Hello. Welcome to week two of office hours. This is still my office. Most of it is still a mess. I'm still not eager to show you much of it. Unfortunately, I'm having to show you more of it this week, because I made the mistake last week of not taping in the format that the Coursera platform demands a wide screen format. So now I am doing that and you can see. More of my office, for example, my dog, Frazier, sleeping over there on the chair, possibly wondering why I'm doing, what I am doing here, talking to something other than a person or a dog which or the things he normally sees me talk to. Okay, so this week The award for most creative metaphor related to a meditation retreat goes to Wynn Matthews. In the discussion forum, he said, in retreats at times of broad stillness, I've experienced the feeling of being squeezed like a toothpaste tube. What does he mean? I'm going to hold you in suspense for a second and go over to the Facebook page where Carl Mountain said something that's related to what Win Matthew said. Carl Mountain says having seen me say in one of the lectures that our feelings are not necessarily to be trusted He says, I would suggest as many Buddhist teachers have already that, that is not just feelings that can't be trusted but moreover you can't trust your thoughts as being true. That is certainly the case, but there is a connection between those two issues. The, the untrustworthiness of feelings and of thoughts, and that brings us back to the tube of toothpaste. What Winn Mathews went on to say, about this feeling of being squeezed like a tube, tube of toothpaste was, there's a very subtle pressure, tension, constriction, and out of that comes a thought stream. A reaction to the feeling tone. So in other words. He was sensing, when he reflected on his interior life, as you are inclined to do on a meditation retreat that, that, that feelings were governing thoughts. That feelings were eliciting thoughts. He says earlier, every sensory input comes with a feeling counter Pleasant, unpleasant, neutral and reactions to those feeling tones cause certain though streams. I, I think, I think it's right. I mean, I think, I think thoughts certainly can illicit feelings, but feelings can illicit thoughts and I think they do so more subtly than we Often realize. And you become aware of these kinds of subtle things through the meditation practice and, I think a retreat is particularly place, good place to become aware of them. Now as for the virtues of this degree of attentiveness to your. Interior life, into kind of a mindful perspective Nguyen goes on to say the following. This was in response to a post in the discussion forum by Camilla Alkin, who had raised the question of distinction, distinction between feelings and emotions. And here's What, what [UNKNOWN] Matthews went on to say in the course of his reply. When my wife says something that I don't like, and a strong feeling of dislike arises in the body, and when, by the way I know exactly what you're talking about, I've been there. He, he goes on to say that Being aware of the feeling of dislike, rather than, than being, you know, kind of reflexively captive to it. Changes his reaction. He says, it may take a minute for it to pass. But I'm able to respond to what she said, rather than react. And I know exactly that feeling too, I remember after my first meditation retreat, in the days after my first meditation retreat, I remember like, my kids would do something that would make me feel like yelling at them, and I would get the feeling To yell at them, the feeling that normally preceded yelling at them, but it's like I would observe it and not act on it. It was amazing. And, that's something that's easier for me to do right after meditation retreat. But at anytime, if the, the more I am practicing the meditation, the easier that kind of thing is. So like right now I'm doing 30 to 40 minutes of meditation every morning. It hasn't transformed me into a wonderful person, but my wife says it makes me a better person and she should know. So, speaking of which Cameron Kingsbury, this was in a discussion forum, says I have noticed an emphasis on separating the self from an emotion instead of saying I am angry one can say I am experiencing anger. And that That gets at the distinction, yes, between kind of owning the feeling and letting the feeling own you on the one hand, and seeing the feeling as somewhere in your realm of consciousness, but not being captivated by it. That said, I do think it's a lot harder Than than just saying this, right? I mean just saying, you know, you can't, I mean you could just say well, from now on whenever I'm angry I'll just instead of saying I am angry, I'll say I am experiencing anger. Well, no, probably no. But at times you, you, you know, I'll just say without the meditation practice It's going to be hard for little reminders like that to really take root, at least in my experience. Another feeling related question. This one came in via Twitter, and again, the, probably the surest way to get a que, make sure I at least see a question Is to address it to @darwindarma on twitter. I mean, I'm doing my best to keep up with everything on discussion forum, Facebook, Twitter and, and, and my two assistants are, are, are, are as well but I, I sometimes miss things because they go by so quickly on the forum or, and sometimes on Facebook. Whereas Twitter, for one thing, the traffic is just lower I guess. Anyway, back to Melissa, whose Twitter handle is mindxgeek. She says, if unpleasant emotions are linked to avoidance and pleasant ones to approach, how do you How to explain rage and anger. And this gets to something I shared when I quoted the 19th century biologist saying that what feelings seem to bout, be about is you know, pleasant feelings get the organism to approach things that are good for it like food. Unpleasant feelings like fear get it to escape from things like predators or, or, or live the vicinity of things like toxins. And Melissa is asking, well what about rage and anger. The, the which kind of feel bad, I guess, I guess she's saying, they kind of feel bad but you don't run away from the person, right? You, you like accost the person. Approach the person in anger. Well first of all, I'd say That quote from the biologist that was kind of in the first instance you know. When feelings arose in evolution this seems to be the kind of primordial function pos, positive and negative, pleasant and unpleasant feelings, approach/avoidance. Once you get to being as complicated as humans. It's complicated so for example, I might have pleasant feelings about one person, unpleasant feelings to another, towards another. What that leads me to do in some cases and not, not either approach or avoid either one, it leads me to say good things about the first person and bad things about the other. And there are a lot of Yeah, the more complicated the animal the more complicated things have gotten as, as evolution has you know, made use of these feelings in kind of increasingly, you might say, convoluted ways. That said, I would also suggest to Melissa, that if she pays close attention to rage and anger. She may feel like, that, she may see that, in some ways, you know? There's, there's something. Pleasant is maybe a misleading word. [LAUGH] But, but, when your anger, it feels good. Something, you know, to, to, to yell, to and also when you are angry, enraged, you feel you're right and they're wrong. And that's a good feeling, right? It may not be a true feeling, that's the point. And this gets back to the relationship between feelings and thoughts. That this feeling, which is not to be trusted, will sponsor a thought, which is not to be trusted. Which is that you're always right and the other people are wrong. How is Fraiser doing? Yeah, I see he's he's not really inspired by my little discourse here. Fraiser's the least, I have two dogs, Fraiser is the least Buddhist dog in the house. The less Buddhist of the two. But maybe I'll save that for another day. okay. So the, the. But one last thing on that. The I think if I've got this quote right the, the Buddha, is said to have said that anger is the. Unless he was talking about hatred but I think it was anger. The poison root with the honey tip suggesting that that he too thought the, there was something Actually, pleasant about anger and, and, and, and seductively pleasant. and, in any event, it is certainly true that all of these subtleties of feeling and their connection to thought and so on, awareness of that is something that, in principle, mindfulness Can foster. And in principle, you can carry that into your everyday life. And be you know less, less vulnerable to the the, the misleading drift and, and the untruthful drift sometimes of both feelings and thoughts. Now I'm going to stop here because For various reasons, and, and then talk about some other stuff. Okay, now some people I think in the discussion forum in particular, have raised questions about kind of the validity of Evolutionary psychology. You know, how confident can we be of, of the various, kinds of, you know, theories that you're hearing about, isn't this, isn't this all very conjectural, actually some of it is quite conjectural Usually I label the conjectural stuff by using the word conjectural. I think I've said that several times in the lectures already. When I'm talking about things that I think are, are particularly speculative. And some things are more speculative that others in, in evolutionary psychology. I want to talk a little about a kind of a handicap it faces compared to some other sciences. Okay. You know, in physics, in much of physics, you have a theory about the way particles behave You, you can do experiments set up an experiment that, that could in principle falsify that hypothesis. Depending on how it turns out you do the experiment, it sheds light on the hypothesis. Evolutionary psychology though is kind of about history, right. In fact, that distinguishes it from ordinary psychology. Ordinary psychology tries to discern the structure of the mind. Evolutionary psychology does that as well and draws on many of the findings of ordinary psychology. But to that, it adds the question of well, how did this structure come to be, the way, it is, or some aspects of the structure, we seem to be discerning of the mind. Design features of natural selection. Well that's a question that's about the past. It's about history. And one thing you can't do, is rewind history and play it again with some of the variables altered, to test your hypothesis about the past. Historians can't do it. Evolutionary psychologists can't do it. And in fact, evolutionary biologists in general can't do it. You know, when you think about it, some of the things you probably just accepted as truths about the biological world, like, well, polar bears are white because that helps them blend in in an, in an atmosphere of snow and ice, right? It's good camouflage. [INAUDIBLE] Well, that's a plausible story, it's probably true. But we don't have the kind of evidence to support that, that you sometimes see in other sciences, right? Because we can't, we can't say, well, let's go back, you know, millions of years. And make half of the Arctic Circle green, and leave the other half white. And see if. If, if the bears that evolve in the green part are different from the bears that evolve, right? We can't do that. We can't do it in the case of human evolution. Now you don't generally see people get all upset when people spec, you know when, when a scientist kind of asserts that the, the polar bears were white for purposes of camouflage. People don't usually get all upset and go how do you know that? Because it's not a very explosive area, right? You know, polar bears, right? It's like, you don't, you don't get, get a lot of dinner table arguments about polar bears. Whereas you do get dinner table arguments about all kinds of aspects of human experience And, and the role of genes in human experience, in human thought, and so on. And so, in the case of evolutionary psychology. The standards of evidence issue. Although it, it is an issue that pervades evolutionary biology, gets a particular comment. And that's good, because, we should be clear that, some of these theories are hard to test. There are ways to test theories, so for example if children are viewed from the cynical perspective of natural selection, kind of reproductive assets, then, for reasons I won't get into, that should mean that different ages parents, their value to parents is different. And, one, evolution of psychology has tested this prediction by looking at how, the extenuate parents grieve over the deaths of children in different ages. In theory, they should grieve over more teenager's death than a three weeks old Three week old baby's death. But less than a, than a, than a 59 year old child's death. And the findings in the, you know? The study seemed to bear out the hypothesis. So there, there are ways, you can, you can get around the kind of, challenges, you know? The kind of evidentiary. Even, kind of, I guess, epistemological. Challenges posed by any historical science, but it's not that easy, and we should, keep that in mind. See, the same things with physics, by the way. The, the cosmological, you know, the theories about the birth of the, the universe are much harder to test. Than theories about the, the current structure of the physical world, so, you know, all I can say is, in general in science. All of the different sciences have different Different kinds of, of challenges and their findings have and, and all of them have different findings that are different levels of kind of solidity. Or, or warrant different levels of confidence. But the general rule is That the best, the simple, choosing, the criterion is the simplest theory that explains the data wins at least for the time being. May turn out to be wrong, but even when, when the best theory, quote best theory is conjectural Because that's what all the theories are. It's still the case that, you know, that's the, for the moment the, you know a conjectural but plausible theory that's simpler and more straight forward and more consistent with the facts that other theories is, is the theory we take seriously. In, in some cases in evolutionary psychology, that is the case. Conjectural yet In the running. And that's and I try to you know, calibrate, express the level of confidence that I think different theories deserve. I, I may not always succeed. I may not always remember to do it. But, but I try. And, and I just warned you, that as we go on we will see some pretty conjectural Things that I'll say. Because a lot of this is kind of untrodden ground. It's not like a lot of evolutionary psychologists have, have gotten seriously into Buddhism, and, and started trying to make the connections between the two. So it's really it, it's fertile ground. And when Any field of inquiry is kind of fresh, fertile ground, you see a lot of conjectural stuff, and that's the way the scientific dialogue gets started. Speculative theories, you throw them out there and you see what people say. In some cases, they may provoke other people to come up with better theories, and that's good. That's part of the process and that's where we are here And I guess that's about. Is there anything else I want to say about that. Well I guess well you know, being, being an organism and being designed to pursue my self-interest, I should mention that my book The Moral Animal very much Tries to address this. It's a book for the unconvinced and I try a kind of casual book length to explain why this world view broadly deserves confidence, even though individual hypotheses deserve varying degrees of confidence. And so it's there. If anybody is just, deeply deeply interested in the question of evolutionary psychology's validity. But, but the main point is just, you know this is what, this is what science is. All, you know, progress starts as, hypothesis begin as speculation. And and then they either amass evidence over time or, or they don't. Or they are replaced by a hypothesis that's clearly superior. And that's life. And I think that's probably enough of office hours for this week. Although there are so many good questions It's kind of frustrating. I really think in theory, if I had enough time, I should go to like, you know, just a, a more, a schedule of like, you know, like every day, or every hour, every minute, you know, take another office hours. But, but other things Other things in truth. So anyway, we'll see you when we see you. Thing, one more thing just quickly you could be excused for doubting that my dog Frazier is an actual dog because he has exhibited so little movement in the course of this office hours. And I just want to Establish that Frasier is an actual dog. And the way you do that, I've found is if you, if Frasier hears the sound of me reaching into a box of shredded wheat, that He sometimes bring to life, let's see if this works. [BLANK_AUDIO] [SOUND] Hey Frasier. Look, it's a box of shredded, Shredded Wheat. You want some? Ray sure wouldn't mind some Shredded Wheat. [SOUND] You want to be seen eating it on, camera? [LAUGH] You just want to be seen eating it period. Okay. Let me give. I'm going to both dogs a little Shredded Wheat. I feel that, I shouldn't hold them in suspense like that. I do want to show you the other dog Milo. Because Milo is actually. Come here Milo, I just want the people to see because. Okay, that's Milo. Milo is actually closer to being a Buddhist than Frasier for reasons that maybe I'll explain in a subsequent office hours. I mean doesn't, doesn't he look kind of wise in a way? [INAUDIBLE] Okay. Next time.
