 Good morning everybody, thank you very much for the opportunity to speak at this great meeting and thank you all for coming out so early this morning. The title of my talk, Purpose Driven Life, a psychiatrist evolutionary perspective on human motivation. The objective of this presentation is to challenge the assumption that a purpose driven life requires a purpose driven universe. Many psychiatrists have a natural affinity to skepticism. A major part of the work of a psychiatrist is to persuade people to be skeptical about their own beliefs and perceptions, not to believe everything their brain thinks is true. Psychiatrists attempt to understand why people believe the things they do, from overt psychotic delusions to depression, anxiety and common distorted beliefs. We're all prone to cognitive distortions as we try to make sense of our world. Inferences about purpose, intention and meaning are very much prone to mistaken assumptions. People naturally tend to seek and find purpose and meaning in their lives. It is an intuitive human tendency to assume that life and the universe are inherently purposeful and designed, intentional, that things are meant to be. To most people throughout history, it has seemed self-evident that our world is purposefully designed and controlled by intentional high powers. It would have seemed quite foolish to suggest that it had arisen on its own. Versions of the theistic view actually seemed intellectually credible, even appropriately skeptical. Not the idea that the universe cares about us personally, as Tennyson put it, nature read in tooth and claw, so careless of the single life. In terms of credibility, we are not taking seriously here beliefs in a personal communicative God or parochial biblical beliefs with its God as an author of books. We are considering abstract notions of God. Theism even made a comeback in recent decades. Experts argued that science had revealed that life and the universe are even more intelligently intricate and complex than had previously been appreciated. Furthermore, the laws and constants of physics appeared fine-tuned for matter and life to be able to evolve. It seemed reasonable to ask, how could the universe be explained as an entirely unguided, spontaneous, self-caused phenomenon? Another long-standing enigma has been human consciousness. In all its mystifying complexity and in the way that it seems entirely distinct from all the physical stuff in the universe. And where do values come from? Meaning and morality. Science for most of its history had little to say about these, whereas mainstream religion which for two and a half millennia did attract a great many deep thinkers, offers many profound philosophical and psychological insights, mixed in with its more problematic aspects. In recent years, the age-old human assumptions about a purposeful, designed universe have been compellingly challenged and refuted by breakthroughs in science. The net result is that far more coherent, rational explanations have been crystallizing as to how our complex world could have emerged and evolved entirely naturalistically, that is, non-supernaturally and unguided. There are now plausible hypotheses to explain even the apparent fine-tuning and first cause enigmas. We've learned enough not to jump to supernatural conclusions to fill gaps in our knowledge. Science neither purports to nor needs to be able to explain everything about the universe, but the mere fact that it is possible to generate fully plausible naturalistic hypotheses should give us pause regarding our supernatural assumptions. Even the immensely complex, seemingly non-physical human mind is increasingly yielding its secrets to fully naturalistic explanations. Now if you have any doubt still at all that the mind is the product of the brain and nothing but the brain, come and work in psychiatry for a while and see if any aspect of the mind that you can think of is not radically altered by the disruption, disassembly or for that matter enhancement of physical brain circuitry. The new scientific insights lead to skepticism about design and purpose. Current naturalistic explanations of the universe, life and consciousness are complex, subtle, and still inaccessible to most people, but highly elegant when fully grasped. There are now extremely cogent reasons to be skeptical of assumptions about a purposeful universe. As we now have far better natural than supernatural explanations, and by better, we mean the best fit for the data. Moreover, we understand that much more clearly than ever before that assumptions about inherent purpose are human projections. Nevertheless, most people will probably continue to find the simple message that the universe has a special purpose intended for them to be far more intuitive, appealing, and much easier for them to understand. I personally doubt that we can expect the average person to move beyond that. An understanding of the evolutionary psychology of belief suggests that humans are strongly predisposed to see meaning, purpose, and intention in events. By the way, the top picture is a romanticized depiction of Indians in Jamaica awed by a lunar eclipse predicted in 1504 by Columbus to impress and intimidate them. As Michael Sherma and others have articulated, these traits most likely evolved to detect predators and prey and to cooperate as social animals by readily identifying patterns and by inferring other beings' intentions in those patterns. Revealingly, psychiatric disorders amplify beliefs in special purpose. These normal human tendencies are magnified in psychiatric disorders such as psychosis and mania. Delusions of reference are the most common type of delusions. These delusions involve the false belief that unrelated, coincidental, or innocuous events, objects, or actions have a particular personal significance. My patients regularly tell me that everything is happening for a reason. It's all about me. They detect hidden messages, signs. They tell me that it couldn't possibly just be coincidence. They have all kinds of proof. These types of delusions are a central characteristic of paranoia and grandiosity. Supernatural belief is also reinforced by other factors. It provides solace, enables death denial, abolishes uncertainty. Supernatural myths provide purposeful stories to explain the world to ourselves. These rituals render beliefs experiential, ordered, and communal. They give us feelings of control and predictability. They also often address instinctive contamination anxiety, tapping into purity fixations. Religion facilitates powerful social binding, fostering group cohesion, authority, and control. The need for order and control through ritual and magical thinking, when amplified to our psychiatric proportions, is obsessive compulsive disorder. In order to understand the natural evolution of purpose and caring, dispensing with supernaturalism, we must now consider an apparent paradox. How have we evolved to care about our lives, being purpose driven, goal directed, motivated, and to care about other people's lives, being moral, compassionate, in an unplanned and mechanistic, indifferent universe lacking any purpose or caring? Fundamentally, purpose driven human behaviors are merely elaborations of the evolved drive to survive, attract mates, and appropriate as vehicles for self propagating genes. All biological organisms, even the simplest, are by definition goal directed, with or without any form of conscious intentionality as an outgrowth of this basic drive. Human bacterium, or a plant, is goal directed. Complex purpose driven human behaviors can be understood at a basic level as extravagantly wondrously embellished means towards basic reproductive ends. This is in a sense analogous to the evolution of peacock feathers. Complex goal directed human behaviors have produced the magnificent spectacle of human civilization. So why do we bother to do anything? Because we are simply wired to be goal directed, driven by our brains in highly evolved motivation and reward circuits, pursuing and achieving goals is neurochemically reinforced and imbued with feelings of reward, in addition to being driven, of course, by hunger, libido, and survival. This is obvious and basic in the case of food and sex. For more complex, creative goal directed behaviors, we experience feelings of reward in complex ways. As feelings of accomplishment, self-actualization, these are complexly evolved elaborations of the same basic behavioral reinforcement system. Motivation is the normal, natural state of animals, varying in intensity as a trade across individuals, partially modifiable by behavioral conditioning involving experiences of rewards and consequences. Apathy and diminished capacity to experience feelings of reward is the abnormal, exceptional state. Many specific psychiatric disorders and brain disorders cause loss of appetite for life or deficits in goal directedness. Psychological and social factors can do this too, triggering depression due to feeling devalued or rejected by others. Depression once it sets in has neural correlates. Will these insights lead some to an existential crisis, despairing that there is no grand purpose to the universe, feeling a sense of absurdity? Our natural purposefulness and appetite for life gives us a powerful inclination to make meaning for ourselves in our lives. Our ability to do so is not dependent on the universe itself having a predefined purpose. The belief that everything happens for a reason and that things are meant to be is a double edged sword. It can be reassuring and comforting, that belief in a higher power, but it can also lead to bitter, anguish, feelings of abandonment and even more profoundly disorienting kinds of existential crisis when suffering cruel adversity. Why me? Existential questions for most people are intellectually interesting to ponder and debate but are highly unlikely in and of themselves to make someone feel suicidal. Okay, so we care about our own lives, but what about caring about the lives of others if the universe really is indifferent and amoral? Group dynamics in social animals are the basis of competition and cooperation. Humans have competitive and cooperative instincts, aggressive and empathic tendencies. Motivation to cooperate includes reciprocal altruism. I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine. As social primates, group dynamics make social status an additional crucial motivator serving the more basic drives of survival and reproduction. Status in primates is dependent on social reputation. Reputation in primates is established by aggressive dominance and intimidation, as well as by being helpful, a team player, and demonstrating useful skills. In humans, as in other primates, status is acquired not only by dominance, but importantly by achieving admirable skills and making useful contributions to the group. This leads to feelings of self-worth and accomplishment and is typically a primary motivator for purposeful living. We are also prone to feelings of failure. Disappointment with oneself for failing to accomplish all one's goals and not being the ideal person we would like to be is a quintessentially human experience. Humorously epitomized in this quote, my goal in life is to be the person my dog thinks I am. Fortunately, feelings of failure have the potential to increase our empathy towards other fallible human beings. As social animals, we are highly attuned to the feelings of fellow group members and adept at inferring their mental states. We also have highly developed mammalian bonding instincts, derived in part from mammals' need to nurture their young. People generally care empathically about each other, are moved by their distress and seek to console another industry. This is not unique to humans. It may be related to the evolved response to mammalian infant cries. It is more developed in humans. Of course, people don't always care. Sometimes we're callously indifferent or just oblivious to the suffering of others. A variety of factors can override caring and lead to aggression or cruelty. This topic could be a whole separate talk. However, there is a fair chance that people will care. Most people are capable of caring once they are able to comprehend and relate to the other person's predicament and perspective and they are even more likely to do so in reasonably conducive social circumstances. Now, getting people to achieve such comprehension and compassion and creating those socially conducive circumstances is the challenge. Yet there is a fair chance of success if dealing with people with intact empathy circuits. The human capacity for sophisticated reasoning plays a very important augmenting role too. Contributing to the development of social contracts and of increasingly rational systems of law. As Stephen Pinker and others have pointed out, the tendency over the course of human history has generally been towards greater caring. This has been a far from smooth trend but an unmistakable trend nonetheless, taking the long view of history. Working towards establishing reasonably peaceful, cooperative care in critically minded skeptical societies is a realistic potentially achievable goal. Indeed, this goal has already been partially achieved in developed democratic countries which not coincidentally are the most secular too. Those countries are also cooperatively interdependent with each other, reflecting an ever widening definition of within group. In summary, humans are innately purpose driven. We care about our lives and are strongly motivated to work towards purposeful, meaningful goals. The realization that meaning is something that we make rather than made for us is both anxiety provoking and empowering liberating. There is a fairly good chance of getting people to cooperate and to care about the lives of others. Developing more caring societies is a realistic, non-naive, collective human project but expecting the universe to care. Oh, best of luck to those who do. I don't know about you but I'm more concerned with knowing that people care about me than that the universe does. So we always try to let at least one or two questions during these sessions. We can't go much further than that but does anybody have a question for Dr. Lewis? If you could move to the aisle, I'm a little bit lacking mobility in a certain little bit. Something I've observed that I seem to have a hard time convincing other people. It appears that human beings are more interested in the plight of an individual than some large group. I mean we're more interested in Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman than the, say, 100,000 people who've died in Syria and even bigger Holocausts than that. Yes, I agree. That more than likely has to do with the environment that we evolved in in small hunter-gatherer groups and later tribal groups. Maximum size speculated about 150 people in the group later on. However, the good news is that we also have our very evolved reasoning abilities and there is cultural evolution that has by far overtaken genetic biological evolution. So we can teach ourselves how to care about large groups. One more question. Hi, you mentioned patternicity and empathy. I just wondered whether there's any correlate between the two. Are people who are more inclined to find patterns, more inclined to be able to intuit what other people are feeling in that kind of empathetic way? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know for sure the answer to that question. But in general there are different factors contributing to both. So, you know, patternicity as Michael calls it would be more of a cortical function. Empathy is more emotional, more limbic if you like, in general. But there are different levels of empathy as well. There are various psychologists and philosophers who have written about this. Empathy can be parsed to the basic biological limbic level all the way up to the cortical level. There are cortical elements in empathy. And perhaps these things are linked. Thank you Dr. Lewis.