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9-o2aAoN0rY
that on the outside q learning is going to beat this these methods but our hope is going to be that of course if we have this zero shot generalization it's much better than running q learning for really long if we get close to it so the green thing is what we've already seen policies one and two will give you a fairly you know good um fairly good extent right here so what
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Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
does it mean it means it can solve it can solve pretty much everything from here here this task this this task this task it kind of falls off once we go down here so once we go to the avoid section it sort of falls off because it has never learned to avoid now still we can of course do the avoidance by simply imposing a negative collection but negative collecting
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Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
and avoiding aren't exactly the same thing in these um in these environments right because avoiding can also be going really close to something but not hitting it while collecting it's not the inverse of collecting the inverse of collecting would be like run away as far as as far as possible so we can expect that we've only ever learned to collect we're not going to be super good at
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-o2aAoN0rY&t=2588s
Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
avoiding um then the other extreme is when we give policies three and four and i haven't told you but you can see it right here uh policy three is explicitly to collect one and avoid the other while policy four is the opposite right here avoid the squares collect the triangles and now this policy this policy is should be pretty good on all of the tasks in between as you can
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-o2aAoN0rY&t=2613s
Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
see it has the biggest extent right here and that also makes sense by the way there's nothing down here because the task of avoiding both things doesn't really make sense because you can just stay where you are because there are also these these squares where there's nothing but you can see that the mixture of those is quite potent so already we can see even
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Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
though these span a bases in fact an orthogonal basis as much as these because of the nature of the features that we define for the task they are not equivalent in mixing after so we can be more generous we can also be less generous if we only provide policy five and policy five is simply to pick up to pick up both objects then we're going to have a pretty hard
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Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
time when it comes to avoiding things so you can see it can do fairly well picking up the various things in a positive manner but as soon as we cross this line into the like this horizontal line into where it's about avoiding a particular object um it's not it's not the the choices of actions we have from policy five aren't going to be super good at that and um they do another they do another
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-o2aAoN0rY&t=2703s
Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
thing right here so that the left thing is where they say it's important which policies we provide and the right thing they want to say something like it's important um so they want to say if we provide more policies that can be advantageous because we basically have more options to choose from okay so now they start off with policy four and policy four is simply
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-o2aAoN0rY&t=2737s
Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
avoid these squares collect the triangle you can see it performs fairly well over here where it's all about avoiding the uh squares and collecting the triangles as soon as you get into you know collecting or even here the opposite directions it's pretty bad right that's the red thing and now they add policy two to policy four so policy two is going to be also
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Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
to collect um the the triangles but to just neglect the squares and that will also do a bit better why does it do better because it's better at collecting uh because this policy here also needs to avoid um and this policy here doesn't care so in the regimes where it's better to not care than to avoid adding this policy adding these options is going to be good and you can see that
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Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
there's a general expansion here as we add more policies however i want to point out that for example here this black thing which should be technically superior to the blue thing because it contains as you can see here all the policies that the blue thing contains plus another policy um i don't i don't know if my vision but i'm pretty sure here the black thing is inside the blue
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Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
thing uh so that means there can also be a disadvantage to adding more policies right here because maybe you got you have too much to choose from and so right here what we say is we add a policy that is all about collecting the squares and it is performing it is actually decreasing the perform the addition of this is decreasing the performance on tasks where you have to
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-o2aAoN0rY&t=2853s
Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
avoid the squares which i'm not sure if if that makes sense again the opposite of collecting isn't avoiding but i'm just pointing this out and this isn't really mentioned in the paper the paper simply says see we add policies and therefore we are getting better i'm not i don't agree with this given these results or maybe it the plotting the plotting is bad all right so
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Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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they say okay more policies better which i disagree with they also say ho we can as as much as we can regress the w right we regress w we figure out the task we can even learn the successor features okay we can not the successor features um the pi functions that lead to the succession successor features and you can see if you do it with the true w you're really good at the beginning
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Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
if you do it with a regress w we can see that before you can you so this is the small version of this plot right here this is like this uh section i think yeah you know you improve however we can also learn this pi function we can also learn the features where if we're not given the features maybe we can learn the features and they say well we can do this with
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Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
but also by regression so here what we can do is we can find the function that minimizes the function and the w along with it that minimizes this error right here okay so you're finding the function and the w that that matches this error and this now really is like learning a neural network i mean you know um so i get i get it you have the i here and the w doesn't depend on the i
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Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
and so on um but you're getting more and more back to actually simply learning non-linear functions mixing them linearly right here and i think that's going to be kind of the crux of this method uh the fact that the more complicated your problems are the less you are going to be able to do this kind of stuff and they even go as far as to say well what if like before
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Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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we the reward is actually something like whether or not you have collected an even number of triangles or squares then they say well you can simply not have a single w but you can find a function w and now the policy is a function of the function of w and you can do potentially the same regression problem but as you can see it gets so now you um this right here is going to be a
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Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
function of state and so you can see that it more and more it simply goes back to basically q learning again the only difference here is that you have this intermediate features but i think you can simply view this let's say as a hidden layer in a neural network i get it some are held constant across sums and so on but you know i i like the method in terms of
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Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
um you know in terms of the analysis so if you are given all this stuff it seems pretty cool that you can derive new policies uh it's implication for lifelong learning they say look here um you have a bunch of tasks in your database that you've already learned on your agent is going out into the world it faces a new task it can use this thing you can use this thing to obtain a new
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Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
good policy for that task it can then use reinforcement learning rl to refine that policy and then it can simply save that policy into the database so it keeps expanding and expanding this thing so it keeps adding rows and rows and rows right here of new policies that it's learned over the course of its life so once it's facing a new task it can just kind of draw from its experience
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Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
and derive a good initial solution however uh the actual analysis only works i feel in quite limited circumstances and if you want to relax these limited circumstances then you need to basically regress and regress and regress away from away from their setup and i'm not sure i'm not sure where this is going to go if this is going to be a general framework for people
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Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
it seems like it because it's pretty easy but then also it seems like most of the world doesn't really fall into this category in fact this divide and conquer approach um i'm not sure but from divide and conquer i almost imagine something like you subdivide and subdivide and subdivide until you know you are at some kind of basic task they still only go for you know single tasks like this here
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Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
the tasks are somehow in sequence and i'm not i think we should really think about hierarchical rl now this can be a good first step right here but most hierarchical rl even the ones that specify themselves as fully hierarchical like we can do many layers they rarely go above two layers or three like like one one metal layer and one actual layer like this one right here uh they rarely
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Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
go further maybe they go two layers but that's about it um i've seen very little in actual hierarchical or dividing conquer reinforcement learning just because it's so hard to train yeah all in all cool paper and if you want to get it into the math a little bit i think it's pretty easy math uh once you kind of set your goals on what it's actually meant to achieve um if you just read
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Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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9-o2aAoN0rY
from the beginning all these reinforcement learning papers it seems a bit like why why are we doing this right you just oh we define this we define that we define this and you're a bit like i yeah but why so often it pays in these papers to go at the end to the examples and then uh come back to the theory knowing what they want to achieve all right that was it for me long rant
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Fast reinforcement learning with generalized policy updates (Paper Explained)
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p0_-7FmrDq8
Thank you. It's a great pleasure to see all of you here tonight. The festival has had conversations about science and religion over the years. Perhaps some of you have come to some of those. And oftentimes, there are two sides represented in that conversation and sometimes the two sides, you know, science and religion, sometimes they're contentious, sometimes they're harmonious,
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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
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but tonight we're doing something differently. We really only have one side here tonight. So the group of people who are going to come out for this discussion, they're all scientists. They all come from the background of science, but our goal is to see if by walking this one side, this one trajectory of science, we can gain some illumination into the other side.
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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
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Into the side of religion side of faith. Before I bring out our esteemed group of panelists, I just want to set some context and to do so, I'm going to begin with something which is presumably familiar to many of you. So this is what a beautiful midnight sky brimming with stars looks like in New York City. Now, I also have a little cabin, Upstate New York in the Catskill Mountains and when I'm
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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
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up there and it's a nice, dark night sky, I can look up and see something that looks just like this. Maybe not just like this. This is takes a Hubble Space Telescope, you know? But you get the idea and when you see a wondrous sky like this, you can't help but ask yourself, how does it all work? How did it all come to be? And I have spent part of my professional life trying to advance the scientific understanding
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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
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of some of these questions, and because I work on the more mathematical end of physics, when I look up, I tend to see order and harmony in a peculiar language. The language of mathematics, a language of symbols. But, many others, when they look up at a sky like this, it brings to mind other things, right? Ideas of soul, of eternity, of divinity, of God. And for some, that kind of talk, it feels kind of loose or vague.
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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
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For some, it's even off-putting. But when you look at the data, you see something utterly remarkable, right here in the 21st century, the modern technological age and we have long since cracked the atom, explored the surface of Mars, detected gravitational waves and so much more. There are still many of us who are believers. So if we look at some of the numbers, about say 2.2 billion of us identify as Christians.
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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
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About 1.7 billion is Muslims. Hindus, Buddhists, that gives us another two billion, plus, if we throw in my little tribe, it's about 14 million, right? And then if we add in the atheists, this takes us to one and half billion which is just to say there's a lot of people on this planet who would look to the heavens and think of heaven. So if aliens were able to sweep down toward planet Earth, and let's say they had some
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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
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wondrous equipment that allowed them to detect religious belief, to give us a kind of heat map of faith, this is what our planet would look like. You could probably work out the color scheme for yourself. Blue is Protestant, Red is Catholic and so forth. You get the idea. We are a religious planet. Personally, I am not religious in any conventional sense, but I do consider myself spiritual
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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
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and I certainly do consider myself curious. One thing that I have certainly gotten ever more curious about is why do we believe? Now, the simplest answer is we have religious belief because what religion tells us is true. That raises a whole lot of challenges that we're all familiar with and perhaps the most relevant for tonight's discussion is there are over 4000 distinct religions practiced
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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
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on Earth and if we just take one of them, say we parse Christianity a little more finely, there are over 33,000 distinct denominations. They can't all be right. So the natural supposition is that at most one of them is right, which would mean that if Sarah here, happy in her own beliefs, she denies therefor the beliefs of all others, like Terrik over here who again, happy in his own faith, denies the validity of all
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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
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others and that goes true for Pim and for Ofryim and also for Amalyia and it even holds for, say this guy over here, Richard, who not only denies in the validity of all other beliefs, he denies the validity all beliefs. We may be a believing planet, but most of us deny the validity of most beliefs, which means that even if Sarah holds to her religion because it is true, she still needs to explain
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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
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why everybody else holds to their own misguided faiths. And that holds true for everybody else. So this takes us to a simple but remarkable conclusion. Normally, the discussion of science and religions, you know, it all comes down to what's right, what's wrong, what's true, what's false. But here we see that even if a given religion is true, it hardly changes the question at
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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
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all. We still need to ask why it is that so many of us have a tendency to believe. We have to ask yourself, what is it about the human species that drives us to find order and meaning and, in particular, to find the turn toward the supernatural so utterly natural. 1936, this guy over here, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to a school girl named Phyllis who had asked Einstein about his own religious beliefs.
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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
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Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifested in the laws of the universe. One that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naïve. Much has been made about Einstein's use of this phrase, religious feeling, but his later
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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
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writings made very clear that he was speaking of an abstract spirituality, not a conventional religion. The word of God is, for me, nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses. The bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can, for me, change this.
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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
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Charles Darwin, the Father of Evolution by natural selection, he allowed for the possibility of God. I have never denied the existence of God. I think the theory of evolution is fully compatible with faith in God. I think the greatest argument for the existence in God is the impossibility of demonstrating and understanding that the immense universe, sublime above all measure and man, were the
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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
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result of chance. At the same time, Darwin also noted that a religious belief, a religious sensibility could emerge from the interplay between biological and cultural evolution. Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief of God on the minds of children, producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains, not yet fully developed that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief
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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
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in God as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake. The Dalai Lama has his own iconic perspective on these issues. Both Buddhism and modern science shared a deep suspicion of any notion of absolutes, whether conceptualized as a transcendent being, as an eternal unchanging principal such as soul, or as a fundamental substratum of reality.
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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
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Both Buddhism and science prefer to account for the evolution and emergence of the cosmos and life in terms of the complex interrelations of the natural laws of cause and effect. From the methodological perspective, both the traditions emphasize the role of empiricism. In the Buddhist investigation of reality, at least in principle, empirical evidence should triumph over scriptural authority, no matter how deeply venerate a scripture
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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
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may be. Years ago, I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with the Dalai Lama in an event that took place down in Texas and I had an opportunity to ask him a question. The question is asked was, I said, "Look, there are all these books out there that make the case that what we're doing in modern physics is somehow a recapitulation or a reflection of ideas that ultimately find their origin in eastern religious thought."
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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
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So I asked him, "Is this true? Is this your perspective?" And he very forthrightly said, he said, "Look, when it comes to questions of consciousness, that's where we have something to offer science." But he said, "When it comes to understanding the fundamental laws and the particles and all that detail about how the world actually works," he said, "We need to look to science."
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So it was a kind of remarkable moment where this great spiritual leader showed this remarkable and broad embrace of science. At the same time there are great scientists who show a similar embrace of religious thought. Here's Nobel Laureate, William Phillips. The point is that there are plenty of scientists who see no difficulty in being serious about their science and serious about their faith.
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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
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I know plenty of others, and you’ve see the statistics that support that idea, but nevertheless there is a common misperception in society that this isn’t the case. And here's Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health. I think most people are actually kind of comfortable with the idea that science is a reliable way to learn about nature, but it's not the whole story and there's a place also for religion,
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for faith, for theology, for philosophy. But that harmony perspective doesn't get as much attention. Nobody's as interested in harmony as they are in conflict, I'm afraid. 2015, Pew Research Foundation found that the percent of Americans that agreed with the statement that science and religion are often in conflict, they found that agreement with that was almost 60% and that again is often how the conversation is framed.
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Science versus religion. That is an important question. It may come up here tonight, but it's not the focus of what we're talking about here tonight. And so we're asking ourselves, can we use science to illuminate religion? Can we gain some understanding of why people have a need to look to a power beyond themselves, beyond the laws of physics? Is that need written into our DNA?
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The natural selection for that kind of worldview, right? Why in the world does this world have so many brains that want to believe? That's the question. And to deal with this question, try to gain some insight, we have a great group of thinkers and I'd like to now bring them out to the stage. Our first participant is professor emerita from the College of William and Mary, where
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she taught anthropology for 28 years, author of numerous books, including Personalities on the Plate, How Animals Grieve, and Evolving God. Please join me in welcoming our first guest ... Barbara King on the fly. Our next guest is a research scientist at NYU Langone Medical Center. He's also professor of cognitive and affective neuroscience at NYU, co-founded the Nonduality
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Institute where he is the principle science investigator. Please join me in welcoming neuroscience, Zoran Josipovic. Also with us tonight is a university distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University with appointments at Harvard Medical School and the Mass General Hospital. In addition to the book, How Emotions Are Made, she has published over 100 scholarly
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papers. Please join me in welcoming Lisa Barrett. All right, finally. Our guest is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, a two-time Pulitzer prize finalist and author of the bestselling books including, How the Mind Works and The Language Instinct, a pioneer and champion of evolutionary psychology, named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People, please welcome Steven Pinker.
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All right, so we're going to have a pretty free form discussion here, where we're going to try to address some of these questions and we're going to organize the discussion into three parts, roughly speaking. A kind of trinity of parts, befitting for tonight's discussion. We're going to talk about some of the history of religious belief. We're going to talk about the longevity, the fact that this is something that has stuck
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with us for some time. Then we're going to focus on the benefit, if at all, for this kind of way of interacting with the world. What I'd like to do before getting started, if you don't mind, especially since it's a nice small group here, it's good to get a sense of where people are coming from in this kind of discussion, so if we could just sort of go one by one, just sort of give us a sense
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of where you ... We'll do it ... If you don't mind, and you don't have to, but if you're willing to share it, just a couple of words on where you come from in the religious spectrum. Steven, you willing to just say a few words? You mean our own beliefs personally? If you don't mind. You don't have to, but if you're willing to. Yeah. Well, I don't believe in the existence of supernatural entities, including God, souls,
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spirits, genies, devils, and so on. I am a ... I belong to the same tribe as you. I'm Jewish and appreciate many of the iconography, the traditions, the community of my own and other cultural groups, but that doesn't mean you have to sign on to the content, and I don't. Right. Lisa. I would say Steve pretty summed it up pretty well for me too. We practice some rituals in our home as sort of, I don't know, not exactly archeological
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artifacts, but they are kind of artifacts of the past, you know? If we decide to light candles on Friday night, I'm using candlesticks that my great-grandmother schlepped from Russia and that people have been doing this for over 5000 years, and that's meaningful. I also think that Judaism is an interesting moral code that is somewhat ... emphasizes somewhat more behavior over intent, which is appealing to us in some ways.
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I would say we're ... colloquially we're atheists as a ... definitely in our house, although we do have trappings of, as I said, of ritual in the way that I described. Yep. Zoran. I was raised as atheist, but later discovered that really my family believed in scientism. Like, science has an answer to everything. It's a form of religion, I think for some people.
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Personally, I have practiced meditation for over 35 years and I'm mostly interested in this mystical unitary states are known to us as the consciousness where people experience both unitary consciousness, either alone or unitary consciousness with experience. I'm interested what it does to a person and what it does to the brain. Right. Barbara. Growing up in New Jersey, I was raised as a Presbyterian, spent a fair amount of time
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in church. I know identify also as an atheist. When I travel, I do find myself drawn to churches, to sitting in the stillness of a church and to looking at the art and the architecture. I think that is a beautiful part of our history, but I do that as an atheist. And for my own sense of spirituality, I go to a Springsteen concert. Right. So, you know, there are some curious human behaviors that strike us as unusual, like,
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I think ... I don't know how much of this is true, but Beethoven is said to have always dunked his head in a bucket of ice water every morning. Ben Franklin is said to have stood naked in front of an open window every morning. Nikola Tesla, you know, a great champion and iconic scientific figure, apparently used to curl his toes a hundred times each night before going to sleep.
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So you sort of hear those, you raise your eyebrows, it's kind of curious and so on. But, we don't feel the need to explain that kind of behavior, but when it comes to a behavior that is pervasive and that lasts for thousands of years, then it feels like it deserves an explanation and that's really why we're having this conversation here tonight. So, maybe start with you, Barbara.
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When I hear the word faith or religion, my mind automatically goes toward one of the major religions that are practiced in the world today. Is that too limited of you? Yeah, I think it's a very natural view, but speaking anthropologically, if we were to do that heat sensing map of the world, we would see people who not only believe in God, or don't believe in God, but also many, many people who believe in gods, plural, spirits
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in the forest, venerate ancestors, or have an enormous range of beliefs. So, I think broadening our view to understand that there's numbers of ways, not just in the past but now, to believe is a very helpful starting point. Now, you've also done work where you've gone beyond this species, right? Absolutely, yes. My work is in animals and there's a fascinating conversation going on now about whether it
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is reasonable to suggest that other animals than us, do have a sense of either spirituality or religiosity and there's very invigorated debate going on. You know, Jane Goodall was the very first person to suggest, as far as I'm aware, that chimpanzees may be spiritual. But this is continued over decades. This is not my view. I am not suggesting that chimpanzees are spiritual or religious.
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Where I come in is suggesting that their behavior is an evolutionary platform, so that what we see in our closest living relative gives us and understanding of the building blocks of what later became our religiosity. So, we know that chimpanzees, for example at a waterfall, can show what we might understand as a sense of awe and wonder. We know that chimpanzees can take the perspective of another through theory of mind.
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We know that they can show empathy, compassion, that they have their own rituals and their own rules. And so I think that we wouldn't be where we are today without our primate past, which includes, of course, not only living apes, but what we'll talk about later I imagine, other human ancestors. Early Homo sapiens, Neanderthals. So, just as culture evolved, language evolved and technology evolved, I believe that that
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human religious imagination evolved. So, Steve, part of what we're doing here is trying to think about behavior and think about evolution and sort of how they can play off of each other, and I know that the field of evolution in psychology is dedicated to trying to make those kinds of connections precise. Can you just give us a sense of what evolutionary psychology actually does and how it can give
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insight into these kinds of issues? Well, the brain, like other complex organs, owes its non-random organization to natural selection. That if there are circuits in the brain that accomplish improbable feats, then natural selection is the explanation for how they got wired up the way they are. And we're going to ask of various psychological features whether they are adaptations.
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That is, whether they increased the chances of reproduction in our ancestors. For a lot of psychological features that's pretty straightforward to do. It's no mystery why we see in stereo, because it's a ... for many reasons, highly adaptive to get a sense of the third dimension. Why we're repulsed by kinds of substances that are likely to carry disease. Why we find certain partners sexually attractive.
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For religion, it's a religious belief. For supernatural belief, it's not so obvious. I don't think there's any accepted theory that religious belief, per se, is an adaptation. Rather, it can be a by-product of other adaptations. In particular, the ability to attribute minds to other people. We can't literally get inside people's heads. A mind is invisible, colorless, odorless, tasteless, but we couldn't survive as social
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beings unless we assume that other people had minds as we do. We interpret their behavior in terms of their beliefs and desires. From there it may be a short step to attribute minds to entities that aren't other human beings, such as to trees and rivers and the wind, in which case we call it animism. We attribute minds to inanimate entities, to our own artifacts, in which case we call
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it idolatry. Or to no hunk of matter in particular, in which we call it ... in case we call it spiritualism. Disembodied souls and spirits and father-like entities that don't have any material existence, but have this thing that we naturally attribute to one another. So it would be an extension. One would then have to explain why the adaptation of attributing minds to others, sometimes
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called theory of mind, or mentalizing or mind reading, or intuitive psychology, why should be so easy to overextend it to entities that aren't in fact brains. And there, part of the answer comes from experience, what kind of input do we have in living our lives that makes this belief congenial and a number of anthropologists have pointed out that before the advent of modern neuroscience, the idea that minds can exist independently
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of brains was not so farfetched. There's actually some compelling and empirical data. Edward Tyler I think was the originator of this observation, that when we dream for example, it's apparent that some part of us is up and about, walking around in the world and our body's in bed the whole time. A natural hypothesis is that our ... some locus of experience is not wedded to the body,
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but can part company from it. Or in death, if someone suddenly collapses, they may look identical to the way they were a few minutes ago, but something seems to have left their body that animated shortly beforehand. And reflections in still water, shadows, seem to capture the essence of a person, including their activity, their expressions, their goal directed actions.
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And again, divorced from the actual hunk of flesh. If you're in a trance from lack of sleep, or a fever, or a drug, again, the experience is that your mind can part company from your body. So, if you combine those experiences with our natural habit of attributing minds, it's not farfetched to think that minds can exist separately from bodies. Now we know better.
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We know that the brain is the locus of experience, that there are many ways in which the brain can be vulnerable to illusions, dreaming being an obvious case. There's brain activity when we're asleep and that's why we experience things. But, before modern neuroscience, it wasn't such a crazy belief. One other ingredient is that we depend for our beliefs on other people, on experts.i
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believe a lot of things that I have no basis for believing in my own experience. Like quantum physics. Yeah, like superstrings. I really believe- You believe in superstrings? I do, because very smart people tell me that they exist and I trust them. I don't say they exist. They may exist. That they may exist. I give some non-zero probability of that. That opens up a niche for people to market all kinds of beliefs about unobservable entities
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including gods and messiahs, and devils and so on, and a whole set of questions which I won't talk about now is, what are the incentives for the purveyors of supernatural beliefs? What's in it for them to get other people to believe in gods and souls and spirits. There are plenty of reasons, but that's the other part of the story. Now presume the overactive assigning of agency out to the world is better than an underactive
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version of it, right? If you're walking around and there's a rock and you happen to think that it has a mind, so be it, but if you're walking around and there's a snake and you don't think it has a mind, you don't think it can attack you, that's probably not a good thing. So, evolutionary speaking, presumably this overactive assigning of agency has adaptive value.
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Possibly. It's not so clear. If it involves making sacrifices that are ultimately irrational, if it involves being manipulated by others, maybe not. But it may just be that the overall benefit of being able to attribute minds outweighs the cost in cases where others can exploit us. In the case of animals, of course, animals actually do have minds so it's not such a
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crazy thing. Indeed, a lot of ... In some hunter-gatherer peoples, they do attribute enormous amounts of intentionality to the animals they hunt and with good reason, 'cause the animals really are trying to escape them for the same reason that we try to escape from threats. So, that degree of extension is not so farfetched. It's when it comes to rocks and rivers and mountains and trees and wind, that it becomes
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more problematic. Right. So, Lisa, what is your view in terms of are we at some level wired for belief, or is that not an important part of the equation? I think it is actually. When we say ... When you ask are we wired for beliefs, I think that that can mean a couple of different things, right? So, in a sense, you could say, well, all brains, actually every brain on this planet, to some
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extent, is wired to make predictions about what's going to happen next based on what's happened in the past. So, brains are not wired to react to things in the world, they're wired to predict. It's metabolically efficient to predict. Physiologically, most of the biological systems we have in the body are predictive to some extent. And so, if you mean ... A lot of people talk about predictions where ... When I say prediction
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I mean, our brains for example, change the firing of their own neurons in advance of sensory input arriving to the brain. That's how you're understanding the words that I'm speaking to you right now. You've had a lifetime of experience of patterns, encoding patterns of what these sounds refer to and the patterns in their temporal contingencies. All brains work like this and if you believe that a prediction is like a belief, which
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scientists do write about predictions this way, as if they are beliefs or explanations that are preemptively offered to anticipate and explain incoming sensory inputs, then yes, we are wired. Another way in which we're wired, you could say, is that- But that's for belief in things presumably that are demonstrably true. That's belief in any case, right? So, the idea that the brain is wired for prediction as opposed to reaction, is a general explanation,
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it's a general computational approach to understanding meaning making of any sort. So, that means making meaning of fluctuating changes in light, which you experience as sights, as vision. It's making meaning of fluctuating changes in air pressure, which you experience as sounds. And it's also making meaning of changes that happen longer ... longer temporal sensory
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changes which we would think of as an episode or an event. Little infant brains, you know, newborn brains ... A newborn brain is not like a miniature adult brain. It's not completely ... it's wiring isn't completely finished and we ... So, what infants are doing to some extent, is they're waiting for a set of wiring instructions from the world. The brain expects certain inputs in order for it to wire itself normally and it wires
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itself both to the physical circumstances it grows up in, but also to social circumstances it grows up in. We encourage ... So, that's sort of the normal aspect of brain development that's related to being wired for belief, but we also wire our children for belief in other ways. We indulge them. In our culture, we indulge them in believing in animacy of their blankets and their little
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cars and their little toys and some people in this room might believe that their cars have minds, right? So, we do ... that's another way in which brains can become wired for belief in the sense of development actually influences the wiring of the brain. Then there, we could also talk about feelings as the root of belief. That to some extent feeling is believing.
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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/p…axresdefault.jpg
p0_-7FmrDq8
When you believe ... When you feel something very strongly, you are more likely to believe it and feeling is at the core of the wiring of our brains, and really you could argue most mammalian brains. Some people would like to make that argument, pull that argument even earlier. I'm going to come back to that in a for Zoran, you've spent some time studying the human
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0_-7FmrDq8&t=1933s
The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/p…axresdefault.jpg
p0_-7FmrDq8
brain. Do you feel that there's evidence that we're ... there's an internal physiological predilection for religious belief? Yeah, I wouldn't so much ... Yes. As much as brain is I think organized to be conscious, it's organized for spiritual experiences and indirectly for beliefs just as Steve and Lisa pointed out. I think something happened to us, to our species, right?
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0_-7FmrDq8&t=1959s
The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/p…axresdefault.jpg
p0_-7FmrDq8
We don't know when, maybe 3000 years ago, 5000 years, maybe longer. Suddenly, we became conscious. We became conscious in very unique way. It's not just we have experience, or that we have conscious experience, but we know that we are conscious. We have implicit knowing that we are conscious. We have an expression of religiosity going as far as we have records, you know, around
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0_-7FmrDq8&t=1990s
The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/p…axresdefault.jpg
p0_-7FmrDq8
3000 years ago, maybe longer actually, but we don't have records any more of that, that people were really trying to figure out what is this thing. We're conscious, what is it? Who is this person who is conscious? What is it that's conscious inside us. And also, what is this universe? The way it appears when we perceive it with the depth of our consciousness, not just with
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0_-7FmrDq8&t=2014s
The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/p…axresdefault.jpg
p0_-7FmrDq8
the surface of our mind, but with the deepest part of ourselves. And so that gives rise to some very kind of a deep core sort of explorations in the nature of human mind that we have records of. When we look at the ... What I personally feel is sort of the innermost core of the religious practices, pretty much in every religious traditions we find this, this unitary
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0_-7FmrDq8&t=2038s
The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/p…axresdefault.jpg
p0_-7FmrDq8
experiences, experiences of consciousness itself. They can be either very deep mental silence in which all mental processes quiet down and then there is either just complete blackness and then within it, there's just awareness. Consciousness itself. Doesn't think, doesn't feel, doesn't need to do anything, but it's aware and knows that it's conscious innately, directly.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0_-7FmrDq8&t=2069s
The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/p…axresdefault.jpg