Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Pamela Lyon uses contemporary biology and physics to illuminate how self-centered perception arises at every level, from quantum uncertainty to bacterial behaviour to human cognition. In this 52-minute talk, she builds a case that the body constantly shapes the mind through biochemistry—hunger, fatigue, and hormonal stress directly influence decision-making—while evolution has hardwired every organism to prioritize survival of self above all else. She explores how this translates to inattentional blindness in humans: we literally cannot see what doesn’t serve our perceived interests. But Lyon also presents evidence that cooperation and altruism, far from being contrary to survival, are actually more successful strategies across nature, from bacteria to social insects to humans. She connects this biological reality to Buddhist teachings on ignorance and the twelve links of dependent origination, arguing that the mistaken apprehension of a solid, separate self drives all suffering, yet recognizing this error makes liberation possible. This is a practical-philosophical talk grounded in neuroscience and molecular biology, aimed at serious practitioners willing to examine how deeply conditioned they are.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2008 25 23 Pamala Lyons 12 links -2 23-05-08.mp3
UUID: 20782f92-b55c-4fe9-b99e-34cb42fdb010
Teacher: Pamela Lyon
Collection: Pamela Lyon (Pamela Lyon)
Date: 2008 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 52.1 minutes
Words: ~6,249
Okay. Here we are in the second half, having been very nicely sated with chai and cake, so that you can’t possibly have any displeasure of anything I say. We have ways of affecting your mind through your body. And that is the point of all that science in the last half was to illustrate a point. First of all So hang on.
So when you’re saying chai, so if we’re drinking lots of coffee, that makes us speedy. Is that what you mean? As simple as that? If there’s It’s not that that is part of it. But how the body affects the mind is, what is homeostasis at this moment?
How am I traveling right at this moment? Am I hungry? Am I thirsty? Am I salt deficient? Do I need calcium?
Is my magnesium I mean, there are a whole range of things that can affect you in any given moment, any given moment. And the decisions that you make, every action you take, every decision you make, then changes that whole profile. So you make a series of decisions. Let’s say you’ve got low blood sugar. Haven’t eaten.
You make a series of decisions. Blum, blum, blum. You go to the store. Buy this, buy that, buy that series of decisions, right? That decision making is apparently a depletable resource.
So now you’ve got low blood sugar. And you’ve got a depleted resource that is whatever that energy is that fuels decision making. But it’s now really clear that if you make a series of choices or decisions, then you can’t control yourself as easily as afterward. So Nigel comes home and says, Natalie, what’s for dinner? And you say, I don’t know.
Right? I don’t know. Because that decision is the final straw. Low blood sugar, multiple choices. Your body will do that for you even before your mind does anything.
Your body will say, I’m under threat. I’m under threat. Because this little organism lives in a world. And that world is changing all the time. And it’s changing not just at the level of gross change, to say nothing of momentary change in the Buddhist sense.
But every single thing apparently is vibrating like crazy. An electron is This is an atom. And inside here, have protons and neutrons in the nucleus. And we used to think that electrons sort of orbited around atoms in a nice little way, right? Well, don’t.
They are routinely described as smeared out clouds of probability. Smeared out clouds of probability. That means all of these dots are one electron that could be anywhere at any time. And until you make a measurement, you don’t know where it is. And that electron, if it’s part of this glass or the water in this glass, it might be on the outside of the glass or it might be on the inside of the glass.
But it’s still connected. They’re connected, yeah. But there aren’t you can’t really get a handle on a there, there. Do you know what I mean? You can say that atoms well, we know that there are particles, right?
And that sort of stuff. But they’re not really particles. They’re both particles and waves. And if one of the elemental particles is a smeared out cloud of probability, its location depends on what you measure. And you can’t say much about its type of behavior until you measure it.
It could be doing anything. There are entangled photons. We’re getting off the track here. They’re entangled photons that have let’s say this is a plus, this is a Mahāyāna, A or B. And they were created together.
They came together. So if this photon is decoupled from this one and this one is taken to the other side of the universe, as soon as this and these are changing state all the time, plus or minus, plus or minus, plus or minus, plus or minus, plus or minus, As soon as this one is measured, and this one comes up a minus, this one on the other side of the universe comes up a plus. This notion of entanglement is what people are looking at for making the internet safer because they want to use this, use entangled photons to encrypt information safely. So the only people who know what the other state could possibly be are the people making the measurement. Yes, Leslie, it is pretty weird.
She’s sort of sitting there going. Okay. So if you want to talk about what there is in the physical world, it’s not going to give you much a foundation. There isn’t much there there. It’s all kind of moving and that sort of stuff.
So the world at both an atomic level and a microscopic level and a mesoscopic level, which is the mesoscopic is the word that they use to describe the level that we operate at are constantly changing. And so the organism has to constantly adapt to this change. And it does so by changing its internal structure. So internal structure, the body we’re talking about gross mind here. We’re talking about gross mind, gross, subtle gross, subtle, and very subtle mind.
They’re all powered presumably by the same thing of very subtle mind. But we’re talking about an organism acting basically in a gross way that creates this, that creates this. And I think it’s pretty clear, it should be by now, that everything this organism does is gauged according to self. Everything it does is measured by self. What it sees, what it eats, how it responds, everything it does, it is evolved to be absolutely self referential.
Me first. Me survive. Yeah. And so in the traditional teachings, they talk about ignorance being a mistake about what we said, about how we apprehend the world. And one of the first things we do is we apprehend a self of phenomena and a self of persons, persons being all subjects, other people, animals, that sort of stuff, phenomena being rocks, trees, everything else, but also persons, because phenomena includes everything.
So we are geared to take ourselves really seriously, really seriously. It’s sort of built into our DNA, as it were. It’s built into every single cell of our body. Every single cell of our body is crying to survive. Everything it does is to survive and to keep the thing of which it’s a part alive.
That’s why cancer is such an interesting thing. Because people have a tendency to think of it as that they describe themselves as being invaded. Invaded by something that’s foreign. But in fact, cancer is self gone mad. It’s like cells saying, I gotta be me, and I don’t care about the rest of you.
And I will hijack your vascular system. I will hijack your nutrients. I will mess up every single metabolic pathway you have because I got to be me. And that’s what cancer is. It’s self gone berserk at a biological level.
If we impute a self of phenomena to things in the world like tables, chairs, the chai that we just had, boy, that had a self if anything did. Because I just went, great. This will make me feel wonderful. It will make me feel good, will make me feel warm inside. And this thing has these qualities of making me feel good, of making me feel warm inside, of it being quite delicious.
So all of our hearing, our vision, our touch, our tactile sense, our olfactory sense, all of it is geared to the world going around this. And that is clearly a mistake. Mistake. That’s clearly a mistake because the world and the universe is a very big place. And there’s a lot of stuff going on all the time.
And the stuff that we see and the stuff that we sense, and how we make sense of it, is all related to this. And it’s evolved to be related to that. Every single bit of us is evolved to worry about this morning, noon, and night. Morning, noon, and night. And so we don’t see how the world really exists because all we see in a sense is us and what’s important to us.
Now, we can study the cosmos. Can build machines that will detect the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is a wonderful thing. It’s given us the first glimpse of what the universe looks like at a large scale. And they’ve even devised what the background color of the universe is. And unfortunately, it’s beige.
At first, they thought it was aqua, which was really quite nice. It’s like aqua sounded good, then went, no, no, no. We got a parameter wrong. It’s actually more like beige, which was so crushingly disappointing. And so we can build these machines.
But at the end of the day, we go home to eat our dinner. We go home to watch our television. We go home to go to the gym. We email somebody because we want to make touch with somebody because they’re part of establishing this nice little thing here. We’ve got this nice little thing going.
And we’ve got to keep this whole show on the road. And the idea about working on our well-being frequently required for survival. You know? I have to have this thing because I’ll feel insecure if I don’t have it. I have to have this thing because I wasn’t nourished enough as a child, so therefore I have to have it.
There are all kinds of needs that we have that are inexplicable but tied to our bodies, how our bodies respond to all this stuff. What they found is that you’d assume that a rat would know how to be a mother, right? We all figured that it’s so hard being a human mother because kids stick around for so long and their developmental trajectory is really difficult. And it’s prolonged, and it’s quite dramatic. And nobody can really teach you how to be a mother the first time around and all that sort of stuff.
And of course, animals, it’s all innate. They just sort of automatically do this stuff because it’s all preprogrammed and stuff. It isn’t so. It isn’t so. Rats have to learn to be mothers.
And they’re taught how to be mothers by their mothers. And they make straw dolls. And they nurture straw dolls. And if they are born yeah, I know. It’s amazing.
Yeah, it gets weirder. If their mothers are under stress when they’re in utero, the whole complex of signals that are sent to pup, the fetus, is it is not safe out here. It is not safe out here. So the hormonal profile, the hormones that basically tell us at any minute, am I Okay? Am I not Okay?
Am I Okay? Am I not Okay? Oops, oops, oops. Yeah, yeah, I’m Okay. I’m Okay.
Because that’s what they’re doing all the time, every moment. The complex of hormones that bathe the fetus basically sculpt its little developmental potential so that when they come out and they start developing, they’re actually very twitchy. They get scared really easily. They startle really easily. They freeze more than other rats when they get out in open maze tests and stuff like that.
And their mothers are really bad nurturers because they’re anxious. So that generation isn’t a very good nurturer because because they didn’t learn how to do it. Now if they’re in a nest or in a cage with other rats that feel Okay and they’re reasonably good mothers, they might be able to pick something up. Because apparently most mammals appear to have something called mirror neurons. And that allows us to pick things up when somebody is doing an action, like somebody’s chopping carrots or something like that.
Mirror neurons will activate according to the chopping motion. Your brain will activate in the parts of the body that you would use to do the chopping motion. So that’s how sushi chefs can learn how to make sushi without ever having done it once before their first attempt. They watch and watch and watch watch and learn and learn and learn and learn. And the first they do it, it’s a test.
But they haven’t done it in the traditional way of teaching. And apes learn things this way. Rats learn things this way. There’s all kinds of learning that goes on that way. So I’m getting lost.
The point I’m trying to make is that the body has huge effects on the mind, huge effects on the mind. When it’s slightly abnormal, or whatever normal is, because normal is really a movable feast, because the world is changing all the time. And what is normal now will not serve us later under different circumstances. What may be abnormal now may be exactly what’s called for in other circumstances. Can I just ask, you know how some people can become addicted to going to the gym?
Yeah. Feel good. Does that come because of the body affecting the mind then, that each time they go and have a pleasant experience, like the gym or athletes running, it’s a bit more than just going. It becomes an addiction, doesn’t it? Well, whether it’s an addiction or not, they certainly want it.
I mean, like if you give rats the opportunity to bar press for cocaine, they’ll do it until they die. We like pleasurable feelings. We like pleasurable feelings. We like dopamine gets released, endorphins get released when exercise. And we like novelty.
Look at the world today. What’s the latest new thing that it’s going to distract and fascinate, right? In studies with rats, they found that given a choice between cocaine and novelty, the rats will basically go between them. They won’t just all go for the cocaine. They’ll split their time between the novelty cage and the cocaine cage.
So novelty, stimulation is just as powerful as you know. So exercise? You bet. And I also think that exercise is really powerful, has a powerful effect because we’re animals. We’re animals and we don’t go for runs.
Nobody takes us for runs. And we basically need well, really, we need to move. Every single thing in our body is built to move. And when we don’t move and we’re really sedentary, all the problems of Western life arise from When the body’s working, the circulatory system, respiratory, that’s what we should be normally doing, not just Yeah, except my teacher doesn’t move very much. He sits and meditates a lot, and I think he’s a whole lot happier than any athlete down at NextGen.
Know? So, you know, as an embodied creature, generally speaking, we’ve got to move. But we’ve got to move to stay in this. Do you know what I mean? We’ve got to move to stay on the treadmill.
Because it all comes back to this and what makes it go. And everything being designed to elevate the self, protect the self, expand the self, view everything in terms of the self is what keeps us on the treadmill. And that’s basically the mistake of ignorance. It’s what we sense and how we make sense of it is basically we sense things that are relevant to us. We make sense of them in terms of our well-being, generally speaking.
And if you don’t believe me about I don’t even know if it’s on the internet anymore. They had to take it off because everybody was downloading it and infringing copyright. But there was talk about keeping your attention on something that is task specific to you and completely missing the point. There was a film that was created in a perception lab at Harvard. And it’s called Gorillas in Our Midst.
And you’re asked to sit. And only about ten percent, fifteen percent people don’t. It doesn’t happen for them. It overwhelmingly happens for most people. And so you’ve got a scene where you’ve got a team in black t-shirts and you’ve got a team in white t-shirts.
And they’re passing a basketball around. Basketball, everybody’s moving. And your task is to count how many times the people in the white t-shirt pass the ball. So you’re looking at the people in the white t-shirts. And they’re passing the ball, you’re counting, and all that sort of stuff.
And what you don’t see is the guy in the gorilla suit who walks right into the middle of this passing things and goes like this and walks out. It’s called inattentional blindness. We don’t see a lot. We don’t see a lot. So it all comes back, is it working for me?
And you can see this is classically the link that keeps it all going. And this is where it also stops. This is where you can intervene such that it doesn’t go anymore, such that you can reach this state of being really, really happy, really, really even in how you respond to the world rather than react to the world. But you can see how difficult this is going to be. Because even as you’re applying antidotes, even as you’re applying antidotes with your mind to your mind states, to your mental states, which are both states of your mind and your body.
First of all, you’ve got to recognize what proportion of it’s your body that’s basically making you feel the way you are and just saying, well, I’m going to sit with it. And the second thing is counteracting it. But even as you’re counteracting it, every cell in your body is going, no, no, no, no. We’re moving. We’re moving.
We’re moving. We’re going. We’re going. We’re going. So stopping this is huge.
It’s huge. But the fact that it’s possible is amazing. And I mean, I believe possible. I have evidence that satisfies me that it’s possible. But I don’t have any evidence that necessarily is going to satisfy you because it requires I mean, there are things that I have experienced with.
You know, I’ve seen with other, you know, with people who are realized, that I believe are realized. And I can’t describe that to you. It’s something that you have to, at first, kind of take on faith. And then if you’re lucky little by little, you’ll see signs of it. Then you’ll go, oh, yeah, is that what it’s like?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I can see that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh my god, really?
Okay. Yeah, yeah. Oh my god, really? You know, that’s how it grows. But at first, you have to be willing to look at how this whole thing works and see just how sucked in we are, just how evolved to be sucked in.
Right? Questions? Comments? Could it be realized your realized acquaintance? Could this realized acquaintance?
Could any mistaken? I don’t think so. I don’t think so. They could be. Basically, what if I hadn’t here’s where I stand up and say, my name’s Pamela.
I’m an alcoholic. I’m a shopaholic. I’m a everythingaholic. Could be mistaken. But what I found is that before I ever undertook the PhD, I was taking teachings.
And I was trying to work with my own mind. And I’m still a jerk in many respects, but I am so different from what I was fifteen years ago. I am so different from what I was ten years ago and even five years ago. And that was all basically following teachings that were given to me by this person that I thought exemplified these things. And now I believe it.
I believe it. That’s why. But see, it’s not going to convince you. You don’t know what a jerk I was. Richard can tell you secretly and in the dead of night in a boys meeting or something like that.
Yeah. Chris? I was going to say, why is it then that we have to go against our natural instincts and nature if our nature is to be selfish? And yet, we’ve been told that unselfishness is the great realization of the world. One of my favorite subjects.
One of my favorite subjects. Selfishness may be the default condition, but cooperation and altruism is the They’re all radically altruistic. The most limited numbers are the most selfish and the most predatory. We love watching the cheetahs, right? How many of them?
Right. Not too many. And it’s not just because of loss of habitat that they’re genetically inbred. Being a top predator is not really all that great. And it’s nature red in tooth and claw.
But when you’re cooperative, when you’re altruistic in fact, everything works so much better. You get access to more resources. You get help when you need it. Ants, the most cooperative, totally selfless, which is not to say they don’t mix it up in nest. And some will go off and decide, I want to breed.
And some of the other ones have to come around and sort of slap them around and say, look, if you do that, you’re going to be wasting resources for all the rest of us. So get over it and eat their eggs. They eat their eggs, and then they move on. Ants are the numerous bacteria, massively social, massively cooperative. When Myxococcus xanthus sporulates so that they’re in a situation of dire emergency, no food, lots of them.
They send out a signal. They all come sliming together. And they form little molds like this, like little stalks and fruiting bodies. And some lucky ones will become spores that will germinate for another day. But up to eighty percent of the rest of them basically split their guts.
They kill themselves so that there will be food. There will be food. There are a lot of bacteria. There are a lot of bacteria on you. There are a lot of bacteria in you.
So even though this is the case, it is not the most successful strategy. In fact, it’s a really dysfunctional strategy. Biology shows it. And that’s one of the reasons why I really love whole connection, this whole the wheel of life is because it shows us really clearly how we generate the kind of subjective experience we generate. And all of the antidotes for it are all and that can be really clearly cashed out in biological terms.
And all the antidotes for it can also be cashed out in biological terms. The thing that I find so beautiful about this is that it would have been true whether the Buddha had said it or not. We were just lucky that a human being did the hard yards to find this for us and tell us about it. But it would have been true regardless. It would have been true no matter what, in all times, in all places.
That’s my belief. Yeah? Yep? I thought that the application of the Not necessarily. Well, that their whole focus was on how is the self Self centered.
Self centered, Okay. Well, ensuring the self continued, persisted, etcetera. The wheels were turning over, So what is it about these eighty percent of the bacteria in these cells? Well, but is contrary? Is it contrary?
That’s the thing. I’m not sure that it’s contrary to it. It’s like, you had an answer to that? I was thinking, go for it, Anthony. Yeah.
Is to me that as a society, they’re behaving in that selfish way because they’re doing things to preserve the whole society. That’s right. And the bees are doing it. And if the ants invade the bees, hide or vice versa. And apparently, where two ant colonies join two different that is a zone of perpetual warfare.
But there apparently is a lot of traffic across either side. And they used to think that everybody in this nest was related to one another. But apparently, there’s a lot of going across the borders and visiting relatives and friends over here. And it’s like once you get past the zone of perpetual warfare, it’s kind of like a different story. It’s a very, very complex story.
Okay. But Richard, I’m not sure that cooperation is the antithesis of this, and if we are talking about this. How it arose, we’re not sure. But that it arose is very clear. And it rose really early because some of the oldest structures believed to be made by bacteria, stromatolites off the the coast of Western Australia.
I mean, if they were made by bacteria, they were made by colonies. They’re made by colonies with colonial behavior at three point eight billion years ago. So there’s something about this that contributes so much to this and survival that it trumps this. Right? Yep.
It seems as if you’re projecting on No doubt. No. Masses, organic molecules constructed in a particular way some sort of intelligence, and that they have behavior which directed towards survival rather than simply replicating You’re talking about bacteria? Whatever, yeah. It is.
It seems like there was a Okay. Okay. I can answer this question. This is one of my favorite questions, actually. But we want to get out of here by nine thirty, right?
Shall I give you a really quick cook’s tour in response to that? Okay. Is that all right? Does anybody else have a question? What was the question?
Jampa was saying, I seem to be making a leap between a lump of inert chemicals and something that’s alive that has behavior that actually is interested in survival and stuff like that. I can’t explain the difference. There just is one. But if you want a mini tour of bacteria as the oldest things on this planet. Of course, they’re today’s bacteria, right?
They’re not bacteria of two billion years ago. We don’t know what they were like. We can’t know what they were like. Do bacteria have minds? I say yes, and here’s why.
This is an E. Coli. We used to think that these were the classic sort of pinball behavior people not people, organisms that if the sugar gradient happened to be stronger over here than over here, it would definitely go in this direction. And it moved kind of like a pinball. It goes sort of going sort of going in a random walk to its target without making any choices.
It was choiceless, right? Okay, but now we know, first of all, that there aren’t receptors all we used to think that there were receptors all over the self wall, too, but there’s not. What there are is there are clusters of cells. There are clusters of receptors that are up at the top of the leading edge of the pole that is now called the nanobrain. And what it has is five Okay, they sense thirty different things, thirty different sensory pathways.
Pathways. Five of them are classical. Okay? Five, five senses. And that means they can sense different states of the environment.
Now if an E. Coli is going along and there’s not enough oxygen. There’s heaps of food. There’s heaps of food. But there’s not enough oxygen.
And there are other bacteria around that can do things with other bacteria. Bacteria. But there are also predators around. Every single one of these cells makes its own choice. Every single cell basically sums up its situation and acts.
And there are differences between individual bacteria. We now have instrumentation so sensitive that you can actually tether a bacterium to a stage and just watch how it behaves. And watch it move individually. And in multi species biofilms, like the things that are on your teeth, like dental plaque, They can take pictures of single bacteria coming along to this great massive colony, right, and sort of checking something out here. And no, that’s not quite doing it.
And basically finding a niche, usually with conspecifics, others like itself, in a place. And when talking about a biofilm like that, it’s got just on our teeth, four hundred to five hundred species, different types of bacteria, all working, maybe not cooperatively. Maybe the ones that are chewing up the carbohydrate, be spitting metabolite that’s food for somebody else. And maybe they’re not doing that intentionally. But they’re all located roughly around one another so that they can do that.
And they make a decision to become social, or they can make a decision to detach and become solitary. There is a life cycle that bacteria have. They are nothing like little robotic pinballs. They have perception. They have memory.
They make decisions under uncertainty. And some of them are really major, like sporulation or not. Do we basically roll the dice and bank on the next generation? Or can we get out of this now? And they communicate with one another.
And they have positive, negative, and neutral affect. What do you reckon? Do they always make good decisions? No. But actually, yeah, but actually I think someday I’m going to write something about why rationality isn’t adaptive, isn’t really good for us.
But I, you know, sometimes they make mistakes. They decide to sporulate. And actually, there’s stuff around. Or they decide not to sporulate. And there’s nothing sporulate.
Sporulation. Oh, And the other thing is they have sex. We just thought they kept dividing and kept dividing and knocking off same copies in the cells. They have sex and they age. We used to think that they were immortal, but they’re not.
Sporulation is where they create spores that can last a long time. It’s like going into hibernation. Yeah, Anthony? Does memory mean they can also learn? Nobody has done an experiment on that yet.
And we’re hoping that as part of this project that I’m doing with Adelaide Uni that will get somebody in. This microbiologist at ANU is hoping to set up some experiments. It’s designing the experiment to get a result that people would say, yes, this is learning or not. That’s a trick. So yeah, it’s being thought about.
But to the best of my knowledge, it hasn’t been done yet. Because nobody’s looking because, of course, they can’t learn. But apparently, they do. Because their memory, they have multiple different types of memory. Some things they hold longer, some longer, some shorter term, that sort of stuff.
It’s really bizarre. I mean, nobody thought any of this was going on. Nobody thought any of this was going on. And all this is just so new. It’s like the last ten, fifteen years.
And most of this stuff is like in the last five. It’s really new. Yep? Are they having sex to reproduce? Oh, no, no, no, no.
Well, they’re having well, they are. They are. But they’re having sex so they can exchange genes. But they don’t have sex so that they then fuse together and then do that. What they do is here’s a bacterium.
Here’s a bacterium. One extrudes a pilus, and then the other one cranks it in so that their cell walls are touching. And then they pass these little plasmids, which are little bits of DNA. And some of them are like compilation types of antibiotic resistance. It’s really scary.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like there have been plasmids that have resistance to like eight different. It’s like, how do they make them? How does it get together? How do they know to transfer this one?
It’s not a knowing process. A lot of this is mechanical. But there’s so much more going on at that level than we ever could have imagined. And it’s not hard to see. Where’s the person shot with the arrow?
Oh, in his eye. Yeah. Where is it? Where is he? Is this here?
No, never mind. I’ll find by next time. This isn’t as good a copy of the original wonderful one as I’d hoped. But they’re all working off the same sort of self, self, self. I want to survive.
I want to grow. So is this what’s called intelligence? Would you call this intelligence? Okay. I think it’s intelligence.
There are a lot of biologists who think it’s intelligence. If you talk to a developmental psychologist who deals with intelligence testing with humans and human development, they probably wouldn’t. What jumping the question? What was his first question? He said you’ve made a jump from A organized inorganic molecules, which seem to replicate themselves and maintain their structure It’s mainly viruses.
Something which is directed towards survival, having a directionality to it. We don’t know where that directionality comes from. That’s another big gap that you could drive a truck through. Nobody knows. And I was asked that question the other day by a doctor at the University of the Third Age, where I teach on Tuesdays.
And he said, but you’re making this jump. There’s this unaccounted for thing between a rock or a crystal and something that has its own interests, as it were. Yeah, I mean, wants to survive and that sort of stuff. And all I can say is the gap is there. I mean, how it gets crossed, don’t know.
And philosophers can argue about we shouldn’t use teleological language in science. But if you read the major biology journals, it’s all through it. It’s function language for the purpose of. It’s all the way through it. It’s all the way through it.
This interesting point you made about a group living in a community and for cooperation probably would live longer than a single animal. Oh, it does. I thought of echidna is another creature that’s very solitary. Solitary. Yeah.
There aren’t very many of those either. No, but I never thought of it that way. Are there any creatures that do live a solitary existence? I mean, do these live in a solitary individual state, or they have big colonies and colonies? Well, they apparently have switches.
They sort of have their repertoire of tricks for solitary life. And they have their repertoire of tricks for social life. And for example, if you’re living in a colony with a whole bunch of others, you don’t want these because your flagella will just shake up the soup, basically. And so they shut down the production of flagella and stuff like that when they’re living in a social way. How they make the decisions, quote unquote, to live solitarily and live socially, we don’t know.
I mean, are all sorts of things that need to be investigated. Under what conditions do they do this and all that sort of stuff. But my interest in all of this was, first of all, to see how low cognition could be said to go. And I really looked at bacteria to rule them out, because I’d been told by all cognitive scientists that I talked to that you won’t find it there. It’s just all pinball behavior.
Yep. It’s worse than that. It’s worse than that. Every morning that you brush your teeth, you wipe out a nation. Sorry.
Yeah. So all you can do in my book is say, I will work like crazy in this life to become enlightened so that I will liberate every single one of you. Sorry. But nobody will speak to me if I don’t do this. And my teeth will fall out.
My teeth will fall out. And I will die young. And I won’t be able to practice the Dharma. Well, no and yes. Unbelievably enough, back in the beginning of the twentieth century, were microbiologists who believed that organisms like paramecia because they couldn’t see bacteria.
It’s much too small at that time believed that organisms like paramecia and amoebas could tell us a lot about, you know, could tell us about behavior. And then some behaviorism took hold. And this is very complicated historical stuff. And basically all those people just dropped out because it wasn’t where the action was. And then there was operant conditioning of pigeons and rats and that sort of stuff without ever thinking about what was going on inside the black box.
It was just observable behavior, observable behavior, observable behavior. And so what’s the point of looking at a paramecium? It can’t do very much. You can’t shock it and expect it to do something interesting the next time. Because that’s basically what they’re doing.
They’re shocking them. They’re depriving them of the experiments, when I talk about studies show blah, blah, blah. There’s practice that goes on all behind that. Some of it is really quite repellent. It’s quite repellent.
But you can’t ignore what it comes up with. I mean, can say, stop using so many animals. A lot of the stuff, you’re just repeating experiments. It’s going to get to the point and I say, bring it on when we will no longer be able to justify doing experiments on monkeys, monkeys and apes. Yeah.
Yeah. We’re coming very, very close to that. There are countries that are actually passing sort of bills of rights for apes so that their interests can be represented and that sort of stuff. Yeah. Yeah, we all have to go, Anthony.
Let’s go. Thank you very much. We’ll see you next week. Okay.