Mark Changizi

speaker

236 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard Nov 2024

Mark Changizi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast · 502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi · 28 Nov 2024 podcast

You know, when in this world, you know, but just expressions, we're just a little bit smarter, you know, but what we have is all, which is why we can understand other animals, right?

That's right. And dogs and we get along great. Um, it's the cultural technology that's fundamentally changed who we are. So, uh, The first big one, of course, was the language, which has made us the language ape, but we're not the language ape per se at all.

This is a cultural product of this evolution, cultural evolution, co-evolving, not co-evolving, just evolving for us to plug into our brains and give us language when we never had one. harnessing object event systems to make it so that we can suddenly communicate with one another. And then music is evolving to the sounds of human movement recognition systems.

And then much more recently, writing evolving, culturally evolving, just to look like natural objects allowing us to read. All of these things are exactly who we take to be human today, but none of this is our human 1.0 selves.

That's right.

So I feel like this is a – so, for example, typically for language, you've got two sides. You've got – and they're gorillas, like Steven Pinker and Chomsky. Chomsky's been on and off of this for years. But roughly, you've got the language instinct folks – That we've evolved over millions of years or hundreds of thousands of years to evolve to really have a language instinct.

There's part of our brain that's designed for language. And I think that's wrong. And the other side, all these years was like, no, we're infinitely classic, infinitely malleable. We do all these things we never evolved to do, like riding horses, whatever. Like there's millions of things we do. We're just infinitely classic. Well, that's totally wrong as well.

And in fact, Pinker's one of the best people that argues against that. Neither of these are right, right? So my view is like completely, it's like, no, this is a kind of zoo-centrism in my opinion, because each of these are violating zoo-centrism. Zoo-centrism is the hypothesis that we're animals, for God's sakes. We're not special having a language- Right, you assume continuity.

There's just continuity. We're not special and have a language instinct that makes us human like nobody else's language instinct, but we do. And we're not special- In the blank slate, all these other animals, they're filled with instincts, but we, we're blank slates. We're like totally have all these general plastic mechanisms. No, that's just another violation of zoocentrism. We are just animals.

And to the extent that we now seem to be something fundamentally different is because of cultural evolution. Another blind designer, blind watchmaker that has got up and running. several hundred thousand years ago, mildly, that's been designing all this tech for us and giving all these new powers. And the fun, of course, language is a big one. Writing is another huge one.

But all around us right now, there's so much more we can't even put our finger, like the phones, all of these things are constantly evolving to raise us to be becoming more and more intelligent and farther from the other great apes.

But a preserved zoocentrism would be the way I'd like to say it. So I'd like to think of this, if you really want to be the Galileo of biology and say, look, no, there's nothing special about the Earth. The world doesn't move around the Earth. The Earth is just one part of the... Same thing for us. We're not special. Then this allows you to say it. There's no language instinct. It's really...

We're just animals. And to the extent that we seem not to be, it's because of culture. But we're truly a zoo-centric creature. Right, right, right.

Pleasure.

Thank you.

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