J. Eric Oliver with Sean Carroll
Show: Sean Carroll's Mindscape
Cleaned and reformatted from published transcript or auto-generated captions — punctuation added, filler removed, restructured for readability. Not verbatim. For exact quotes, refer to the original.
Sean Carroll
Eric Oliver, welcome to the Mindscape podcast.
J. Eric Oliver
Sean, it is such a pleasure to be here. I'm a huge fan of the podcast and have been waiting a long time for an opportunity to come on. So this is great.
Sean Carroll
The audience loves it when podcast guests are podcast listeners. But there's at least a little story to be told about how you in particular came to write this book. Tell the audience what the book is called and how it grew out of a class you've been teaching.
J. Eric Oliver
Sure. The book is called How to Know Yourself: The Art and Science of Discovering Who You Really Are. And it started from a course I've been teaching here at the University of Chicago for twenty-plus years. One of the great things about teaching here is that they basically let us teach whatever we want. I had this eclectic interest in psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, neuroscience and Buddhism. So I thought, what would it be like to put a class together around all these eclectic interests? My wife jokingly said I should call the class 'Stuff I'm Interested In'.
I put it together and it ended up being a real success. The students got a lot out of it, and I realised this was a class on how to know yourself. So I called it The Intelligible Self, and I taught it for decades. During COVID, I met a lot of people who said, 'I wish I could take that class. Do you have a book to recommend?' The problem is I had hundreds. So I thought, maybe here was an opportunity to put these disparate strains of science and wisdom in conversation with each other and integrate them into a way of understanding how we apprehend this experience of being that we're all going through.
Sean Carroll
That makes perfect sense. You probably would not have got a lot of students if you'd just called the course 'Stuff I'm Interested In'. But in particular for our audience, you're a professor in a political science department, and probably not a lot of your political science colleagues are teaching courses about the self.
J. Eric Oliver
No, and my students always ask me, 'Why is this a political science class?' And I say, 'Well, because I'm in the political science department.' But it does draw on my past research. In my day job as a political scientist, I do research on public opinion and political psychology. My last book examined the way politics gets organised by human intuitions. When we look at modern American politics, we have people on the rationalist side of things and people on what I'd call the intuitionist side, and that actually explains a lot of the growth of populism and conspiracy theories. So within political science, which is a big epistemological tent, there's an opportunity to explore a lot about psychology and philosophy. In some ways it's not entirely inconsistent with our discipline, even if it goes into a much more personal and introspective version here.
Sean Carroll
As we both know, disciplines do professionalise after a while, and certain questions are deemed askable and others not. But in principle political science should certainly involve individual people's notions of themselves.
J. Eric Oliver
Right. I was thinking about you, because aren't you now a professor of natural philosophy? I thought, on those lines, maybe I should be a professor of moral philosophy, going back in time, reclaiming that tradition.
Sean Carroll
It's good to have the seniority to get away with these kinds of things. You young people out there looking for an academic career, don't try this at home. It's a little dangerous.
Sean Carroll
So let's dig into the substance. You're begging the question a little bit, but is there a thing called the self? Is that a useful notion when we talk about ourselves as human beings?
J. Eric Oliver
I think that's one of our biggest misconceptions. When we think of ourselves, we typically think of ourselves as things, and there's a good reason for that, because things are easy to discern and apprehend. They're stable, fixed, solid. But when we look at ourselves, there's nothing singular, stable or solid about us. One of the claims I make in the book is that to really understand yourself, you have to get to the more elusive idea that you're a process, or more importantly a set of processes, that elaborate up from some deeper inner cores. It's like a set of Russian nesting dolls. And at the deepest level, we are energy systems at our very core. This is where physics can actually tell us quite a bit about ourselves. So I start the book talking about physics and what it can tell us about both energy and life.
Sean Carroll
This does seem to involve a presumption of something like naturalism. You're not thinking of the self as the expression of some eternal soul.
J. Eric Oliver
Yeah. That's the interesting thing we always have to confront. Our intuitions want to tell us, at least mine does, that I am the same person I've always been since childhood. Even though I know I'm different, I've had different experiences, there seems to be a kind of core element to me. In the Western tradition, and actually in the Eastern tradition, this goes way back: it's the notion of dualism. There's the body, which is corporeal, temporal, farting and burping and doing all these terrible things. And then there's the mind or the soul, which is pristine and eternal and seems to go on forever. I think that reflects how we often think of ourselves. But of course that is an illusion, and one of the biggest challenges for knowing ourselves is getting past this illusion of dualism.
Sean Carroll
Do you know Derek Parfit's teletransporter experiment?
J. Eric Oliver
I don't know that experiment. I know Derek Parfit and his work, but not that one.
Sean Carroll
I recently had a conversation with Adam Elga, a philosopher at Princeton who works on: what if there are multiple copies of us in the universe, and how do we reason about who we are? Parfit was interested in personal identity. He said, what if you jump into a transporter machine like in Star Trek, but by mistake it makes two copies of you rather than one? Which one are you? He comes to a similar conclusion, that there's no answer. There's a process going on. There was one person and now there are two, and they both have just as much claim to being the original.
J. Eric Oliver
Right. Another way of thinking about this is the ship of Theseus paradox: there's no part of us at a molecular or cellular level that is constant. It's always getting replenished and replaced. So how can you say you're the same person you've been all along? In some ways you can say you're not, but in other ways you are, because there's a continual process going on, a continual process of life generation sustained within the structure of you. If anything has a claim to be you, it's this life force that's animating you and continuing to animate you.
Sean Carroll
It's obviously very consonant with the ways I think about entropy and processes, so I'm going to be a big fan. It does raise the question that maybe we have life events that change who we are dramatically, and then the concept of a continual self doesn't fit as well.
J. Eric Oliver
I think the answer to that is yes and no. At one level, there is a continual life force contained within our DNA and the processes it codes for and sustains, and that's particular to us. But in some ways that's a myopic view, because you could trace us back in time and say every living thing is just cousins in the same underlying life force that goes all the way back to our last universal common ancestor, what biologists call Luca. Everything that has been alive on Earth since then is a descendant of Luca, and we all share a certain number of genes. We could think of ourselves as just different elaborations of the same underlying life force that started with Luca 3.7 billion years ago. In that sense we are part of this continual force, and we're not necessarily that distinctive. If a leaf on a tree thinks it's very distinctive from all the other leaves, you get that idea.
At the same time, if we go up in the elaborations of our life processes, there are elements to us I'd call our linguistic self and, more importantly, our egoistic self. These are social and cultural constructions that shape the ways we interact with reality. They're really important and distinct, and they do reflect our individual life history. But that's a higher level of elaboration of our self processes. So the answer is both yes and no.
Sean Carroll
But the idea of a linguistic self and an egoistic self means there's more than one notion of the self.
J. Eric Oliver
Yes. And that's a common misconception. When we go back and think of the self as singular, there's nothing singular about us. Even at a biological level, your cells carry around mitochondria that have different DNA from the DNA that programs for you. The biologist Lynn Margulis championed the theory in the 1960s that this was the result of an early symbiotic relationship that developed between a eukaryote ancestor and an ancient bacterium; rather than destroy it, the two work in concert. So at the cellular level, we are an amalgamation of two different domains of life, not even just species. Throw in our microbiome and there's more stew and complexity.
As a linguistic species, we're totally contingent on language for our survival, so that links us to a whole cultural legacy. And as a social species, we depend on other people. We are a fundamentally social being, and these processes are highly socially determined. So we should all be using they/them pronouns, really. At the end of the day, there's no real 'I' there.
Sean Carroll
This is a very common thing that happens in science, or more broadly: we have a primitive folk notion that makes sense to us, is almost inescapable, and then we think about it hard, philosophers do this too, and you realise it's much more complicated than you thought. And some people are going to be resistant to being told this story.
J. Eric Oliver
Exactly. This is part of the challenge of self-knowledge. We have habitual intuitions and ways of thinking about ourselves, and we get very attached to them. Our psychology holds on to them because we really like certainty and predictability. Our brains are these prediction machines. At some level we think these habits are necessary for our survival, so we hold on to our notions of ourselves and our emotional and mental habits because we think that's what we need to get by. That often impedes us from addressing the real imbalances in our self processes, and from growing as people. So we often live in a less than optimal state.
Sean Carroll
And the fact that this concept is more subtle and complicated than you might naively have thought doesn't mean it's useless. It is true that I think of myself as having continuity with my past self and my future self, and I almost can't imagine thinking differently. I make decisions now for the benefit of my future self. What else could I do?
J. Eric Oliver
Exactly. And part of the hard thing is that what it means to transcend that is to let go of conceptions that are hardwired into us, and in some ways to let go even of language. To move to a level of consciousness that involves more direct sensory perception, not always filtered or distorted through the linguistic prism by which our conscious cognition typically operates.
Sean Carroll
I'll note parenthetically that there are some people out there who refuse to accept the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics because it messes with their notion of personal identity over time.
J. Eric Oliver
Sure. It's funny, because one of my favourite interpretations of dreams, and I know this is totally off base, is that dreams are how you link up with your different selves in all these alternative universes. I don't think that's the case, but it's still fun.
Sean Carroll
It would be fun. But the process view of the self, rather than a fixed essence, doesn't have any problems, I don't think, with splitting, whether it's through many worlds, transporter machines, or having a copy of ourselves uploaded onto a computer. We can evolve from a single process to multiple processes, and they're all still part of the original self.
J. Eric Oliver
Yeah, it's getting over the notion of preciousness about yourself that we hold onto.
Sean Carroll
Along those lines about thinking about my future self: Laurie Paul, a former Mindscape guest, a philosopher at Yale, has this notion of transformative experience. The example she always uses is becoming a vampire, but really it's code for having children.
J. Eric Oliver
Or giving birth to vampires, maybe.
Sean Carroll
The idea is you're going to do something that will fundamentally change who you are, so much so that your current views of what would make you happy are different from the future you's views. How should you act rationally when the thing you're about to do makes you unhappy now, but once you do it, you're happy with it?
J. Eric Oliver
There's an interesting debate right now in controlled experiments using psychedelics that's very similar. How can we get informed consent from research subjects about an experience that's going to be so transformative, something they've never experienced? If you've never taken LSD, it's such a distinct and disruptive experience, so hard to describe with ordinary language, how can you ever get informed consent about what you're about to do?
There's an analogy for this writ large. If we go back to the wisdom traditions, the big struggle of our contemplative traditions is about this very subject: how do we unlearn these habits of mind when every fibre of our psychology is desperately clinging to them? I think this is really the heart of Buddhism in that regard. It's a big task, a big challenge. I know my mind doesn't want to be unlearned. I'm very attached to this mind.
Sean Carroll
This is a very open-ended question. There are things we learn by thinking carefully about the science, philosophy and psychology, but then there's the operationalising of those lessons. So okay, I'm a process, not an essence. So what? How does that affect how I go through my life?
J. Eric Oliver
One of the ways I describe it is that I spend a lot of time with a lot of unproductive thoughts. I'm in my head all the time; I'm a professor, an academic. I'll be going through the day obsessing about a lecture I'm going to give, or worrying about my children's future, or any number of things. And I stop and say, 'Okay, is this thought really helping anything?' I'd say about 90 per cent of my thoughts aren't really helping me. They're just my mind practising, or processing, or obsessing.
When you begin to understand yourself as a process, it gives you a little space to step back and appreciate that not only are my thoughts not as real, or as important, as I assume, but I can begin to recognise that this is my brain as a prediction machine running through old routines. For me, the big promise of self-exploration, and of books like mine, is that they give us an expanded vocabulary of our lived experience. With that greater vocabulary, we can begin to take different perspectives on situations that normally keep us trapped or limited.
Sean Carroll
I like that idea of running through the old routines. Some of the research on psychedelics, and here at Johns Hopkins we have the largest psychedelics lab in the United States, holds out the promise that it will help people escape from addiction or PTSD, because it bumps us loose from whatever ruts we keep running around in.
J. Eric Oliver
Yeah. A good way to think about this is what neuroscientists call the connectome. The best working theory on how the brain operates is that it's a series of neural networks, and we have different dedicated networks. We have a salience network that makes us sensitive to loud, unexpected stimuli. We have an attention network that helps us focus. We have a visual network in the back of the brain, and so on. These networks are often learned early on. One of the things that's beautiful about being human is that we're incredibly plastic, and this plasticity is heightened when we're infants, in the first years of life, when these neural networks coalesce. That's great: it helps us move efficiently, learn patterns in the world.
But then the problem is that those early childhood experiences leave an oversized imprint on our neural architecture. As adults we end up carrying around a lot of outdated, archaic or dysfunctional neural routines depending on our early experiences. That's what we need to begin to unlearn if we want to live in a more optimal, healthy way.
Sean Carroll
We've been going to these slightly science-fiction things, many worlds and teletransporters, but everything you've been saying reminds us that even right here, right now, whatever the self is, it's not very unified. There are different parts of us inside, kind of arguing with each other.
J. Eric Oliver
Exactly. Another way of describing it: if you're a process, you're something like a river or a fire. And how do you describe a river or a fire? It sounds like a Zen koan, but there's a truth to it. A lot of it is learning to let go of a certain need for everything to be concretised and predictable, and to be more comfortable with ambiguity, with uncertainty, with this indeterminate flow of the life force.
Sean Carroll
You mentioned that all sorts of traditions weigh in on this. I have an impression, an entirely uneducated one, so tell me if I'm wrong, that Western philosophy from Aristotle through Descartes has been especially insistent on the mind-body distinction, and a little reluctant to think of the self as plastic, changing, disunified. Is that true? Are other traditions more comfortable with it?
J. Eric Oliver
The Western tradition definitely is that way. The ancient Greeks were, it got incorporated into early Christian theology, and Descartes is the champion of dualism. But in the East you see it too. In the early Vedic traditions, the Brahmins had a similar notion of the Atman, sort of the soul, and then the body, which is temporal. This actually explains one of the big schisms between Hinduism and Buddhism, the debate over the Atman, which the Hindus said we had. The Buddhists had the idea of Anatman, no-self or non-self. That's why you often hear Buddhists say there's no such thing as the self. What they're really saying is that there's no Atman. What the Hindus believe is that we all have this Atman, and it thinks of itself as distinct from Brahman, this great mystical source of energy in the universe, and part of their spiritual practice is to reunify Atman with Brahman.
Sean Carroll
You might have given me an insight into Buddhism, which I know very little about. When the Buddhists talk about no-self, they're moving within a tradition that has connotations attached to the word 'self' that I, as a Westerner, don't recognise.
J. Eric Oliver
Right. This is one of our challenges even with the concept of self. I write about this in the book. When I was in high school, my English teacher wrote 'Know Thyself' on the blackboard and said these two words crystallise the distilled wisdom of the ancient Greeks: if you wanted to live a meaningful life, you had to know yourself. What she didn't tell me is that the Greeks didn't really have a word that meant 'self' in the way we do. They didn't mean this modern, introspective, individualised thing. When they said 'know thyself', what they really meant was 'know thy place'. It was another way of saying: you are in a very tightly bound traditional cultural context.
If you want to survive, adhere to that context. You know your role in the tribe, you don't question your purpose or your place, you don't ask what love is, you just go along, and the tribe will protect you and keep you in place. Those customs evolved relative to the local ecology. Most of our ancestors lived in very parochial circumstances, and the cultures evolved that way. It's only with the Enlightenment, the rise of industrialisation, liberalism and mass individualism that we come to know the self in this individualised way. And the same holds when we encounter philosophical or contemplative traditions from the East: we often interpret them through this modern lens, when in fact they have their own traditions.
Sean Carroll
So you're telling me that as a post-Enlightenment individual, when I hear the phrase 'know thyself', I'm hearing almost the opposite of what the ancient Greeks actually meant by it.
J. Eric Oliver
Yes, exactly.
Sean Carroll
Okay, that's good to know. But I want to keep pulling at the threads of how useful this concept of a self is. You mentioned thinking about your own thoughts. How can we conceptualise that? Who's doing the thinking about your own thoughts? Aren't you your thoughts?
J. Eric Oliver
Well, to answer that, maybe I can step back a little. I want to engage you as a physicist, because really the self starts with us as energy systems. Like everything else in the universe, we are an energy system at our very deepest core. But we're something distinct, in so far as I don't think we know of any other energy systems doing what we're doing, which is pushing back against entropy. This was Erwin Schrödinger's great idea about what life is: an energy system that draws in free energy to push back against the greater entropic tide of the universe. We'll all eventually succumb to it too, but at least we're like a little eddy in this greater entropic stream.
Living things do this through what I'd call a life force. That sounds mystical, but what I really mean is the processes of food, sex and death: taking in free energy through food, replicating with an opportunity for evolutionary development through sex, and resisting destruction. I say death because it's more fun to say than survival. That's what builds up into a life force. Spiritual traditions try to interpret this in their own way; they call it prana or chi. But we can think about it from physics: this is a particular way energy gets configured on our planet. The question I'd have for you is, is it even worth considering life as a force in the same way we think of other forces? I'd be curious whether that has any validity in your mind.
Sean Carroll
When you ask whether life should be considered a force, my immediate reaction is: no, don't do that. Forces are things like electricity and gravity. But of course that's not quite true. There are emergent higher-level macroscopic forces. There's famously something called an entropic force. If you have a system that has a favourite size to be, because it's trying to maximise its entropy, then if you try to squeeze it smaller or pull it larger, it will resist. It will pull back, because it's trying to maximise its entropy. So in a very generalised sense, we think of living creatures as physical manifestations of certain complex things going on in a world where entropy is increasing. Is it useful to think of them as exerting a particularly life-y kind of force? Maybe. 'Force' is probably not the word, but I bet the spirit of the question has an answer that is yes.
J. Eric Oliver
There's an interesting corollary I'd be curious to hear you reflect on. When I was young, I thought, if I could just get a handle on the self, I'd have the keys to the universe. Maybe I could understand this through some deeper physics theories, or some ancient Vedic tomes. You see a lot of self-proclaimed gurus out there, and it's always a dude, who claim to have this privileged knowledge that you too can access for the low price of $49.99 a month. The problem is, I don't think our brains are actually designed to fully apprehend energy. When I think about energy, we have placeholder concepts; ancient traditions used spirit or chi or prana, and physics gives us elaborate concepts and formulas like E equals MC squared. But when you really start thinking about energy, it quickly moves out of my normal intuitive conceptions. I begin to wonder whether physics is something like maths, something we've discovered, or something we invent.
Sean Carroll
This is a classic chestnut in the philosophy of science: do we discover or invent the laws of physics? One quick thing, and I'm sure you know this: you have to be careful when you say our brains are designed to do something. But you can say they're optimised to do certain things by natural selection, and understanding physics is absolutely not one of the things our brains are optimised to do. They're optimised to understand a certain kind of folk physics, the manifest image: apples fall from trees, they don't fly upward when you release them.
But formalising that in abstract thought is fascinating to me, because on the one hand it's one of the things that makes us uniquely human, and on the other hand we're not very good at it, which is why we have to train ourselves to become better. So it's not surprising to me at all that when you formalise an idea like energy, force or matter, you end up with something not comfortably equivalent to what you always thought it was. It's something a little new and different, and you have to expend some effort to wrap your brain around it.
J. Eric Oliver
Thanks for the correction, too. It's funny, because I've written about this and I do it all the time, and it shows our intuitions. It's very hard to understand evolution at some level, so intuitively, even if we know evolution and champion it, we fall back into the old rhetoric of design.
Sean Carroll
I totally knew what you meant, by the way.
J. Eric Oliver
This speaks to why it's so challenging to know ourselves. If at our core we're energy systems, and energy is ineffable to our ordinary minds, then knowing ourselves is always going to be, well, is there an essence I can objectively know, or is knowing myself always going to be something of a subjective experience? It's analogous to whether maths is something we discover or invent. And it's both.
Sean Carroll
My colleague Jenann Ismael at Johns Hopkins, a philosopher, has written a book called The Situated Self and another called How Physics Makes Us Free. Her theme, over and over, is that we are little subsets of the universe, and the interactions between yourself and the universe get in the way of full understanding. You can't actually predict what will happen next in a world where you're the one making the prediction, but the world is out there too. So the overly simplified point of view, which neither of us nor any grown-up really believes, that ourselves are dots with an essence that just float through time, is born and then dies, is way oversimplified. When we really think about who we are in the world, it necessarily becomes more complicated.
J. Eric Oliver
Right. The best we can say, at least what I concluded from writing the book, is that what is me, this process, is a process negotiating between this life force, and me as this particular incarnation of the life force, and reality. Everything I know, from my cellular metabolism to my sensory apparatus, my brain structure, my use of language, the laws I follow, the mores I try to observe, my own egoistic ideas of identity and personhood, all of these are part of these processes. We are very complicated beings. That's why it's so hard to know these processes: they exist in all these elaborations, and most of them go on in ways not apparent to our ordinary consciousness, under the hood. Without a microscope I wouldn't know I had cells. Same with my neural architecture and my psychology. All this stuff, so important for defining the experience of being I'm having right now, and I'm mostly unaware of it.
Sean Carroll
So we need the psychological equivalent of the microscope to reveal some of these things. I do wonder about things like psychedelics or meditation. Are we really learning something about ourselves by doing that? Is it crucial? Should everyone do it? I tried meditating once, it didn't really work for me, but I'm in favour of other people doing it.
J. Eric Oliver
As you should be. If everyone else could meditate, the world would be great. I've actually had a pretty long experience with meditation and gone on a lot of these ten-day silent retreats. When I first started, I thought I wanted to meditate in order to be a better person. Then I realised that assumes I'm a flawed or bad person to begin with, and there was nothing in the meditation stopping me from being a certain kind of person. The genius of contemplative practices in general is that they help us unlearn the mental habits we have. If you sit in a contemplative state, focusing on your breath or a mantra, and you're not reacting to any momentary stimulus, not saying 'my knee hurts, I'm going to react to it', but instead observing it with equanimous detachment, you begin to unlearn the mental habits that calcify in our brains.
The problem is that this happens unconsciously, so we can't really measure it directly. We can sort of measure our progress: 'Okay, I feel more contented, more at ease, I'm not so buffeted by my emotional storms.' You see this with people who have advanced meditation practices. They're always so present and so quiet. Going back to your point, if only everyone else meditated, we'd be surrounded by all these very quiet, attentive, lovely people. Science does give us a few clues about what might be going on, and I could go into that if you want.
Sean Carroll
I do want you to go into that, but first, for the audience and for myself, what is it like to be in a ten-day meditation retreat? Is it very explicitly instructed on how to spend your ten days, or are you just left alone?
J. Eric Oliver
Before my first retreat I was terrified, because I'd tried to meditate, and I would sit down and after ten minutes get up in an agitated state. I thought, how am I going to do this for ten straight days in silence? But I practise a form of meditation called Vipassanā, which comes out of the Theravāda tradition in Southeast Asia. There are a number of centres here in the United States, and they're remarkable cultural institutions, because they give you a lot of instruction and support. It's really a place to go and learn how to meditate, and sit with all your business, for ten days in a safe, supported environment.
The way it typically works is you spend the first three days doing what's called Anapana meditation, just focusing on your breath. What you're doing is getting the constant chatter of your mind to quiet down. Once you get to that state, you move to Vipassanā meditation, focusing on the body as the point of concentration, scanning your body from head to toe, back and forth. That reveals some really interesting stuff, because as your mind gets quiet in this desensitised environment, your inner sensitivity expands. I remember thinking, 'Oh my god, I can trace down my oesophagus to my stomach, have some sense of my intestines.' And more interestingly, a subtle effervescence becomes manifest. You know that feeling you get when you have goosebumps, that tingly feeling? You're always experiencing that; it's just your nervous system, but usually too subtle to meet our ordinary consciousness. When I sit down on a retreat, it's suddenly like I get plugged in, and I become this body electric. It's a wonderful and remarkable experience of being.
The challenge is that when I'm feeling great, there's this radiant, ecstatic energy flow. But when I'm dealing with my past habits and challenges of mind, you get exposed to very intense discomfort. They have a word for it, sankaras, these psychosomatic responses. For me, I had this feeling of being stabbed in the chest with a spear. I've been working on dealing with that for a long time. So meditation is really hard work. I have a joke I tell my students: why are Buddhist monks always smiling in photographs? Because they're so happy not to be meditating.
Sean Carroll
Are you at least allowed to check your email at the end of the day at one of these retreats?
J. Eric Oliver
No, and it's not done to restrict you, it's done to help you. When you're in that kind of sensitivity, if you saw an email from your mum saying 'When are you going to be home?', it would be like dropping a huge stone in a still pond.
Sean Carroll
I figured. I just had to ask.
Sean Carroll
Going back to our flow through time and entropy increasing, I wanted to ask a vague question about the relation of time and the self. Right now I have memories of the past, they may or may not be accurate, and I have expectations or imaginations of the future. I feel that moving from the past to the future is absolutely crucial to being a self. Is this just my idiosyncratic idea, or is there some purchase there?
J. Eric Oliver
Once again, I think the answer is yes and no. It's going to be a theme here. At one level, your animal brain is a prediction machine. We animals evolved sense organs and brains as a way of mapping the universe around us and predicting what's coming next. It made us much more efficient at going out and eating other living things. When your brain becomes a prediction machine, taking in information and anticipating what's next, you are now living in time.
But I don't think most animals have a time horizon that extends beyond a few seconds. They have accumulated experiences and learned behaviours, which you could say is the residue of their past shaping them, so maybe that pulls them back in time somewhat. But most animals' conscious experience projects maybe ninety seconds forward. You can think about their emotions: if they're triggered for a particular emotion and the trigger isn't sustained, that emotion lasts, psychologists estimate, a couple of minutes, and then they go back to their homeostatic set point. We, however, are a linguistic species. What does language do? It allows us to imagine the future or ruminate on the past, because we can now hold abstract concepts in our heads.
Sean Carroll
Let me interrupt. That capacity to ruminate on the past and imagine the future is clearly critical, I agree, but you're giving credit to language for it.
J. Eric Oliver
I think so. My wife and I were talking about this last night: does our dog think about us when we're not home? I don't think our dog has a vision of me in his head saying 'Oh, where is he?' I don't think he's doing that.
Sean Carroll
That's an excellent question. I don't know how to test that one.
J. Eric Oliver
Maybe some animal biologists would figure out a test. But the problem is that when we do these tests with animals, we're always doing them through a human-based frame. Take a good example: do animals have the capacity for self-reflection? There's a famous experiment by Gordon Gallup in the 1960s. He wanted to know if animals had a sense of themselves the way we do, so he did the mirror test, or red-dye test. They'd put an animal or a young child in front of a mirror and see if it showed any signs of recognising itself. A lot of animals see the reflection, think it's another animal, and charge it or run away. Then they'd surreptitiously mark the animals' or children's faces with red dye and put them in front of the mirror again. Some species, elephants, chimpanzees, even dolphins, gesture toward the mark, which seems to show they have some self-recognition.
So does that mean animals understand themselves in time? Well, yes, but on the other hand, mirrors don't really exist in the wild. When we test that, we're interpreting through the lens of human culture. Whenever we study animals, we're inevitably doing it through our own cultural prisms, and because animals can't communicate abstract concepts, we can't interrogate them about what's going on in their heads.
Sean Carroll
But we human beings do have this capacity to remember the past, and even though our memories aren't very good, we condense them into the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. At one point in the book you ask, if we are defined by our stories, who is the author of these stories anyway? Are we writing them, or are they being imposed on us from outside?
J. Eric Oliver
Right. When I describe the self, I have various layers. There's a cellular self, the energy system in our cells. There's an animal self, our biological collection of multicellular processes. There's a linguistic self, which comes from our shared language and all its cultures and laws. And there's an egoistic self, all the psychological processes that help us negotiate with other people, because we're a very social species with these egos.
Here's a challenge. When it comes to the egoistic self, science can't tell us a lot. The way we know our egoistic selves isn't through a scientific paradigm; it's through stories, through the humanities, through language. Think about what therapy is: sitting on the couch interpreting your stories. It's narrative. This is where self-exploration shifts away from being a solely scientific endeavour and becomes a cultural one, of understanding our stories. I tell my students that this is why I think we should call our species homo narrans, the storytelling human, not necessarily homo sapiens, the wise human. We love stories, because that's how we organise information efficiently, and it binds us. A lot of my expectations about who I should be are caught up in these narratives: I'm a good student, I want to be a successful professor, I want a happy life. A lot of those narratives were not ones I came up with on my own. They were bequeathed to me by my culture and its myths, or by my family and their expectations about who I was supposed to be.
Sean Carroll
This is the thing I've been waiting to discuss, because I find it fascinating. You mentioned expectations. One of the ways humans are most different from animals is that we have expectations for ourselves, and we get nervous or embarrassed if we don't think we're living up to what the culture around us expects. Is this uniquely human? There's always a spectrum, but it seems this ability to say 'there's something I should be doing, and I'm not doing it' is one of the crucial hallmarks of human existence.
J. Eric Oliver
Ultimately this is Freud's big contribution: understanding that we are a species that is culturally determined, and one of the ways culture determines us is that we internalise our cultural norms in our own psychological processes. In Civilization and Its Discontents, he famously says we're not just feral beasts; we internalise morals and begin to police ourselves. He builds this whole edifice of psychology around an ego structure trying to negotiate with the world, and then a superego, an internalised police figure that keeps us from doing things that might cause our destruction, and punishes us when we have untoward thoughts or engage in bad behaviours, through neuroses, extended feelings of anxiety, guilt or resentment. No other species does that. Sometimes my dog looks shamed or guilty, but that's just a submission display; I'm interpreting it that way.
That's part of the challenge for us as a linguistic species. In the state of nature, and you could go back to Rousseau or any number of philosophers, we were unconstrained by expectations; we could behave as the moment allowed. Once we live in a moral society, we not only learn rules but internalise them, and develop ways of adhering to them even if nobody else is around, punishing ourselves if we don't. Then we become very clearly bound by other people's expectations about who we're supposed to be.
Sean Carroll
I don't want to get too political, but you are a political scientist, so maybe this is okay. I have a feeling that some of our political issues today arise because the world is changing, expectations and norms are changing. There used to be a script, at least in the minds of many people, a golden age when we all knew how to behave. There were rules; women played certain roles, and men, and white people and black people, rich and poor. Now it's harder to tell; everything is breaking down, and this causes extra anxiety, and maybe this has something to do with why young men in particular are looking for something better. Is there anything to a story like that, that the clarity of our expectations is important to us?
J. Eric Oliver
If you look through political history, that's a theme that's always happening.
Sean Carroll
We always think we're unique right now.
J. Eric Oliver
You go back to the ancient Greeks and they were saying 'oh, in early Greek times'. The Roman Empire especially was always finishing sentences about the virtue of the early Roman Republic. So yes, there's that eternal theme that things were always better before. The challenge for us is that we're in an epoch of such incredibly rapid technological and cultural change. Think about smartphones and social media within smartphones. These are part of our self processes now; they've become so deeply involved. If you think about the amount of waking hours most people spend on their phones, they're interfacing with reality through this mediated device and all its software. That didn't exist twenty years ago. What is it doing to us? Are these technologies helping us optimise our self processes, or are they corrosive? We don't know the answer, because it's happening so fast.
Sean Carroll
Certainly the idea that we offload some of our cognition to our devices has a benign aspect. I take notes as I'm sitting here; I don't need to keep everything in my brain, I can write on a piece of paper, that's very useful. But there are worries. As we're having this conversation, there was a quote a day or two ago, and I'm going to butcher it, so sorry, but Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said something like: yeah, people will forget how to do certain intelligent things because they're leaning on AI too much, but that's okay, we will sell intelligence back to them. That sounds a little dangerous to me. Would Zuckerberg have said the same thing?
J. Eric Oliver
This is what I think is really scary about AI for us: it seems to be supplanting some core traits within us. On the one hand it offers the seductive promise that you don't have to think for yourself. But does that mean I'm giving up my autonomy, my capacity, my career, my ability to sustain myself? On the other hand, what a seductive technology. Is this inevitable? I don't know if we know the answer. I haven't been able to puzzle through this, whether AI is just the next step in the evolution of our self processes.
One way I think about it is: to what extent is this energy efficient or not? The way to have an optimised self is to have a homeostatic balance in our self processes, between their ordering function and the vitality, the flow of energy itself. A self process with too much flow and energy can be incoherent, chaotic. At the cellular level that's cancer, too much energy going on in the cell. A self process with too much order and constraint is going to be inhibited, not going forward. So what is AI doing to our self processes? It requires a lot of energy. Maybe we'll have more efficient AIs in the future, but is the benefit it provides worth the tremendous energy expenditure it demands?
Sean Carroll
There was another thing that came out recently, and again I'll butcher the specifics. Large language models are trained on this giant corpus of text and other things, and in some sense they inevitably smooth out the bumps. They take an average, become a little bland, a little homogeneous. Some people are beginning to reflect that way of thinking and talking and writing. One of the new dangers of AI is that it will make everyone sound the same.
J. Eric Oliver
Yes, but doesn't our language and culture do that anyway? That's the devil's argument here. Our culture, I didn't come up with the words I'm using, they were bequeathed to me, and maybe it does pull us down to a lowest common denominator, but so does listening to FM radio.
Sean Carroll
That's an excellent point, because the common denominator need not be the lowest. We're approaching a situation where everyone is connected to everyone else, and you can't have the growth of microcultures or individual personalities in quite the same way. There are good aspects to that and bad aspects.
J. Eric Oliver
And who knows how this technology is going to grow and develop in evolutionary terms. Think about AI-generated imagery. When it first came out it was, 'Oh my god, look, cats jumping off a diving board, this is remarkable.' And then how quickly we go, 'Uh, okay, cats jumping off a diving board.' We want something distinctive. In so far as I think of AI as a digital prosthesis for us, there's always going to be some cultural avant-garde, and maybe it will use AI to advance new notions. We're in the early stages, still so overwhelmed by this new technology that we're back down to the lowest common denominator. But at some point we're going to get sick of it and want to push it. Maybe that's just me being optimistic.
Sean Carroll
It's good to be optimistic. I'm in favour of that.
Sean Carroll
Let's pull back from AI to our messy biological selves. One question that's very obvious to me about the self is that human beings will sabotage themselves. We're not always rational; there are things inside us, certain destructive behaviours, that come up again and again. Do you think we understand why that's true? Does thinking about who we are and what our self is help us escape that?
J. Eric Oliver
Hopefully yes to the second part. To the first part, it begs the question: if we have these self processes there to help us thrive as an energy system and a life force, what explains things like schizophrenia, our neuroses, or, at a collective level, genocide or mass exploitation? We can think of our political and social systems as elaborations of these self processes we're doing collectively. How do we account for these dysfunctions? From an evolutionary perspective, we're always developing random new tendencies, and some get culled over time. Some are spandrels, they just keep going along.
Part of it has to do with the dilemma of being a linguistic species, because what language ultimately allows is some plasticity in our self processes, but it sits on top of an undercurrent of biological imperatives. I'll give you an example. I love ice cream. It's my total weakness. If it were up to me I'd eat it every day. My ancestors didn't have ice cream, so they didn't face this problem, but my culture has created this temptation and struggle. It's both wonderful and problematic.
This goes back to: once we have self-knowledge, how do we cope? This was the hardest part of writing the book, because I don't have a set formula, and I think we should be genuinely suspicious of anyone who claims 'just follow my seven-step plan and you'll find the happiness you deserve'. What we need to do is two things. On the one hand, we can begin to recognise where the imbalances in our self processes lie, and there are different modalities that can help. Some spiritual traditions offer good advice; psychology gives us a helpful framework for identifying imbalances; a good friend can help. But it's very hard for us to see our own imbalances. It's easy for other people to see them, and sometimes, if they're close to us, they'll enlighten us. Once we recognise them, the question is how we take the corrective steps. A big part of it is really just letting go.
Letting go is a deceptive concept. When I first think about it, I think of kicking back with a bong and a PlayStation and letting the world go to hell around me, a sense of abdication. But in the traditions that actually cultivate greater self-optimisation, typically the spiritual traditions, letting go is a very engaged, vigorous activity. It goes back to meditation. Meditation is arduous because you're trying to unlearn your deep core habits, and those habits don't want to be unlearned; they throw up a lot of resistance. Part of living in a more mindful, transcendent, optimised way means engaging every moment with your imbalances, and those imbalances throw up a lot of discomfort. How do I coexist with this discomfort, when my intuition, whenever I feel pain, is to run away from it? I head for the freezer and get the ice cream.
Sean Carroll
Yeah, you can self-medicate.
J. Eric Oliver
Rather than running from pain, it's recognising that pain is there with information for me. In a biological way, if I have pain in my leg, it means my leg is broken and I should stay off it until it heals. But a lot of our pains reflect imbalances within us, and the more we can sit and be open to the pain, rather than just reacting, and be attentive to what it might be communicating, the more we can move forward productively.
Sean Carroll
Two different things just happened there. One, you mentioned it's a challenge even to say the statement that we want to improve ourselves, because it's the 'we' who are doing the improving, and we are already who we are. How can we trust ourselves to figure out what it would be to be an improvement? So we look elsewhere, to other people, to wise traditions. But it sounds like when it comes to actually doing the improving, you're putting the responsibility on the individual.
J. Eric Oliver
Ultimately we have to take responsibility for ourselves.
J. Eric Oliver
This goes back to a question I wanted to ask you: what is your life's purpose?
Sean Carroll
To have a good time.
J. Eric Oliver
Now, having a good time can be interpreted very differently.
Sean Carroll
I have a good time by learning things and teaching people, as well as pizza and ice cream; those both play an important part. Living in a loving relationship with my wife and my cats, and travelling the world. But I also want to make the world a better place. What do I know? You just asked my personal opinion. I think a combination of having relatively thoughtful and refined notions of what it means to have a good time, plus actually having a good time, leads to a good life.
J. Eric Oliver
I'd posit that there's something underneath all of that. This goes to an Aristotelian idea about our true purpose. Aristotle said that if you want to know anything's purpose, you need to know its function. Take a hammer: its function is to smash things, so a purpose-driven hammer would try to smash things as excellently as it could. The Greeks loved this notion of excellence; there's this idea of eudaimonia. The same holds for us. If we want to know how we live better, it's about optimising these self processes. When I hear you say you want to have a good time, what that really means is two things you identified, which are really important. It's not about pleasure. The pleasure of ice cream quickly fades; all pleasures are designed to be short-term, not there for our long-term benefit.
But for a satisfied and meaningful life, there are a couple of things. One is our connections with other people; helping other people helps us sustain that homeostatic balance. Without other people we'd be completely out of balance. We evolved to be co-regulated with the people around us. The other thing, which is distinct to us as humans, though maybe other animals have it, is exercising our competencies. I give my students an exercise: go out and do something that gives you pleasure, and something that gives you satisfaction, and notice the difference. The pleasurable ones are typically solipsistic and individualised. The satisfying ones are either connecting with someone else or exercising a competency, doing something you've trained to be good at. If you can combine those, for example, if you practise guitar and then play music with other people, it doesn't get any better than that. That's how we optimise ourselves: enhancing our connection to other people, and finding ways to exercise our competencies.
Sean Carroll
I mostly agree, but two things. Number one, I want to open space, because I'm super pluralistic about purpose and meaning, for some people just not wanting to deal with other people. Maybe their optimal state is isolation in some form, mild or pretty severe. I'm not going to say they're making a mistake if they're like that. I'm open to that possibility.
J. Eric Oliver
Maybe. But the evidence is pretty good that for most people it's really hard to have a good or meaningful life in total isolation. There may be the occasional deep introvert, but if you think about what our ancestors needed to survive in the wild, we're relatively fragile creatures. And other people can be super annoying, so we need some strong biological mechanisms in place, and one of those is loneliness, that sense of complete discombobulation that happens if we're cut off from other people.
Sean Carroll
The thing I super agree with is that we have our own notions of what gives us satisfaction, and then the world has expectations of us, things it would like to get from us, and seeking a balance between those is crucially important. Maybe there's something that brings me satisfaction that the world doesn't want or doesn't care about, and that's less successful than getting positive feedback from the world. I tell my graduate students: think about the questions you're really passionate about answering, and also the questions the rest of the community cares about, and try to work at the intersection.
J. Eric Oliver
We have to be pragmatic. Part of me would love to move to Costa Rica and surf on a beach every day. But I don't know how I'd sustain myself, and I might ultimately get bored. So there are always pragmatic choices. I wouldn't have written this book early in my career; I'm now at a place where I can do these things. There is a negotiation; we're not completely free. But it's important to question whether what we're doing is leading to somebody else's expectations. I tell my students about the 'gold star trajectory'. A lot of us carry this idea: I'll just go collect my gold stars, go to the right school, get the right job, get the right house, find the perfect partner, and then everything works out and I don't have to worry. Of course, most people, even if they collect all their gold stars and get into their 40s, realise, wait a minute, I'm still not happy.
Sean Carroll
Not fulfilled.
J. Eric Oliver
Right. So it becomes really important to recognise when we're living according to somebody else's expectations. The earlier we can address that, and figure out what our own expectations for ourselves are, and what we can do to maximise those relative to the pragmatic necessities of living in a post-industrial consumerist economy, the better. It's challenging. I notice this with my students and many people I talk to, figuring out what really animates me, where this feeling of greater authenticity is. There's a common misconception that there's somehow a core authentic self within us, and that's part of the idea of self-discovery. But that's going back to the idea of the self as a thing. It's better to think of the self as these processes, and to ask whether we can get them to work more efficiently, less burdened by past neural habits.
Some of it is just how we interface with the moment. There's something to the power of positive thinking. Maybe the only job I can get is flipping burgers. I could go in and say, this is terrible, I'm miserable, how horrible. Or another mindset: I'm now able to support myself and my family, I'm feeding a lot of hungry people, I can try to flip burgers as well as I can. Part of it is adopting a more proactive, healthy mindset, the Stoic idea, about how we negotiate between what the world demands and what we really want.
Sean Carroll
You mentioned authenticity, and I should have brought this up earlier, because it's one I really struggle with. Part of me wants to say what you just said: there is no single authentic self, we can change and adapt, we're influenced by a million things, internal and external. But I also think there's some reality to behaving authentically versus being fake.
J. Eric Oliver
Yes. When we describe someone as fake, it typically means they're prostituting themselves relative to some social circumstance or expectation. It's more of a projection: I think all these other people are going to demand these things of me, so I'm going to act relative to what I imagine other people want. Often we're misunderstanding that, or doing it in a way that's relatively shallow, that provides only shallow rewards. I don't know anybody who's become happier because they have a million Instagram followers, at least over the long haul.
Sean Carroll
I don't have a million Instagram followers.
J. Eric Oliver
Let me ask it this way. You've achieved this level of public acclaim. It's provided you a lot of benefits; you get invited to do nice things, you're all over YouTube. Do you think that in itself has provided you with greater life satisfaction?
Sean Carroll
Obviously it has, a little bit. I have the right level of public acclaim, I think. I don't want to be recognised on the street. But when I get emails from people saying, 'Ten years ago I heard a lecture by you, and now I'm a PhD student in particle physics', that makes you feel really good. I'm a give-and-take person about this. It's not the central thing. I could easily have a more popular podcast and write more best-selling books if I just tried to optimise for that. But I'm optimising for other things at the same time. I'm just lucky enough that the things I want to do also appeal to some other people.
J. Eric Oliver
That sounds pretty authentic.
Sean Carroll
Maybe another way to put that is self-aware.
J. Eric Oliver
Yes, in terms of realising, it goes back to ice cream. There are pleasures, but they're going to be short-lived and not great for our long-term waistlines.
Sean Carroll
Okay, so this is a good place to wrap up with a slightly difficult question. How practically useful is it, to the people listening, to really examine themselves in the Socratic way, or transcend themselves in a Buddhist way? How much do we know about the actual practical benefits? Is it mostly that it's interesting and fun to do, or do you really think we can become better by taking these issues seriously?
J. Eric Oliver
I have two thoughts. One is: what's the alternative? The alternative is continuing to live according to forces, stories and imperatives that we did not choose for ourselves. If you want to have some measure of autonomy, and I think if you ask most people whether they want to be autonomous, whether they want some control over their own lives, most of us would say yes, then self-exploration is absolutely vital toward that end. If you don't, if you just say 'I'm going to go along', that's your choice, because ultimately we don't matter all that much.
Sean Carroll
That's the other part of it.
J. Eric Oliver
To the universe, even to life itself. We could destroy ourselves through any number of cataclysmic events, and microbial life will happily go along without us. We are not the culmination of life by any means. We're one strange derivation, an evolutionary moment, and who knows how long we'll keep going. So you could just kick back with a bong and a PlayStation and let life carry you around, sure. But most of us want a little something more. And then the second question is, does this actually work? I think we have pretty good evidence that there are a number of things we can do to improve the quality of our lives. Start with your cellular self: what do your cells need? Nutrition, eating right, plenty of sleep, contact with loved ones. Having a strong foundation of these self processes is vital. And if you ask who seems most content in life, it's the ones who have strong social connections, who are exercising their competencies, who are connecting with and helping other people around them.
Sean Carroll
So what you're saying is: eat, drink, play, love.
J. Eric Oliver
Yeah, but not in the Elizabeth Gilbert narcissistic way. There are real challenges. How do we do this where we're not just completely self-indulgent, but actually, maybe, eat, pray, work with others is the addendum.
Sean Carroll
It's useful to know there are multiple aspects of ourselves going on inside us, and there are other people out there, and taking all of these seriously is probably a good idea.
J. Eric Oliver
Yeah. No self exists in isolation. We are all interconnected here.
Sean Carroll
We're all interconnected. I like that place to wind up. So Eric Oliver, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape podcast.
J. Eric Oliver
Sean, this was such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.