The document tree is shown below. this psychologist named Piaget some of you might know about him PSA was very interested in what happens to value structures and their hierarchical organization once they have to apply outside of the confines of a body so so here's a way of thinking about it two-year-olds basically hypothalamic that's why there's so much fun first they're happy then they're sad then they're hungry then they're tired you know they just zip from one pretty straightforward and rather are inspiring motivational state to another and but at two they can't play they can play with by themselves but they can't play with other children they can't get that until they're three and they need to get it by the time they're free because if they don't get it by the time therefore they will never get it and then you have an antisocial kid who's going to be an outsider for his entire life and there isn't anything you can do about it so that has to happen between two and four so what happens at about age three is that the kid learns how to play a game with another person and what that game is is fundamentally the development of the ability to share a frame of reference which is what you're doing when you play Monopoly it's like it's stupid to play Monopoly obviously who cares if you have a whole pile of counterfeit paper right but doesn't matter a because the way you're constituted is that your brain will treat anything you act like constitutes a valuable goal as if it's a valid framework of reference and if it couldn't do that a you couldn't abstract and B you could not get along with other people so you can sit around the table and you can say let's pretend that monopoly is a reasonable facsimile of reality which you wouldn't say but it's what you mean and everybody says yes that would be amusing and so then you set your goal which is to get all the little hotels and all the money and hope your emotions go along for the ride and what's so interesting about that is you can get everybody into the game and so one of the things that's really interesting about people is that we can establish a shared fictional frame of reference and it organizes all our emotions they're predictable that's also why we can watch movies you go to a movie you identify the hero you figure out what the hero wants proof you're the hero and the way that works is you don't look at the hero and think about what he's doing and evaluated emotionally and then feel it what you do is you specify the hero's goal and then you map him onto your body and you read off the emotional responses of your own body and that's how you understand the hero so it's embodied you're using your your embodiment as a computational device that can run simulations of other consciousnesses and it does that with the body and we like doing that you can go to the movie and you know you're Brad Pitt for an hour and a half you know when you're Brad Pitt doing remarkable things and that's also how we understand other people we're very good at that so anyways we have these shared frames of reference like when we're playing Monopoly okay so children at free learn how to play games and that means they learn how to organize their own internal motivational states into a hierarchy that includes the motivational states of other people and that means they can play and that's what you guys do when you're out in the world like we're playing a game right now we all know the rules that's why we can all sit in this room and play the game without fighting with each other you know when the room is set up like a theater and we all know the theater game and so and the chairs are all facing this way at the moment and so that's against that you should look forward and this is raised so you know the room is basically telling you what to do because it's a stage like all rooms and because you're smart and socially conscious you can walk into a stage brew and your body knows what to do and if you're civilized and social you just do it then all the other primates can predict what you're up to and they won't kill you yeah well that's what it means to be part of the same tribe you know when people are very peculiar creatures and god only knows what they're up to but as long as they're playing the same game you are you don't have to know what they're up to because you can predict what they're going to do and you understand their motivational states and so part of the building and constructing of higher order motive higher order moral Gold is the establishment of joint frames of reference that allow multiple people to pursue the goals that they're interested in simultaneously and then what you have to think about with regards to that is that not all shared frames of reference can manage that there's a small subset of them that are optimized so that not only can multiple people play them but multiple people can play them and enjoy them and do it repeatedly across a long period of time so its inner eight ability that partly defines the utility of a higher order moral structure and that is not arbitrary it's an emergent property of biological interactions and you might say well it's kind of arbitrary because people can do what they want but it's not arbitrary at all because a lot of what's constraining your games is your motivational sub structure and those ancient circuits that are status oriented and they operate within virtually every animal has a status counter creatures organize themselves into dominance hierarchies the reason they do that is because that works it's a solution it's a solution to the Darwinian problem of existence it's not just the nepeta nomina it's the real thing so you your environment fundamentally a huge chunk of your environment is dominant our key plus god only knows where you are and that's order in chaos and part of the reason that people fight to preserve the dominance hierarchies is because it's better to be a slave who knows what the hell is going on then someone who's thrown screaming and naked into the jungle at night and that's the difference between order and chaos and we like order better than chaos and it's no wonder now we'll invite a little chaos in for entertainment now and then it has to be done voluntarily and generally you don't want the kind of chaos that upsets your entire conceptual structure you know you're willing to fool around on the fringes a little bit but you know when the going gets serious you're pretty much likely to bail out and no wonder
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