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 can't see anything because you're just looking at these, but where in real life, you're in a bush, you pretty much see the entire world outside of it. You can, you know, peek from outside of your bush. Oh yeah, that's interesting. So you had to keep shaking to get different shots than someone shoots you because they see you wiggling in the bush.

In real life, you're designed to be in these cluttery environments and to see perfectly well beyond that. Without having to move, too. Without having to move. And yes, you're losing what's behind you. But then you can start calculating how much of the environment can I see if I'm a forward-facing animal with this X-ray ability. That is, my eyes are bigger than the leaves.

Versus a rabbit, let's say, effectively, who has a full panoramic view. Yeah, he can see entirely behind him. But you can actually then calculate how much of the world outwards can you see. He's actually – I can see up to – if you think about it two-dimensionally, I can see up to – One, two, three, three and a half times better than him if you think about it as a two-dimensional grid.

But in fact, it's more of a three-dimensional grid. Then you have to sort of think about spheres, sphere packing problem. And so I can see only the front half of my little sphere is. But if the little – the world is sort of built out of these spheres of these little –

surrounded by lots of clutter, I can see the six spheres in front of me fully, and I can't see beyond that, and only half of mines, but I can see now six and a half times more of the, there's like simple models that you can build of simple models of forested kinds of environments where you can show that now you can see really almost an order of magnitude more. It's see the most.

It's not a little bit more stereoscopy here, but a little bit less seeing. No, it's just see the most. And so animals have, depending on their environment, they have more forward-facing eyes, the greater the extent to which they're in cluttered, forested kinds of environments.

And so one desideratum, see the most, suffices to explain all the variability that we find across mammals in terms of how forward-facing eyes work.

I guess they're… Yeah, I would say they are.

Even there, even in the African plains. So even when you have animals in the same habitat, you have some animals that find microniches, for example, cats, who like to hang out in the clutter and wait for their prey. And then let's say the gazelles who don't want to be anywhere near that clutter because they can't see crap when they're inside it.

So they will find micro environments within even habitats that at first glance, we kind of don't think of them as very cluttery, but animals that are good at clutter will find those cluttery spots and leverage them.

Way before there were social animals, every animal would have had emotions, right? So these are just rough and ready. One way to think about emotions is just states that you're in that feel like something that motivates you to engage in certain kinds of behaviors, right? And they would have all been dead-eyed shark-like creatures.

They're filled with lots of emotions, filled on the inside with emotions. But they're not social animals, so they never had to signal to anybody anything, right? So what really, what Darwin was concerned about, it was like, okay, that's great. There's all these animals with all these emotions and it feels like something to be them.

And there's like all this internal stuff and there's no reason for them to tell anybody. So why are all these social animals signaling so much to one another? What's the point of it? What does this language mean? So what...

What we do here is just ask, if you're social animals and you don't have a language of any kind that we're so used to, you need to have, what is the optimal language stimulus signaling system such that you can carry out negotiations and compromises and you can negotiate and someone can back down or someone can raise and someone can do.

So let me give you an example where people can come to a decision and come to an agreement Without ever saying a word. We do this when we play poker. So I know something and you know something. I've got cards, a certain hand. You've got cards, a certain hand. And we don't know. And imagine that we can never talk about it. Like it turns out I could say, actually, it's, you know.

But imagine I've got these things that I know in the world and you've got these things that we're arguing over. Zucchini bread keeps it. Arguing over some particular thing that we want to split. And here we want to split the pot, whatever, the ante. There's the ante in there. We want to get the ante out. And I can't talk. And we can even play online where we can't even talk, right?

There's not even any emotional expressions there. But what I do to make my case is I just slide in a certain amount of stake. I stake something and then you stake something. And it could be that after a while, I go, okay, I think he's, Jordan's pretty confident. I'm going to, I'm going to fold. As I'm agreeing, okay, your hand is stronger than mine. We've come to an agreement.

I never signaled anything. I never spoke anything. Um, but we nevertheless managed to solve a potential conflict because it could call, call would be to say, screw you. I'm going to like, we're going to go all in. And that means in this, in the case of poker, just laying down to see whose cards are better.

And so figuring out who, you know, whose cards are better in real life might be, oh yeah, I'm a better fighter than you or whatever it might've come to blows or whatever it might be. Or, um, Something that we don't want to have to get involved with all the time. We'd like to make our lives much smoother in terms of the utility- The path to negotiation. Right. So poker is how you do it.

And so what we're able to show is that you need to have the ability, you need to have a signal that says, I think I'm really confident or really, really confident. And you do this by shoving in social capital chips, shoving in reputation. So when you signal- pride, or I also signal that I don't think you're confident at all, I have disdain for you.

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