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People call each other jerks without wondering what they mean by it.

Psychologists have had trouble pinning down personality disorders.

Even psychologists use intuitive "skyhooked" terms to describe behavior without explaining it.

Explaining motivations in strictly physical terms would impose useful rigor on our diagnostic practices.

I called my book on jerks "advanced psychoproctology for beginners," and defined beginners as people who know a jerk when they see one but have never stopped to wonder what distinguishes a jerk. My own psychoproctology research was inspired by that question: What is a butthead since it can’t just be anyone I happen to butt heads with?

Collaboration with Terrence Deacon and the Evolution of Language

I’ve done this research while collaborating closely for 30 years with Terrence Deacon, a Harvard/Berkeley biologist who studies how humans evolved language, and how it transforms us from just another mid-sized mammal into the radically different creatures we are.

All organisms interpret, respond, and communicate. But language is different. Humans are born parasitic on our local culture’s maintenance of what people who study such things call “symbols”. Symbols are social conventions – letters, numbers, words, etc. – that are not inherently connected with what they represent.

Take the word “dog”. It doesn’t resemble or point to a dog. It’s not a picture of a dog, which would make it “iconic.” It’s not the sound of a dog barking in the next room, which would make it “indexical” – indicating or pointing to a nearby dog. The word “dog” is a symbol, some squiggles on a screen or sounds in the air, that, as toddlers, we English-speakers learn to associate with dogs.

A photo of a dog, or the sound of a dog barking, has inherent reference. The squiggles or sound “dog” don’t. They’re what we call “tokens,” physical forms with no inherent meaning. Humans assign meaning to them by social convention. Only humans do that to any extent. All other organisms get by with icons and indexes, in other words, resemblances and pointers.

AI’s........

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