Robert Tracinski - What is Human Nature?

Speaker 0 00:00:01 All right. Well, uh, thank you for joining us today. Uh, I'm Scott shifts substituting for the Atlas society, CEO, Jennifer Grossman, uh, and I'm looking forward to, uh, Atlas society, senior fellow Robert discussing what is human nature. And after Rob offers his view, uh, we're going to open it up to questions on the subject. So feel free to raise your hand and we'll bring you up to be part of the discussion of the session is being recorded for educational purposes. Rob, thanks so much for doing this today. Uh, what is human nature? Speaker 1 00:00:39 All right. Well, as usual, I'm glad to be here. Uh, so this is a topic I've been, uh, mulling over for some time. Uh, human nature is a core concept of philosophy and of all, you know, any moral debates that people have. You have a question of what is human nature, quote unquote, human nature. What does that imply for how we ought to behave and how we can expect people to behave? But I think the concept itself and the idea of what is the concept of human nature is someone infrequently discussed. And the reason why it's come up to me for a long time, why, what have I been wanting to write about this for a while? And I want to talk it through today is because there's one particular misconception about human nature or one particular view of human nature. That's I think is different from the objectivist view that I think is very, very common. Speaker 1 00:01:31 I noticed that many years and years ago and many times since, and it's the assumption that human nature means some kind of in-built hardwired pre-programmed tendencies. So if you say something is something is not human nature in this viewpoint, unless we are automatically predisposed to do it. Now, I've noticed this somewhat recently in the, um, like a couple of years ago, there were all these discussions about, uh, the legacy of enlightenment and, you know, Steven Pinker had a book and Jonah Goldberg had a book. And one of the themes that tends to come out of that was the idea that reason is a natural that are rational and enlightenment lightened society is you have the problem with the reason we have so much trouble with maintaining it is because it's unnatural. It goes against human nature. And the idea is that, you know, it goes against the predispositions we have as leftovers from our origins as cavemen. Speaker 1 00:02:28 Uh, I actually, I did a review of journal Goldberg's book where I called them. I think the title I used was the unfrozen caveman intellectual, you know, that, that, uh, it's based on a Saturday night live skit where they have, it's sort of take off a Matlock or something like that. They have this, um, you know, in Matlock, he always has the address. I'm just an old country, lawyer kind of routine. Uh that's you know, the later Andy Griffith years and, uh, this one is the, uh, the lawyer is an unfrozen. Caveman is live just on a frozen caveman, your, your modern ways frightened and confused me. Uh, and, uh, that's sort of the attitude that we all, we're all unfrozen caveman. We all have these, uh, tendencies and predispositions and cognitive biases that we're, uh, susceptible to because of our origins as a, these are instincts built into us from when we started out in the caves. Speaker 1 00:03:19 And because of that re you know, uh, uh, a tribal, uh, irrational society is the normal and feels normal and comfortable to us, whereas a reason as a fragile basis for our society, because it's unnatural. Now, you can see how this kind of fits in with, uh, this would come from a conservative writer and it sort of fits in with a religious outlook and the ideas of original sin. Um, you know, the idea that we are somehow by nature, we are predisposed to act irrationally or to act in a way that's that that is uncivilized. And I noticed this actually popped up a number of years back when I, I wrote something about the, uh, uh, the latest pedophile priests gamble that was happening at the time, and, and just talked about the church, uh, being engaged in a war on human nature. What I mean by that as the church was war against, uh, sexuality, uh, and how that, you know, in, in, in its prohibitions on priests and how that it backfired on them. Speaker 1 00:04:18 And I got a Catholic coming back to me and saying, well, of course the church was in a war on human nature because human nature is this tendency, the susceptibility to sin, you know, human nature is original sin. Human nature is, is how vicious we are and how, uh, how we're, we're, we're, uh, uh, predisposed to all these irrational behaviors and all of these, uh, uh, predatory behaviors through each other. So obviously all civilization is a war on human nature, because we're a war against, uh, these innate tendency is to act in and certain destructive or, um, uh, antisocial ways. All right. Um, I'm gonna notice how this kind of undercut, even among someone like Jonah Goldberg, who's trying to make a defense of the enlightenment. It kind of has undercut it by saying, well, you know, the rational enlightened society is, is inherently unnatural, but it goes against human nature. Speaker 1 00:05:14 Um, and then I noticed that though, from coming from the other side that, uh, I think Steven Pinker is part of this. And, uh, I, when I was looking at the origins of Quill S uh, you know, this magazine for heterodox intellectuals, I noticed that there's a lot of it comes from the idea of attacking the idea of a blank slate. Now, the blank slate is the idea that we were born the Latin term as tabula rasa, that we don't have any innate tendencies or ideas that, uh, everything that humans do is based on, uh, every idea we have every, uh, uh, uh, outlook we have, every, every view of life we have is something that we built up through our own thinking. Uh, and not it wasn't, pre-programmed into us that somehow we don't come with pre-installed heart, uh, pre-installed software, uh, uh, I guess maybe firmware, would that be the right term? Speaker 1 00:06:08 Uh, and so this is the idea of, uh, and, and the, the sort of Steven Pinker and Colette attack on that is that, you know, it seems like as empiricists, they would be in favor of the idea of, of the type of the rasa, the blank slate, but they were opposed to it. And I figured out what they mean by it, but they mean by it as they to have a blank slate means that there's a lack of any innate predispositions, which in their view means that humans have no fixed nature. And anything goes, uh, you can devise any, uh, weird, uh, bizarre social scheme scheme for social improvement or reform of human beings and human nature. And there's no limit on it because human nature is endlessly, malleable, malleable, or the other version of this. You know, you can be born a man and claim you are a woman because that's how you feel. Speaker 1 00:06:56 And there is no way to gain say that because there's no such thing as human nature. All right. So they took this idea that, that if, if human nature means being programmed with innate predispositions to, to think and act a certain way, then if you say we have a blank slate thing, you're saying there is no human nature, humans are infinitely malleable, anything goes, and this outlook, by the way, I think it's very popular today, especially, uh, among the sort of evolutionary psychology set. You have the people who evolutionary psychologists is this idea that human psychology can be explained by reference to evolution. And you can come up with stories that types of new explained various human behaviors by reference to the evolutionary survival value of one behavior versus another, which supposedly led to us to be pre-programmed with various tendencies, to think a certain way, or act a certain way as survival mechanisms. Speaker 1 00:07:51 Now, I think there are various problems with evolutionary psychology, which I would love to get into in the discussion, but it goes back to this idea that reason is unnatural and anything for we do, which we do not have a, um, uh, for everything, everything for which you do not have a clear pre-programmed evolutionary response, which frankly is virtually everything in modern society is an issue on which there, you know, human nature offers no guidance. So the problem I see with this outlook is it answers the subjective with the subjective. It says there's neither arbitrary whim or there's instinct and answers one kind of rule by feeling with another kind of rule by feeling. Now you can see the appeal of evolutionary psychology here though, because it's, it's an attempt to say, well, the rule of the feelings that I'm asking you to follow the, the instincts are the pre-programmed responses. Speaker 1 00:08:46 Well, I can provide a quasi sort of rational basis for those feelings and evolutionary by describing the evolutionary survival value of this or that. Uh, but in an actual practice, that means, you know, one kind of feeling is being answered with another. Now the upshot of all this is that I think objectivism has a very different idea of what human nature is. And I want to briefly spell out what I think that is before we go to the discussion. So what is human nature? If we do have a blank slate and we don't have pre-programmed instincts or tendencies, well, what human nature refers to as it's not, if we don't have any pre-programmed tendencies that therefore, if anything goes, what we have are we have the things that we have that are in-built and, and, uh, uh, unchangeable parts of human nature is we have certain capacities and certain needs. Speaker 1 00:09:38 Now, what I mean by having certain needs is that our objective needs things that require our re we require whether he wants it or not. So the example here would be the need for food, right? You need to eat, need to eat. You need to fuel your body by the nature of, you know, the physiology of the human physiology by the nature of a human metabolism. And your need for food is independent of whether or not you have a pre-programmed desire for food. Uh, and in fact, you know, you can look at examples of this, that there are people who, um, uh, whose, you know, we all have the, the, the feeling of hunger, but your desire, your need for food, isn't dependent of whether you're hungry or not. And there are people whose, uh, desire who, whose, whose, whose pre-programmed response of hunger is actually miss wired in some way. Speaker 1 00:10:27 Uh, I saw a case a while back and found some people who are incapable of satiation. They have a good genetic disorder, and they're incapable of feeling full when they eat. So they feel constantly hungry all the time, no matter how much they eat, but clearly how much they act food, they actually need is independent of that, uh, subjective experience, a desire. Or of course there are people who are taking certain medications, like going through chemotherapy. People will lose their appetite and often experience dangerous and unhealthy levels of weight loss, because they don't feel like eating and they eat less. Uh, so obviously their need for food is independent of whether or not they feel that need or have an urge to eat. Uh, so that's the kind of objective needs I'm talking about. The human beings have the needs for food, for shelter, uh, for clothing, for, you know, being shielded from the elements, et cetera, those basic needs and everything that's built on top of that, all of those come from the unchangeable aspects of our nature and the needs of our metabolism, the needs of our, the physical needs of our body. Speaker 1 00:11:33 And then in terms of capacities, we are, we have a whole bunch of potentiality, a whole bunch of, uh, uh, uh, uh, capacities for action that we are equipped with by our nature. Uh, so that, you know, we have the capacity to walk because we have muscles of a certain shape and nerve, and the muscles and nerves are, are built in such a way that we have the capacity. The normal person has the capacity to walk. And even if you have to learn how to walk, and everybody's had a small child, those your children learn how to walk. They learn how they don't have an instinct for it. They're not born. You can compare them to like a young Colt that is, is, uh, is, stands up and walks and gallops around within minutes of being born versus a human being that takes, you know, nine months to a year to learn how to do this programming itself through trial and error. Speaker 1 00:12:27 So the idea is we have this capacity, these physical capacities to act and to think, and, but we have to, uh, actuate those capacities, tabula rasa without a pre-program without inherent programming for it, but simply by programming ourselves through trial and error and learning. Uh, so we have the capacity to gain knowledge, but we gain it by going through certain steps that there are certain tests we have to go through in order to perceive the world and make accurate observations of it and no other steps. And we have to learn those steps, uh, through experience through trial and error. And that's the reason for our capacity for bias. It's not that we have, or, or for error. It's not that we have certain inbuilt tendencies toward, uh, know pre-program tendencies for certain cognitive biases. It's that our, uh, our, our capacity for thinking has to be learned, uh, it, our knowledge of how to use it does not come automatically one way or the other. And so in the process of learning it, there are certain common errors that people are going to fall into if they don't learn it properly. All right. So I would say we're susceptible to biases rather than prone, or, uh, have a tendency towards bias. Speaker 1 00:13:43 And, uh, one of the ways to look at this as that, you know, the, the, the people who say, oh, human nature includes these inherent tendencies as they'll point out that well, look, people, people across the world, the different societies all tend to gravitate towards a certain way of doing things. Uh, there are certain things that are universal among humans, and you could take that agreement as proof of, oh, well, we, all of us have a pre-programmed instinct, a language instinct or something like that. Or you could get us proof that we live with ch with we live with is that we all live in the same reality. We're all trying to solve the same basic human problems using the same basic human capacities. And therefore, if we are all arrive at very similar solutions is because we're all dealing with the same problems. We're all encountering the same reality. Speaker 1 00:14:34 We all have the same basic human, uh, capacities that we're trying to actualize. Uh, and, uh, I think that now, so that's sort of the, the objectivist idea of what human nature is compared to the, I think the very common, especially today, the sort of evolutionary psychology view of human nature, as we have a set of inbuilt tendencies or pre-programmed behaviors, and that's, that's what constitutes human nature. And that's what you have to work around to developing the morality or in developing a social system. Now, the advantage of, I want to talk about all the w in the disk, I'll open up the discussion. We could talk about what difference these two different views make. But I think that the advantage of the objectivist view of human nature, which is we are tabula rasa, that our nature consists of these capacities, uh, that we use to solve these basic human needs, but that we are, we, everything is learned and invented by us through experience through trial and error through choice is that it lets us be men and not cavemen. Speaker 1 00:15:43 And I think it does a much better example of explaining a much better job of explaining how it is that we rose up into all the unusual and unnatural things that we do, uh, in, in, in modern society, in a, in a modern, advanced, enlightened society, things that cannot, I think the explained just by an extension of us acting on whatever was programmed into us by evolution as cavemen, but can actually be explained by us being able to do things that, that, uh, to be able, being able to program ourselves and using our capacities in response to our basic needs, in response to our CA our encounter with reality, being able to program ourselves and raise ourselves up to much higher levels of survival than would be possible if we were just going on in built pre-programmed, um, uh, uh, responses or tendencies. Speaker 0 00:16:41 That's great. And, uh, I want to invite, uh, people up from the audience. Um, I, in preparing for this, I, I saw the, uh, human nature, one that you brought up about the priest, and also you had an article about the future of augmentation, which kind of touched on human nature a little bit. And I'm just curious, is there a point at which technology has an impact on human nature? Speaker 1 00:17:07 Well, that, that's kind of interesting. Uh, I think my, my feet on the, so I did, this is the piece that did for real, for a future, um, uh, sort of futurist publication I was doing for the real clear group, a number of years back. And it was on this idea of what about human augmentation? Cause there's a lot of chatter about it right now. It's kind of a bit of a trendy Silicon valley thing. And you know, this is like Elon Musk is developing this a thing called link, which I've, some people have a lot of skepticism about, and I think it's probably valid, but this idea that you could put implants in your brain and you could do a, you could add on to the capacities of your brain. And I, I think as something, so as with a lot of things I wrote for real clear future, that piece was putting a little bit of cold water on those speculations as anything that's going to happen any time soon. Speaker 1 00:17:56 Uh, so that, you know, because a lot of that is, you know, people getting out, getting really getting caught away from themselves with this idea that, oh, we're gonna, you know, in five years, we're going to put these implants in our brain and expand our capacity for memory and our expand our capacity for this. It's not going to happen in five or 10 years. I think it will eventually happen. And that will raise the question of how does human nature change? What are the requirements change? I don't think human nature will change fundamentally, but I think that, uh, what will happen is we will grow and augment in power. And partly that article was my answer to the robot apocalypse people, because I was, I was doing this publication dealing with emerging technology and future technology. And when you do that, it's really like a whole series of people coming up with, with, with, um, ideas for how human beings are going to be destroyed by technology. Speaker 1 00:18:49 Right? So one of them is the rope or the robot popups, and they're going to come along and the robots are going to get, there's going to have artificial intelligence and the robots are going to get smarter than us and stronger than us. And then we're all going to be doomed. And if we're lucky, they'll keep us as pets. And I, one of the things I pointed out is that as if human augmentation is eventually possible, what we will do is that as we develop these technologies to make more and more powerful brains and things like that, we won't just let the robots have it well, we'll plug ourselves into it and we'll create that augmented intelligence for ourselves. But I think that's all going to have to be built onto and grafted on to how human beings, you know, th the, the capacities were given by nature and how human beings work now. So I'm not sh I'm skeptical that, that love her to a fundamental change in what human nature is. It will lead to an augmentation and the power and range of, of what we already have. Speaker 0 00:19:48 That's great. Uh, David, did you have anything Speaker 2 00:19:54 I'm going to, I've got various ideas here, but, um, uh, Rob is already hit on most of them. So, um, I'm going to hold off for now. Thank you. Um, and you follow the discussion. Speaker 0 00:20:10 All right. Good. Well, um, you know, I have this random quote of, uh, you know, the key to what you, so recklessly call human nature. The open secret you live with yet dread to name is the fact that man is a, being a volitional consciousness, man has no automatic code for survival. And I'm curious how you kind of integrate that into your view. Speaker 1 00:20:34 Oh yeah. So that, that's what I mean with the idea that, you know, the advantage of this outlook on human nature is it allows us to live as men and not cave men. Uh, and, uh, so in, in the, I don't think it was part of the piece on human augmentation. I did, but, uh, elsewhere, I came across some interesting speculation of people saying somebody saying human beings are already augmented in the sense that, uh, the way our brain, the theory here was that the way our brains work has already been changed, not by some futuristic technology, but by our cultural, uh, achievements, but by, you know, so that, uh, the various, uh, ideas that we've developed and practices we've developed as a civilized society, actually all through the way the human brain works and make, make it possible to do more and accomplish more, uh, like language, for example, you know, the use of language, uh, or, um, uh, uh, I'm trying to remember what the examples were, but I think the language was the primary one that it actually changes the way memory works and, and basically increases the capacity of our brain that we've already altered the way our brain works by the cultural software that we pass down from generation to generation, by loading this cultural software edge, teaching our children about this, this way of thinking ways of acting that we actually have already augmented the capacity of our brains and changed the way our brains work relative to the way they worked beforehand. Speaker 1 00:22:07 So that's, and that's the thing that I think is really powerful is that one idea I've been toying around with a lot recently in the last few years is the crucial role that volition has in conceptual thinking that the fact that we are able to, we're not programmed, but we are capable of programming ourselves, that we're a self programming, uh, a creature creature, this capable of self programming that that's the, the role, the central role the volition has in our consciousness. That it's what volition is, what gives us the ability to be self programming. And that's what allows us to augment our capacities so far beyond what we're given by nature. And so I think that's part of what iron Rand is, is getting at. There is that, that self programming ability that we're not just pushed around by whatever programming was loaded into us, uh, by the factory when we were cave men, but that we can, we can reprogram and, and, and, uh, we can reprogram, we can, sorry, not reprogrammed, but we can program ourselves to engage in, in terms of our behavior in terms of our thinking methods. And then in that, in that way, we go beyond far beyond what was given to us just by habit or by, um, by imitation or by, or by nature. Speaker 2 00:23:33 Um, Scott, if I could jump in with, uh, a couple of examples, uh, that I think, um, relate to what Robin's is saying about augmentation. Um, one, one is that a lot of the augmentation has to do with, um, enhancing our sense, um, our sense of sense of faculties, of perception, um, glasses to correct visual problems are centuries old. That is an outward, that's a piece of technology. Uh, we take it for granted now, but it's a piece of technology that corrected for an inborn, um, uh, deficit that some people have. Um, similarly there's a lot, been a lot of work with blind people in, um, trying to invent ways to give them the experience of the world around them, through, uh, the touch, uh, modality with sensors that, um, provide the, the equivalent of a sensory of a visual grid. There's a lot of those things around, um, there's an entire field called embodied cognition, the whole universal approach to, uh, of it added, I mean, includes everything from note taking that externalizes ideas so we can remember them more easily, um, in the technology that we're using right now. Speaker 2 00:25:02 Uh, we didn't have 30 years ago, um, where we can communicate and talk to each other, um, without leaving our homes. And, um, but there's also the cultural evolution of Robin's talking about. My favorite example is numbers, or we all think in Arabic, numerous now, including zero, which took centuries centuries for people to understand what zero was. It didn't seem like a quantity. So finally we have a system of numbers. We've all learned it in grade school, adding subtracting things, but trying to just be like Roman numerals or with, you know, counting, you know, an Abacus or something, um, whether or not that has effected the brain, it has certainly, um, become automatic on our parts, but it was a human invention. Um, and the capacity for it may have been in built, but it was discovered and then applied by all of us. So, um, you know, I think the distinction between what's the, the capacities that are inbuilt in human nature, um, and the, the content, including the, uh, many of the, not just, you know, subject knowledge, but many of the techniques and, um, the methods of thinking are, um, we have through invention, but the, you mentioned occurred because we have the inborn capacity to discover and produce. Speaker 2 00:26:34 So that's Rob that's. Yeah. Well, here's another example. My favorite examples, and this sort of thing is, um, this is from a professor I had in college who was, Speaker 1 00:26:43 Uh, uh, teaching ancient Greek. And he talked about how the earliest Greek writings, there's a change in, in ancient Greek writings that before a certain period, um, the sorts of things that, uh, he said that before a certain period writing is treated sort of like a musical score. Is there sort of more as a note to a performer? So, you know, the, the primary method of communicating was oral. You would speak something aloud to a group of people and the texts was there a sort of the, the, the score to be performance by the performer. And so things that you would do in speech, like contractions were never included in the writing. And then it's that there's a certain point at which suddenly contractions and the things that you would do when actually speaking the words are put in the writing and where people begin to treat writing as something that talks to them directly. Speaker 1 00:27:41 So the experience do you and I, that that's just totally normal for a modern civilized person where you sit down, you know, an illiterate society, you sit down and you read a book and the, when your experience of the book, because the author is speaking to you directly, his point was, that was not how writing was used until this very distinct period, about 2000 a little over 2000 years ago, where you see it happening in the way people are writing that they're right in a more conversational style as if the book itself is supposed to be speaking to you. And just imagine how that changes the amount of information you can take it. And, you know, it reprograms your brains, be able to take in this enormous amount of information from other people in a method that is different from, and faster and more widely accessible than having to talk to a person, you know, using, you know, through speech. Speaker 1 00:28:39 Uh, so it's another way in which our, our way of thinking about the world, that our way of taking on information gets, gets programmed by us and programmed in AF programs and new ways. So it's not just, you know, language doesn't mean, oh, we can talk to each other. Using speech language eventually means I can sit down and read a book and absorb this enormous amount of information from somebody who died thousands of years ago, without any intermediary, uh, without any, uh, intermediary person through which I'm getting it. I'm getting it directly from a long dead author. Speaker 3 00:29:20 Um, Lawrence. Speaker 1 00:29:24 Hello? Can y'all hear me pretty good. Yes. Okay, great. So, um, Robert great subject, and I think you've touched upon this in your explanation, just to sort of pull it out because you know, people, when you talk about that more, that blank slate sort of tabula rasa, a lot of people, they don't, they don't find that satisfying. They, they make the argument well. Oh, well then that means humans have the capacity to do all sorts of terrible things. They're just going to be, you know, you'll often hear the term, they're just a product of their environment, which means they could be doing great, good, or great evil, and they don't find that truly satisfying. Now we talked about here, right? And you know, the Astrodome reason that that is also at play here and that is learning and testing. But to talk to those, to sort of answer that specific thing about these people will say, then isn't everything inherently product of environment. Speaker 1 00:30:25 There is no morality or subjective trying to, could you maybe try to really hammer home the counter to throw that mindset, right? So that's sort of evolutionary psychology, or, you know, we have inherent in built a desire. A desire is for tendencies, that viewpoint, I think is almost like it's an attempt to answer it. It's, it's an attempt to answer subjectivists arguments without really exiting fully from the subjectivist outlook. So, because the subject of its outlook is we are pushed around by whatever, uh, um, feelings we happen to have and there. So I think the idea is that that the people who the evolutionary psychology types want to guard against or fight back against the idea that, oh, everything's all just socially subjective. And that's the sort of the, the standard viewpoint of book left, which is everything is socially constructed. And, uh, so, you know, concepts of gender are just socially constructed. Speaker 1 00:31:32 So if they're socially constructed, they can be socially reconstructed and everything. You know, every idea we have about, about how will human behavior about what's right and wrong. It could be endlessly malleable, malleable changed. And this really goes back to the history of this on the, on the, on the political left, goes back to, uh, the idea under Marxism, that if you just change people's environment, if you change the human environment, if you reprogram the way society is constructed, that human beings will be constructed differently. They'll have different values and different actions, and that's what will make socialism work. And this is the idea of the new Soviet man, right? If you, if you just reconstruct every aspect of society, you could stamp out individuals. And when people will act of the collective good with no concern for their individual wellbeing, because they will have been programmed that way by the social environment in which they're in which their race. Speaker 1 00:32:30 And of course that that's not how it works and it didn't happen. And so the attempt to say, oh, well, let's because we, you know, we are inherently self-interested or we're inherently selfish, uh, or, you know, there are certain inherent thing tendencies that we have that are part of human quote, unquote human nature, this sort of somewhat, somewhat determinists, uh, view of human nature that you know, that by, uh, uh, by genetics or by evolutionary programming, or what have you, we behave a certain way. That was almost like an attempt to answer that socially subjective view of things in which we could endlessly be reprogrammed by, you know, by, by the, by the rulers and controllers of society. But they did it without really fundamentally exiting the subjectivist perspective in which what really matters are well, how do you feel, what are your urges? What are your desires rather than the idea that human nature comes from? Speaker 1 00:33:33 The things that we are metaphysically given apart from consciousness that is apart, apart from the perfect, the subjective inner experience of consciousness, you know, there's how our consciousness is constituted in terms of how our brains are structured and how our faculty or perception works. But, you know, this is the, these, those are sort of the, does. It's not just how you feel or your internal subjective experience of consciousness. That's how your consciousness is constituted based on its physical nature. So it's the idea that, you know, what's given to us metaphysically by nature and our encounter with that metaphysical reality, that's the source for, that's how we, that that's the source of which we learn and program ourselves, but on the, on the basis of that learning and trial and error, and that's what yields, that's where human nature comes from. So that's as a fully objective fully non-subjective conception of human nature, where it's not just, well, you, you think we're programmed with certain feelings by our, our environment. And I think, um, but I think there we're programmed to certain feelings by our, um, by our heredity and throwing out the idea that no, it's not about, you know, your feelings determining reality. It's about reality, giving you a certain capacities and your, a counter with the physics of the world around you, and then you programming yourself and programming your consciousness in re in relation to that reality. Speaker 4 00:35:09 Great. JP, do you have something? Yeah, I, uh, thank you, Scott. I, I, I, I guess I, I ponder a lot lately, especially in the last few years, uh, as to what the split is in human nature, between virtue and vice good and evil good and bad. And, um, that's what I use for my yin yang symbol for my PTR. Um, and lately I've been, if I'm, if I am, if I understood objectivism bright, we as a civilization have started to not conduct ourselves with the, the appropriate code of ethics. And hence, um, in, in, for example, from, from iron's novels, you would, you would probably deduct that she had a grim view of humanity. Um, she, she was sounding the bell and that's pretty much something that we sort of, uh, I agree. And so I was from there, I was of the belief that we were mostly good. Um, and lately I've been thinking that's exactly half. If you're a good person, you will be hated by exactly half of humanity and vice versa. Speaker 1 00:36:47 Well, my version of the, of the yin yang here would be, we have the capacity to do either. And that's, that's, that's just the key to human nature is the, is the, is the capacity of choice humans have the capacity to do either. But the other part of life I would put into it is that I think the fun, one of the fundamental aspects of this perspective on human nature is everything has to be learned. Nothing's programmed in everything has to be learned. And when everything has to be learned, there's always the possibility of not learning it or getting it wrong or making a mistake. And, uh, you know, either as, as an individual or as a culture, a culture can, you know, and, and struggling to get it's ha it's it's it's, uh, and, and, uh, you know, a group of people all working together and a culture, trying to get their minds around certain basic concepts of how to live human life. Speaker 1 00:37:41 They can make mistakes, they can make, uh, errors in how, or, or, or come to own, you know, they can come to a, uh, an understanding that that's valid, but doesn't quite, but not exact enough, or make some small error within the process of having learned something valid. They make some small error over there. You know, I think for example, um, uh, uh, w w we had a discussion about this the other day where we're talking about, uh, I think also in a clubhouse, we were talking about some concept like this, where, uh, I think it was an enlightened self-interest, that was that a lightened self-interest and talking about all the confusion. So historically that have come up with the concept of self-interest and self-sacrifice and how do you account for the, the role of self-interest in a society? And I was saying that, you know, this is such a, it's a fundamental concept of how you organize the society. Speaker 1 00:38:39 What's the diff what's the relationship between the self and others between the individual and the tribe that you would expect that throughout history, there are people are going to come up with all sorts of misconceptions or wrong versions of the concepts as you're dealing with it for the first time that, you know, if you have to learn everything, you have to develop these ideas from the ground up, you are naturally going to not get it right immediately. And you're going to come up with approximations or things that are not quite exact. And, you know, I think that's an interesting way of looking at human history and until, and especially the history of ideas, the history of philosophy is that we have certain capacities and certain needs. And we're trying to program ourselves with the ideas that will help to capture what our capacities are and how we use them to address our needs. Speaker 1 00:39:32 And in doing that, we're going to, you know, we're going to make progress, but then make mistakes, make incomplete progress over here and make disastrous errors over there, and then working out those errors and correcting them. You know, so for example, if you have this, and I think in the 19th century, we, we, we made a big, vast started to make this vast detour towards the idea of collectivism that, oh, well, you know, we don't need the individual and the individual thought and effort. If we all just had a very working together as a collective renouncing, their own good, then we can have an ideal society. And then over a period of 150 years or so, that was rigorously tried over and over again on an increasingly large scale, and then led to, it led to increasingly larger disasters with the Soviet union and, and, uh, uh, fascism and communism and all of that. Speaker 1 00:40:26 And that was a process. You can sort of view that history as a process of human beings, trying out a wrong idea and figuring out a, hopefully figuring out, uh, we're still not quite there, uh, figuring out, uh, why that it was wrong and then tried to figure out why it was wrong. And so, uh, you know, and of course, if we don't figure out why it's wrong, we have faced the danger of repeating the mist experiment again with equally disastrous results. So I think that that's sort of the, the, the, the capacity for good and evil comes from the fact that we have to learn everything. We have to create everything. We have to do it through choosing our own actions. So the capacity for getting it right and getting it wrong, or for, you know, uh, building up knowledge or undermining knowledge, that capacity is there at every moment in every human being. And that's the sort of, that's the, I guess, the, the balance of good and evil, that's the, my perspective and how you talk about the balance between good and evil and human nature. Speaker 0 00:41:30 You know, what, what you said about, uh, socialism, and it's one of those things we tease them about that, you know, oh, you think it's gonna work this time? What we're really saying is that it's not working because it's going against human nature. Speaker 1 00:41:45 Yeah. Yeah. And I think that, I, I think it also explains why they want it so badly to work. I mean, I've never, there are very few ideas that people have been as resistant to learning as the failure of, of socialism or the failure of communism. And they will just dig in and find any excuse they can find not to have to, you know, you can have a century and a half a history of, of this thing, idea failing over and over, over again. And people will dig in deep to avoid. I mean, the New York times, a couple of years ago in 2017, I think it was the hundredth anniversary. They, the New York times, quote unquote celebrated. I think that's the word you have to use. They celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the Russian revolution by having this whole series of articles, assessing the legacy of communism. Speaker 1 00:42:40 And what was noticeable notable about it is how many of the articles were basically about how good the legacy of communism was. And somebody talking about, oh, women were liberated and, and, uh, all these and, oh, what the tremendous idealism of the, uh, that the communist brought, that was the wonderful thing about them was how idealistic they were. And he was like, was that before or after they were putting people in the gulags and this tremendous resistance people had to learning even the most basic lessons of history. And it's because this all has to be learned and you have to develop the discipline, you know, part of this, what are these pieces of cultural software that we have that helps us to, um, uh, to, to augment and make our brains work better? Is this idea of developing the discipline of, uh, identifying and, uh, uh, not, uh, identifying your own biases, your own desires and wishes and keeping in your mind the idea that just because I want something to be true, doesn't mean it's true that I have to be open to evidence to the contrary and you know, not enough people have absorbed that particular discipline, uh, here, here's another, by the way, we're talking about this programming, historic, uh, how we program our consciousness to make it work better. Speaker 1 00:44:01 One great example. I've a theory that I found very intriguing on that was, um, somebody is putting out that, uh, you know, if you go back to all these ancient stories, the most ancient stories from the world know ancient, Greek myths and things like that. One that's common tropes in them is that, you know, a DCS, this trend is trying to figure out what to do while he's traveling back from Troy. And I, God comes to him and says, and speaks something. It says, tells him to do something and prompted by the God, tells him to do, he then goes out and does something and it's successful. And that the speculation somebody came up with, which I think is, is really intriguing. And, and I think there's something to it is that that's how people processed it, you know, in an early period when they weren't good at introspection and good, they weren't good at figuring out this idea I had. Speaker 1 00:44:53 Where did it come from? A new idea? What just seemed like when you think about it, you've ever been solving your problem, an idea suddenly pops into your head and with your outlook, you have the idea of, oh, well, the idea popped in my head because my subconscious was feeding it to me. But if you didn't have this idea of, oh, my subconscious was feeding it to me, you might think an idea popped in my head, where did it come from? Maybe this was the voice of a God prompting me. And that's why this is so common in, in like, you know, literature from thousands of years ago, this idea of a God coming to speak to somebody that that was how people conceived of the ideas popping into their own minds. And, you know, as much more powerful, of course, if you understand, no, that's not a God's speaking to me, that's, you know, uh, an I that's, that's my own consciousness, working through ideas and making connections and, and feeding those to me through my subconscious, that gives you much more control over how your brain works and, and, and much control, much more control of your process of thought and a much better ability to, to double-check and to, uh, adjust your method of thinking. Speaker 1 00:46:03 Uh, rather than that sort of, you know, every new idea that pops into my head is the prompting of some spirit or demon Knorr, or God. Speaker 0 00:46:11 That's good. Thank you for indulging me, Philippe you, uh, do you have something Philippe Philly? I hope I'm pronouncing that right. Um, making me discover this, uh, this club, um, I got late in the room, so apologies if, uh, if the topic was covered, um, I'm still new to a Ayn Rand's works and, and philosophy. So, uh, I'd like to throw a question for, you know, an open question to the room and, um, which is, uh, what does he, uh, what did she have to say about the creative impulse of the human nature and its place in society at large? I would guess. Speaker 1 00:47:00 Okay. The creative impulse. Well, I think the, I, the really powerful thing about iron Rand is that she, I think ultimately now, I don't know if she ever dressed it in quite these terms, but I think ultimately the power of her ideas that she did not see the creative impulse as being separate from, or, uh, from the, the, the basics of the job of living, you know, the job of living as a human being is you are constantly learning and, uh, trying to understand the world around you and then trying to reshape the world around you to better fit your needs, you know, to, uh, you know, whether the need is to plant crops so you can eat, or the need is to produce steel. So you can make tools, whatever the needs are. You're trying to learn how things work, how does the world work? Speaker 1 00:47:52 How do, uh, what's the physical nature of things around me and how, how can I rearrange those things? How can I change them? What processes do I have to go through to make steel, or to make a better steel, uh, and that this is the central activity of human life, right, is trying to understand things and then understand how you can change and rearrange them and how you can come up with new ways of doing things to do, to do them better. And that is the creative impulse. Right now, you can talk about the creative impulse in terms of, of art or ideas or imagination, but really all of that creative impulse is really just those, that's a subset of a particular kind of application of this wider creative impulse, which is the essence of, of human activity. The essence of human life is trying to understand how things work around you, and then understanding how you can change your actions, how you can do new things to, to rearrange the world, to make it better suit your needs. Speaker 1 00:48:56 So, and that I think, and that's a crucial theme of her, her novels. Um, if you look at it now they'll shrug to comes out a lot. Uh, but I think even it comes out in the I'm rereading the Fountainhead recently, and I think it comes out a lot. There is the idea that, uh, you know, invent what you do to, to make steel is, is not a fundamentally different creative process than what you do to make a symphony, uh, that it is, you know, that the creative impulse is the essential human activity of trying to support our lives by understanding the world around us and rearranging it to suit our needs. Speaker 2 00:49:35 Uh, Scott, if I could jump in with a, another thought on this point in natural do Felipe, um, and it, it, it, it goes deep into the objective is to piss demologies the, the, uh, view of knowledge that ran developed, and it is it's this, every other species of animal that we have studied or known anything about has, um, certain cognitive capacities, but those capacities are limited to, uh, responding to perceiving response and, and dealing with, uh, a specific domain in their environment, humans as conceptual beings. Our domain is reality. The ability to think conceptually, um, means that nothing is inevitably, or, you know, we inherently beyond our range. We're always limited at a given time, in our knowledge and any given any individuals, unfortunately they didn't what they, what that individual knows. But, um, there is no, um, uh, knowable and part of that is the ability to ask, um, the question, what if I ran, I've made a point of, I mean, writing about her grid processes as a fiction writer, what if, oh, that's an interesting, that would be really interesting. Speaker 2 00:51:05 What if, um, there was a character who was, um, a crook and a really devious fraud, but he was a hero. What if, and that you wrote nine in January 16th? Uh, so the same process, the, the, the ability to imagine possibilities beyond what we're directly aware of or beyond what we know already is built into the conceptual faculty. And, um, it it's essential as Rob was saying to, um, technological invention, manufacturing, all the inventions that have changed us, uh, changed the world. We live in from the world of cavemen, uh, from skyscrapers to computers, to medicine, everything else. It was always someone asking what if and then saying, okay, let me check it out. Speaker 1 00:52:03 Um, there are like four scrunching your forehead because giving a little warble for me. Yes, yes. Is it better now? Yes. Okay. But it's an absence of response. Uh, one of the aspects who also the creative power that I wanted to talk about is I said, well, yet we have certain capacities that are given to us by nature. And one of those capacities is this ability to think conceptually to have a very complex consciousness. And the interesting thing about that is that S are fundamentally, we're driven by our physical needs, food, clothing, and shelter. The other aspect of creative, our creative or imaginative or artistic life is that we, we, we answer these basic physical needs by in, by using this conceptual consciousness, which is an extremely complex, uh, and abstract. And, uh, uh, uh, um, how would you put it? It's a way of thinking that requires it has tremendous psychological demands. Speaker 1 00:53:31 And as a result of that, we also then on top of the physical needs, we have a whole bunch of needs that come up that are needs of that complex conceptual consciousness. And that's what gives rise to our need for companionship or our need for art, uh, or need, uh, uh, uh, or our need of, uh, a pistol MALDI or philosophy, or you have some overarching explanation to explain to us how, how are, how the world works and how our consciousness works. So we have all these, uh, I think, you know, what people tend to think of as the creative aspect of life, that by that they tend to mean that a lot. They tend to mean things that address these psychological needs of our consciousness, things like art and love and imagination and entertainment and recreation, they think of all those things, but those sort of things that are to this, like the primary needs that are the physical needs of survival food, clothing, and shelter, but then because our way of solving those needs is to, is this amazing tool, this amazing capacity we have of extremely complex conceptual consciousness that gives rise to this whole secondary set of needs on top of that, which is the psychological needs of things that we need to keep that consciousness functioning properly, or to make it function even better. Speaker 1 00:54:55 And that's what gives rise for the very beginnings. You know, one of the earliest things human beings, modern humans do is they, they have they're, they're making, uh, paintings on cave walls. Uh, so we, you know, those are very clearly the things that mark us off from the pre-humans that came before us is we start engaging in things like rituals and using art and, um, uh, and, and, and start to develop the first sort of wider concepts, uh, and, and religious beliefs, uh, very early religious beliefs. Uh, and so that's definitely a marks us off as that, the height of consciousness we have gives us tremendous power, but then it creates all these needs of its own. And we develop ways of addressing those needs, such as art and religion and music. And what has, Speaker 0 00:55:46 Uh, oh, I'm sorry, Scott. I just wanted to add that. Um, well, I apologies. I should have been more precise because indeed I was referring more to the artistic expression of creativity, but I think that Robin and David, uh, sort of rounded up pretty nicely, and I would assume that an entire hour could be dedicated to that topic as well. That's what I was going to say. Uh, William, do you have a quick warning squeezing? Speaker 5 00:56:16 I don't know if there'll be quick, but I'll try. Um, thank you, Rob, for your presentation. Um, I have a question about the development of human nature. I know. So there are stages of the human's life, um, when you, when you're born. Um, and then when you go through puberty and become mature. So I see at least two or three stages of life. Um, and in the initial stage, you're born with primitive reflexes. So while I agree that we're not born with inherent or intrinsic ideas, I think we do come into this world with reflexes, which allow us to have automatic responses to stimuli. And I was wondering, how do you think that impacts the development of our faculties such as reason? Speaker 1 00:57:05 Yeah, I think, I think we have to be born with some very, very basic reflexes because otherwise you wouldn't survive the first reflex a, uh, an infant has as the sucking reflex, right. It wants, it wants to suck on something because that's how it gets food. Uh, and, uh, but although the interesting thing about that though, is we have way fewer of those than any of the other animals. And, uh, there's, uh, I think it's been fairly well demonstrated that, uh, basically what happened is we're, we are because of how humans evolved. We are born nine months too early. That is, you know, compared to other animals, we should be, we should have another nine months in the womb to help develop our, all of our capacities and their different speculations about why it is. We don't have that. And one of them is, well, our heads, you know, as we got larger brains, our heads got too big. Speaker 1 00:58:00 And if we stayed long enough to develop our brains, to the point where we had all of these capacities, we'd never fed out, you know, we'd never make it out. Um, but it also has to do with the fact that not being, as pre-programmed not having as many reflexes. So, you know, think of a horse I do, and horse, we've all seen footage of this, or if you grew up on a farm, you've seen it in real life. I do born horse or a cow coming out and it stands up immediately. Your human beings can't do that. So part of it is that we have these big heads that won't won't fit through if we let them grow for another nine months. But part of it is also that they have vantage. We get the huge advantage that we get, and here's where I will cite evolution. Speaker 1 00:58:38 The huge evolutionary survival advantage we get from having fewer pre-programmed, if you were software pre-programmed into us and more ability to pro and a much, much faster ability that virtually everything we do is programmed into ourselves that produces such a huge advantage. That evolution said, okay, I'm going to produce this infant that can do virtually nothing except maybe suck on, on a nipple, uh, once it comes out of the womb and it's going to have to develop everything else, but the trade-off for that is because it has to develop and learn everything else. Then it could do so much more, you know, as, as it, when it reaches adulthood, as I think we come with some very, very basic reflexes. But I think by my, my view is that by evolutionary design, is that in effect and evolutionary design is one of these sort of paradise skull, uh, formulations. But by, by the way that we evolved, we are, we are, we come out with, we come out with fewer reflexes and fewer in-built re re inbuilt inbuilt reactions, precisely because of the huge advantage that comes from having to having to program most of it for ourselves. Speaker 0 00:59:51 Great. Well, um, William, I, I thank you. Uh, we are, unfortunately, we're not going to have time for Mark's question either. We're at the top of the hour, but, uh, this was a great subject. Uh, we touched on a lot of great things. Um, I just wanted to say real quickly tomorrow, uh, iron Ram's birthday Atlas society is having, uh, three big events. The Atlas society asks Ashley Ryan's Berg at 3:00 PM. Uh, then here on clubhouse, Steven Hicks, it's 6:30 PM Eastern. Uh, asked me anything about ethics and then my favorite at seven 30 via zoom. Uh, they're doing an iron Rams birthday celebration with, uh, scholars and people from the Atlas society. And, uh, that's, uh, can be found on Atlas society.org, but, uh, thank you everyone for joining us today. And, uh, we look forward to, uh, everything tomorrow, Jennifer, Speaker 6 01:00:48 Just saying great job. Speaker 0 01:00:52 You're counting. All right. Well, thanks. Speaker 1 01:00:55 I thanks. Say thanks for taking the reins today. Speaker 0 01:00:57 Absolutely.