Purposes

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Robin:
Today, I suggest we talk about purpose.
Agnes:
OK.
Robin:
And what I have in mind is the conflict between the purposes we describe ourselves as having, or choose for ourselves based on looking at ourselves and how we feel about people around us and what other people say. That's all on the one hand. And then on the other hand, the purposes we infer that we would have by being the result of biological evolution. That is the sort of things evolutionary psychology might say about our purposes. And these have long been in conflict. So much so that people were reluctant to believe that biological evolution applied to people because the purposes they felt like they had were such in conflict. So if we believe biological evolution is actually the source of our purposes, then how do we reconcile that with all of the other things we see inside ourselves? And is it that the things we seem to see are illusions and behind all of that really is the biological purposes? Or, is there room for deviation? And when we look into the future, to what extent should we think about purposes that would fit with biological evolution, or can we just ignore that and choose entirely different purposes without much of a problem?
Agnes:
Yes. So I wonder... this might be a terminological issue, but it's like I would distinguish between motivation and purpose, right? And it seems clear to me that we have desires, inclinations motivations, that, then you could tell an evolutionary story about the origins of those desires, and inclinations and motivations. But a purpose, so I would give some synonyms of that as like, you know, that for the sake of which the end, the goal, right? And, as far as I can tell that's a normative concept, it would be something like the good that is set to be achieved by a given course of action, or a given disposition or whatever, right? And it isn't clear to me in that sense that there are any purposes that could be inherited evolutionarily, though, there certainly could be motivational tendencies and patterns of inclination and desire that would be inherited evolutionarily.
Robin:
So evolution, mainly just needed to guide your behavior to induce behavior, it had many different mechanisms available to that. So, if you were a creature just who responded to your desires and immediate impulses, then it would be trying to shape those desires and impulses. But if you're a creature who looks for the good, and tries to choose what's good, then evolution will need to shape your concept of the good. So, the difference between desires and the good, don't seem to change the basic issue that whatever you think of those things, you should expect them to have been shaped by evolution, for its purposes of getting you to reproduce and have descendants.
Agnes:
I mean, say, you've got a hill, right? And then, you know, you have sort of towards the bottom of the hill, you have things that overtime rolled down to the bottom of that hill. And they are sort of things that were, you know, maybe rounder, and kind of had less friction, right?
Robin:
OK.
Agnes:
And maybe even over time, things that hung out in the hill for a long time sort of got into that more rounder shape, and then ended up at the bottom of the hill. Like, I would say, you know, you could see how the shape of the hill would have an impact on the distribution of objects along the hill...
Robin:
Exactly.
Agnes:
...and the shape of the objects, right. But it would be weird to say that the hill was trying to shape any objects, and that anything was the goal. The hill’s goal isn't that stuff end up at the bottom of the hill, as opposed to at the top of the hill. The hill really just can't have goals. It's not the right sort of thing to have goals. And I'm not sure that evolution is in any better position to have goals than a hill.
Robin:
No, but you have goals.
Agnes:
Right.
Robin:
You have purposes and you were created by evolution. So we should expect that the goals and purposes that you have would be the sort of goals and purposes that evolution would create. So if rocks at the bottom of the hill had goals, we should expect those to be the sort of goals that rocks who would fall down to the bottom of the hill would have, that have goal – rocks at different parts of the hill have different goals, then we can use that to predict which rocks have which goals.
Agnes:
Right. And so maybe, to put your point, you probably could put it this way. Suppose the rocks were conscious, and they were at the bottom of the hill, and really we all know, they just roll into the bottom of the hill. But they said, "Yes, our goal was to get to the bottom of this hill, good thing we're here." And we can say, "Well, actually, the reason that you're down there is you just rolled because of the hill."
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
And so then the thought would be the rocks could engage in this inquiry as to whether their goal, but now what I would say is like, is it really a goal? Or, is it simply a result that... like that is sort of the predictable upshot of a certain process? Just like landing up at the bottom of the hill is a predictable upshot of gravity and the shape of the hill.
Robin:
Yes. Indeed.
Agnes:
And so, the question is really about to what extent our goals even operative in...
Robin:
So that's exactly the conflict here, which is exactly why it's so wrenching for people for many centuries now. Because in your mind, you have this idea of a goal. And a goal isn't in your mind, just something that's a result of a natural process that has no goals. But nevertheless, there you are, a creature that is the result of this natural process that has no goals, but it gave you your goals.
Agnes:
I mean, I think that a really big part of a goal is the, let's say, the normative appearance like, that something seems good to you, right? And...
Robin:
And evolution gave you those. Your... things like that came from this long evolutionary process, and we can use this process to predict what those would be, those would be the sort of goals that would induce you to the behavior that evolution needed you to do, to reproduce and multiply.
Agnes:
So it seems to me that we can distinguish between a kind of impulsive, like, movement in a direction of something like, if you're hungry, you feel like eating or something. And Plato says, it's like, the soul is nodding, yes, in answer to a question. Like, when you're hungry, you're like, "Yes, I want that." But it isn't really an answer. You don't really say, "Yeah." That's why you're just kind of – you're kind of driven to go in that direction. And you can take a step back and you can say, "Yeah, but is it good for me to eat?"
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
And now your thought is, yeah, but even at that step back level, your judgment that it is good for you to eat, you're sort of what you take to be your rational reflective judgment, that it's good for you to eat, that too is akin to the original impulse, the inclination.
Robin:
In sense of its origin. That is, if it has details that could be different, the particular details that it has were shaped by that evolutionary selection process.
Agnes:
I mean, it's like, it's a little hard, you know, in a sense, right, everything – we don't have to talk about evolution. Everything in your life is the product of like, some kind of initial programming of your brain, and then the set of interactions with your causal interactions with your environment, right? And...
Robin:
Sure.
Agnes:
So you could say, "Oh, you think you have these purposes, but actually, they're just a function of how your brain started out being wired when you were born, and that this set of interactions." Why is that any – why is that less threatening reductive approach than the evolutionary approach?
Robin:
The story that you are just the result of physical pressures doesn't sort of contradict or have a strong conflict with the goals you think you have. You might say, I want to be beautiful, or I want to create beauty. And you think, yes, in order to think that I'd have to be a machine of a biological machine of sorts that could conceive of the concept of beauty and could ask the question. And I would have had to come from an origin of a small creature that was born that had the structures that evolved to be that. But none of that tells me that I'm wrong or misled about this goal to have to want to see beauty because that's – history doesn't challenge that assumption.
Agnes:
I guess it's not clear to me that the other one tells you that you're wrong or misled either.
Robin:
So what happens as we get into the details of what we should expect evolution to want to have you do. So, once we ask what exactly would evolution want you to do? Then we say, "Ah, well, evolution would want you at some point to have children. And it would want you to raise those children so they would have more children. And it would want you to survive long enough for that to happen and want you to eat and therefore stay protected and stay away from predators and maybe move when the environment changes. And it would – if you're in a social group, evolution, wants you to gain respect of other people in the social group so maybe you can attract a higher quality mate, maybe you have people who can defend you against hostile enemies." These would all be the sort of things that evolution would be trying to get you to do in order to have many descendants. And then we look at things like, literature or reason or beauty. And we ask, how does that fit in to this story? So, the usual problem is we do see desires not to starve, not to freeze to death, to have children. But we also seen people having plans and concept of the good and goals that are oriented around some pretty abstract, pretty grandiose things that don't seem very connected to the obvious agenda that evolution would have. And that's the puzzle, that's the problem to come to terms with. How illusory are those? Do I really have those goals? Or do I just sort of think I do because evolution is trying to trick me into something else?
Agnes:
I mean, I guess it's interesting to me, because in a certain way, it seems to me that the... so let's say we have two kind of potential, reductive, demystifying kinds of explanation. The one is just the physicalist causal story of I'm a machine interacting with my environment. And the other is the evolutionary story. In a certain way, the evolutionary story should – it's sort of less dismissive, less demystifying, less productive. Because we can talk about evolution as though it had like goals and intentions and as though we were like, at war with it, or something, you know, and it's like this. And I mean, but like a lot of the things you're saying where it's like, does the evolutionary story make us doubt that these things like reason, and art and etc, that we elevate as being so high and valuable, like, maybe they really not? I mean, I think you could have those doubts due to the physicalist story, right? Like, here's what the world really is. And we imagine that there are things like friendship and art and reason. And we are just in– those are just, that's just stuff we made up. And you might say, "OK, there's room for those things." But like, what kind of room? It seems to me maybe more like that it's somehow easier to avoid this – it's easier to think about physicalism, but just like not think about these questions of cultural artifacts and reason and intentionality, just to avoid that. Whereas with evolution, it's maybe harder to avoid the fact that the two things are trying to occupy the same space, but they are still trying to occupy the same space in both cases, it seems to me.
Robin:
But the first set of doubts seem to me about whether the things we have value or have as goals exist at all. Can there possibly be beauty? Can there be truth? Could there be glory? Could there be friendship, love? You might say, in a world of atoms in the void, where is love? And therefore we couldn't have love as a goal because we can't find it.
Agnes:
Mm-hmm.
Robin:
The second approach says, "No, love exists. It makes perfect sense as a thing, but why would we expect you to want it, or you to have it as a goal, or for you to value it?"
Agnes:
Yes.
Robin:
OK. And so I think it is correct that, in fact, love can exist, and beauty can exist, they can exist as patterns of the atoms that you know, satisfy certain features. And there's a long sort of history of trying to describe what those patterns are. They aren't, you know, what the dead matter cares about. Dead matter doesn't recognize love or beauty, but we do, and it's enough that we do. But nevertheless, we might wonder how much we actually care about them. Because evolution says, well, it would create creatures that could understand love or understand the concept of beauty, but whether it would create creatures that care about them and put a lot of effort and resources into their pursuit, that's the doubt that evolution brings in.
Agnes:
Well, I mean, it evidently did create creatures that...
Robin:
Right. Yes, of course. But – so there's several... so right, so there's several different resolutions hear. One is to find a sort of a direct practical benefit for each of these things. Let's say fiction, people might say fiction involves rehearsing realistic stories that will give you experience and the more things you could ever see yourself through many quick stories and therefore, fiction is a quick, efficient way to tell you about a lot of different things that happened in the world. That would be a story this is trying to give you a direct evolutionary functional resolution to say, "There is no conflict because look how practically useful these things are for the things evolution cares about." That's one possible resolution. Another possible resolution is to say, "Well, we think we care about these things, but we don't actually care about them quite in the way we think." So for example, what we care about with beauty is showing off our beauty to other people so that other people are impressed by this, and want to meet with us or be our allies. Or, we want to show off our ability to discern beauty, which is our ability to discern other people's better capabilities such that we might want to associate with them. The art itself is just an indirect way to achieve that other goal. And we are somewhat misled about our goals.
Agnes:
I mean, there's a lot of cultural variation in, say, art, in the kinds of art that exists, and in, you know, the importance that the art has in the culture and who's producing it. Is it like experts? Or is it everyone?
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
And how it's appreciated? And so, why not think that like, evolution leaves a lot of like free rein, right, that there are some constraints. But then there are other – there are ways in which these constraints are going to be filled in that are – it's neither the case that you can explain the way they're filled in as being practical or useful for what evolution wants. Nor, is it the case that evolution dictates that it went this way for other reasons. It's just that evolution underdetermines cultural development. And that's why we have a massive diversity of cultures.
Robin:
It certainly is true that we have a diversity of cultures. And it's certainly true that that means basic evolution under-determinism. The question is, which dimensions of variation could be explained by that versus not? So for example, you know, in different places, we might have different colors that were popular, or different hair length, different ways to do your boots, or certainly language can be constructed in different ways, different sounds can represent different things in different places. You know, we could – cut a hole in your nose as a ritual, certainly, once we're sort of doing costly signaling on that and we have this wide range of what do you use as a cost to show you're finally an adult and you're loyalty group, right? And so there's a huge range of costs we could bear to show that we are loyal to each other, various kinds of pains, we can endure, or various kinds of modifications we could do yourself just to show we were willing to do it as a loyalty signal. So there's a large range there. But if we look at something like fiction, say, or art, we see just a huge area of effort there, that we need to see some payoff from it. That would make sense evolutionarily. That is, we can't explain all possible behavior just merely by cultural variation. So a standard story, in game theory is the idea of multiple equilibria. That is, there can be different equilibria to a game, and we can think of cultures as different equilibria to sort of the social game. But you can't have any arbitrary behavior be an equilibrium. There's rules to the game of what counts as an equilibrium, and we want to see that each set of behaviors were matching each other as an equilibrium.
Agnes:
Right. But I guess, in terms of the function of art, it just seems like it could have a variety of different functions in different cultures.
Robin:
Sure, but now we might want to know, OK, in our culture, which is here, which is the most common one?
Agnes:
Oh, absolutely.
Robin:
And, you know, since you and I are not artists, this is less at stake for us. But if you and I talked about, say, intellectual pursuits...
Agnes:
Right.
Robin:
We might start to say, "What's evolution stake in that? Why would we reason about these very abstract, very distant from practical application things?"
Agnes:
But like, so just in terms of the worry that you get started here with where we are worried about ourselves, that are self-described purposes aren't, so to speak, our evolutionary purposes. And I have some more questions about that worry. But like, suppose that with respect to a given domain, your purposes in that domain, are very much characteristic of the people in your culture. And they're very different from the people in other cultures, like how – so like, we're American intellectuals.
Robin:
Right. Sure.
Agnes:
And it's suppose that we were to learn that like British intellectuals and German intellectuals have whole different types of norms, they have different ways of understanding purpose they have different... blah, blah, blah, right? And so then would we feel a lot better, because we know that it's cultural and that it varies and thus that it isn't going to be determined by evolution, are we now relieved to learn this? But are we relieved by the cultural contingency of our purpose because we solved your problem? Because that just seem like that would be relieving, that's why I'm asking.
Robin:
I don't think it is. So, we want to explain the data and the data are, you know, how each culture behaves, and how people in each culture behave.
Agnes:
Right.
Robin:
And the data includes the variation and the average. So, my usual heuristic is the first thing I want to explain is sort of the middle of the distribution of behavior across space and time, just what are the typical things people do. And then if I have time, I want to go to explain the variation, why do some people do it different than others. And I'm happy to eventually get there. But even if you look at the middle of the distribution, we can say, look at all these people everywhere are doing a lot of art. Yeah, they do it different in different places, or look at all these people spending a lot of time in conversation, or looking all these different people in different places, spending a lot of time doing up their hair, or whatever else it is. You want to say, "Why is there this overall pattern of a lot of costly effort going into particular areas?" And so then we want to think about the different possible explanations. We could say, "Well, doing up your hair is useful, it keeps the bugs out." Or we could say, "Doing up your hair is impressive, and everybody wants to impress each other with their hair." Or we could say, "Hair tends to be useful sometimes to strangle people." Again, we were looking for explanations, but the mere fact that people have do their hair differently in different places, isn't enough to say, but yes, but everywhere people are doing a lot with their hair.
Agnes:
Yeah, but like, I mean, it seems to me that you were worried that the self-described purpose would be undermined by the evolutionary explanation. But if my self-described purpose is described in a pretty fine grained way that is fine grained enough to pick out my culture, right?
Robin:
Yeah.
Agnes:
Then... and so, you're like, "Ah, so you're into doing your hair?" And I'm like, "No, no, I'm not into that in general. I'm not into every – I'm just into like this particular version of dyeing my hair." Right?
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
And, in my society, it's like, I want my close female friends to notice that I like – my hair looks nice. And that's like, that's the thing. And you're like, "Oh, in my culture, the women don't care what the other women think about the care the women hair care about whatever, right?" And so I have this like, pretty culturally-specific purpose, right? My purpose isn't my hair.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
Like simpliciter, it's, you know, having my close girlfriends notice that my hair looks nice. And...
Robin:
So let's just go to some very generic ways to explain behavior, all behavior, any sort of behavior. So we've been talking about explaining behavior in terms of evolutionary pressure, but we have some other options available. So one option is just error. We could say, "Well, everybody can't exactly achieve evolutions purpose. Evolution can't be that good. So that with deviations between any one behavior in any one context and this evolution purpose." And so that's an error explanation. And the explanation can explain sort of random variations that's relatively uncorrelated. But the more we see a pattern in the error, or correlations between different people in places or a tendency in one particular direction, then error is going to be less attractive as an explanation, but it is a standard explanation. And we do explain many things people do our mistakes. And that's a real thing that affects behavior. But it's a limited explanation, but it does apply to some things. Another favorite explanation is conformity. People say, "Well, look, you need to get along with your culture, your culture wants X, so you got to do X." So cultures can vary in their acts. Different cultures want different things, and you got to go along with your culture. So that explains ways which people within a culture all do the same thing. And then different cultures do different things because of cultural conformity, pressures. And there really are cultural conformity pressures. But again, this isn't the, you know, it looked... I think that explains everything. You can't explain all possible behaviors merely with cultural conformity pressures.
Agnes:
Right. I mean, so the reason why I'm bringing up this cultural thing is that if I think about your problem, let's call it the gainsaying purpose problem, right? So the problem where somebody says, "Here's my purpose." But you're like, "Ah, no, actually, here's your purpose." Right? And they are made uncomfortable by the fact that you have contradicted their self-avowed purpose. I think the gainsaying purpose problem gets much worse when you get culturally-specific, not better, which suggests that we're actually not that disturbed by evolutionary modes of gainsaying our purpose, we're a lot more disturbed by cultural modes. So like, if you tell me that some mode I have of being an intellectual is just how all the American intellectuals do it.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
And then I'm like, "Oh, I thought that was like... I thought I was doing it in like the good way, but it turns out, I'm just conforming to like how other American intellectuals are."
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
Then that's more upsetting for me than if you tell me, "Oh, the reason why you want to have sex is like your evolution says you have to reproduce." I'm like, "Yeah, OK, we're all like that. That that's just less..."
Robin:
Right. So, in some sense, all explanations are disturbing. Like even the randomness explanation is disturbing. If you say, you know, if you say, "I've always felt that, like, the moon looks just perfect this time of the year." And somebody says, "That was just a random genetic mutation. Your grandfather had that too." You know, it's nothing special, right? And that could be very deflating as well. And certainly, the idea that what your behavior is explained by cultural conformity, it tends to be upsetting because most people don't want to admit that their behavior is conforming to some cultural pressures, conformity pressures, that's just also deflating. And so, I'm not sure how we can find explanations are anything more reassuring to people. Other than you made it up yourself, and nobody's ever seen this before, and what a great innovation you pulled off.
Agnes:
I mean, so that's interesting like that in and of itself, right, is kind of interesting, that, in effect, I think, it's that people think of themselves as authorities on themselves. So, it's relevant here that we're talking about explanations for people's behavior, and desire and dispositions and all of that, right.
Robin:
Yeah.
Agnes:
So, I think if you were like giving me an explanation for why, like the leaves are falling in that way, I don't feel similarly invaded, right?
Robin:
Right. No, no. And even, you know, you have physical constraints, your arms are only this long, for example, that's why you can't reach some things, you kind of accept those things.
Agnes:
Right.
Robin:
But you know, inside yourself, there's this purpose you have, and you feel like you were the author of that "I chose my purpose," or nobody chose it for me at least, or maybe my parents or teachers influence so people might be willing to accept that sort of cultural pressure early on. But now, they are the author.
Agnes:
Well, part of it, right, is that, what does it take to view yourself as responsible for the things that you do? Like, morally responsible to be credited, to be blamed, to be praised, being able to held accountable, right, to be held accountable. And, like, arguably, and I say, arguably, it's a big argument. But arguably, if you do something, you engage in some behavior for the sake of some purpose to achieve some goal, and you didn't choose that goal. Suppose somebody brainwashed and...
Robin:
Right. Exactly.
Agnes:
And put, you know, just inserted that goal into your head and like, made you robotically inclined to like pursue it, then it looks like you're not responsible for the thing you did, right? Because really, you didn't do it, really the person who inserted that purpose into your head did it. And so it's not just that, we would like to flatter ourselves by thinking of ourselves as creators of, authors of, in a gentle relation over our purposes. It's that we are very insistent that other people see themselves that way too. Because we otherwise it's not obvious how we can hold one another morally responsible.
Robin:
So as I specialize in law and economics, I would say that in liability, in general, we have many people we can hold responsible and who we choose to hold responsible is a choice we make based on what would seem to be the most effective. So, we often have cases where many people caused an event. And we can either hold them all responsible, we can find one to hold most responsible, and then it's an issue of, if we hold that person more responsible, will doing so have good effects on their – adjusting their behavior? So in that sense, I'd say if another person put that purpose in your head, well, if we hold them responsible, and they know that ahead of time, that might adjust their behavior to choose the purpose as well, to put in your head. But if it's the universe putting this in your head, and we cant go, "Oh, you don't have any incentives to affect them, then we're just going to, we're going to hold you responsible." So in general, we hold things responsible when, if they knew we were holding them responsible, they would adjust their behavior, and we choose the parties to hold most responsible such that we would have the biggest effect from, that we're opportunistically deciding who to choose to respond, who to make responsible. And so in this case, we could hold you responsible, we might just prefer to hold somebody else responsible, if that would be more effective, but we could hold both of you responsible.
Agnes:
Right. But I mean, suppose that, you know, you knew full well that I, you know, I was just brainwashed by this evil scientist. But that if you hold me responsible that will affect the evil scientist’s actions, because he'll see what happens to me and then he'll program it differently next time around.
Robin:
Right. In that case, it would be sufficient to hold you responsible.
Agnes:
Right. So, like when you say like, you know, this is what we do. Like, I don't know who you're speaking for, but I think a lot of people would say, "No, it's not morally OK to just opportunistically hold people responsible in order to bring about the best effects." You're really only allowed to hold someone responsible for something that they can be plausibly construed as responsible for. Right? And so, like, if for instance, you know that I was like at – it was actually a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation where I was like, "I was not in my own right mind and this other– the evil scientist was like totally controlling my body and I was like a zombie whenever..." And then you're like, "Yeah, we're going to like torture her to send that scientist a lesson." Like that just seems wrong?
Robin:
Well, so this is actually interesting parallel to the basic topic here. So the basic topic here was you were formed by evolution. You have your purposes, but evolution had its different purposes. How you sure can you be about your purposes?
Agnes:
Right.
Robin:
A similar structure happens in society with law, in the sense that when people live in a society with laws, they internalize these laws as moral norms. And they basically treat it as if that's just sort of the reality of morality. And, in fact, societies evolve in their moral norms, through various pressures, and law and economics is trying to describe those pressures and trying to explain that society is in fact, over time opportunistic about who it holds responsible, but it's hiding that from you somewhat. And that when you are reacting to how someone behaves, say, and demanding that they be held morally responsible, you're sort of taking these morals in your society as given, and not appreciating the cultural selection pressures that produced your society's moral norms. And so, with the same biological selection argument, we can also talk about cultural selection arguments. People in a society see that they have these purposes. And they say, "Well, that's just my purpose because I'm in the society, it seems obvious." And you don't realize. "No, your society had an evolutionary past. It went through a series of societies that had different norms at different times. And this heritage shaped your society's moral norms. And therefore, maybe you should accept that you think this is just morally wrong, but in fact, some larger calculation was saying this was the most cost-effective way to produce better behavior."
Agnes:
But now, you know, the idea, like that sentence that you just uttered, only has any tension in it if you think two things can come apart. One, is what's moral? And two is like, costs in producing, and I take it what you mean by better behavior is just like, behavior that's going to lead to this satisfaction of more people's preferences or something like that, right?
Robin:
Something like that, yeah.
Agnes:
And I take it that the people who advanced this framework are also the people who really don't– can't get any daylight between those two ideas. And so they're going to actually for them, what this– it's just straightforward moral progress every time these norms evolve, right? Because it's the satisfaction of more preferences.
Robin:
Right. So I think there's an interesting parallel here, but I think it does better to focus on the biological case, because it's more stark, and you have fewer moves to evade it, in some sense. So if we focus on this moral norms and the law history, I think it's harder to make the case. I think you can eventually, but that's why I would rather focus on the, you know, your purposes, in terms of your biology and the evolutionary heritage. So...
Agnes:
Let me interrupt you for a second. We'll go back. So we'll go back to biology in a second, but the thing I wanted to sort of note here is that, it seems to me often in these arguments, there's like a both giving and taking of multiple kind of like normative concepts or something. And it's often not as easy to say, well, like that there really is a space between those concepts. So like that there is some concept of purpose where evolution is giving you purposes. And then some other concept – and then within that same concept of purpose over here, where you are taking certain things to be valuable. Like in order to set up this paradox, or this tension, you need that, you need it to both be purpose and so that their intention with one another, right? As opposed to two different things, which is more like the causal mechanism case, right? And similarly with the law, right? It's the same structure where it's like, you want to say, "Ah, look, morality can come into conflict with this cost benefit." And then I'm like, "Well, wait a minute, aren't you the people who think that those are actually the same concept? And now there isn't a conflict, right?" So I'm fine. Let's go back to biology. But that is I think the pattern that one has to attend to is like, so are you creating as much normative space as you think you are?
Robin:
So, in that case, we could say that you and your community share a moral norm when you see if somebody did something that you would know who to blame about it and how, right? So, you could say we're in a community that agrees on its moral norms, if we know who to blame, how, for what? And then we could say, those norms, for example, might not be exactly the most cost effective way to discourage bad behavior. Or, they might be. Or they might plausibly just look like they – look like there's a tension you're not sure. So that's more of the analogy with the individual biology. You are a creature evolved from biology. And you do like to comb your hair. And we might say, if we don't see a reason why an evolved creature would comb their hair, then we are puzzled by this conflict. But we can either come up with an explanation "Oh, combing your hair is useful for this purpose." Or, we can find a more indirect explanation, "Oh, you look pretty when you comb your hair and looking pretty as more useful, etc." So that's the kind of issue but the point is, it's very stark with the individual biology. That is, people, when they think of their own purposes, they often want to write a novel, they want to enjoy the Grand Canyon view, they want to travel more, they want to write more books, those sort of purposes people will talk about, they want to remind seem quite a distance from the evolutionary goals that evolution will have or her in view with you. So that's why it's this especially dramatic. Now, that doesn't mean it's actually in conflict, that is, we can try to come up with ways to resolve those conflicts.
Agnes:
Well, so first of all, I have to say, it's very ironic to use this example of the hair because I never – I haven't combed my hair in maybe several years, three or four years, but today, yesterday, I did. And so now my hair looks terrible, it looks frizzy, because I forgot why I don't comb it, which is that it looks better when I don't come in. But anyway, that's not – luckily, this is only audio, so people can't see my frizzy hair.
Robin:
We'll take a picture.
Agnes:
But, the distant purpose is –, so, you know, you could think, like, here would be like a very one-size-fits-all way to square these things. Like you could think that evolution would want us to be innovators, or like to think big, or something, in some kind of indeterminate way. Right? That we are, you know, our descendants, overall in a long term way are more likely to survive if we are such as to be in some way open and sort of self-disturbing creatures, right? Always on the lookout for new possibilities or something. That could just be a thing that's programmed into us by evolution. And then that's on the one hand, another hand, it's like, yeah, and also we think that's good. So great, super, right? It turns out evolution is hand in hand with what we actually independently judged to be a good thing. Then we wouldn't be too, you know, uncomfortable with that, that it would not seem very demystifying, right?
Robin:
That's exactly one of the approaches to take is to take these behaviors that seem not to have evolutionary payoffs, and identify apparent, you know, proposed evolutionary payoffs. And that's one of the standard moves in this game. I would say that people are often reaching a little too quickly for explanations. For example, they might say it's good for all of life on Earth, or good for the species, or good for some diffused...
Agnes:
It clearly can be good for all life on Earth, because most organisms don't know how to adopt a strategy. So...
Robin:
Right, but so we might say, well, you know, evolution will need it to be more specifically good for that person's lineage, not just good in general, from some broad thing. And so that would be more of a challenge to come up with why those particular behaviors would have that kind of concrete effect for them. Because, again, they are spending resources on this that they could be spending on other things. They could be collecting more food or building a bigger wall, so they don't freeze to death or other sorts of things.
Agnes:
Yeah, I mean... I guess like, I can't get around this, I know, this must be some – this must be a very dumb thought. But I can't get around the thought, like evolution is kind of modest, in what it wants from us. Like if we think about, look, like, it would want us to reproduce, right, and to take care of our children, and put something towards the preservation of our grandchildren. And it's like, I feel like I can do that with about a quarter of my time or something, or even less than that, right? And so then I got the rest and evolution is not going to tell me what to do with the rest. So what's the... what's...
Robin:
That's because we're living in this unusually rich era, where most everyone is rich in that way. And that's a strange feature about our era. And so, we don't really intuitively feel the pressures of evolution so much in our world in our era because we're rich.
Agnes:
Right. And but, I mean, maybe we don't feel them because they're not there. That is because...
Robin:
Well, I mean, so, you know, counterfactually, you could have three times as many kids as you'd had. Like, if you, from the very young age, felt this driving urge to have as many kids as you could, you could have had far more kids.
Agnes:
Right.
Robin:
So I mean, by this point in your life, maybe it's too late to go back and undo those changes. But even now, you could be really encouraging your kids to have kids and setting them up with dates and promising to pay and help for childcare and right, you could just be going wild, really pushing your kids to have kids.
Agnes:
Right. So this is why I feel like evolution is, it's got a little bit of a light touch, you know, like it's telling me some stuff to do, but it's leaving me lots of freedom.
Robin:
But that's the puzzle, right? It seems to be giving you freedom.
Agnes:
But your thought is that the freedom, the freedom that it seems to be leaving me, I mean, you know... Yeah. And why not think that like some of what culture is, is kind of re– it's like upcycling our evolutionary instincts into different sorts of goals, right? And so, there's a great passage in– there's a great passage in Plato's Symposium where he talks about how the lower sort of person has kids, and they aim for immortality through their kids, right? But then there's like the higher sorts of people, the poets, they aim for immortality through their poems. And their poems are like children to them, and they love them in the way that people love their children. And there's the law makers, right, who aim immortality by creating laws and... and so you might think that like, what is – Freud uses a word like sublimation or something for this, right? Like where we're in effect there is a desire or an impulse, but it can be... I think upcycling is the most natural term to, you know, use towards a different purpose. And so, you end up with people who don't have as many kids and who are pursuing these other goals that don't have a direct evolutionary payoff.
Robin:
So in that case, we would expect this other thing to be reproducing. So it is true that culture can change a lot faster than genes can these days, and so that we expect most evolution recently to be cultural evolution. But we still might expect cultures to be trying hard to reproduce. So that cultures would be really pushing you to do whatever it takes to reproduce that culture.
Agnes:
But they kind of are, right? I mean, we even try to export our culture to other countries, and...
Robin:
But we could try a lot harder.
Agnes:
I mean, I feel like we're trying pretty hard.
Robin:
But again, you said you had you know all this extra free time, if you do what you want.
Agnes:
Well, what I'm doing, what am I doing? You can ask what am I doing with that free time, right?
Robin:
Yeah.
Agnes:
And like, like, say I'm writing a book on Socrates, right? What is that? I'm kind of, I'm trying to propagate a certain culture, namely, the philosophical culture, and the ancient culture, and the culture of refutation. I'm trying to propagate it in the world and spread. So I am doing this thing cultural reproduction.
Robin:
So what really should be happening is genetic cultural co-evolution. And that's, in fact, what really does happen. So all the different things that encode who we are, that get passed on to future generations, all of those are evolving together. And they will use whichever pathways can be most effective to do that. But, you know, we should still not expect the genes to be suffering a lot from culture. We would expect culture to be a way that genes are using to promote more genes. And similarly, cultures, like, you know, over all the people who live in a particular area who interact a lot, that's kind of unit of culture, these artistic projects, whatever they should be helping those unit of cultures reproduce. But for example, the United States population is declining, its cultural influence is also somewhat declining. So in some sense, as these larger units were somewhat failing to promote reproduction of them. Again, you know, if the US people will just have a lot more kids, the US culture would also grow. Right? I mean, so...
Agnes:
So here's, I mean, it seems to me there's a really interesting, like, there's a way of thinking about this, where the culture itself constitutes something like an upcycling of what is there to be reproduced, right? So, you might say, humans, you know, insofar as they were just very, very indistinguishable from non-human animals were mainly doing what non-human animals do, but you know, back in the day, right? And fundamentally, what was getting reproduced was genetic material. But that part of what culture is, is a substitute in terms of what is getting reproduced. The genes are also getting reproduced, right? But over time it becomes more and more something like the reproduction of the genes is like a vehicle, a bearer for the culture. And, you know, there's a question here, when you look at this whole story, there's a question of sort of where you put the throw-weight or something. And I think something that's distinctive about your way of thinking about this, and probably an evolutionary biologist would think about it this way is, would always put the throw-weight at the gene. That is there's a kind of reductive stickiness there. But if you don't think about it that way, and you think that the cultural evolution, then you would think that once this process gets, so to speak, leveled up at the level of culture, evolution is going means something slightly different. And in particular, like say, if we take me, right, propagating philosophical refutation, Socrates, et cetera, through writing a book about it, I don't think that what I'm doing is just taking a code and like, creating more copies of that code in the way, that's how genes reproduce, it's just create more copies, right? But another way you can sort of reproduce something is to be always aiming to produce the better version of the thing. So we could call it like aspirational evolution or something, right? Where my hope is not, like, suppose that after I write this book, you know, it just goes crazy. Everyone reads the book, everyone's copying the book, everyone teaches it to their kids, you know, 200 years from now, this book is like a kind of Bible, that people are reciting...
Robin:
Just how it's going to happen.
Agnes:
Right. No, for me, that's some kind of hellscape, right? It's like that better not happen for a number of reasons. But like, the main one being like, "Well, no, I want to put these ideas out there. And then I will be able to improve upon them, I take myself to be improving upon, right?" So that's a very different, that's a very different way of how evolution works.
Robin:
Well, let's take the example of say, a car firm. A car firm can grow. And it could also have descendants, like spinoffs. And the car firm has many different parts of it, right? There's marketing, there's manufacturing, there's design, there's distribution, there's management. And in order for the car firm to grow, basically, all these parts are going to have to grow. Because it can't just grow the manufacturing part without growing the rest. And so, any sort of things that grow and evolve over time, you know, they have different parts of them, and then all of them will have to come along. Now, a car firm, for example, that didn't have much marketing, like maybe the first car firms do might grow, but then other firms come along, and they add marketing, then your firm needs to add marketing or it can't compete. And so you could think about the ways in which culture adds on. You could say, well, so you have a package of people, they don't have much culture, they just reproduce their genes, but they get out beat by some other group of people who have some culture, and that helps them grow. And now you will see the total of that thing growing because they have all the different parts that are necessary to grow well. And so, a car firm can add trucks, and now it can grow more, because it has trucks. And then other firms might need to add trucks if they want to compete. And so we do want to think of larger systems that co-evolved together, but we still want to see them growing. And we still have this principle of evolution that applies to them in the sense that we can roughly predict their goals from this need to reproduce and to have descendants. And so, even humans with culture need to reproduce their humans and the culture in order for that package to grow.
Agnes:
Absolutely. But if you think that, like fundamentally, and by the way, I don't think there's any reason to feel so sure that culture is the end of this story, right?
Robin:
No, of course.
Agnes:
It could be gene goes to culture, and culture goes to something else, right? But just for the moment, let's stick with the culture. Like, it's clear that what it is for the gene to reproduce, it's just for their beat to be more instances of it, right. And then, you know, in the long term, way, more and more of them, and then kind of exponentially. But it's not at all clear that when the culture is trying to reproduce itself, that there's going to be some kind of like, linear relation between the reproduction of the culture and the reproduction of the genes of the bearers of the culture, right? So you might not think, like, you might think, for instance, that suppose that the culture has to make a choice. Either we can double the number of people who have our culture, or we can double like the share of the world that has our culture. Right? And suppose that in the second scenario, fewer people actually have the culture, OK, this, just imagine counterfactually.
Robin:
Right. Right.
Agnes:
And like, it's at least it's like, plausible to me that, like the logic of cultural reproduction would go for the second over the first. Like, I'm not even saying it's intuitive that it was, I'm just saying that the thought like, yes, there needs to be some reproduction. And I think that like, if, for instance, like we just saw nobody having children or something, and like, you know, maybe only like one and 100 people were having children all across America, I think there'll be a panic, and I think it will be a cultural panic of our culture not reproducing. But if it's just like a little bit less like, "Hey, there's lots of Americans somewhat, you know, reproducing somewhat slower, who cares?" Like that, that clearly doesn't seem to be an – that clearly doesn't seem to be the impediment for the reproduction of the culture.
Robin:
I would say it seems pretty obvious that behavior today just isn't remotely near what would be maximizing, you know, long term production of people plus culture, as a culture or as a person, you were just not remotely near that maximum. So that's a somewhat separate issue than the fact we started out talking about it, which is the goals in your head don't quite match the goals that evolution seems to have for you. Those are not quite the same issue, but they're related. But you know, I would say, "Sure, it's worth sacrificing some degree of fertility or number of children for some degree of cultural increase causes cultural influence, but we're just crazy far from that optimal choice." This is not anywhere near that.
Agnes:
Well, I mean, it's, it's very, very hard to see what the optimal choice would be, just given the fact that part of what culture is doing now is like competing with other cultures, right? So, and there's competing, and there's incorporating too, right? And that's a very difficult negotiation of who do we want to be, given these other options that we see, that we see we can sort of take up some of cultural incorporation. So maybe a lot of our energy is going into questions of negotiating cultural competition and cultural incorporation. And that that's what we're doing with a lot of our time. It seems plausible to me that that's what we're doing with a lot of our time, reading all this stuff from different places, learning about all these different places, going and visiting all these different places.
Robin:
Or we could do nearly as much of that and have twice as many kids.
Agnes:
Right. But like... look, I mean, you seem to be stuck on this having a lot of kids thing. From the point of view of spreading the culture, it's just not obvious to me that it matters that much, how many kids you have.
Robin:
It does. It matters a lot.
Agnes:
Well, you – but we haven't defined in any clear way what it is for the culture to propagate. Like, maybe what it fundamentally is like to strive to be a uni culture.
Robin:
Because we have models of, you know, genes and culture co-evolving. And what that means is you end up with more descendants who have the culture, but you know, you can't win by having a lot more culture and far fewer descendants that...
Agnes:
I think you totally could if the – so that's kind of what more is, right?
Robin:
Relative to other groups.
Agnes:
Like... well, right. I mean, so but like, but that's why I say it's not just relative to other groups, because we are actually in competition with those groups. And some of these choices are competitive choices, right? And so we're deciding, so, you know, I'm deciding, do I go to war with your people? And it's like, if I go to war with your people, I'm going to have fewer descendants, because some of my descendants’ decisions are going to die in the war, right? But like, there's clearly a kind of, you know, cultural evolution pro, I think of the war. I mean, if there's been negative, which I could lose, and you could eliminate me, you know. But that's like, this is how the Greeks and the Trojans saw it as like, it's a battle of the cultures, and we're going to erase even the memory of your people, right? So the thought there is like, you know, it's just less about having descendants, and more about establishing the hegemony and the reproduction of that culture, which requires descendants as a necessary condition. But it doesn't at all suggest that you would want to maximize your descendants. And I mean, look in the same way that like, we need money in order to survive, right? We need money to have food or whatever.
Robin:
Yeah.
Agnes:
And like, but neither of us is really engaged in maximizing the amount of money that we have that is we could design our lives so as to make more money than we do that would require other sacrifices, right? And you're just like, "Yeah, but anything you do you need money for it. So why aren't we just spending a lot more of our time and energy making more money? Money is useful for everything." And it's like, "Yes, that's true, right. But that kind of trade off doesn't always mean that you're going to pursue money." And similarly, I don't think you're always going to pursue descendants for the same reason.
Robin:
So, there are clearly like some cultural markers that you could try to spread that really wouldn't have much of a payoff for your genes. Like, for example, say pink and purple. Say, you just want more people to wear pink and purple in the world, right?
Agnes:
Mm-hmm. And I do.
Robin:
And say you become part of a coalition that pushes more pink and purple in the world.
Agnes:
I wish, I wish there were more of me, but I sadly, it's one-person coalition. OK.
Robin:
And exactly. Well, so far but soon maybe this change, right? And you could succeed in pushing pink and purple into the world.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
But it might be that your genes just don't get much man benefit from that, right?
Agnes:
Right.
Robin:
That is, if you were famously the originator of the pink and purple movement, and people celebrated you for that and wanted to have sex with you and have your babies, et cetera, then your genes might gain or they wanted to feed you and celebrate you at meetings where they pay you a lot of money to come talk to them about pink and purple. You see, now your genes can be benefiting from this cultural winning. But merely pushing pink and purple in a way that nobody knows it was you but you managed to make the world more pink and purple. You should expect behaviors, sort of genes that would induce you to have that sort of behavior, those would lose. They would be discouraged by evolution. That is because it's not feeding back into the genes. So genes will encourage culture when culture feeds back into the genes. Ways in which genes would encode a habit of promoting a kind of culture that would not reward the genes, we should expect decay of the gene. So the kinds of cultural evolution we should expect to see are the kinds of cultural evolution that tend to feed back and reward genes.
Agnes:
OK. So like the speech you just made is a perfect reflection of the thing I said earlier about you presupposing that the genes are the throw weight. And what I wanted to suggest is like the genes aren't the thing that matters anymore, they were the thing that mattered, right? But until they got us to culture, and now genes are just kind of a vehicle. It doesn't actually matter and it's because culture takes over, and because it evolves much more quickly than genes, right? It doesn't matter whether my descendants are...
Robin:
The same arguable type of cultural elements, right? If we have a culture, and say there's a culture, maybe your hometown.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
And your hometown has a culture of promoting pink and purple, but your hometown doesn't get credit, or rewards for promoting pink and purple, then the culture that is, the culture of your small town, would get discouraged and not rewarded compared to other cultures. That is other towns that promoted things that rewarded their town again, would be gaining out – their cultural habits would be gaining out against this habit of your town that was promoting pink and purple, but not promoting your town.
Agnes:
But it's – like suppose that my town really didn't care about its other habits besides the pink and purple thing, we're really, we're one cause town, right?
Robin:
OK.
Agnes:
And suppose that we succeed in promoting pink and purple and lots of other towns take it up, and like lots of people are wearing pink and purple, right? And nobody remembers my town. And in fact, my town is annihilated. But nonetheless, our culture has gotten transmitted and is being transmitted in a large scale.
Robin:
Only this one piece of your culture was transmitted.
Agnes:
Right.
Robin:
And all the rest was lost. So whatever cultural structures, there would have been, that would have allowed your town to exist to promote this behavior, that cultural structure will be discouraged by this evolution.
Agnes:
Right. So I think that's right. And so that's why what you would expect, as sort of culture takes over as the throw-weight, that you would expect that it would become very important to be propagating all of the elements of the culture that are seen as the significant elements of the culture.
Robin:
As a package together.
Agnes:
Either as a package or independently, but to propagate all of them. I mean, you see people...
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
I think a place where you see this very strongly is in the questions over the canon, right? The literary...
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
What are the great books? OK? That's – it's like an evergreen topic for Twitter, right? And the idea that such and such a novel is a great novel. It's like, there's this pressure, and you could almost – you could think of it as a cultural evolutionary pressure to propagate Middlemarch as a great novel. So when I on Twitter, show up and can say, "I find this kind of boring." People are like, "No, no, no, this... we need to propagate this."
Robin:
Right, right. So a standard story is that organisms are packages of genes that are cooperating together, right?
Agnes:
Mm-hmm
Robin:
Individual genes can be out there competing, but they don't work very well unless they have these packages, organisms are packages. Similarly, culture comes in packages, too. Individual cultural elements would be like the promoting pink and purple, those really can't win against packages of culture that support each other. So what we should expect are cultural packages supporting each other. So but again, when we think about how can cultural packages support each other, if we think that is what's structuring your purposes, and then we look at your actual purposes, we could still see disconnects there, we could still have this problem of, "I think I want to do this, but I don't see how that promotes a cultural package."
Agnes:
Right. So I think I am much more on board with and clearer on the problem if we understand it as a cultural propagation problem than a genetic propagation problem. That is, if you ask me, like, you know, like, the aesthetic that I like in coffee shops or something. Like there's a weird, very specific kind of airspace aesthetic, that people who like the kind of coffee I like, also like the aesthetic in a coffee shop. And it's like, Why do I... and I like it, like lots of people hate it, but... I think some of them are pretending to hate it, or they don't like the coffee because somewhat goes together with liking coffee that you like this aesthetic. But if you actually think about, like, how are these things connected? They're not connected at all, right? But it's clear that you've been sold on this package, right, of this good coffee goes together with this, you know, third wave decor.
Robin:
OK. So there's a coffee package style.
Agnes:
Yeah, exactly.
Robin:
That can propagate itself but it will need to have the support of other cultural evidence, including people's work – the people who go there, they'll need to, like have jobs maybe and get medicine and not kill themselves, right, and not take drugs and die, right? In order for that to promote, it's not just enough that they have a coffee that matches an architectural style.
Agnes:
Right. Right. No...
Robin:
They're going to need a whole bunch of other cultural packages that go with it that are also promoting winning behavior. And one of those parts of the packages will be fertility, that is in the long run, if they don't have fertility, they will go away.
Agnes:
Sure. I feel like this is one of these things. It's like the status thing in our last conversation where it's like, there's like a gravitational pull of like the importance of fertility that's not strictly related to this topic, right? But in a way, the reason I brought up the coffee shop thing was I wanted to say, to sort of acknowledge that it's like uncomfortable for me to raise the question, why do I like about this aesthetic?
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
Right? Where in effect what I have done is...
Robin:
How was it reproducing itself in me.
Agnes:
I have bought a package, right, a cultural package. And...
Robin:
And you understand all the parts.
Agnes:
And... right, I didn't evaluate all of the parts independently. I think that that's right. I think that we do that all the time though I actually do think that those sorts of things are subject to inquiry like they're...
Robin:
Of course, sure.
Agnes:
They're subject to critique and then subject to change, but I do think we just do buy the packages in that way.
Robin:
And I think we should end that here. So thanks for talking, Agnes.
Agnes:
Yeah.