The Topology of Fear

00:00:00 I'm Edward nessian uh director of [Music] the director of The Healing Center and I welcome you to today's program on the topology of fear uh I should tell you that next Saturday the program is on um Elizabeth Bishop and the participants arbani Costello uh LD Schwarz uh Alice Quinn and Gan

00:00:33 Valentine uh programs for April will be on our website uh on the website we also now have a section for conversation so if there are any thoughts and questions that you have after today's meeting or opinions that you have you can go on that site on that under conversation and uh write whatever you are thinking uh today's Round Table was proposed by professor grael chichil nisi

00:01:05 she's professor of Economics at Columbia University I'm going to just give you very brief points from their bio biography of the group uh bibliography of the group or whatever biography bibliography of the group she's professor of economics and mathematical statistics and the university Senator at Columbia University uh she's director of of the Consortium for risk management and has worked extensively on the Kyoto Protocol

00:01:36 she's the LA lead author of the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change and acts as a special adviser to several un organizations and heads of state Paul glimer uh who like grael has been here already before is the director for the center of of the center for neuroeconomics at New York University and Julius silver professor of Neuroscience economics and psychology at myu Center for neural

00:02:06 science he's the author of foundations for neuroeconomic analysis neuroeconomics decision making and the brain and which is the winner of the American Association of Publishers economics and social science Sciences book of the year and his book decisions on certainty and the Brain the science of neuroeconomics is the winner of the American Association of publisher uh Publishers medical Sciences book of the Year Linda kin is Professor of

00:02:38 mathematics Graduate Center and lemon College of the City University of New York she uh her research spans various parts of complex analysis including complex Dynamics hyperb hyperbolic manifolds and te Mueller Theory she is the co-author of hyperbolic geometry from a local viewpoint and has edited five books she's a recipient of the Edwin s Webster Abby M Rockefeller award

00:03:09 from MIT Joel Leu who has been here many times is Professor his university professor and Henry and Lucy Moses professor of Science Center for neuroscience at the department and Center for neural science and the department of psychology at NYU uh he's director of the emotional brain Institute and the author of the book emotional brain um The Mysterious underpinnings of

00:03:41 emotional life and synaptic self how our brains become who we are he's the editor of the self from Soul to brain and co-editor of post-traumatic stress disorder basic science and plan clinical practice David L Stein who's sitting here is co-founder of austic Association in New York he's a co-founder faculty member and supervisor at apru psychotic Association in New York editor of

00:04:12 division review a quarterly psychotic Forum an Adjunct professor of psychology at the Sunni postdoctor program and also he is at adelfa adelfa University derer Institute he has written many articles including born in Exile there's no place like home and if it be not now right and uh at the

00:04:42 cardoo cardoo law review so uh Grilla is going to get things going the topology of fear which is the title of this uh meeting today this uh Round Table puts together two different concepts one from mathematics pure mathematics and that's topology and the other one is uh fear and generally

00:05:14 emotions and we have here specialist from both um so I wanted to introduce very briefly the uh topic before we have the usual format that this round tables use we're all very curious about emotions and the emotion of fear is uh very uh well understood by anybody who looks at the what happens on an everyday

00:05:44 basis and the Press what the Press chooses Etc and uh the uh article the topology of fear which is the um which is here is an article I published a few years ago um essentially looks for a mathematical explanation of how fear fits and helps Define our

00:06:15 decisions in a way that is not the same as we are used to and we are talking we are talking we have here very impressive specialists in fact the best thing about this Round Table are the people here and uh so I'm not going to be talking too much about that because that's their field although I have done some experimental work on this but the critical thing about topology is that it helps you explain a form of rationality that puts fear in a

00:06:48 rational context in a way that is different than what we are used to in decisions analysis and in in Psychology and in economics etc etc in the social Sciences so how does that work the the branch of mathematics topology we were discussing just before with Linda who is a mathematician and she can tell you about that is really about what does it mean to be nearby what does it mean to be similar nearby and there are very different

00:07:21 versions about what that means for example you can say that the weather in New York is similar to the weather on inside Siberia uh if on average we have the same temperature but if in Siberia or in a desert the temperature is extremely cold over parts of the year and then very hot over others you would say no it's not quite the same so what do you mean the weather is similar in New York

00:07:51 and in Siberia what exactly do you mean by that there are two versions at least two but there are two actually one is let's look at things on the average let's look at the average of the weather over this Century over this Millennium that's one way over the Earth that's another way and the other way is look at extremals what's the worst that can happen was the highest and the lowest and we won't say that things are close by unless the extremals are

00:08:23 nearby and if we do that we're looking at what nearby means in a complete completely different way we defined a completely different topology and all of a sudden what appear to be irrational Behavior because of emotional reasons appears to be mathematically very very rational so just wanted to be more precise in the paper uh the topology of fear Paul said brief outline and he has to be very brief I looked at the dis joint that

00:08:57 appears when you try to to explain in experiments how people behave under conditions of fear and they appear to behave irrationally an experiment upon experiment and upon experiment shows that and where does it come from so in that paper I show that if you look at the axioms which are the basic beliefs on which the theory of decision is based and you assume that instead of making decisions on the average and and

00:09:30 valuing the average and caring about the average you look at extrem ads mathematically that difference is the topology of fear and in terms of decisions it leads you to completely different decisions and rationality for example you would say that if you wanted to invest in a fund you may look at the average returns that this fund brings to the

00:10:02 investors but you may say that's okay that's all very good but I'm afraid there will be a market crash fear and therefore I'm going to invest in the fund that assures me that even if there is a market crash I will have my money back or most of my money back those are two criteria completely different criteria and depend on the topology and I'm saying when you have fear when there is fear present when there is catastrophes

00:10:34 rare events with enormous consequences you tend to use the topology of fear to determine what's close to each other and that leads you to make decisions which are considered to be irrational by the standard decision Theory namely no I'm not going to invest in the investment fund that gives me the higher expected r turns why what's wrong with you are you going to be irrational no I'm not I'm

00:11:07 afraid I will give a lot of weight to what happens in that Fund in the case of a market crash and I will not optimize according to what is the expected return alone I will not do that that's not irrational according to the standard Theory it turns to be irrational it cannot be explained so by introducing the topology of here you can explain a different form of rationality and then it leads to the following criteria that

00:11:37 is okay I'm going to invest in the fund that gives me the highest expected return provided that the worst that can happens in the case of a catastrophe I'm willing to accept it it's like maybe I will lose 5% of my portfolio but no more now this sounds like a reasonable thing to do particularly these days with economy being what it is but is contradictory to what we think is IR rational decision making and it leads people in experiments to say humans are

00:12:10 irrational you just don't make decisions by what you expect that will happen the expectation part is really averaging things the consideration of the catastrophe and extremal is looking at the worst that can happen and it is using the topology of fear this turns out to be mathematically connected with uh gel's theory of the incompleteness of mathematics and with the resolution that beran Russell gave to some of the

00:12:41 biggest contradictions that appear system that has the richness of mathematics but without going into details I wanted to explain that going Way Beyond the issue of the fund that I mentioned but is nice because it an everyday phenomenon that we're not afraid of how do we make decisions about jumping into uh an accident and trying to pull a person out and we are governed by

00:13:11 fear well under those conditions we need to expand our notion of what rational means and what the topology of fear does it gives you a mathematical tool a measurement tool an experimental tool to Define rationality in a way that admits certain ambiguities and allows you to cope both with the extremals that you behave with when you are involved in a in a situation that has a catastrophe or can cause fear and

00:13:42 at the same time the average behavior that you consider when you are being uh you know naturally uh weighing the probabilities of what can happen the two things emerge so the result of that paper is that when you consider fear and when extremals do matter and you use a topology of fear which is your value system the topology is your value system is what matters what's similar to what then you will end up behaving like that

00:14:15 you will choose the electric Network for our city so that it maximizes a throughput of electricity but minimizing the worst that can happens in the case of blackout does it sound reasonable yes it is inconsistent with the way we view rationality until now through averages so what I just said is reasonable but our Notions of rationality until now have eliminated it as if it was

00:14:46 irrational I can give more and more examples so uh instead of doing that I wanted to say that that gives you a use for mathematics that really opens up a completely different sphere and uh we will hear maybe more about that from Linda but I was told before by David that the French are not uh adverse to using topology when they try to study the uh

00:15:17 internal uh psychological behavior in she's going to explain that of uh in their own in how people make decisions so I think I with your permission I will stop here here because I am more interested in what these people have to say than what I have to say I hope it's an introduction it's the beginning and uh right maybe you can pitch in is that sufficient B yeah that was good I have a comment um so you you tried to um take an everyday word like rationality and

00:15:50 turn into more of a scientific mathematical concept is that correct no I mean go no with a smile uh no I think it's a very good point I have to say that Joe's work is fantastic so um you know it's my pleasure to be answering your question um no what I do is something different I look at the definition of rationality that we use in just about

00:16:23 every scientific discipline I know and it has to do generally speaking uh with having some aoms and deriving from those aoms logically statements that we are willing to accept because we accept the ations that's the way mathematics is constructed I just describe to you what mathematics is I also describe to you what is decision Theory what is probability Theory we start with axioms and then anything that

00:16:56 we're willing to accept as rational is what derives from the axioms in a logical system that we accept that's the way science proceeds I didn't say should proceed I said proceeds so the rationality that I speak about is not a loose word that we use at breakfast maybe it should be but that's not what I'm talking about I'm talking about scientific rationality I'm talking about the fact that Quantum probability quantum theory has axioms that were defined by Forman in 1932 from those

00:17:29 axioms logically speaking you derive the entire you know quantum theory and everything can be drawn back in a logical steps mathematical steps to the axom that's rationality so what have I done here how am I redefining rationality am I changing the logic no what am I doing I'm changing the axioms okay but it's a scientific view of rationality but you started asking me if it was a a a a loose way of

00:18:02 understanding I was more interested in the scientific part so you have a scientific um but you uh on the other side you took fear and used the everyday version of it so you didn't have a scientific approach to fear you had a uh an everyday version of fear well yes and no uh in the sense that after I changed the axioms and I said goalie when you have catastrophic events rare events that that terrible you need to use the topology of fear different axium

00:18:32 different results different rationality and he says okay but with respect to fear you're still wooy wooy you're not giving me the scientific version right and he's right I don't know what fear is what I do know is that I have carried experiments in which people are subject to uh propositions that Inspire extreme fear to see whether they behave according to the axioms and the logic from those axioms using the of fear will imply and the answer is yes so far

00:19:04 because you can never prove anything with experiments you can only prove that you don't know that you have made a mistake yet but if you don't define fear you can't scientifically use it no what I do is I Define uh the topology of fear as a topology that takes into consideration as a value focuses on extrems the worst that can happen and and uh that topology then gives rise through to a different axium through Logics to different

00:19:35 behavioral patterns I checked them I tested them experimentally with a team in France but this is baby stuff compared to yours well I you know I think the I have a problem with fear myself so um or you're afraid of snakes yes but that's not the problem uh the problem is I'm afraid of what we've been calling fear for um hundreds or maybe thousands of years and I've gotten really hung up on the question of how everyday language

00:20:06 relates to the scientific language especially in emotion and fear because I think we've made a lot of mistakes and in my own work I've um I've made mistakes as well so I've um studied how rats detect and respond to threats for 30 years and have called the brain systems that we've identified the fear system and I think that's a stake uh so I'm publicly announcing my uh my errors here I think you should still buy his book though by the next one it's where I

00:20:37 explain this which book you can give us a title it's called anxious anxious so um but it's it'll be a while yet I'm still working on so anyway so the um by studying the way the brain detects and respond to Danger we we've identified circuits that are very important in ultimately in fear um but they're not fear Circ circuits and for many years when I I've been introduced to give lectures I've been introduced to someone who's discovered XY and Z about how we feel fear and nothing could be further

00:21:10 than the truth so I'm trying to backtrack a bit and look at what we mean by fear and um I'd like to just describe you know how you go about the science of doing something like this take a couple of minutes to do that so in you know if we're studying the psychology and its relation to the brain psychology of fear and it's relation to the brain we have to first Define uh identify the everyday experience we that we're interested in that's basically what we do in Psychology Paul is interested in reward so that's an everyday concept and he

00:21:41 turns that into some kind of scientific approach so you first Define what you're interested in fear and you say well fear is an emotion and it's different from uh other things that we call mental States like cognitions or thoughts uh and it's different from other emotions uh like sadness and anger and um uh empathy and so forth um it's it's closer to anxiety maybe that's kind of a topological relationship in some sense and in fact I think mostly what you were talking about is anxiety rather than fear but we'll

00:22:12 get to that in a minute um the um so you've identified the you've defined the thing that you're interested in and then you figure out some experimental way to study some aspect of that so uh I've done that by studying the way the brain detects and responds to Danger now when you do the the experiment your goal is not only to study the little thing that you're uh that you're modeling but also the bigger thing that you want to make you want to gain some clarity on the bigger picture that you started out with fear uh and so these

00:22:44 two processes of defining and researching often go hand in hand so over the last 150 years of so when as fear has been studied in various ways it's gone through a lot of Transformations the first approach has been to start with the otherday experience Darwin talked about fear as a um uh a state of mind that's evolved um Freud talked about fear and as a a conscious experience it might be turned into an unconscious or repressed uh uh

00:23:16 State uh William James talked about it and then the behaviorist came along and said well this all this talk about Consciousness is getting in the way of doing research so let's talk about fear as a disposition to act in a certain way um and the um then then a little bit later that was turned into something called an intervening variable so the behaviorist talked about observable events like stimuli and responses um a behaviorist um um uh call

00:23:46 Tolman introduced the intervening variable which is something that sits between the stimulus and the response but has no psychological or biological reality so fear in that sense was a a concept that relates an external event with an with an observable response it wasn't a real thing it wasn't a fear in the sense of a psychological experience it was just an a variable that explains how certain stimula give rise to responses The Next Step was these got turned into hypothetical constructs so the uh

00:24:19 hypothetical construct of fear was a the main idea was as a drive so it was a drive that when reduced uh eliminated the the uh aversive state that you're experiencing and then this became turned into a biological entity certain kinds of states of the brain now the original uh ideas that were coming along when people were talking about brain states of fear uh were in something called the conceptual nervous system uh because they didn't know enough about the details of the brain to talk about the

00:24:49 real nervous system uh so again it was all hypothetical it wasn't a real thing but then finally um research on brain circuit came along and we were able to identify circuits of fear um and now that those circuits have have come along to explain how the brain detects and responds to Danger something else has happened those circuits you know all of this effort has been to not talk about the not talk about fear as a psychological State because we're studying animals and we wanted to be able to understand how the stimulus

00:25:21 produces the response without having to assume anything about the psychology of of what that animal might be experiencing but then then once you have the circuit the circuit starts to be psychological lied into a fear circuit so that circuit is also generating the feeling of fear which people who are studying those circuits never really say so all of this is a long way of saying we have a lot of problems in starting with a psychological concept like fear and getting back to how the brain is working but then coming back to understanding the psychological concept

00:25:52 and I think there's a way to do that what we have to do is first distinguish what is that psychological concept from one of the underlying things and I I'll just wrap up by saying that every organism whether it's a bacterial cell or a human has to be able to detect and respond to Danger it doesn't need to feel fear to do that even in a human brain uh the brain can detect and respond to Danger without knowing the stimulus is there and without having any experience at all so what the what the organism is doing whether it's a

00:26:23 bacteria or a human is detecting and responding to a threat and somewhere in the course of evolution when the brain acquires the capacity to be consciously aware of its own activities you have the feeling of fear that comes along or the feeling of anxiety or love or whatever else so um I think we have to distinguish the feelings I think the you know that the everyday language is the way we should think about uh States like fear and anxiety and love and so forth uh and that the scientific way of thinking about these things has to

00:26:54 explain where that comes from but without assuming that it's the same thing as the scientific stuff that we're studying I don't know if that makes any sense at all but that's this is fascinating one thing I wanted to say is that as we start the new geological period on planet Earth the the anthroposphere uh in which humans are dominating the planet the notion of fear or rather as he points out the threats he's saying just let's talk about

00:27:26 threats okay we are not clear what we mean by fear or do we need to have an emotion but the response to threat is what we're talking about well we do have fear we experience it but that's not what the brain the brain circuits that that detect threats do not exist in the brain to make you feel afraid they make you they're in the brain to allow you to detect threats so let's back off and say instead of fear let's talk about the response to threats and then I'm saying what he used the key word Evolution it

00:27:57 turns out that the brain is like an automobile that has pieces of all sorts of primitive material like bicycles and monocycles and until it gets to a modern automobile we have all these pieces and they're Loosely connected with each other in some way or another that we somehow understand but the point that he's making is if we made it so far is because somehow we relate we we reacted to threats and what I'm saying is and we are in a position now where

00:28:30 emotions may be evolving as the threats are evolving because in the anthrop in the anthropos scene this new geological period that started in 1945 we are facing totally different threats so the response to threat which is what he says is the only thing I can be clear about which is what the brain is doing is now something that is evolving because the threats are completely different we used to be afraid of our survival uh in in nature as other

00:29:04 animals were our Predators well it is nature who has to be afraid of us now so we have other fears the fears of what we ourselves may be going to do so this evolution of emotions is you know I think leading a lot of people to think well are emotions reasonable good should they Orient our actions or not and to the extent that the response to threat is an emotion and I don't even know if it is an emotion it's not I would say no

00:29:34 but there it is fantastic let let's get the other people into discussion Paul what do you do I hate to have to jump in right there gel I'm struggling a little bit with understanding the relationship to topology and um I mean I I heard what Joe said very clearly which is maybe we aren't talking about fear maybe we're talking about the way organisms respond to to threats um and I understand when I put on my hat as an economist being both an economist and a neuroscientist I I'm

00:30:07 very sympathetic to the classical Economist definition of rationality that people are consistent that they follow some set of rules or maybe even an economist would say a human behavior is maximizing something that we have goals that we proceed towards these are all alternative ways to talk to say the word rationality so it seems to me the classic story is if I'm afraid my behavior is discontinuous ac across this boundary where I become afraid and my behavior stops being rational and goal

00:30:38 directed and progression and consistent and become something else disorder dysfunctional and it seems to me that the core of the argument here is that you found a way to say well maybe maybe that's not true maybe this is one thing and I I was wondering if you could elaborate for me a little bit more for all of us a little a little bit more about topology and how it does that how it takes a discontinuous disordered behavior and reveals it not to be discontinuous disordered or

00:31:10 unproductive um I did not introduce Paul so I didn't nor did I introduce anybody else so I didn't tell you how great these people are but you probably understand already how they are clarifying things and cutting things down to size okay Paul yes the rationality is defined from aums with logical deductions I'm saying if I change the aums and I keep the rationality scheme

00:31:40 which is using a logical deduction I will get to explain actions that were considered to be discontinuous and irrational before and you are asking me explain how well it giv us an intuition for topology role in Linda you want maybe I can say something so what topology is all about is in some ways defining what continuity is

00:32:11 about uh because when you say something is continuous you want to say that uh if I move if I don't move too far and I'm measuring something that's happening out there it's not moving too far or I'm looking at my results and if these results are close together the what people do what whether it's an economic model whether it's biological model whether it's a physical model I move a little bit that came from stimuli that

00:32:43 were close together and that is what continuity really means and to say that it's discontinuous as that well if I have nearby things here the events that they create can be very far apart so you come down to the idea of what's nearby and so how do so if you want to if you change the topology about saying what are your nearby things you

00:33:15 can turn what seems in this model to be discontinuous because those things that you start close they got far apart here when you're measuring them this way but when you change the topology you change what's nearby here they become closer together so the graciella's example about weather for example uh if you just say things are nearby if they have nearby averages then you're going to

00:33:47 have B big discontinuities if you say okay when are things nearby they're nearby if the average temperature over the year is nearby and they're extremes are also close together things are different if they have very different extremes well then you have a different model and what's continuous in one one model can be discontinuous in another model and so there I think that it's very this idea

00:34:18 of saying topology and fear you're taking different kinds of words that we're all used to using in different contexts I mean this is part of what you were saying how do we use these words and I think that if you want if you're trying to set up some kind of model that you can work with you do have to make these words have definite meanings in the context that you're talking about so fear when we talk about the apology of fear we're talking about

00:34:49 certain ways of measuring things if we change the ways of measuring things then maybe different things are closer together or not but um it's very hard to take a very amorphous concept of fear talking about it this way and then here's your model and so you know you want to make the model it kind of reflects the things that you really are interested in I mean that's what people do when they try to set up mathematical models you try to find the things that you're really interested in and use

00:35:20 those as the building blocks for your model and build those into your ACC system so that you get out things that you can predict from otherwise why do you want a model so Paul does that gratify for you it helps a little let me bounce it back and you tell me that if I if I got enough to really grab on to that I mean when I hear you say continuity the three of us are probably all immediately thinking about the mathematical term continuity and and it may have slightly different meanings to

00:35:51 different people in the room but what I hear you saying is if we look at a change in the environment than a change in Behavior we say oh look you know the environment's getting a little bit riskier and people are getting changing their behavior a little bit change it a little more they change it a little more change it a little bit more they change suddenly you make a little change and they the behavior looks completely different so I think to me as an economist and neuroscientist that's disc discontinuous right yeah oh sure and so I had this problem which was that the thing I was

00:36:23 manipulating the risk looked continuous to me and the behavior looked discontinuous to me which left me kind of like well that's not good and I'm hearing you say that the critical idea here is well when you see discontinuous behavior that doesn't line up with what you think is a continuous state of the outside world maybe you're looking at the outside world wrong maybe there there's a lens that makes the outside world either look discontinuous or flip the other way makes the behavior look continuous right yeah in fact to be very

00:36:53 specific you as I said but using different topology you're using different values so something that you in the example I gave before your value is on average you want to be as well as you can when you invest your money that's the way you value your investment an investment approach but then all of a sudden there is a small probability that this year there will be

00:37:23 a market crash under the average response which is what you were saying and you are saying you will just you know neglect the market crash you will deny the market crash and you will dive into the market crash which is what happens to us so you're not looking at the worst that can happen that would not be your behavior if you're using the normal

00:37:54 topology under the topology of fear it doesn't matter to you how small is the probability of the event if it is bad enough you're going to focus on it really hard and then through these results I give a complete characterization that tells you how the human behavior irrational human behavior incorporates the two parts incorporates I want to be on average as well as I can so I like the temperature to be on average 70° but I'm going to also mind

00:38:26 if it is a jump of 100 degrees from one day to the next I can't deal with that so I'm going to look at those two things and that leaves you to totally different behavior and not to look at the average temperature if you don't look at the average temperature you look irrational according to that Criterion and it goes you know this can be made very very uh uh very very precise mathematically as precise as you want so

00:38:57 in the in case of a market crash we might have avoided the market crash if the people in Wall Street instead of using the economics of averages which is the standard forment Theory they would have used the economics of reacting to a threat which is what I call the topology of fear and that leads to a decision Criterion or function in which the worst that can happen all of a sudden May pop up whoo

00:39:27 we can go into a crash whoo stop break change behavior is that discontinous well it would be if you're just looking at averages but if you're looking at the worst that can happen it wouldn't be discontinuous so the notion of rationality which is tied up with continuity as Linda says depends on how you measure things what your values are what you what you observe what you care for does it make sense yeah David why don't you well I mean there's a great deal that's been said

00:39:59 already that uh uh in terms of psychoanalysis raises a number of interesting questions but just this last point about continuity and discontinuity and about flipping the topology of the uh response so as to find a continuity where it appears that there's a discontinuity is a position that one experiences as a psychoanalyst all the time that is one of the things

00:40:30 that takes place in listening very closely to the discourse of a patient is link is one hears or finds links proximities continuities where it appears there are discontinuities in the content that's being talked about um there're also for example things which may seem highly unrelated on the face of them on the surface uh through further discourse you begin to see how they are in fact linked

00:41:02 so you you find unexpected uh uh continuities unexpected proximities right on the level of meaning for example a person is talking reassociate a little bit he will show you exactly what what he if you're free associate he'll give you an example we're already using the couch but uh people are uh speaking about one

00:41:33 Topic in what appears to be a clear rational uh uh depiction of some story and suddenly they have a thought and they say I don't know where this comes from it's got nothing to do with what I'm talking about right but under the structure of a psychoanalytic treatment which is that you say whatever comes into your mind they say this thought that's random that seems completely unconnected uh as they speak about it and it happens this is a daily event

00:42:04 this is not an unusual event in psychoanalytic work at all as they speak about it two or three minutes into thing of course I see why I thought about this it happens to us all all the time we have an association which seems entirely discontinuous and we discover the continuity but I mean how do you know it's a real continuity as opposed to that interpreted without any interpretation now the question there of course is what do you mean by real cont I don't mean that as a question it's more about how

00:42:36 this gets back to the science and the well the way it gets back and and uh is that it has to do with the the level of analysis you know each of us work in a different framework of analysis right uh uh what's of interest to the psychoanalyst is subjective reality is subjective experience is not just the description but the articulation of subjective experience putting it into language conveying it to

00:43:07 another person so the continuity is Real by virtue of the subjective experience what its reality is in terms of other criteria is another question so in my field we have something called memory reconsolidation where you take a memory out as as you do in py analysis examine it and um what we and others have found is that when memories are are taken out in this way and made in in a made active they go

00:43:38 to a period of vulnerability where they can be changed and then restored and the new reality becomes what's restored rather than what the original reality was can you explain that um so a common example is someone Witnesses a crime and gives a a report to the police on the day of the crime and then uh they go to court to testify and rather than talk about the details they gave the police they come up with details that were in a newspaper article that they read in the

00:44:09 meantime So reading that article reactivated the memory cause new information to be stored and then that becomes the reality that they carry forth as the next memory so the you know the the extreme version of this is your memory is only as good as your last memory and that's that is an extreme version but there's some truth to it mhm okay I have to say something directly related to that uh and what Paul was saying mathematically when you

00:44:40 have when you have the foundation of how we observe reality is probability and statistics that's how we observe things we measure things and we take statistics okay that's we look at statistics of what you don't see one object you you look at statistics of it now these same axum of using the extremal events lead to a different probability and statistics which when you look at the

00:45:11 stochastic processes that they generate when you have a probability function and you pull out uh you pull balls from an earn that has a different distribution then you plot how many many were red how many were black Etc that gives you a stochastic process that's what it's called and the prices of the stock in Wall Street also are a stochastic process the observations of particles in

00:45:43 the universe are also a stochastic process Etc well if you take these ations and you put the topology of fear and the DI the stock IC processes that occur they are not random walks and they are not small diffusion processes they are diffusion processes with jumps that's a theorem now what you are saying and what you are saying is you observe a person

00:46:16 talking about an event and all of a sudden they make a jump which is discontinuous which you say unrelated well there is a theorem coming from these aums that says that's the way it is there will be Market trashes there will be discontinuities on the psych analytic chair and they will the discontinuities are the rule not the exception but they are not really discontinuities when you take into

00:46:46 account the value system or the topology of fear that is underlying this form of rationality they are what you expect to be in fact you prove are going to be jump diffusion processes that's why the mass in the universe is not uniformly distributed that's why you have stars so you have nothing for a while and then you have you know jumps in Mass that's why people in the couch all of a sudden come up with something strange but could you predict what the patient is going to come up with you can predict the

00:47:18 frequency in which they will occur You can predict uh the form that these probability distributions take and then you can experiments about it and and that gives rise to a new form of probability and statistics and it reproduces what what happens for example with earth earthqu earthquakes I just want to add a dimension to that uh and and in so doing bring it back to the question of emotion and to the question of fear and threat because that

00:47:49 your argument I think is that fear introduces a particular form of discontinuity uh which can be accounted for by a topological structure which will match the values of that new form of discontinuity what I'd like to uh suggest saying the opposite that the discontinuities are only apparent yeah so if can you explain that I

00:48:22 thought you should well you know seems to me though that there there is something about you know you it's not clear that fear I mean it works maybe in this context but there are a lot of situations people are building now these huge supercomputers and they've got thousands of computers that they put together and they know as these things go they generate heat you know they're

00:48:53 going to generate heat so you know that this one is going to fail and you have to PR them in such a way that when this one fails this one is taking over and so that people when you're looking at the output it all looks very continuous because you don't see that this one stopped and that one started but in fact there was this jump now this is and all of this has nothing to do with the emotions this is because people have thought about well how are you going to

00:49:23 deal with situations where you know something's going to get hot you don't know which one's going to get hot you don't know when you have some sense of meantime to failure but you try to build this in to the system and but this is not an emotionally charged situation where you're dealing with some kinds of discontinuities and so you try to create models where you think this is going to work and in that sense you create topologies which are measuring what's

00:49:54 going on and there is something similar to that in terms of your saying you have a top you want to create a topology that takes these what seem to be irrationalities when we put it in the context of the market uh as discontinuities and make them into a situation where you you can know what to expect so that you know you know how to react to them you know that the mark that you can make a situation where you're in good shape so

00:50:27 the so is using the word fear throwing in an emotional charge into the discussion and that's a and you agree with him because he's saying I'm I just you know I just he's saying it's not really fear it's like the there is a systematic way in which we respond to threat and we better know how to do that because otherwise we wouldn't be here and that's what it is and you may or not feel fear right and so there is no role for the emotion no the once once you've detected

00:50:58 a threat and it invades your Consciousness then it's a whole new game then that's when fear is there and uh begins to act back on the the whole system uh and everything changes I I work in the first 15 milliseconds of a stimulus so that's what I'm trying to understand but you know by the time that you have the the awareness of something obviously it's a whole new ball game so you are saying the reaction to thread in the first few milliseconds is what it is no fear no emotion it's just a reaction

00:51:30 to threat and then eventually the brain picks up oops it realizes what's happening it's observing itself and then it feels fear right there's another step though so the the brain first detects F first we react to Danger so you're walking along there's a snake on the ground you stop and then you realize there's a snake right because your brain is detected or you're walking down the street you jump back and the bus goes flying by so you're able who's flying by the bus the bus so or a car whatever a

00:52:02 taxi so your brain is able to identify these um these stimula that are potentially dangerous uh and and allow you to react in hardwired pre-programmed ways now once that's happened that changes the state of the brain so that you become more sensitive to threatening stimula uh you you have gold directed behaviors that begin to be called upon through past learning and uh and so forth for that allow you to then uh perform instrumental or willful behaviors that help you cope with the

00:52:32 situation not necessarily consciously but then at the same time you're beginning to become consciously aware of everything and then that will also impact as well so we can think of like three levels here and then once you're conscious of it then it's a whole another ball game where you know you're consciously planning things and you may say that that's a complete artifact as well there could be uh um a topology going on that's making predictions about what the next step is going to be and Consciousness is a total epiphenomena I don't think that's true but we certainly

00:53:03 don't understand what Consciousness is and and how it works one question are emotions good or bad they're both so how do we know whether we should yield to our emotions or not well first of all you can't I'm just asking you a simple question I mean you in terms of your reaction you can't stop that I mean first you're going to react act and then you may you know you may short circuit it but it starts uh and then that's will what will determine whether you continue to respond or not

00:53:34 uh and you may not even be able to stop it but if we develop emotions as part of this process of coping and observing Etc and rationalizing what happens when we reacted to threat and now in the anthropos scene threats have changed are our emotions changing different threads different emotions it depends on what you mean by emotions I mean it's you know it's it's all about defining what the terms are uh I think the you know I think David was in the middle of something when we got off track so maybe we should go back to that

00:54:06 well it relates to your question and and it's to introduce another uh term in the question of decision making and that is the the notion of Desire uh because it seems to me relevant that in making a decision the subject is not simply a engaging in IR rational calculation of advantage and disadvantage uh the subject also experiences something about a a fantasy

00:54:38 a wish an i an idea of what the consequence of success will be um as part of subjective Life One continuity one proximity that is very striking is that very close to the experience of Desire is the experience of threat say that again very close to the experience of Desire is the experience

00:55:09 of threat that's that mean it Define close well I'm I'm using the topological I'm using the topological idea that is that is whereas we might think that nothing could be more discontinuous or further apart uh as for example someone speaks about uh a wish that they have and they

00:55:40 begin to articulate the nature of that wish a wish for some outcome some Behavior some activity to take place as they articulate more and more about that wish including unexpected elaborations about that wish what often takes place is an experience of some kind of inhibition something stopping them they stop I can't go on I can't really say more about this to talk about what you want to talk about your desire freely is a very difficult thing to do something

00:56:12 takes place something related to what I think Joe is talking about as as a threat response to threat preconscious the desire is a response to threat no no in talking about desire in articulating desire we observe a response to threat in the form of a of a of some kind of an inhibition some kind of a stopping some kind of a difficulty right going on David are you saying anything more than if you want to

00:56:44 put $10,000 in graciella's fund and you think grael is going to give you $3,000 more by the end of the the year so you'll have 13,000 so your desire is to change your 10,000 into 13,000 then you have the idea what if graciella doesn't succeed then I lose my money is that what you mean by desire and threat no because that that I mean that that's a very rational you know what you're worried about

00:57:15 there now I'm talking about the more and it's a garden variety I think we all experience it you think uh I have a good chance of doubling my money in this investment but there's something about that that that bothers me there's something I you know what I'm not I I'm not sure I can actually uh bring myself to act on that knowledge uh it's an inhibition uh why do people get in their own way why do now what I would suggest

00:57:47 is this happens constantly this happens in daily life this isn't a rare event under extreme conditions afraid of what you want I think people are generally afraid of what they want now in post post-traumatic stress disorder isn't it doesn't it come up in some cases where you associate something that you want very much with something which is a tremendous threat to

00:58:18 you like what I mean what do you mean well let's look at the case of uh um domestic violence so you are in love with this man and one day he tried to kill you and then out of that you have this Association you love this person there is all these warmth and these wonderful feelings but then all of a sudden you relate that with the worst possible

00:58:50 experience which is that your life may be at stake in a horrible way so describing you're describing the person's subjective conscious experience but underneath that are going to be approach and avoidance tendencies that have been conditioned by those experiences so there may be some uh you know some very good times that created um positive relationships stimula associated with that person that are attractive and appealing but also the very negative things that are going to

00:59:20 be pulling you in the other direction so these are these are the kinds of things that are going to be triggering these implicit unconscious processes every time you encounter that person uh and you know which one wins probably the aversive is is uh is going to win in every situation because but Joe the what you were saying seems to me would make sense if uh the example wasn't graciella's example because graciella's

00:59:51 example is that your actual life is being threatened it's not that you say you know he's a nice guy cuz he buys me nice presents but whenever he comes home for dinner he starts yelling and screaming that's a when you are talking about an extreme example like she's talking about how would you justify remaining with somebody who actually is threatening your life and he's saying that would be natural because what you most desire is also

01:00:21 what you're most afraid of he not really saying that no I wouldn't put it that simply in in in the sense that it's in all cases all I'm saying is that there is an unexpected proximity in the sense that uh you were talking about it topologically there's an unexpected proximity between threat and desire unexpected by what we might think of as a an ordinary topology but

01:00:51 the the topology that a that a psychoanalyst comes to work with is is the expected proximity of threat and desire I can give you a research example that I think helps to address this question um one of my colleagues Regina Sullivan uh has studied rat pups and at a very early age while the pups are still uh nursing um pups what's pups pups baby pups baby pups baby rats nursing with the mother um a stimulus

01:01:22 that's associated with the mother but uh is also connected to to a painful experience in the pup uh the the uh the pup will treat that stimulus as a positive stimulus so it's as if you know the mother may be abusive but the pup is dependent on them on the mother so the connections formed are still in the positive approach uh vein but as soon as the the pup stops uh nursing um the those same stimula now become aversive

01:01:53 and the pup will avoid those under any circumstance now that okay that's fine but then in the adult you can bring back this infant uh attraction by stress so raising cortisol levels in the adult rat will bring back the infantile pattern of approaching the dangerous harmful stimulus so to the extent that PTSD is often something that um a person doesn't just develop

01:02:23 PTSD after one stress in life often it's something where one has been traumatized as a child uh and then that sensitizes the brain to to later stress uh you can imagine how this same kind of mechanism would kick in wow so essentially what he's saying is that masochism is [Laughter] cortisol well the the topology actually is uh is actually doing a lot of work for

01:02:55 us here because is telling us again values in some cases what you really care for but also in reality what things are close to W I mean it's very it's uh I mean I there is no question that it really depends on the topology we use depends on the the way we're wired but also our culture uh certain things in our culture are considered to be similar and that topology that proximity Is comp

01:03:26 completely um hard wire I mean there's no particular reason for it I was going to give examples but I don't want to create anything too uh difficult to comprehend but what you're saying is very interesting for that I mean I think was agreeing with what you said about desire and uh well so do you so what what I was taking out of that was that we can put a topology on

01:03:56 emotions that are measure two two emotions are close together if they both make you feel relatively good or if they both make you feel relatively bad and we sort of tend to think of um being happy is on the way to being ecstatic which is sort of closer than being in great fear or uh being terrible sad and I think

01:04:27 what you're saying is that of if you change your idea of what the topology is and you say we put emotions together we say that they're close if they occur at the same time or in close Pro you know if you see within a given individual these emotions occurring simultaneously then maybe that's when you say these should be close so that's a different topology that you can put on emotions saying that these are these are close

01:04:59 together because they occur often together as opposed to having that they're far apart because they have uh you know they seem far apart about what they make people feel Paul was the did you get a response to the question you had I think so I mean I understand a little bit more this notion of what you mean by topologically consistent and I mean I think the discussion here has really focused on

01:05:29 how emotions are topologically consistent how they that might align with the topology of fear and the topology of efficient decision-making I mean I'm not exactly sure how these two sets of ideas the one psychological about topology and the other economic basically about topology exactly align and I see Joe chafing constantly at the border between those two ideas but but what about um reward prediction eror which is something you study I mean that's a

01:06:01 discontinuity I'm sorry I didn't give you yeah no you don't want to go there I don't want to go there I'm don't not sure that's true but did you have a something that's being predicted and that prediction is not coming true and that's triggering yeah but we I mean I have to say I view that as a very continuous process because I'm thinking well I'm expecting to find a full glass of water and I find only half a glass of water so I'm surprised negatively by half I mean

01:06:31 these are you know little things that you learn from don't expect whatever an over water but I I don't I don't see this as discontinuous at all I mean those map and normal topologies those are just straight linear spaces I Ian I don't want to descend into mathematics here but U I think this is something really different well I have a question about the ology that maybe Linda can answer the the model that some psychoanalysts use to map the space where these

01:07:04 unexpected continuities occur is uh it can be talked about in a variety one of them is the cross cap the project the real projective plane yeah the self- intersecting plane yeah right um does does that make sense to you as a topological model related to the questions that we're talking about uh

01:07:38 here I guess for my my sense thinking about that kind of model is uh that what is special about it is is that it's an example of something that is not orientable so the simplest example of that is the mobus strip where you take a piece of paper like this and

01:08:10 then you want to glue the ends together and you glue it like this and the thing is that you can keep going around it it has only one side right I think what you're saying more about this question of proximity that you don't expect to find is that you have a situation where you're looking at this Global question of dealing with these emotions and trying to see how

01:08:40 they fit together and they're sitting it's more like a surface that comes around and meets itself it's not the question of orientability that is what characterizes crosscat but the idea that you have something that what we call in mathematics is is immersed rather than embedded that you have you have a surface that comes around it intersects itself it comes out and then it comes around it might intersect itself again in some other kind of special place so it's more this question of the fact that

01:09:11 you have self intersections and immers ability as opposed to embeddability in terms of the the mathematical technical terms for it yeah that is a great are those moments of intersection called singularities yes mhm yeah it's a very evocative term for a psychoanalyst yeah I mean you know if you the simplest kind of thing is you know if if you take a a curve that you draw on the plane that comes around and intersect itself on one

01:09:42 point well you can write down equations for surfaces where the surface lives in a bigger space because there are more variables but then they intersect uh in a whole line or and bigger and in even bigger pieces and sometimes it does it in a nice way and sometimes it does it in a very not very nice way and there are lots of theories to think about these various singularities and see how they come about what she's saying also is that sometimes the opposit

01:10:12 meat and that's what you're saying with these type of emotions I mean the extreme desire and the extreme fear or feeling of threat meet but the only thing I would say that somewhat differ from your position is that I find that this is occurs all the time I don't think it's a rare event I think in decision making all the time there are these uh singularities these conjunctions of opposites these unexpected I agree all right I what I'm

01:10:45 saying is that when looked at it from a conventional approach you like this and you dislike a threat okay they're separate and what you're saying is no don't expect them to be separate expect them to converge and in mathematics expect them to come together all the time and they do and I agree with that and that leads to a totally different types of type of mathematics and you can predict different things for example believe it or not you can predict some things that happen in Quantum

01:11:15 probability using this type of uh mathematics that you couldn't predict otherwise and and it may be that we should be using more of those because the quantum probability scheme that is also topological uh connects with the issue of Frameworks and I don't understand why since psychologists or understand that we think in Frameworks those two Fields have not been closer together did I say something wrong no I

01:11:48 don't yeah I think um I'd like to just go back to the uh the basic question of of fear versus anxiety because I I think most of the stuff you talked about in your examples would uh fall into the category of what scientists call anxiety more than fear um so the typical scientific definition is fear is a state that occurs when there's an immediately present threat so like the snake on the ground whereas anxiety is one where you're anticipating uh a threat Now by

01:12:22 that definition though really almost everything that we call fear is anxiety because it's usually not you know the snake itself but the what what you're what's you know there's nothing about the snake that's inherently dangerous it's the your worri that the snake is going to bite you so all of that is uh becomes anxiety um now one way to to look at these things is in terms of what's called predatory imminence um this is a theory that Michael fanso at UCLA has advanced and he has a scale of

01:12:54 uh different degrees of temporal and spatial proximity that determine how a rat is going to respond to a particular threat or any other organism so if the uh stimulus if the threat is like immediately in front of you uh then you have you will freeze if the threat's a little bit further away um you will freeze but sort of be engaging in uh what's called risk assessment kind of head bobbing and moving back and forth

01:13:25 with when you're Frozen you're just dead solid no movement at all but if the threat is further away you're kind of checking it out if the threat is very far away you might just run away because that's uh the best thing to do if if you have the opportunity to escape and if it's really far away and is not even visible then you know there's no response at all even though it may be potentially present so an animal that is um is hungry for example he's what hungry will have to overcome certain

01:13:56 concerns every time he goes out of the the nest and into the world there's a chance there's a probability that he's going to be eaten but uh he knows what's going on in his local area so he's going to take that chance to go find something to eat uh so there's no threat present but he has to be vigilant just in case but he's going to still perform the behaviors he needs to unless the threat is actually detected at some distance and depending on how close it is the U uh the the way it will respond will be different so it seems that maybe that's just too simpleminded in terms of

01:14:27 topology but it seems that there's a a topological relationship between what the animal is going to do and uh what it expects and so forth that is a very good example yeah okay I think we can go to questions yeah I think there is a couple of questions here they have to be questions they don't have to be statements and long comments brief questions please um let me I did have a a comment that was

01:14:58 going to turn into a question so let me rephrase it uh I think Joseph mentioned as Paul did later on but you were very explicit that one of the issues here is definition of terms so I went the question I have for Linda I think at first um in topological space especially mathematical top uh topology uh the notion of continuity versus a continuous versus disree transformation is very very precise so I think the whole idea of discontinuity here was used in a

01:15:30 context that Strays from a strip topological uh interpretation so I want to ask you that uh and I don't quite understand well in that um if one if the if if you're talking about for example the uh transforming the topology based on certain axioms into a second topology based on different axioms if that's a continuous transformation that's one thing if they're separate type topologies it's something else so right so I think

01:16:02 basically what she's defining is a separate okay good it it's not it's not that it's not that you're making a continuous transformation from one topology to another yeah no and then the since that's cleared up the question I have for you specifically would if you uh have looked into or think that looking into to um aelan Le groups would have any traction in this context uh and I bring I bring that up

01:16:34 because of its relationship to quantum mechanics and that lead groups have been shown to um be very useful in probabilistic uh interpretations of quantum events yeah so I actually grael can probably answer that better than I can because she has worked with mathematics of those models so she would better whether you really how how you use the a bilion yeah but they will kick me out of here if I start talking about but yes I mean if

01:17:07 you everything that we're saying is very very close to Quantum probability by that among other things you have different Frameworks in which you look at things now when you do have that and you transform one framework into another that is a group of Transformations that gives rise to either ailan or non ailan groups oh very good okay so then I'll talk to you later about M the relationship of minmax uh to that statement as well oh that I I don't

01:17:37 know it's like Linda said they're not connected okay I mean typically speaking what you do there is you transform if a basis of coordinates into another and you're not using minmax no but in terms of the topological representation of the two different uh State spaces that's what but not now because I'm my thanks hi I'd like to ask if you could Define embedded versus immersed and if there is a an analogy in both

01:18:09 psychoanalysis and in the work show that you do this question only in New York City okay I it's an amazing question okay okay well so it's um if I have a surface that's embedded it will intersect itself if I have if I have a curve I mean it's easier to think about a curve that comes back and Crosses itself if it cross but I can

01:18:41 think of it as a curve because it makes sense to follow it around right so when I follow it around like a shoelace and I go to tie it that's where it crosses itself if it fuses together if it doesn't come together if it if if when I follow it around it never touches itself it's embedded very simple okay so your necklace is embedded it doesn't come together actually but you know

01:19:12 I but is there my question analogy well in the in the sense that when you start thinking about emotions that are close together in terms of say the way they make you feel or and you start going through moving through emotions that are close together and then these are would somehow feel very far apart but in terms of their

01:19:44 occurrence within the space they come together again as in feeling good and then feeling feeling fearful and so youve made this transition through these various different emotions and you come together and all of a sudden there you are in the same place yeah I'll I'll give you one other example uh it has to do with the notion of transference in psychoanalysis transference transference yeah the notion of transference to put it very simply is that an event taking place can be

01:20:17 simultaneously meaningful in two points of time two points of time I.E a memory and an an encounter in the present can be at that moment experienced Sim as a simultaneous event so there is exactly the kind of um so you've gone from when it happened before through some period of time and now you experience it again and so it it is in the but it it feels like so you're in the same point from the point of

01:20:49 event but at a different point in time yeah and that is transference in cycl analysis you know defined topologically so from the neurobiological point of view that what you just described is the U you know when we scientifically we think of being able to attend or be conscious of a particular thing in our mind means that that information is in what's called working memory so maybe you first had one state one of these states in

01:21:21 working memory or the other but now they're both in working m so they're simultaneous uh but in terms of you know so-called emotions whether you can have two emotions at one time uh in terms of the biological underpinnings of emotion uh is um I don't think we we know the answer but you know if we think of um for example the what what these states do let's say you're in a a state that's been

01:21:51 triggered by the presence of a threat uh it begins to monopolize your brain because it it takes over U causes you know this is a survival situation so your brain is now in a state where everything has to be dedicated to survive the moment so that's why it's monopolizing so it would be hard for another state to take over at that point unless it had some greater priority so let's flip things around let's say You're really hungry so the the the uh nutrition energy balance system has

01:22:23 taken over your brain but um you um uh know that there's a predator right out there where you've got to go get your food so you're not going to go out you're going to stay hungry for a while on the other hand let's say you know the Predator's there and you're still hungry and you're really hungry you're on the point of starvation now so you have to risk encountering the Predator to get some food so these are uh can be thought of as different points of monopolis

01:22:55 that where the states are almost uh discontinuous and switching back and forth as needed on the momentary State okay that's interesting I a little bit frustrated by this idea of this this U model this topology which is is trying to be imposed on something and it doesn't fit or and well it seems to me that I've been I was a computer programmer most of my life and I

01:23:27 understand programs that I understand programs that uh uh you know possibly predict to like which where you're going to put your money U if you're uh evasive uh you want to avoid too much risk and something like that you could put it but it can't be just it isn't something simple it's something very very complex you would have a cases well case from from this this age to this age or this you would have write a comp a very

01:23:58 complicated program and and the complicated program would have to follow the analysis and the input from the people who uh were actually dealing with something real it's sort of like a uh science following observation and then uh people coming up with uh this happens this time and this time and this time and then the theories are uh evolve and uh when the after the

01:24:29 theories evolve something comes up that this that doesn't quite fit in so it's slightly modified you modifi the program slightly to fit it in and to me that's what science is about it is I I find it very frustrating to think of a topology uh that uh that's very vague and I don't know any practical use for it and and I don't see how it's going to work you if you have a programmer programming these decision tables interviewing every uh analysis uh and

01:25:04 you could I could set up a I believe I could set up certain questions that that for a a individual patient and every person would be different and they would have these different things that they would be afraid of and when they wouldn't then you they would become very predictable if you fit it into a program and then you could test it to see if if it worked and when it didn't work you would have to modify it and but I don't understand a a an abstract

01:25:35 philosophical uh topology imposed somewhere or or where it isn't either uh influenced by the underlying analysis and uh or experiments that would uh say prove that this analysis of theory was wrong you have to start with the observation observation of the rats or OBS observations of or much more complex observations of human beings by

01:26:08 analysts uh getting uh getting all this data and then you come up with after the fact with a formula that would work I can't see coming out starting with a formula and then imposing it from the outside first of all it's a fascinating comment fascinating from your experience uh to tell us that um but let's look at the rat okay so the question is you want to

01:26:39 predict what's going to happen to the rat or he wants to predict what's going to happen to the rat when he grows up so he's not doing that I think what he's doing well you want to predict what your what your computer same rats when they were grown up observe many of them see what happened to the ones who be who uh had this experience and the ones that didn't have that experience and then you then you do that after the fact what's your name Betty Betty what topolog is

01:27:12 doing is telling you what to look at what to look at yeah what's important okay and if you tell me that is a large philosophical theory that doesn't matter that's not the topology is telling you what what matters is is the average behavior of the mother or whether the mother at some point took a deep dive and did something that how could caused a big impact on the young brain what matters more what you do on an everyday

01:27:43 basis with a child or what you do what you did once and that's extremal so sorry in the same thing is about the computer programming yes you want to say you're going to feed data and then you're want to see if the data is within this neighborhood I know this is going to be the result but suppose that you say no what matters is what's the minimum of all the numbers you feed and that's going to determine whether it's going to go this way or it's going

01:28:14 to flip in your computer program so the question is what are are you testing for the correct thing is that yes and therefore that is very crucial it's not philosophical and that's what we're talking about by topology I by the way I take the opportunity to say that I brought 15 copies of the article the topology of fear if you want to read them they will be left on the table I did not read it before so I'm no no of course not but I mean they're sitting there so in some

01:28:44 sense it's really very fundamental because that's what science is looking for patterns but I think psych psych it seems to be that psych psychologists are doing that they are coming up with tests they're coming up with tests that seems to me that that's anyway I don't I'm not going to I shouldn't thank you br but thank you thank you and I will read your article thank you why hasn't anybody mentioned uncertainty which seems to me uh the

01:29:17 fundamental condition of the human condition and which to link what the psych said with what you were saying you've got your financial decision that that needs to be made and at the same time somebody has a desire in both cases what's really an issue is the uncertainty of the outcome that comes with our normal day in and day out

01:29:48 living and decision making we have to make so that what what what we're talking about and it really is the response to threat as well because what is the threat we're responding to we're responding to the threat of uncertainty because that's the way life is we don't know what's happening from one one second to the other psychoanalytically if somebody has a strong desire it seems

01:30:19 to me it's fairly natural to also have fear associated with it because it's uncertain we don't know that it will come out it's not a matter of the specific uh desire that we fear it's another aspect of it that we know the uncertainty that we may encounter in reaching uh in having that desire satisfied but again what my basic point

01:30:50 is what was missing in this whole discussion was nobody talking about uncertainty and the fact that in each and every case what you're really looking at is we're here now and we're either perceiving threat perceiving concern that's the future and that's where the uncertainty comes in I let people answer it but we're going to have a round table on uncertainty later in the year okay actually everything we

01:31:22 said was about uncertainty everything from the from the word go when we started saying well you don't know what's going to happen with the market conditions are you going to invest to get the best possible expected return that's uncertainty are you going to be afraid or and focused on the market crash another form of uncertainty the question is how do you define uncertainty and what do you focus on are you focusing on the average uncertainty of the weather or are you focus on the maximum and the minimum well you see but but this is where I I get my question

01:31:54 regarding the the mathematical explanation and the the topography and again a couple of times you alluded to Quantum Mechanics okay and we know that quantum mechanics the uncertainty principle and the idea of what you're trying to do is predict probabilities mathematically but when we're talking about I think the topic of human uncertainty we're talking again to go back to the subjective the the individual trying to make their own decision and all I all I can say at that

01:32:27 point I mean it is so much more complicated I think than what we've said but you still got to look at it from the standpoint of the individual and again each one of us has to face our future and we do it every minute of Our Lives it's too bad Paul is not here because that's exactly what he works on the the way the brain is a basian statistical probability generator and how our decisions are based on these probability estimates and incidentally what I wanted to talk with him about is the basan decisions or

01:33:00 the basan updating which is that you have this belief and then you get a new piece of information and you update your belief that's what basan uh Theory does well how do you update your belief mathematically you update it so that the new updated distribution that you adopt uh minimizes errors given what you now know and the minimization of error depends on the topology do you want to minimize

01:33:32 error on the average or do you want to minimize the extremal errors it makes a completely drastic difference to your basan optimization whether you want to minimize the worst possible error or the average error so therefore you even then the the issue of the topology that you use makes a big difference and you're ises about the animals making decisions like that the Frozen animal making a decision uh getting more information as

01:34:03 you said that's making a basian decision is sitting there Frozen and scoping up what is that basan updating right well is it scoping up for the average of What the Predator is going to do or for the worst possible thing that's going to happen and is it going to react differently and the answer is very differently and that's what the your fear T gure sorry so let me give a simple example take physics you drop a ball from a tall building and you can predict by an

01:34:35 equation how long it will take to hit the ground however if at the same time you happen to have an earthquake which is a rare event you get a different outcome the point of this is trying to try explain a bit more because I think people are not used to that it's a very important example so so so the point I'm trying to make is there are two complex systems involved here there's the reality and then there's the brain and they both have this phenomena that they are capable out the butterfly effect of having a

01:35:06 discontinuity that is a very small new piece of basian input will cause a drastic change in your updating of your information so the question I have in the studies in the trying to the notable effort and Noble effort everybody's trying to do to try to put this on a scientific basis there's some of the fundamental limitations that come with it being a complex system and even more fundamental when you have two interacting complex systems that is the brain and the reality is trying to deal with so my

01:35:37 question to to the panel is how does one simultaneously recognize that there's no fixed Point here that both the decision making apparatus that is perceiving the reality has this capacity for a butterfly effect that is to have a discontinuity and suddenly change its reaction instantaneously for very incrementally small new piece of information and the reality itself that it's trying to make a decision about has that same basic

01:36:07 property how do how does one fix it how does one know how when disentangle where that extra little input came from it was in your case because the person had an experience in real life that was a butterfly effect it traumatized them and it therefore made a fundamental change in how they're going to subsequently react or was it something that the reality was essentially continuous but something else as you talk about in the background suddenly made a fairly uh normal thing cause a discontinuity in

01:36:38 their brain how does one disentangle those two things you don't they're coupled you know your question is related to the one before and I think it's about the limits of knowledge and factoring the limits of knowledge into your expectations and your schemas uh of analysis your theory of rationality even uh uh to have built into it uh that idea of of U uh you know an uncertainty Factor an accidental Factor

01:37:09 unpredictable Factor uh it's a change in the position of knowing I right so just want to comment on this it seems to me that the thing that I always think about in this context is that and I think that's what uh uh R's Theory I think is useful in is that if we walk around with an expectation of a continuous reality with a machine that is inherently discontinuous in the way it functions that will lead to some very incorrect

01:37:40 analysis of what is going on how the system is reacting and the way to compensate for that at some level is what I call what is called commonly metacognition that is to acknowledge in a feedback loop to yourself that you are dealing with a series of discontinuities and have some mechanism both scientifically and personally in order process and make your decisions that ask yourself that question are is this new piece of information that is causing this

01:38:11 discontinuity something that I should reanalyze and make a fundamental change or not and therefore be able to somehow compensate for the fact that you know you have two interacting circumstances that can expose you to these very rare moments that could cause a very significant change in your reality that's not particularly warranted but there are animals that have been around since the uh you know earliest times of life on Earth that are so primitive they can't possibly have metacognition yet they've adapted to these discontinuities pretty well well I

01:38:43 don't think they have 99.9% of the species are not bacteria for example yeah because they produce so quickly and so their lifetime so they've adapted to that okay that's not that's not a mechanism available to us and you are 90% bacterial DNA so don't stand there and talk against it okay next question um so I'm a trauma psychiatrist that's how I make my living and I did read this paper years ago and have thought about it for many years

01:39:14 because I know gr have talk about this paper and I I sort of the comment I do want to make a comment FB question the comment is I think that this is a groundbreaking paper and the reason I think this is a Bing paper is because it very in some ways it has a very similar place in the history of this kind of science to the famous paper by by Becker about rational addiction and what the paper by Becker with rational addiction did was to move the boundary of what is rational to show that I could use purely axiomatic rational modeling to explain

01:39:44 addiction which broadened the concept of what rationality was and shrunk the concept of what irrationally and emotionally driven things were he showed that you could actually mathematically and rationally predict even something as unusual as as addiction and I think graciella's paper takes that even a step further and expands our notion of what is rationality and what we mean by rationality is something to do with consistency something to do with comput computability something to do with predictability and those Notions of

01:40:15 rationality so I think it expands the very concept of what we think is rational and what we have to think is and and therefore there is actually less that we have to explain by this vague notion of emotional and irrational and I think it I really think it does an amazing job of that but I think if you want to explain the paper you have to sit down with a friend of yours who's a mathematician to read this paper trust me on that one thank you hi um I've got a quick question about let me raise this up about the proximity of fear and desire

01:40:45 so it's been suggested that because these emotions often times occur together that there might be some tight-knit relationship between them so they should be close our topological map of these emotions but your that's your example um of the Rat who's hungry for something that's in the same area as a threat makes me think that the closeness the the frequent reoccurrence of these emotions in tandem might say more about the events than the actual proximity of those emotions every event has multiple

01:41:16 components some of which are good and some of which are bad and it has multiple potential components some of which are good and some of which are bad so you have different reward circuitry and different fear circuitry and they might be activated at the same time for the same event simply because there are different components to these events if my fiance invites me to go to dinner with her parents I'm afraid to act like an idiot and I'm also excited so I just don't think that should inform our topology of these emotions it might be the case that different events can

01:41:47 excite both of these emotions and I was wondering you agree disagree well you in order to answer that uh we would have to get into the notion of desire and and what I mean by that or what is meant by that in psychoanalysis uh there is a logical connection between fear and desire not a contingent connection so what is it uh it has this will take a lot longer than than we can get into but it has to do with

01:42:19 um the uh how can I do it quickly it has to do with the experience of satisfaction uh of a wish and the complex symbolic meanings of that satisfaction uh there are fantasies that accompany the satisfaction of a wish and those fantasies involve ideas that are forbidden

01:42:50 why as I said it's going to take a long time to answer this question what what it touches on is the I just is is the notion of repression in a psychoanalytic sense the psychoanalytic notion of repression that something occurs that makes desire uh uh linked in some way to the Forbidden and it's the linking to the Forbidden that constitutes the threat I guess right constitutes the source of

01:43:20 the threat so it's not contingent Joe's example was about a contingent connection which can also exist it's also I mean you anything that you desire is potentially threatening for its loss so I mean threat comes with almost everything in life you know and that's the the most fundamental thing of staying alive is warding off the threats and the opportunity to acquire something useful uh will usually cost you something there'll be some threats involved that you have to overcome to

01:43:51 get it but also then you have to face the uh the threats that come from maintaining hanging on to it whether it's love or anything else I I would agree that it's about the the centrality of loss I'm wondering if you could consider oh I'm sorry just to just to comment on your example of the fiance there it's not a given that you should be afraid because you're going to meet your fiance's parents it is yeah

01:44:23 then you need to see him well I guess I'm wondering if you could consider even the psychoanalytic desire for Mastery just to simplify the discussion might you consider that a component of that same stimulus the event that you fear and the desire for Mastery of that fear couldn't that be considered a component and then you can avoid the difficulty of letting that influence your topological map that way

01:44:59 um so I guess what your question is is could there be a a more um sort of ukian or linear explanation of how it is that threat and desire link up I I guess ultimately I'm thinking it would be a mistake to conflate the events that trigger certain desires and those desires or emotions generally in the elv so ultimately we were just dealing with different systems and I guess I I kind of agreed with your point uh what what is the topical

01:45:30 topological map telling us I understand its utility and driving research questions but does it really tell us anything about the ACT is it does it have any predictive value yes and the point that's the point if he didn't forget it who cares okay thank you okay question thank you uh we will end here yeah