypnosis the status dynamics of psychotherapy and supervision and the parameters of empathic action currently he is exploring liberation improvisation and play and the behavioral logic of social progress and reaction he maintains a psychotherapy and supervision practice in boston

00:05:48 where he works with individuals and couples so somebody should begin okay well we're supposed to talk about empathy and altruism i gather so let me just make this as a preliminary statement um just a reminder that to be a person in a world of persons as all of us are means you already know practically speaking all you need to

00:06:18 know about empathy and altruism in an ordinary sense because you have to know about that in order to practice your life as a member in good standing of the community what i'm going to suggest is that empathy is an ordinary feature of social practices an essential feature of how we know how to respond and coordinate our behaviors with others and that we only become especially interested in it when it goes wrong when we think we understand somebody and

00:06:49 we discover that we have misunderstood them or when we think we're being helpful and we discover that we've in fact not been helpful that's one dilemma the other dilemma is that our subject matter um psychology and its uh related disciplines often get in the way and confuse us i think as to what the hell the subject matter is about and so i think we there is going to be i think some useful discussion about to what extent we're talking about empathy as um our shared understanding of

00:07:21 each other's actions in the way in which we understand these actions in a way that we can appreciate being understood and some other set of phenomena that may be um secondary to that may support that or maybe something else instead so you know i think it's it's a fascinating subject but like everything else in our subject matter we have a hell of a time figuring out whether we're talking about the same thing or something else so i think some of what we may end up wanting to play with is to get on the same page yeah i'll respond to that because in

00:07:53 thinking about this i think the biggest question is are we all talking about the same thing when we're using words like empathy compassion and altruism because to me they're quite distinct and i come from a psychoanalytic background not a research science background so i'm really looking forward to hearing what you have to say when i think about empathy to me empathy is a morally neutral term so it's not necessarily a good thing it's just a thing that we can do so we can tune into

00:08:28 resonate with understand somehow the interior experience of another person to a certain degree never 100 can never totally understand what i'm feeling i could never totally understand what you're feeling but we can get it to some extent and that's a human capacity so for me that capacity for empathy can be used for good or ill so some of the greatest empaths of all time are cult leaders so i thought about this a lot because to

00:08:58 me no one was more empathic than jim jones or someone like that why because a real empath can understand what motivates another person and what their needs are and then how do you fulfill them maybe in a negative way maybe by tapping into their wounds and sort of addressing them so to me empathy itself is not a moral good it's a it's a capacity compassion would be

00:09:28 then for me the extension of empathy that's the moral action or the moral good and altruism is the action that comes out of compassion so um i would love to hear what other people think about that because i think we often talk in our psychological world about empathy being kind of the goal but to me empathy is the beginning it's not really the goal what are you going to do with your empathy and how is your empathy formed and for what purpose are you using it that seems like a reasonable starting

00:09:58 point i want to just add that your distinction between um empathy and compassion as empathy being sort of value neutral compassion being the good i would argue we can't necessarily say altruism then is an outcome of compassion because you know flying planes into buildings can be thought of as an altruistic behavior on behalf of the cause of the country you're right no it can't that's just you know it's not an altruistic behavior it's not

00:10:30 an altruistic behavior you know if there's a certain way in which you know a certain kind of relativistic use of terms can undermine any fundamental meaning of those terms there may be a community in which vis-a-vis that community i have done something you know that enhanced my status in that community or is maybe even enhance that community but when you get to the level of talking about um a destruction of the other in a fashion that has nothing whatsoever

00:11:01 to do with an eye to thou relationship a destruction of a mass destruction of the other based on a theology based on a policy based on an ideology it distorts the meaning it fundamentally just distorts any ordinary notion of the meaning to talk about that as either empathic or altruistic it may so serve a goal it may serve a political goal it may serve an economic goal it may serve a religious goal but as soon as that enters this discourse we end up talking about something else so let me get this straight you're the

00:11:33 one that wants us to define our terms ahead of time and not presume that we mean the same thing by the word so when i use the term altruism i i just i i submit to you that i might be using that term differently and if i were to describe to you my definition you might agree that something like the 9 11 event would be an example i stand corrected how are we gonna get on the same page about that uh perhaps i could define what i mean by altruism um i i

00:12:05 take a evolutionary definition a biological definition and i use the word altruism to describe any behavior so it's a behavior as opposed to an intention that leads to a um benefit to the recipient at a cost to the self and so um and then from an evolutionary perspective would translate into beneficial reproductive consequences but that um we can take a step back and and talk about intention but when i use the word altruism i'm mostly referring to suppression of

00:12:37 some sort of self-interest in in a way that would promote allocating valuable resources to another entity or individual well if you use the biologic concept of fitness though here even you starting with your example you know the biological fitness of the guys in the planes were sort of wiped out um that's not the biological scenario i disagree with that you know you can take it like three or four generations out but no i mean i mean the definition of inclusive fit i mean this is an inclusive fitness era this isn't just we're not just talking about your own um survival so some uncle and cousin and

00:13:07 saudi is going to reproduce better because of that or i mean who whoever it's not bad evolution whereas 3 400 people got taken out of the gene pool here evolution works on the successful transmission of genes into the next generation whether or not those genes are shared within yourself between you and your children or within a larger group or there be there are relationships that potentially connect people who are unrelated but who nevertheless are looking out for

00:13:37 people who do share your genes so so we have a very um from a from from a you know classical darwinian sense fitness is actually something much broader than the individual's survival oh i understand that but that's why i'm raising the question in this particular example why would you apply altruism there what you know because you're raising an empirical question it's an empirical question whether the fitness whether it's going to be a differential reproductive success uh increase based on some set of acts that that involves self-sacrifice that's

00:14:08 the confidence that can happen although all that we have to hypothesize or postulate is that whatever neural hardwiring that we have that causes us to sacrifice to raise children for example helpless infants to reproductive age whatever neural architecture is designed for that purpose that parenting purpose somehow gets triggered in other instances that's all that we have to hypothesize and is there any evidence that this kind of event had an impact in that form that's why i'm saying it's an empirical question

00:14:39 no what i'm saying is that the empirical we don't actually have to demonstrate that there was an impact of that event on anybody's individual reproductive success on their inclusive fitness on the inclusive fitness of others there may be there may be monetary exchanges that went on there may be solidification of the al qaeda in group that benefited you know particular nieces and nephews of you know the leadership i

00:15:10 don't know i'm just guessing but there may be things like that but that's really not the point the point isn't whether the resources did benefit in that instance all i'm saying is that we could use the term altruism to describe what happened because individuals who commit crimes crimes or or who are soldiers during wartime who sacrifice themselves on behalf of a group or a cause or a country that that basic tendency that basic human tendency derives from this

00:15:41 sort of um willingness to risk one's life to benefit others so can i i'm gonna ask you a question because this is interesting to me i'm not an evolutionary person i find it really interesting so what i'm hearing is that from this point of view altruism is also is morally neutral altruism is not a moral good you're saying it's just the willingness to sacrifice oneself or cause whether that causes good or evil right in the minds of the larger

00:16:11 social groups that's my doctor okay so part of the issue you know part of why this argument broken out so fast is um not simply because we have different definitions of terms and so forth but we we think about these problems from very different angles so if if you're thinking about empathy or altruism at a personal level the kind of level that we consciously

00:16:43 experience uh it's a great puzzle by anybody who would sacrifice the life for some greater cause that they perceive your particular approach is from an evolutionary point point of view and they have this sort of point of view centered on a gene that doesn't have any experiences or consciousness or anything of that sort it doesn't really entertain ideas it's just it's actually just a chemical

00:17:14 but it's a self-reproducing chemical and it tries to spread simply because that's its nature it's an entirely physical process i approach these questions from yet a third angle which is as part as a question in cognitive science and it's sort of quite interesting because it it relates to the personal level in some way it looks hard to say exactly how and it also really

00:17:46 relates to the evolutionary level and the cognitive science approach is something that's been growing over the last 30 40 years and now becoming very much part of neuroscience and it's the approach to trying to understand the brain in terms of how it creates the mind so it it's it's sort of trying to bridge between these two very different levels the

00:18:16 biological and the personal i don't think ever quite makes it to the personal level so there's still a gap that remains but that's the general framework that my work situates in and within that i my approach is to be interested in the uh very beginnings of the development of the brain and it's functioning in babies and

00:18:48 preschool kids and we study these questions experimentally and the field's been going perhaps for about 20 30 years a little bit longer um and it's been making extraordinary progress over that time so i end up knowing a little bit more about empathy and i sort of resonate to lisa's opening remarks that um empathy can be thought of as in a way

00:19:19 that's not uh doesn't it isn't valence that's thought of as good or bad um whereas perhaps something like altruism might be similarly an action and i appreciate the problem that stephanie's brought up because altruism for evolutionary theory poses a puzzle that seems to run contrary to evolutionary theory the notion of the selfish

00:19:49 gene that simply acts to promote itself its frequency in a population then it's hard to see why a behavior would seem to run against the interests of of the individual but these kinds of cases are well testified in both other species and in our own um and so it makes an interesting problem to understand i think part of the answer

00:20:22 to can be given at the level which i study questions like this so there are in fact the attempt is to show that in fact there are benefits from our truism uh that accrue and one of the one of the examples that comes from my field is drawn from game theory it's a very very

00:20:52 simple game there are two people in the game and the one of the people in the game is appointed as the dictator and they're given say ten dollars and here's the game the game is that the dictator can decide how much of the ten dollars he or she is going to give to this other person whatever amount that dictator decides uh the other person gets

00:21:23 including if the decision is to give them zero and the remainder the dictator actually gets to leave gets to leave the lab with however much of that ten dollars they give to themselves and um it's comes from game themes it's a branch of mathematics and the mathematicians assumed that the rational behavior in

00:21:54 that game would be that the dictator keep the ten dollars and give the other person nothing at all after all they've never seen this other person before they never will see them again once they leave um so the natural thing to do the sort of rational defined in a certain kind of way the way to win this game is to give your fellow nothing at all now that's not in fact what people do in fact people keep only about seventy

00:22:27 percent of the ten dollars um and they give away thirty percent and the mathematicians throw up their hands and say uh human beings behave and in an irrational way but it depends whether it's rational or not depends on how you define the game yeah and human beings refuse to play the mathematician's game they could play this play this altruistic game i think that's why it's useful to start with what people actually do and um what the nature of of a lived

00:22:59 life um looks like uh you know we start and i in this i've been about make some remarks in preface to a question about how brain mind or brain behavior research might proceed sometimes proceeds often doesn't and that is let's say for example that we take for granted because we see it we practice it we live it that we more or less understand each other and that we get it right often enough so that we can hold hands and walk across the street that we can you

00:23:29 know know what hurt each other's feelings i can actually feel bad because of my opening attacking remarks of yours which i apologize and i can reciprocally feel bad you know it's just you know it felt sort of unbecoming and i feel pretty awkward about it right now but you know all of this is part of the shared social practices shared understandings we we know you know how to you know we we understand when when there's empathic behavior when there's lapses of empathic behavior we also know as a matter of course that at times um we take care of other people

00:24:00 um without at least at the forefront um concerns for ourselves and you know i'm not thinking about whether it's going to help me get laid or whether it's going to help pass on my genes or my cousin's genes or other members of my tribe's genes it may very well have that consequence in the long run but those aren't what's on my mind what's on my mind is that i want to make you know my kid's life better i want to make my neighbor's life better i want to feel satisfied i want to there's lots of things that i want to do i want to behave fairly my perspectives

00:24:32 my rational perspectives aren't simply a hedonic or prudent they're also ethical and aesthetic i also have some built-in sense of being a person in the world of people being a member of our community of some notion of justice and fairness of some notion of what fits together in ordinary practices of what feels good of what and what is in my self-interest and all of those are intrinsic considerations that mark an ordinary person's behavior now if we start with the fact that people already do

00:25:04 this then i think the problem for brain research isn't so much it becomes in fact well how can a brain support doing that and i think often we get it somewhat asked backwards we start with some mechanistic notion some deterministic notion some theology some um already some pre a priori commitment to a particular view of science or what knowledge or rationale is and then from there we can't get to the ordinary things that we do and so

00:25:35 we end up saying well i guess that's not really what's happening here something else must be happening here and so what i'm describing and sort of advocating is what i guess is generally called a top-down approach that we begin with a full understanding of what people actually do with an adequate literary dramatic description of the way lives actually unfold and then it's our job as scientists insofar as we want to do normal science is to account for that and i think what happens is that if in our production of a scientific argument if we can't get from our science to what

00:26:07 we already know we know how to do then i think the question generally should be well there's probably something wrong with the science and not with something we already know how to do and part of my concern here is that we already you know we have some shared meanings about altruism um there was a never there was a level of detail where we start to become i think we begin to differ in terms of of its motivation whether it's motivation is a cellular motivation whatever that would be whether it's motivation is you know self-satisfaction or ethics or

00:26:38 self-interest or or or what have you but what we mean is i'm doing something for somebody else in which it counts more that i'm doing it for them than what rewards i get they're up to the boundary condition of self-sacrifice when we talk about empathy we're talking about some vision in which i understand your intentionality i understand what you're trying to do what the significances are of your actions which is to say i know something about what you want what you're recognizing what you know how to do and what

00:27:08 significance it has for you those being some parameters of an empathic act and i know how to represent my understanding of you in a way you can tolerate being understood in which my understanding of you isn't exploited doesn't strip you naked doesn't violate you um it isn't in effect um it may manipulate you and in the very ways in which a person is feeling understood often wants to get closer to the person they're feeling understood by or further away if they don't want to be understood but that it involves some ordinary sense

00:27:39 of an appreciation of the ongoing intentionality the ongoing significance and mental states of the other person however we do it however we do it but what you are saying is you already have the answers to the question of empathy and altruism and the way you just describe it you gave the answers rather than the other position which is let's see if we can understand these things better that we use everyday language but you just describe everyday feeling but what if that's nothing to do exactly

00:28:09 with what's really happening on a scientific basis that would allow us then to distinguish between various things that we put under one heading i think there's a reasonable maxim that people take it's that that just so if you were to ask the question instead of giving the answers how would you ask the questions about empathy and altruism where would you think the the issue is live where are you here's the question and the question comes we can you know the way uh wickenshine began uncertainty so if you grant that there's one hand in front of me all the rest follows

00:28:40 if you say there's not one hand in front of me i can ask you to look closer or parallel to that what are your reasons for not assuming or seeing things are as they seem if people take it the things are as they seem until or unless they have reasons to think otherwise the scientific enterprise um generally doesn't do a whole lot for us in amplifying the way things already seem it sometimes will show up the earth seemed flat until it was found that it wasn't flat so your position would say

00:29:11 look the earth is flat why should we worry about it no need to go further i feel it's flat i see it's flat i see there's the horizon that's it well actually um that's not my position but it it bears it but it bears a family resemblance which is at some point i can't get away with the idea that the world is flat um at some point and that's why you a person takes it as they seem until unless they have reason enough to think otherwise within you know a cert if you're living you know in uh the plains of of of of missouri and it's

00:29:43 you know uh seven or eight hundred years ago the world's pretty flat and you get away with it if you're a mariner and you want to move all the way from here to india at some point you know you're going to discover that there's something wrong with that that algorithm or that that method of understanding so the question is where does the question come from um i mean freud for example you know and darwin and a number of others turn things upside down by pointing out that there were all sorts of other factors that made things that looked one way actually have to some extent

00:30:13 other sets of meanings but that's different than saying none of us or any of us it's one thing to say that all behavior is motivated you know um sexually or aggressively which of course is a distortion of freud but it's another thing to say that these behaviors that you were claiming had nothing whatsoever to do with sex in fact look kind of sexual and aggressive by then building a case demonstrating through evidence the scientific project requires building evidence for showing

00:30:45 that things are not the way they seem and so that's actually the only point that i'm i'm trying to make in terms of this which is that you know there i wasn't providing an answer to empathy um anymore that i provided answer the question of how do i know how to get from here to the other side of the room i just get up and walk i do it um the question becomes what happens if i can't do it successfully or um if in fact i think i'm walking across the room but in fact i'm doing something else so i i just want to i just want to clarify the sort of defense of science but also point out that you're making an

00:31:16 excellent point with from that really meshes with my understanding first of all science i think is maybe maybe more precise to say it's about explanation so we're using it to discover things that we that we don't understand so which um which i would agree creates a bias but in this case i wonder i i struggled to figure out why science reduces everything to self-interest which it

00:31:47 does across the social and behavioral sciences if you want to study something like relationships you're going to find no feel devoted to genuine concern for the well-being of another person like in a relationship everything gets reduced to the benefits that individuals ultimately get in the relationship that's just an example so whether we're talking about what you're what you raised with the mathematicians assuming that or the economists assuming that people are going to keep as much money for themselves as they can or um or or

00:32:20 you know the psychologists who decide that everything is about reinforcement and reward seeking and punishment avoiding and psychological hedonism that's that's the question i have why is it that science seems to be i mean i've always argued it's because it's been progressing as an intuitive field and not actually doing the hard work to try to think about what are the implications of having social creatures that need to you know take care of one another to survive um i'm saying they're they're going with their intuition that

00:32:51 everything feels selfish but you know i have no idea why do you think why do you think science is is assuming that selfish you know it's interesting question that you know when wittgenstein ended the investigations with in psychology we have experimental method and conceptual confusion um part of what i think was being noted and it's been something that's been struggled with in a variety of areas in psychology the particular uh area that i'm mostly interested in which is called descriptive psychology has been an attempt to sort of start over by

00:33:23 beginning with a general concept of person as a a person being an individual with a history that involves deliberate action um that occurs in a kind of dramaturgical fashion that you can see it tells a story there's their life is lived in in the nature of a of a story of a set of episodes that have meaning then you come to the question well what what are the sources of meaning what's intrinsic uh and certainly self-interest is intrinsic just as pleasure is intrinsic but the concept of person especially when we begin to look at the idea that a person

00:33:54 is able to deliberate to make choices brings brings immediately certain other logical categories as things that are inherent in the practices of persons and those involve the full range of aesthetics and ethics on the notions of justice or fairness the notions of truth rig or objectivity of beauty all of which are intrinsic all of which are reasons to do something now there's been historical attempts to reduce all of these to one of the other

00:34:24 categories it's all really hedonics or it's all really prudence and what those end up doing is distorting the fundamental meanings of ethics and aesthetics for example so when you point out that in a general reading of psychology what you see are these very narrowed visions i think that's correct and i think that's part of what has made our subject matter in some ways so unfortunately limited but it's not intrinsically limited that way historically it happens to be

00:34:56 limited that right i think i think the kind of key thing here is the this i think applies to both of your room marks are is historical so historically it has been the case that uh psychology and its various self-styled scientific forms has been committed to very simple kinds of ideas like hedonic motivation self-interest

00:35:28 only associations just very very simple start to the mind i think that's historically true but i think that big picture is actually kind of changing and that people are in fact now people like me are now in fact studying um studying human nature without these uh assumptions that

00:35:59 should reduce to something you know a handful of very simple intrinsic properties i think in fact there's a quite a vast range of very sophisticated and very abstract uh properties that are intrinsic to the human mind from the outset and i think in fact to understand that is really to understand something about human nature and part of the problem of being a psychologist of any sort

00:36:30 is it's very hard to get away from the idea that you already understand your own mind and the mind of others and science really only starts when a person recognizes that they don't know something i mean that's actually the actual practicing scientist that's their life is trying to identify things that are not already known that are not already understood uh to uh try to identify where the

00:37:03 where the uh terror incognita is with the dark places are and to go into those places um and find a way of going into those places and and casting light instead of being like the drunk man he's looking for his keys under the lamppost you know something that's what he's doing he's looking for his keys and say well oh did you lose them here is that why you're no i just um but why are you searching there then well at least i can see here um if if that's your approach to

00:37:34 doing science you won't really ever achieve very much um so part of the problem is just to get a distance from your own mind the distance from your own experience and trying to get away from this idea that you actually know anything at all about how your mind works in fact i think it's this this this feeling that you know how your mind works is largely an illusion the brain is a sort of a trick that the blame brain plays on the mind that kind of gives the mind the feeling that it understands

00:38:06 what the brain's doing but in fact you don't really know anything about what the brain's doing um any more than you know you know what your stomach's doing whether it digests food i don't know i just put food in my mouth and i i don't think about it again and my stomach knows what to do with it that's pretty much the way the brain works so asking questions about the brain is one way that you can get this scientific distance um and um another way to get this distance is to ask well what about a baby

00:38:38 um because there's all these things that i know of uh that i know about i don't really know how i came to know most of these things so for example i know something close to probably about 80 to a thou to 100 000 words in english and i i can't i mean perhaps i can remember learning one or two of those words uh but the vast majority of them i have no idea when or how i learned them uh but i just

00:39:08 did um so that's so if there are things if you think really hard there are things about your brain there are things that you know and experience now you don't really understand where the where it came from um it just is so and um but it's true that psychology at the turn of last century the big issue that a a psychologist had was to try to be taken seriously by other scientists and

00:39:40 there was a sort of an inferiority feeling there and so one way to get around that was to find something that you could reduce everything too because that seemed to be the way that science worked although that's a kind of superficial understanding uh but anyway i think that's part of the background of why these kind of simple ideas were adopted but on the other hand it's also partly not a bad way to approach things start with some very simple ideas and and push them as long as you always

00:40:10 remain open-minded and don't dogmatically refuse to ever open your mind to any other questions for example that this simple set of ideas may not actually be working um um well anyway the thing about science is that it it does actually change it does actually make progress over time uh seems to me it's one of the few things areas that you can say that about um and i think that um certain parts

00:40:43 of psychology and brain science are beginning to make progress although i don't want to exaggerate just really how far we've got one of the things that uh so i i realize the way you guys are talking about empathy it's just really what i would call theory of mind uh of the theory of mind that we have and it's not really a theory i think it's not really a theory about mine but it is this uh intense um overweening interest in the inner

00:41:14 lives of other people that we have and that seems to be a basic thing about human nature um and in this historical way people that started to study um um thinking in children made the assumption that this ability which would generally be called perspective taking so taking somebody else's point of view on a situation that that was something that

00:41:46 oh there was something very high level that you couldn't do until you were at least seven years old um and it was as as a result of learning lots of language and having which the seven year olds already have uh being enculturated to quite an advanced degree perhaps going to formal education going to school it was really it was going to be it's bound to be had to be a very late

00:42:16 uh achievement even its most rudimentary forms and um i noticed that on the website um there's a reference to theory of mind and it says that this is now known to emerge at about three years of age and i thought well that's quite good because people usually say it's about four and a half years of age so it's quite good that this website has revised that pushed it down a bit to three years of age and i guess i'm here today to tell you that we pushed that

00:42:48 back still further now it looks like it emerges in the first year of life um probably in the probably probably in the second half of the first year of life although um it maybe they'll have to come back in two years time and tell you that you know it's there in the first half in the first year but anyway that's already remarkably early and it's very very striking that this seems to be something that human babies and that let me remind you that they say they have no language whatsoever

00:43:18 uh um in fact you know they're just beginning to try to crack into la language um they have no language whatsoever they are virtually no in enculturation i mean you really have to push the boat out to say that they've been influenced by culture by that time so this really does begin to look nice if it's an intrinsic property of the human brain um and i think if you find something that the human brain's doing very very early on in life it's a

00:43:50 probably a pretty good clue that as far as the brain's concerned this is something pretty basic i want to just jump in here um it seems like you know i'm not a scientist so i'm a relational psychoanalyst so from a relational psychoanalytic point of view that first those first months of life and that creation of the theory of mind where the baby can sense that the other has a mind that's different and interacting would seem to make a lot of sense right

00:44:20 that that's a a relational phenomenon that is intrinsic but can only develop to the extent there's actually a person there interacting with the infant the infant wouldn't develop that that mind or that ability to empathize or connect with another person without a relationship it's without a person there they die right there has to be a an interaction right so the relational aspect of that to me is really foundational and i kind

00:44:51 of want to shift our conversation a little bit maybe just because i don't feel a lot to contribute to the discussion of science but um i think about you know i'm probably going to bring up a word that may blow up the whole situation because the word is religion and so my i'm a psychoanalyst and a psychologist of religion so very particularly interested in people's psychology and their lives their spiritual lives their lives of faith their lives of belief whatever form that might take including science

00:45:23 can be your religion that can count too um so thinking about the some of the questions that we that were posted on the the blurb about today what was inc one that was included in there was can people actually be altruistic in any kind of pure sense or is is all are all acts of selflessness actually performed in some way in a self-intere in a self-interested way even if it's unconscious even if there's an unconscious sort of

00:45:54 self-interest and i wanted to talk about that a little bit because i think that we do see people including ourselves every day acting in altruistic fashion in small ways and sometimes in big ways and i just i mentioned to the group earlier that i just saw desmond tutu last week in london received the templeton prize humanitarian pride this is basically a prize for altruism that's what you get and it's two million dollars

00:46:25 right so mother teresa has won this prize and nelson mandela has won the pride he wasn't planning that all along he did these actions apparently he did not have secondary features the dalai lama won it last year so i don't think the dalai lama was you know scheming his whole life to do all these good things so that he could get two million dollars from jackson right so i think about people like that on a sort of larger scale the people who when i was a child i

00:46:56 wished i could be like right why would you wish you could be like a person like that who sacrifices their life essentially to for for other people for the good of other people and not their own good not to make two million dollars from please let me explain a question about the way you're formulating this um and i think it in some ways one of the questions is whether or not the behavior is done intrinsically or instrumentally um if i'm going to do something good

00:47:26 because i know when i'm finished i'm going to get paid you know like when i work in my private practice um you know there's acts there that i think are intrinsically merit but i'm also tired of my living and that's part and parcel of the act i'm not doing it just for the for the good of the other um so there's something both instrumental and i believe something intrinsic but can there be and i think that's in some ways the the distinction if i'm doing something that is intrinsic i'm doing it for its own reason if it's instrumental i'm doing it

00:47:56 because it's inherently tied to another goal now that's the first part so this is what my question is it seems to me that on logical grounds if you have two reasons for doing something you have more reason if you only had one of those reasons but that doesn't mean that either of those reasons are intrinsically tied to the other that um you know i can do something for the good of the other uh for reasons that are ethical as an intrinsic reason um

00:48:27 that i and and i added some sacrifice to myself and in doing so feel satisfied right now if i you know is the feeling of satisfaction um does that make it instrumental to the extent that you begin to argue that then the concept of an intrinsic meaning loses loses any any kind of quality so one notion is if there is you know given that when we do good we often feel satisfied in contrast to feeling nothing or feeling miserable um i suppose if we

00:49:00 do good and we feel miserable we actually describe that motivationally as as masochistic and we got a whole other set of ways of explaining it but if i do something for for good and doing something for good also accomplishes other means that also are intrinsic and so that's in some ways part of my confusion about this notion that somehow it needs to be unalloyed right it seems to me that it has to be intrinsic not instrumental but one can be doing a number of intrinsic things side by side without that destroying the

00:49:30 merit of any one of them sure unless of course it does i agree and you know i was thinking this week discussing this with my partner right saying he's a filmmaker documentarian who makes movies about people doing good things that's basically what he does so we about altruistic people doing good things and so we were talking about this and i thought about this sort of unalloyed notion of altruism that somehow there's no good to the person otherwise it's not

00:50:00 altruistic in the pure sense i don't i agree with you i don't think that's a necessary condition because even if it's just feeling that you did the right thing and that's a sense a satisfying sense it doesn't diminish the the power or the ethical power of an altoist act but i was trying to think in my own you know the stories i know about do i know of a person who really ever did something that seems to

00:50:31 me completely against their own interests for the benefit of others um and i the only story that i could come up with that felt as close to that as i can imagine is dietrich bonhoeffer so i don't know if all of you know who diedrich bonhoeffer was but he was a protestant minister and theologian german who wrote about doing good things for other people among other things he had a wonderful book called the cost of discipleship so how do you live a good life without cost to

00:51:01 yourself you can't you have to you have to give up something of yourself but he came to the united states and um could have stayed here for the rest of the war and spared his own life he was not popular with the nazis as you can imagine and decided not to do that so he went back to germany during the war and became part of the plot to assassinate hitler and he was a religious minister right not the thing you think most ministers would put at the top of their list that they're going to kill someone as a

00:51:31 good act um and he was caught in that plot and he was hung so i i thought about this from a religious person's point of view and from dietrich bonhoeffer's own protestant theology the act of participating in the murder of another person even if that person is hitler is immortal sin he would go to hell for doing it he would he would give up his hope of

00:52:02 heaven by participating in this act and his entire life was structured around this religious philosophy where he would want to be in the presence of god after death that would be the christian view and what he sacrificed was not only his physical life but literally his salvation in order to save as many people as he possibly could so i couldn't think of any possible good to him in that story it's one of the most to me

00:52:33 or purely altruistic acts that i can think of historically i'm sure there are many many others but this is stephanie's question at the very beginning which is somebody who would uh would basically self-kill themselves in the act of promoting something that they took to be a good so would that kind of fit with what you're talking about even that because this would benefit humanity as a whole over the long term sure i mean any it really doesn't matter whatever gets attached in your mind to the recipient

00:53:06 the the beneficiary i mean it's it's i define um i look at a particular kind of sacrifice or particular kind of altruism which is incurring cost over a long period of time in the absence of reciprocity and in some cases giving up your own life and and so i look at very costly investment in others and that and that um that's why i say value neutral because we can disagree with what other people have decided justifies their horrific acts um

00:53:36 we can think on the one hand killing is wrong but on the on the other hand um that um it's it's outweighed by the benefits the recipient and so we're going to incur those costs and you know and research in the brain is really helpful for disentangling some of these things i mean there are circuits in our brain that are weighing on the one hand the rules of right and wrong and those are interacting with the um personal relation aspect which is interacting with the

00:54:08 social good and um i mean these are very complicated and i agree that disentangling the pure reason and pure motive is is to me i consider it a point in in the work that i do so even though i studied altruism i would never go into a situation and say i'm going to decide whether this is altruistic or not i i don't think that's possible these are certainly very i mean these are you know you bring up these very dramatic cases like 911 and bonhoeffer and i mean they are very

00:54:40 dramatic um cases there is a difference between what you said and the 911 the what those people believe is that that act would get them to heaven that's right unless he thought he could negotiate with god once it's up there and prove that he did a good thing even though he did a bad thing he was actually not having any he was doing it for no gain anyplace well he knew he was doing it for adult he knew he would lose right he was giving up but there was one

00:55:11 thing that he wanted in life and i think that's true i think in the 9 11 situation there was actually quite explicit gain that they wanted but the 9 11 situation to go back to the bin does actually offer a certain insight into the the two cases notice i jumped all over the place when you brought up 911. but i smiled when you talked about you know doing something against the nazi and i think in a way the part of the thing is is this notion that it's kind of like to the the victor gets to define at the final state who's who's the real good guy and i

00:55:42 think we're conflating good guy with with altruism which i want to do and which you don't want to do because you want to look at it in a very specific way connected to the notion of fitness no i actually want to look at it in a very disconnected abstract way where i can take myself out of what i'm observing but you're making some connections between um sacrifice and did i may have misunderstood because i thought you were predicating your argument on an evolutionary biological definition because it gets me out of the can of worms i'm trying to

00:56:13 think about specific motivation in a given instance into another can it works well behavior i just look at behavior are resources going outside the body acting towards another individual is there a cause to the to the one person is it benefiting the other so i choose a biological definition as a start point really because of some of the points you're making which is that how can you theorize about something unless you have a clear way to define it and i think behavior is nice and clear we can get a thousand people together

00:56:44 they can all say yes this happened or no it didn't happen um and so it's a good starting place to say okay now once we establish what we're interested in defining what are the likely motivations behind it how can we think about the brain and and so all i'm trying to do is say i can't consider the moral or the value judgment of the particular behavior in question without bringing myself into the mix that's true you can't and you know and i think that's one of

00:57:15 the things that's interesting i mean i don't know if you can anybody could ever keep themselves 100 out of things obviously it helps to do neuro imaging and blood samples because you can't you can't mess with that as much right it's not it's not unperfect no but it certainly helps i don't help is the right word but changes things when you leave the question of you said you look at behavior so leaving the question ethics or morality out of it and leaving the question of meaning

00:57:46 and meaning out of it so the problem we're describing in some ways is i'm taking as a given um that in the history of the and the origin of the terms of altruism somebody's going to check wikipedia and figure out that i'm wrong now but i believe that the history of the word um has has always been invested in in moral or ethical language that it's always it's happening it's had its place in in that kind of in that kind of discourse so it's had that commitment um if you want to remove and and that's we

00:58:19 actually we first sat down uh at the table before he came in here i was talking to you and i'll just make a brief digression into this about the problem of definition and there's a lot of things that are almost impossible to define in a strict you know webster definition form we talk about emotion as one um uh empathy as another or behavior many many things are hard to hard to define try to find what a chair is now one way or out of the

00:58:49 problem which we see now in legal studies in which what we do in descriptive psychology is called a paradigm case analysis where you start with a complete case a case that has all of the elements that everybody can look at say yeah if it has all of those things sure we agree that that's empathy that if it has all of those things should we agree that that's that that's altruistic that if it involves self-sacrifice that if it's good good for the community that there is no apparent self-gain if it has all of those features we're going to call that out we're going to

00:59:19 call that altruism if in the example of empathy if it involves my recognizing your motivations what you recognize what you know how to do what you can tolerate what your ongoing intent is what the significance is of all that to you if that's what's part of what your recognition of the other is and you do it the way that they can tolerate yeah that's that's pretty clearly at least what the average joe is the average scientist also is going to say we mean by empathy we start to remove pieces of that we start to remove for example in this particular case

00:59:50 if we take the the general notion of altruism being as something that it that is a feature of the moral universe and we take out this notion of ethic or greater good or whatever else we want to combine to the notion of morality and instead simply define it as self-sacrifice we have one of the important elements the self-sacrifice element now under those conditions some of our judges will say okay that's still what i mean by altruism we can study that but others are going to say it doesn't involve enough of the case

01:00:21 for me to feel that we're talking about the full subject matter and so some of the tasks in science often is to do what you're describing i believe which is to pull out some feature of it the trouble is if we take that feature and now confuse it with the paradigm case or what happens is that you begin with an example and somebody like me gets upset because but you didn't include this oh and that happens all the time i mean that's the goal in science right is to actually take the pieces bring them into the laboratory control everything you can to just discover cause and effect and what you

01:00:53 do is every cause and effect relationship and all the boundary conditions around it they constitute puzzle pieces yeah obviously i think that's a problem but let me finish we have your puzzle pieces and then what you do is you try to put them together and when you put them together therein lies the help when it comes to something like ethics or something like social policy because as a result of the pieces that i've put together i've been able to figure out ways to actually

01:01:25 trigger these kinds of motivations in others which can be used and also to understand which aspects of our society are inhibiting and interfering with these kinds of more pro-social motivations i could tell you what's wrong like i could hypothesize about what features of the media or what features of our technology are actually shutting down every single ounce of compassion that we might have and what causes us to operate in defensive ways and fearful ways and and so what i can do is make predictions

01:01:57 about ways to harness and leverage what we what what seems desirable about the human condition i can do that as a result of this kind of systematic analysis that does include a conversation between observation description and also theory and explanation yeah i think the only only distinction i'd want to you know after that is you know a kind of a historical um philosophical point which is cause and effect is an extraordinary use of useful device you know if this happens

01:02:27 this always happens if you've got time one you've got time to sequences there's a long history of that kind of technique and technology paying off but that actually is a subclass of the more general more mode of explanation which is is that it which is something gives reason to um something is understandable something follows in a lot of behavioral descriptions i'll prefer talking about something elicits or something fosters rather than something causes for a very simple reason which is that

01:02:58 for a set of conditions that in retrospect i see how it got there but in looking into the future it's understandable that it might follow but it doesn't have to follow any particular way you cannot discover cause and effect without the scientific method i would say that's well yeah i'm i'm not not arguing with that but i think there's systematic ways that go back to to natural history studies that show that there are broader ways of doing that cause and effect is is something yeah i mean when we do our correlational studies we have to use language like associated with likely to happen predict we have to use

01:03:29 that we have to soften the language the beautiful thing about an experiment is we don't have to soften the language now we can be wrong we can discover something in our experiment that turns out to not not be um replicable but then we find that out because we can't replicate it so what's nice is all the puzzle pieces all the cause and effect relationships that are you know solid enough to be replicated over and over again and you put them together in an explanation and then you go out and you predict what that explanation suggests if you're right

01:03:59 if you find what you're looking for it may as well be the truth even if it's you can never get to the truth because what you can do is you can build bridges around these kinds of concepts and so the kind of hard um hard objective you know something that you can get your hands on the science is the way forward you know it's interesting because you know we're sitting here in a building devoted to psychoanalysis which um from freud on had to contend with um probably until the mid-1970s with an

01:04:29 extraordinarily uh difficult paradox which was at least initially a theoretical and i would argue theological um argument that all understanding should be deterministic everything in some point is going to re reduce the cause and effect explanations while developing a therapeutic methodology based on on liberation based on an attempt to be utterly honest to speak freely to be liberated in effect from the unexamined to be able to move from the unexamined

01:05:00 caused to action with reason to be able to move from a determined unconsciously determined um uh set of of of activities into one in which the actor can make some choices and you know and that kind of tension i think has has you know uh informed and infected our our studies for a very very long time which is including in science i mean you see this tension everywhere i mean we can't sit here and talk about what

01:05:32 the fundamental principles of of uh you know the relationship between emotion and motivation are at the level of you know neurotransmitters i mean there's so much we do not know and it's all this back and forth between what we see and what we tweak and and and some things we can take to the bank other things we can't and even when we can take things to the bank there are so many qualifiers right so many circumstances under which well it's not true here and it is true here and it really depends on what problem you're trying to solve and how do you generate knowledge and they're just i'm just saying science is

01:06:03 a useful way to generate knowledge we put these two things together empathy and altruism uh from your work on theory of mind and from your perspectives are they related do they have to be put next to each other or they're not related at all well my way of approaching these kinds of very interesting questions wouldn't be through dramatic examples like 9 11 or

01:06:35 um or even the second world war simply because those things are so complex the reasoning that bonhoeffer uh went through itself very very complex case but if you take a very simple case like um i begin to take out my pen and i drop my pen on the floor and i've before i've hardly noticed that i've done that

01:07:05 you beginning to stretch and you pick the pen up and give it back to me put it in my pocket well you put it in your pocket that wouldn't that's not going to count but if you're actually if the effect of what you do is to help me um well there you have an act and you can ask all these same questions about it is this is this was this an altruistic act and so forth and again with somebody as complex as you it would be hard for me to be exactly sure

01:07:35 what your motivations were but so um that's where asking the same kinds of questions of babies uh can be so interesting because it's it's we we ask these questions of babies and small children always through the lens of experiments because we have to be able to control and to try to determine what cause and effect is and to do things that are replicable and one of the um so all the kind of claims i'm making

01:08:07 about babies they're based on experiments and i could uh i you know don't want to turn this into one of my classrooms or anything and say exactly what these experiments are but here's the basic situation you have somebody who's an 18 month old present and you have somebody who's who's a stranger an experimenter an experimenter um takes a pen out and drops it it looks it looks like it's an accident drops it on the floor and

01:08:41 pauses for a moment and it's commonly the case that toddlers of 18 months of age will in fact you know struggle down from the chair that they're sitting on and toddle across to this pen and give it back you know that sort of shaky way still at 18 months i give it back to the person who dropped it and the contrasting cases where um the experimenter does the same thing in

01:09:11 a sense uh but does it in such a manner that they're displaying their intention to throw their pen upon the floor and so this experiment and this other condition throws the pen on the floor and under those circumstances where the experimenter has deliberately thrown their own pen on the floor you don't see this helping behavior from 18 month olds now that's a very remarkable thing to me now i mean i'm sure that in

01:09:42 a way that caregivers and i know this is true caregivers have always sort of known that about their babies they've always felt that about their babies that they have there is really a person i'm talking about the baby now on the other end uh who is with whom you have a relationship and part of that relationship is that you are reflected in that baby's mind your mind your intentions and desires and

01:10:13 perspective is reflected in your baby's mind and that's sort of really what we mean by having a baby at a very basic level what we mean by having a relationship and that's also the big thing that's absent if your child is is is substantially uh autistic that you don't have that reflection of your own um inner life in the uh in your um typically would be a son um

01:10:46 and and that makes the whole job of parenting extremely difficult um so if you take these little cases in very simple cases undramatic cases everyday cases to me these are the cases and and i use this to investigate very early development lo and behold you find that these kinds of responses and judgments and would i call that altruistic well you you know i mean what you want to call things

01:11:18 um i sort of up to you but i just say look this is this is what they do so there's something we need to explain this what what are they doing why are they doing it and you can see these nice sort of distinctions you can set up by giving the two contrasting cases ones where i do something by accident so i don't want to drop my pen on the floor in fact you know this is this is something that's disrupted my life for a moment and the child spontaneously wants to help

01:11:48 to set you back on course versus the case where you deliberately throw it on the floor well that's what the person wants has this been done with siblings to see if they're so this is this all all of this is well you would then have to get one of the siblings to do the acting and the rules that's that's more difficult so so the one side of this is taken by an experimenter who is very you know trained and practiced at producing these different displays um

01:12:19 and there's other kinds of examples that are even more dramatic where the task for the baby is uh to figure out what it is you want what you're trying to do what you're wanting not from any overt sign that you give in the manner of your behavior accident versus deliberate but simply in terms of your perspective on the world

01:12:49 so you're you're trying to open this box and you can't quite manage um there's another box a few moments ago you put uh an object in this first box and then you left the room and while you were away somebody moved that object from this box put it in that box you didn't see that but you come back into the room and now you're trying to open the box and you can't quite manage in this case what 18 month olds do

01:13:20 is they struggle to their feet and toddle across to the other box open it take the toy out and give it to you in the other so we need to contrast we always need a contrast so the contrasting cases you put this object in this box and you start to leave the room and while you're leaving the room a second person takes the second adult takes the object out of this box puts it into this box but just at that

01:13:50 moment you turn back and you look and you see the second arrow putting the object in this box and then you leave and then a few moments later you come back in and you go up to this box and try to open it again now in this case what does the toddler do well the toddler struggles to her feet and totals across to this box and opens it for you doesn't retrieve the time what stage does the uh child look at the situation and just start to laugh

01:14:24 i'm wondering about is is that you know the part of what what i think is beautifully illustrated in these kind of experiments i gathered you hang out with experimental philosophers and they they tend not they they like to play with all sorts of general general notions yeah um but in experiments like this part of what i think it's beautifully demonstrated is at what you know how children how infants become people become persons and some of what you're noticing is that early on what happens more often

01:14:55 than not is that the child does something that appears to be pro-social in some fashion something that you know seems to be nice benefits the other person um i suppose at some stage some of these kids under other circumstances just watch the adult struggle wait for the adult to leave and then swipe the pen from the the one where it was really hidden um maybe not under these conditions where they're being observed because of their the knowledge of the consequences but i think what's what's really interesting is that you're observing um i mean obviously one of

01:15:26 them to go back to the earlier question about brains obviously brains facilitate our becoming persons because if they didn't you know we become something else or we would misunderstand the brain so in effect what your research is showing is that very very early on um an infant begins to develop a perspective that has that is seen by another is pro-social that recognizes what the other is trying to do and that facilitates the other getting what they're trying to do in this case getting getting the pen

01:15:57 and that you're finding that that occurs versions that occur earlier and earlier but i'm wondering at what point the child you also begin to notice or have some evidence that the child is deciding whether they want to do that or not well i mean i think i think the way that i put this is that you know those questions that you're asking about say yourself um what i would always give them yeah i mean what would be my motivations or something in this case and how does that relate to to the baby becoming

01:16:28 you well you know i would simply point out that your brain used to be in an 18 month old toddler it's the same brain it's just you know fast forward um uh a few years and it's that same brain it's still in there um it's of course being as far as far longer it's been working far longer but i think that you know you have the

01:16:59 properties that you have and i have those that i have and that we share as human beings because those properties are built in to the brain and they were there already in the 18 months though and perhaps they were there even in the 12 month old i mean i don't know another species too like chimpanzees but they have to be cultivated i mean they're not exactly the same in other species so i mean with when when uh when you look at the question of whether

01:17:29 you get real well real whatever you know i can i'll just have it altruistic behavior in chimpanzees you get a partial cooperation so if you can set up a situation with two chimps whereby one chimp can only get their bit of banana if the other one helps them to do something and this one can only get their piece of banana if this one helps them so you're asked to so the chimps have to learn

01:17:59 that they have to cooperate if either of them will get are going to get a piece of banana they have to cooperate with one another and now what happens is the chimpanzees start off behaving now of course this means that one chimp has to help the other one first i mean at some point this chimp will get the big piece of banana first or this one will get it first which means that this one has to help this one this one gets its banana and now the question is what's this one

01:18:30 just got a banana what do they do do they continue to act so that this one can get the banana after all and the answer is because no no they don't as soon as they get their own banana they're off but but if you do this with three-year-old children human kids they do cooperate all the way so this kid gets the banana and then continues to help the confederate get there so some of the some of the problems there is there's a there's a big difference between the species which i find intriguing what you made me think

01:19:02 about i mean i always go to sort of the human experience overall and he says the same brain right so you're 18 months old or six months old and you started to develop this empathy and then you have six younger brothers and sisters right in a real family where's the point where the kids stop wanting to so that that question about how does it how does the empathy and the maybe compassion develop over time

01:19:33 because it doesn't seem to me it's a static thing because the older you get the more choice you have about whether you're doing it or not and a certain point you may choose the child may choose no it would certainly change but there are certain things that don't change as well as lots and lots of things that that do so some of the things that don't change are the very very simple things but part of what i think there's there's

01:20:03 a behavioral logic that we could use to unfold most of this which is that if you've acquired any personal characteristic regardless of your species it's dependent on having a prior capacity and an intervening history um however that's how you acquire you've got a capacity and then the child who you know is on the spectrum who evidently has a different capacity um and is going to require a different set of histories and intervening experiences order to develop

01:20:33 in the average expected environment with a good enough child and the good enough mother by a certain age the age that you're noticing some of these children are beginning to engage in things that look to be pro-social what i think is sort of an interesting question is whether that activity at that stage is automatic in some fashion and i'm neutral about i don't know where it is or not or whether it already has something to do with some set of of histories

01:21:05 about how the child has been smiled and appreciated what has been done so that the child now having those prior capacities is now able to see that oh i'm going to help you rather than not help you and that and so there is this there is a notion here of of i think both um if you will hard wiring in the sense of of what the hardware is what the prior capacities are and how they change over time and what the intervening history is that enables some set of characteristics

01:21:35 to be more likely to be the case than others right and i'm going to answer that and then i'll go to the audience right well it's certainly your your each individual's developmental history will be very different if you are locked in a dark cupboard um but you know there are just lots and lots of things between the most extreme two possibilities one is that there is no human nature it's just all

01:22:06 a result of your exposure and if you were brought up with chimps you would be a chimp and um if a chimp was brought up with a human being it would turn into a human being and that like if people have tried to bring chimps up that way and they don't turn into human beings so but on the other hand between that um extreme and the other extreme that somehow we're born knowing absolutely everything that we know now that's obviously not true so the answer is somewhere between those two extremes

01:22:37 um and and that's what makes the all these questions so difficult to answer and there is animal there are animal models of responding to need in others and the hypothalamus as a plays a primary role in that and it's across species from rats to sheep to birds and um that that what you do what you find is just this hardwired response to need it looks like and it looks like the experience will make it easier or more difficult to respond to need because look altruism

01:23:09 is a special case you're incurring costs you could give up all of your resources to another person if you were always activating that motivation you'd never survive and reproduce and that's why becomes so important which is especially if you want to look at the notion of prior capacities or embodiment issues or what would what the the the um you know what within the body is uh would facilitate or inhibit the expression of what the person in the

01:23:39 average expected environment with a good enough mother with a good enough set of socializations becomes and under those conditions most of they become like us you know one of the really beautiful features i think of the sort of saved psychoanalysis uh from the 30s 40s into the 50s was this notion of an average expected environment a good enough mother some notion of a very broad set of conditions but still a broad set of human conditions that would lead to a certain kind of enculturation that if you distort those conditions too much you end up in trouble and even if you

01:24:10 have those conditions but if the child is not a good enough child to begin with you don't get the result and in some ways this you know where science becomes extraordinarily important is defining how these things can go wrong um i think we know we do know early exposure to stress completely changes the um you know the the the receptor distributions in these areas that we're talking about so you know moms who have to be away from their infants because they're having to work in our country for example um

01:24:41 that's probably a problem um i agree with you human capacities though are i mean these do look like very general mechanisms okay questions please ask questions rather than make long comments if you can line up the microphone so you think this guy just kept wanting

01:25:11 just to play with your shirt i mean what was that about go ahead i hope they got that on the film apparently they're filming exhibit a that's going to go very well yeah speaking to the issue of the trial of you dropping your pen on the child picks up the pen my question is how do you know whether this is an act of right action or right place and i'll give you an example what if that same child is in a room and something falls off a shelf

01:25:44 and he approaches the object picks it up and puts it back on the shelf the pen belongs with the man the book belongs on the shelf interesting that's a good question let's go to your name it's cool well i think part of the answer is given by it's not simply where the pen belongs because presumably that's the same answer in both the both the cases where the um person drops their pen

01:26:16 by accident they didn't mean to and the case where they deliberately threw it on the floor i mean it's still that person's pain it belongs but it has no sense of altruism or right yeah that would have said is it this experiment done so it's i mean um why do i think these are nicely simple cases because you can't really imagine i think that an 18 month old is reasoning this out in a very complicated fancy way uh or reflecting upon this

01:26:50 for you know several months laying plans and plots it's just this is a very spontaneous uh reaction but it's a sophisticated one because it takes because it takes into account my intention it takes into account what i wanted but it's his intention he's only 18 months is his intention an automatic it fell from the man's hand it fell from the bookshelf just an automatic response or is it a a sense of altruism oh the poor man

01:27:21 dropped his pen and i think we have to i mean in my opinion the book and the panda are are equal something is awry and he just naturally corrects i i like studies though with other manipulations like trying to help an experiment or open a door that he's trying having trouble opening yeah i've seen that yeah so i mean they're but what about what is inanimate i think you know like you're saying is it automatic or is there a person's sense of word to hell i think the answer

01:27:53 is yes in both cases it's an automatic sense of wanting to help it's an empirical question i can give you a uh a naturalistic observation unfortunately it's an n of one but eric marcus psychoanalyst tells a really wonderful poignant story about his 24 month old son who uh was in the room when eric was returning from the hospital after his mother had died and his father was with him and no words were spoken and the and the two-year-old looked at his father took the binky out

01:28:25 of his mouth and walked over to him to offer it yeah um i write about evolutionary biology and um i guess i was hoping for some clear picture in your minds of this distinction between human

01:28:56 altruism and and other organisms i mean the the problem we get when we talk just sort of this generally about the subject is that we say well altruism must really include this component for example this must include this component of selflessness it must be it the organism the human the actor can't benefit well in evolutionary biology we call that strong altruism and frankly

01:29:26 we don't have an explanation for strong altruism all of the research in the last 40 years assumes either kin selection or assortment both require the carrier class and the recipient class to be virtually identical which means that you must get some benefit so strong altruism where by definition the carrier doesn't get any benefit doesn't receive it's not a recipient or a beneficiary

01:29:56 there we simply don't have a good explanation for that per se now i'm not suggesting that there won't be one or that i'm you know not working on one but uh so i think what i'm wondering about is you know if you want to try and maybe distinguish between what you feel human altruism is from this more uh animalistic uh you know i don't know i don't know what uh what would be a good word for

01:30:27 i'm sorry not sapien okay about from from biologically uh well we're all biological and if you believe certain writers uh groups are living systems and societies in your question does is because i thought we actually tried to play with the question and one of the one of the and we did it in three ways one was the difference between intrinsic versus instrumental

01:30:58 in which and if i mean and i'm taking as a given that people can do things for intrinsic reasons i'm just doing it because it's the right thing to do now that's one class versus instrumental but the other questions suggesting that's distinctly human yes i think that's distinct for humans and i'm going to be neutral about that because it's hard for me to ask my dog i mean i cuz the joke goes i'll trust my dog with my life but not my lunch i can comment on it but we have that other case which is that's anecdote is that no no you finish let me finish with that so we discussed intrinsic versus instrumental but then we also

01:31:28 brought up the case in which there is um a genetic and or other set of biologic um uh uh advantages um that you were speaking to and it seems to me that these are the three the the way we've been breaking this down um one way is to re is to insist at least in the human example that there is a moral component another is to remove the moral component to be neutral about that which allows to introduce these other cases but that's a self-satisfied answer because the moral

01:32:00 your suggestion moral component only exists in humans therefore no i'm not saying that it's a moral component it must be human uniquely no no i wasn't that was not what i said i'm not saying i'm not saying that it only exists in you and i'm saying that it's only easy for me to find out about humans i can talk about it it's hard for me to talk about it with my dog i do in fact believe my dog does do some things only for my good but only on a good day but is it moral i mean i think there is you know how you talk about morality and animals but i also i mean there may be a way i don't know what the boons hang behind

01:32:32 the when when they flee a predator the larger male baboons will hang behind and they will mob a predator and prevent the predator from pursuing the pack now are they doing that for their own but see i think part of it is the question of can you can the active actor reflect on the morality of what they're doing so so i think there are many ways that what we think of as distinctly human is not distinctly human at all

01:33:03 and when we're talking about activating this general parenting system where where you know whatever is in place for mammals to raise their young and that that would be cross species right and and what would change with species are a couple things one is what does it take to activate that parenting system so when you talk about you know brains that are much smaller it may be particular sign stimuli that activate that brain that activate that system but we talk

01:33:34 about something like humans we have these reasoning abilities and all kinds of things that could potentially make us think oh this person over here i don't know her but i i think she might need my help because you know she's looking at me in a particular way and i'm not sure if but i'm gonna go see what she wants so it's like we can we can activate it in other ways right but the behavior itself may be very similar with one other very interesting piece about humans compared to other species is that part of our brain that's more lateral is

01:34:05 really a relatively new evolutionary development and these areas of our brain track things like morality and these um it's it's and including in that is is senses of injustice and and um and that even little kids have even though they they might still act in their own self-interest they can still be outraged and they still have those feelings um so the so the question i've wondered is if we start with these capacities to

01:34:36 give and now we're in humans where we're giving all the time to everyone and now everybody's starting to exploit us now you're going to really start to have to develop sophisticated mechanisms to really track costs and benefits over time who's my friend who's not my friend is this person trustworthy and now all of a sudden we have something that's more instrumental because we can have strategic helping that enters where we can empathize for other reasons than necessarily the good perhaps and

01:35:06 we can we can apply these in in moral ways and what it does it adds this interesting layer i guess on on everything that's that's my explanation thank you i think this gentleman was describing a study experiment and it was about the dictator who had the choice of taking all everything for himself or

01:35:36 giving and you mentioned start to say something about 70 percent and then you were interrupted i was very curious what the the resolution i remember doing a study like that but you were interrupted and i don't know what came of that that study okay where why was that a manipulated was that uh you know the it's it's i mean

01:36:07 despite the fact that 100 of people could just pocket the whole 10 bucks and leave um and there'd be no come back you know despite that for the what's about 70 percent of people do is they give about 30 of the 10 bucks to the other person and then they take the remaining 70 and leave um and um the

01:36:38 the mathematician says they're not playing the game they're irrational because they should take it all um and that's really been the basis of economic theory it's been the assumption that the rational agent would take everything and leave but we we don't behave like that actually so yeah what is there any any explanation any conclusion is there a as you know there are

01:37:08 possibilities that this is a kind of a calculation if i do this then ultimately this will be rewarded or is there an intrinsic sense again of morality is in fairness uh so i was curious right i i think so i'm on the side of intrinsic i think there is an intrinsic moral sense i think there's an intrinsic sense of being interested in other

01:37:39 people's inner lives interested in their motivations and the way that i study intrinsic is by looking at babies and very very young kids and if i can find uh if i can find these things in babies and young kids i'm going to take a big step towards supporting my claim that these kinds of things are intrinsic now they're intrinsic but they're completely routine so the ins the 18 month old picks up my

01:38:10 pen when i don't mean to drop it um it gives it back to me tries to help me you say well is that automatic is it praiseworthy they should well i don't know if you saw your grandchild doing something i bet you you would praise your child even though well maybe she did that automatically or something of that sort and one shouldn't be praising them but i think this experiment that you described they didn't ask people afterwards why did you take the

01:38:41 ten dollars why did you leave three dollars why did you do this why did you do that yeah yeah but so now the variation right so if you give these kinds of experiments to adults and then afterwards you say to them why did you do that you get all sorts of different explanations i think basically when you look at these explanations they're all over the place i think people don't really know why they do these things why did you help me you see this

01:39:11 heroes that jump down onto the subway and pull somebody from the electric lines that risk their lives and afterwards they're interviewed on the you know channel four or something why did you do that oh no anybody would do it i just did it they were doing it and then without thinking could there be a basic tribalism that we connect we relate to things that that is similar that we relate to and that's kind of programmed

01:39:43 for hormonally oxytocin whatever that could that be a factor that we all have uh some of that uh connection that's empathy isn't it i've well again i don't mind what you call it i just say there it is i think this is part of human nature and and the human nature is in part angelic and it's also in part you know the devil

01:40:14 i mean it's both things are there but both possibilities yeah but you know in part and parcel people's explanations i mean it's i think it's often the case that people know what what they take to be the right thing to do without being able to articulate it yeah um and you know i think these things often often show up it shows up behaviorally they know what's expected of them they know what is you know in character yeah um they know what the tribe requires whatever it is it's the unconscious mind i mean i think the unconscious mind is is far more sophisticated than freud

01:40:46 could have imagined it's not a primitive thing it's a very sophisticated um thing it reasons it thinks it remembers it knows it it talks it does all sorts of things and uh you know that's like the you know that's like the rest of the iceberg and and our conscious selves very much sit on top of this and um so i you know i i think these things are real and i think they're really built into the brain and i think we all we always have them

01:41:18 and it's just fundamental part of human nature so i'll take the last four questions i'm terribly upset by the thought of reverend bonoff in hell and i'd like to get him out with your compassion i guess he's not there but i don't think he's there ah that's it yeah i i tried to transpose the situation a little and wonder what the church would say

01:41:49 if one of its leaders one of its pastors was in a situation of seeing an armed man aiming at perhaps in a theater or a school and a minister on hand the only way he could stop the person was by life-threatening action uh to me killing hitler might have saved a

01:42:20 few more lives sure and i mean i think that was his thought i know in yoga in in hindu mythology the story the teaching is you cannot take a life life is sacred you cannot take life however right even the swami should he be defending the life of an innocent child could take life without having karmic repercussions right so i i was sort of speculating not theologically but about what might have gone through bonhoeffer's own

01:42:51 mind about his moral life and his salvation and his faith he may have imagined he was giving up heaven by doing that and would have been willing to give up his own salvation in order to save the people that he was trying to save i don't think he's in hell i'm much better so so the devil's in the in less clauses

01:43:22 yeah but there's always been less clauses in all theologies there's some set of the less clauses that allow maybe okay shifting gears just a bit uh i'm familiar with game theory separate theoretic game theory the dictator the dictator model do you know have you performed do you know if anyone is performing uh or designing these kinds of experiments based on non-zero sum game theory rather nation economics or some derivative because if so and that panned out that

01:43:54 might give a mathematical framework to start addressing the myopic nature of always focusing on self-interest and what you thought about that well i think it's it's not you know this is not my field um exactly but i know there's a lot of work um in a field that can be something that's called behavioral economics sometimes it's called neural economics and so one of the things they study in that field are these game theoretic games

01:44:27 and the basic idea behind this new movement neural economics or whatever you want to call it is to actually try to take these economic models and and better represent the actual the actual nature of human beings rather than just make these assumptions that mathematicians made i have two colleagues joe jeffries

01:44:59 and anthony putman who sometime in the last two years in the journal of of behavioral finance have done a series of redescriptions of these classic experiments using a a wider behavioral logic to to make sense of of why you know of of these these kinds of problems um uh so i think it's within that general realm of behavioral economics we

01:45:30 find all the classical problems of psychology still there and the kind of introduction of some broader ways of conceiving what what people actually do and i know that uh puppet and jeffrey's work seems to be of that sort and we have a a study where we did a cooperative card game it was a behavioral economic study and we measured progesterone a calming hormone and and the cooperative card game was basically the subjects came in and they had to learn a really

01:46:01 sophisticated new language almost they didn't get told the rules ahead of time they had to sort of discover it as they went along and when they had an increase in progesterone when they played that game they reported a greater willingness to risk their life for their partner at the end it's also interesting because in the in the extreme with some techniques like single neuron recording through diffraction and all the rest of that you might be able to track that neural network formation while they're developing that new

01:46:32 response yeah i'm a little bit of a devil's advocate although i believe in conscious uh altruism and and believe that there is some moral consciousness that does exist but i think also there may be pleasure of well-being some form of endorphins to do to do well and i think human beings are

01:47:02 very pleased sometimes when they're not paid back and they do something for someone else so there is something intrinsic just to the self that enjoys that that that uh that whole behavior um and i just wanted to say one other thing about uh the falling the falling pen or something i mean i did have a dog who did pick up things when something fell but i i think they're the the the line what's interesting in human beings is that line that eventually becomes conscious as you

01:47:32 were speaking where it no longer is instinctual is no longer on those other levels but turns into a conscious act and awareness i think that's the important part where one begins really thank you i want to bring this back a little bit to psychoanalysis i'm a psychoanalyst um one thing we know is and i think this has been a fascinating fascinating discussion um and it's so complicated and freud certainly said in one of his papers that at one point

01:48:05 in in the future we will find that there is a organic underlay to all of the psychological theories that he uh postulated so i just wanted to say that i also hate people getting up and not asking questions and making points but i really want to um so please forgive me there is a i think a brilliant psychoanalyst who talks about writes about narcissism his name is sheldon bach

01:48:36 do you know him yes and he talks about the child who grows up in a family in which the mother neither the mother nor father has that child separate child in the mind in her mind and those children tend to grow up with what we might call narcissistic personality disorders and if and i've seen this in patients it's really quite dramatic so that's

01:49:08 that's one thing i want you to mention the other thing i thought of is in terms of altruism i thought of socrates in the apology and how he really knew he was going to die but he kept he kept his um his principles um i thought of schindler well he got something out of the factory that he but it's a good example of just an ordinary man as they say becoming extraordinary the other thing i just wanted to ask and i wanted to ask you i had a very strong reaction um to what

01:49:41 you said about and this is political okay i have a lot of political concerns about uh fox news uh had a uh they had people talking about how one of the big problems in society is that women go to work and they and they are the people who are who are taking jobs away from men etc and i just i assume that you didn't mean what you said about when

01:50:12 when women go to work and leave children behind as if they do because many women don't they have great care takers their husbands stay home or the grandmother is there i just wanted that that was a politically incorrect moment what i it i think it's dangerous if no no i i should have said when the primary caregiver has to go to work and that's the word i would have used well there's a you you began with a point that i think that that i think absolutely has to be addressed when you

01:50:43 say that freud um makes the argument that at some point he thinks it's all going to be reduced to the organization no he doesn't say let me actually let me finish let me finish he makes he makes similar points about his writings but if we look to the final work we look at the outline of psychoanalysis the first paragraph he begins with the fact that we know sort of two things we know something about consciousness and we know something about the brain and i don't have the full paragraph in mind but in that paragraph um in effect what he says if we knew something about the connection

01:51:14 it would tell us at most location and this is the key nothing about meaning he's always conceptually separated out meaning from mechanism and this may go back to his his relationship with brentano in uh you know when he was studying when he was studying law his philosophy professor at vienna who you know argued that all what's inherent in in all organism is intentionality versus his commitment to the helmholtz

01:51:45 program and these constantly defined attention within psychoanalysis which he finally addressed beautifully in that last and that that final volume in the first paragraph he separates it out and he sides with brentano thank you thank you thank you to our panels

01:52:16 you