 Let's turn from language to a closely related topic, theory of mind. Of course, you've written a lot on this. We had John Height for one of these discussions. And he has this notion that in the mind there are these modules, and they're almost a bit independent. So there's an empathy module or a being analytic module. And if I understand him correctly, in our political discourse, different modules take over, and it's almost not integrated with the rest of your brain, what's your take on how unified cognition is? To what extent, to say, are political discourse ruled by independent modules? Or is that not how you think about it? Yeah. Well, the metaphor of the module comes from my former colleague, Jerry Fodor, a philosopher and psycho linguist. And it comes in different versions. You had Howard Gardner proposing a theory of multiple intelligences. You have evolutionary psychologists proposing the metaphor of the mind as a Swiss army knife. Now it's more like a smartphone with a bunch of different apps. I think that I do agree. These can all be opposed to a view of the mind that would just have a theory of everything, that there's just one principle. It's all Bayesian statistics, or it's just the law of operant conditioning. How about all just one big teeming mess, but no modules? Well, see, modules never quite seemed like the best metaphor. I think there is structure specialization. I don't think the mind is spam. I don't think we just have a homogeneous neural network in these skulls. I think there is some organization. The problem with the module metaphor is that as soon as there are snap-in components that with very limited channels of communication between them. I think that's too strong. But I think it is reasonable to say that there are different faculties to use an old fashioned word to choose a different metaphor. I think it may have been Chomsky who proposed that the mind is like a biological system made out of organs and tissues, where when I was in high school, I was taught, for example, that the blood was an organ. Now, the blood, of course, suffuses all of our tissues. You can't draw a dotted line around it. It's not like the rump roast and the flank steak of the supermarket cow display. And likewise, the mind can have a specialization and structure and different components without them literally being independent. So I would agree with John Hyde that there are different mindsets, there are different faculties, there are different ways in which we can analyze the same set of events and that a lot of political disagreement consists of what frame of mind, if you want what module you use to analyze a particular issue. So you've got to acknowledge the complexity, the multiplicity of the mind, even if you don't subscribe to the strict metaphor of modules. What evolutionary purpose does a sense of self serve in human beings? So could you imagine human beings performing the same actions but being zombies not saying to themselves like, hey, I'm Tyler, or hey, I'm Steven Pinker? We have the sense of self, however difficult it may be to describe or study scientifically. And that evolved, you're a Darwinian. So where does that come from? Why is it there? Well, I would distinguish certainly the self-concept, self-knowledge from the issue of subjective experience. And people often use the word consciousness to refer to both of these phenomena, namely self-consciousness or self-knowledge on the one hand, and subjectivity or the qualitative nature of consciousness, qualia, what it is like to feel something or taste something on the other. And I think those are two different interpretations. You mean the latter. You can sit up and feel something, taste something, and say, hey, I'm Steven Pinker, and know introspectively that you're saying it to yourself. Right, but those are two, you could have subjective experience of redness, and sourness, and warmth, and so on without it including some concept of yourself. And conversely, you could imagine an intelligent system, a robot, say, where there's no one home, where it monitors its own state, it presents itself in certain ways, and at least as far as we know, it's not actually feeling anything. Of course, we don't know it, and that may be the key. The philosophical problem of sentience or qualia, or sometimes called the hard problem of consciousness, I think might ultimately be a quirk of our own way of analyzing the world, that is the mind reflecting on itself is naturally gonna be puzzled by some aspects of itself. We know from neuroscience that there is no aspect of consciousness that does not have some physical correlate. There's no ESP, there's no life after death, there's no mysterious action at a distance, it's all information processing in neurons. Why it should feel like something to me to be that network of neurons? I don't think we have a satisfying answer to, and it may not be a scientific puzzle at all. There are some philosophers who claim that it just isn't a coherent intellectual question at all, Dan Dennett being the most famous. For some people, this is a kind of escape hatch from materialism and a way to bring back some notion of the soul. The problem there is that you'd expect the mind to have some kind of non-material powers, which it does not have. I tend to gravitate toward a view that sometimes has been credited to David Hume. Colin McGinn is the contemporary philosopher who has kind of made it most prominent, sometimes I think misleadingly called mysterianism. Tom Nagel in his seminal article, What Is It Like to Be a Bat, whose title captures the essence of the problem, speculated in that article along the lines that I'm suggesting, namely there may just be some facts about the universe that are true and will never be satisfied that we intuitively understand them, not because there is some mystery in the sense of undiscovered scientific principle, but just that our very way of grasping reality might make certain things puzzling to us, even though we know at a more explicit cognitive level that they're true. So a heap of neurons that registers the environment, that organizes the information, acts on it, including a model of itself. From my point of view, it feels like something. Why that should be true, I don't know. But then again, here I am inside me and almost by definition, there are going to be some things about the view of me inside me, that the me doing the view is not going to be able to articulate because the part that would do the articulating is part of the me trying to explain it. So I don't think there are a lot of cases where we, I think there's some cases where human intuition hits a wall and this is one of them, the nature of time, what could have been before the Big Bang, if that was the beginning of everything? How can the universe be either finite or infinite? There's no reason to think that every aspect of reality will be intuitive. There may be some aspects where our best science will give us a characterization and we'll always scratch our head as we appreciate that it's true but it never feels totally satisfying.