NATURAL-BORN DUALISTS

Conversation : MIND

NATURAL-BORN DUALISTS

A Talk with Paul Bloom [5.11.04]

In the domain of bodies, most of us accept that common sense is wrong. We concede that apparently solid objects are actually mostly empty space, consisting of tiny particles and fields of energy. Perhaps the same sort of reconciliation will happen in the domain of souls, and it will come to be broadly recognized that our dualist belief system, though intuitively appealing, is factually mistaken. Perhaps we will all come to agree with Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett and join the side of the "brights": those who reject the supernatural and endorse the world-view established by science.

But I am skeptical. The notion that our souls are flesh is profoundly troubling to many, as it clashes with religion. Dualism and religion are not the same: You can be dualist without holding any other religious beliefs, and you can hold religious beliefs without being dualist. But they almost always go together. And some very popular religious views rest on a dualist foundation, such as the belief that people survive the destruction of their bodies. If you give up on dualism, this is what you lose.

This is not small potatoes.

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Introduction

As a teenager, Paul Bloom worked extensively with autistic children, and when he majored in psychology at McGill University, he expected to end up as a clinical child psychologist. His interests shifted when he met John Macnamara, a professor who studied the interface between psychology and philosophy. Bloom worked with Macnamara as an undergraduate, and then did his graduate work at MIT with Susan Carey, on cognitive development and language acquisition.

As a professor—first at University of Arizona, and then at Yale—Bloom explores how children learn the meanings of words, and he developed a theory of word learning that has social cognition (also known as "theory of mind" or "mindreading") at its core. More recently, Bloom and his students have started to explore a set of related puzzles having to do with the nature and development of art, religion, humor, and morality.

PAUL BLOOM is a professor of psychology at Yale University who works on language and development, and with Steven Pinker coauthored one of the seminal papers in the field. He is co-editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences and the author of several books, the most recent of which is Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human.

Paul Bloom's Edge Bio Page

THE REALITY CLUB: Responses by Jesse Bering, Marvin Minsky, Jaron Lanier, Paul Harris, Pascal Boyer, Paul Bloom replies; Mark Mirsky

NATURAL-BORN DUALISTS

(PAUL BLOOM:) For the last few years I have been interested in common sense dualism, which is the notion that people have two ways of looking at the world. We see the world in terms of material bodies, including our own bodies, and in terms of immaterial souls. And we are dualists; we see bodies and souls as distinct.

Our dualistic conception isn't an airy intellectual thing; it is common sense, and rooted in a phenomenological experience. We do not feel that we are material things, physical bodies. The notion that we are machines made of meat, as Marvin Minsky once put it, is unintuitive and unnatural. Instead, we feel as if we occupy our bodies. We possess them. We own them. Because of this, we talk about my brain, or my body, using the same language of possession that we use when we talk about my car, or my child. These are things that we possess, that we are intimately related to—but not what we are.

This dualist perspective explains certain intuitions that we have about personal identity. We readily accept and make sense of situations, real or fictional, where a person stays the same but their body undergoes radical changes. In 13 going on 30, a teenager wakes up as Jennifer Garner, just as a 12-year-old was once transformed into Tom Hanks in Big. Characters can trade bodies, as in Freaky Friday, or battle for control of a single body, as when Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin fight it out in All of Me. This body-swapping is not Hollywood invention. We make sense of Kafka's Metamorphosis where this guy goes to sleep one night and wakes up as a cockroach, or Homer’s Odyssey, where sailors are transformed into the bodies of swine. In such cases, the soul is unchanged, only the body is different.

In fact most people around the world believe that an even more radical transformation actually takes place. Most people believe that when the body is destroyed, the soul lives on. It might ascend to heaven, or descend to hell, go off into some sort of parallel world, or occupy some other body, human or animal. Even those of us who do not hold such views have no problems understanding them. But they are only coherent if we see people as separate from their bodies.

Our dualistic perspective also affects how we think about such moral and political issues as stem-cell research, abortion, animal rights, and cloning. These are complicated issues, but the way people tend to address them—often explicitly, but always implicitly—is in terms of the question: Does it have a soul? If so, then the being in question is worthy of protection, a precious individual. If not, it is a mere thing.

In the case of abortion, our common-sense dualism can support both sides of the issue. We use phrases like "my body" and "my brain", describing our bodies and body parts as if they were possessions, and some people insist that all of us—including pregnant women--own our bodies, and therefore can use them as they wish. On the other hand, the organism residing inside a pregnant body might well have a soul of its own, possibly from the moment of conception, and would thereby have its own rights. President Clinton, one of our most scientifically literate presidents, was at a town meeting ten years ago, and he discussed abortion. He described the controversy as a reasonable disagreement among moral people. Nobody doubts the preciousness of human life. What they disagree about is an empirical issue: Precisely when does the soul occupy the body?

Or take cloning. About three years ago the Vatican issued a statement against human cloning. There are all sorts of reasons to be against human cloning, but the Vatican raised an interesting point. They claimed that clones would not have identical souls. While doctors and scientists might be able to create new bodies, only God could create new souls. I think some people take the next step here, and the worry lurking in a lot of minds is that with human cloning, you might end up with soulless bodies. And if you believe that, which is kind of scary, you don't want human cloning.

Admittedly, some people wouldn’t be caught dead talking about souls or spirits. But even for those people who would explicitly reject the notion of a body-soul split, dualist assumptions still frame how these issues are thought about. You can see this when people appeal to science to answer the question "When does life begin?" as if this is an empirical question, and an objective answer would settle the moral debate once and for all. But the question is not really about life in any biological sense. It is instead asking about the magical moment at which a cluster of cells becomes more than a mere physical thing. It is a question about the soul.

~~~

I am a developmental psychologist by training and by inclination, and so the question that fascinates me is this: Where does common-sense dualism come from?

One reasonable answer is it is learned. Children are raised in environments where they hear dualistic stories, they see movies where souls are depicted as independent from bodies, and they usually get some sort of religious training. And this dualism is inherent in the language that they learn; when we talk about the relationship between a person and his or her brain, we use the language of possession, not of identity.

There are also certain universal experiences that support a dualist worldview, such as the sensation of leaving one’s body in a dream, or the experience of our bodies disobeying our will. Saint Augustine uses the examples of impotence and involuntary sexual arousal here, seeing them as divine punishment after the Fall. As Garry Wills states, "the chanciness of arousal shows the loss of the integrity, the unison, of body and soul". But the experience of the unfaithfulness of our bodies need not wait for sexual dysfunction. It is experienced by any child who howls in frustration at learning to crawl.

So it is perfectly plausible that children start off innocent of any body-soul separation, and come to be dualists through experience. But I want to defend a very different view. I think children are dualists from the start. Even babies start off with this sort of body-soul split. To put it somewhat differently, they start off with two distinct modes of construal, or systems of core-knowledge, one corresponding to bodies, the other to souls. Because these systems are distinct, common-sense dualism emerges as a natural by-product.

For much of our recent intellectual history, in philosophy and psychology, this claim about babies would be thought to be utterly ludicrous. Total madness. It was said that babies and young children know nothing about bodies, and know nothing about souls. They are blank slates. Rousseau called the baby a perfect idiot. And Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist who got developmental psychology going in the last century, was adamant that babies have no notion of what an object is, and no notion of what a person is.

But over the last two decades there is decisive evidence showing that this minimalist perspective is wrong. In fact, babies, before they hit their first birthday, have a rich and intricate understanding of bodies and of souls.

First, there is a lot of research from psychologists like Elizabeth Spelke, Renee Baillargeon and Karen Wynn showing that young babies have a powerful understanding of physical objects. They understand that physical objects obey gravity. If you put an object on a table and remove the table, and an object just stays there - because there's a hidden wire - babies are surprised, they expect the object to fall. They also expect objects to be solid, and that objects should move on continuous paths over space, And, contrary to Piaget, they don't think that once you look away objects go out of existence. They understand that objects persist over time even when they aren't being observed. Show a baby an object, and then put it behind a screen. Wait a little while and then remove the screen. If the object is gone, babies will be surprised.

Karen Wynn showed that babies can even do addition and subtraction, of a rudimentary sort. You put an object down, a screen rises to hide it, and then you put another object behind the screen. Then the screen drops, and there is one object, two objects, or three objects. If there's one object there, babies are surprised. If there are three objects, babies are surprised. They know one plus one equals two.

Second, even young babies are social creatures. They prefer to look at faces over just about anything else. They quickly come to recognize different emotions—anger, fear, happiness. They imitate people. As soon as they begin to move their bodies in different ways, they can do clever things to manipulate emotions and behaviors of other people.

Then there's a lot of recent work from people like David Premack and Gyorgy Gergely and also from my own lab, that before children learn how to talk, they can make sense of social interaction. A typical experiment involves showing them movies where a character moves in a way that makes sense from an adult perspective—pursuing a goal, moving away from something—or in a way that doesn't make sense from an adult perspective. What we find is that even children before their first birthday get it. They expect people to act in certain ways. They expect people to pursue goals.

In some work that I've done with Valerie Kuhlmeier and Karen Wynn, for instance, we found that when babies see one character help somebody, and another character hurt that person, they later expect the person to approach the one that helped it, and to avoid the one that hurt it. This is sophisticated social knowledge. (The article is available on my lab web site, along with much of the other work I am talking about here.)

That the foundations for a body-soul understanding are present early on does not make children dualists. It's possible that they have some understanding of bodies and souls, but they don’t view them as separate. This issue is far from settled. But I want to give two examples that suggest to me that young children do have a dualistic understanding of the world.

The first involves their understanding of the brain. Young children start off now knowing what the brain does. That makes sense; it was a scientific discovery that the brain was involved in thinking, But once they do learn about the brain they develop an odd and interesting misunderstanding. I can illustrate this with a story about my son, Max, when he was six years old.

We were having an argument because he had to go to bed. I told him, You have to go to bed, it's very late, and he said, You can make me go to bed, but you can't make me go to sleep. It's my brain! This got me interested. I said, Okay, fine, stay up, let's talk. I got out a piece of paper, and started asking him questions about what he thinks the brain does. I gave him lists of things - does the brain do this, does the brain do that?

His answers showed an interesting split. He agreed the brain is involved in perception - in seeing and hearing, in tasting and smelling. He'd been taught that. And he agreed that the brain is particularly important with regard to conscious problem-solving: Solving a math problem, making sense of a story, planning what to do. But he said the brain didn't do certain things: it didn't do dreaming, it didn't do loving his brother, it didn't do pretending to be a kangaroo. Max said, that's what I do, though my brain might help me out.

I later found out when I looked at this literature that there are several experiments supporting this conception as typical for a child his age. Once children learn that the brain is involved in thinking, they don't take it as showing that the brain as the source of mental life; they don't become materialists. Rather they interpret "thinking" in a narrow sense, and conclude that the brain is a cognitive prosthesis, something added to the soul to enhance its computing power. In other words, there's Max, the person, and then there's his brain, which he uses to solve problems just as he might use a calculator or a computer.

I don't think that this is an entirely immature way of thinking. For instance when adults read that a certain part of the brain is involved when you think about sex, or race, or politics, they are often surprised. And I think this surprise is revealing. After all, the details of the studies may be of scientific interest, but the mere fact that the brain is involved should be boring. In fact, it would be the discovery of the century if some sort of thinking went on that did not involve the brain. And when they describe such results, even experts slip into dualistic language: "I think about sex and this activates such-and-so part of my brain"—as if there are two separate things going on, first the thought and then the brain activity.

A second sign of early dualism concerns when children think about the afterlife. The best study on this was done by Jesse Bering and David Bjorklund. They told young children a story about a mouse and an alligator, where the mouse is running around and the alligator comes up to him and chomps down, and the mouse is no more. The mouse is dead. Then they asked the children questions. Some of these are questions about the biology of the mouse. Now that the mouse is not alive, does its brain still work? Now that the mouse is not alive, will it grow up to be a big mouse? For these the children tended to say No. They understand that once the mouse is dead, his brain is not going to work; he isn’t going to need any food.

What is more interesting is that they also asked children about the mental life of the mouse. Now that the mouse is not alive, does he still love his mother? Does he still like cheese? Does he know he's dead? For these questions the children tended to answer Yes. So they tacitly believe that even though the mouse is not alive any more, its mental life persists. This is the foundation for the more articulated view of the afterlife you usually find in older children and adults.

I take this evidence as supporting the claim that children are natural-born dualists. I should add that I have done some other research—in collaboration with Valerie Kuhlmeier and Karen Wynn—that suggests that 5-months-olds see bodies and souls as entirely distinct. They are super-dualists. Normal dualists appreciate that people are both body and soul (or more precisely, a soul inhabiting a body), while babies see people as entirely immaterial beings, and hence not subject to physical constraints such as solidity and gravity and continuity. As you might imagine, this is a somewhat controversial claim, and there is a bit of a back-and-forth about our research that will appear in the journal Cognition (see again my web site if you want to look at the papers).

~~~

A different aspect of my work looks at the implications of common-sense dualism. Some of this research concerns how children and adults think about artwork, and I’m also exploring humor (particularly slapstick humor, which is rooted in a sense of body-soul duality). But the work that I am most excited by right now concerns its implications for moral reasoning.

The framework that I adopt is the philosopher Peter Singer's notion of a moral circle—the circle of things that matter to us. This circle can be very small, including just your kin and those you interact with on a daily basis. Friends and family. Or it can be extremely broad, including all humans but also fetuses, and animals, and even complicated computers. For most of us, it falls somewhere in the middle.

What causes the circle to expand and to shrink? I think you can make some progress towards an answer—both historically and developmentally—by recognizing that we have two ways of seeing a person, as body and as soul. Normally when we interact with people we see them as both. We appreciate that they have beliefs, desires, and consciousness, and so on, and we appreciate that they're physical things that take up space, that are subject to gravity, and can be moved around. Both stances coexist pleasantly enough in the normal course of things. But when you emphasize one perspective over another, you get moral consequences.

Social psychologists, for instance, have shown that simply getting an experimental subject to take another person’s perspective will make the subject care more about the person and be more likely to help them. Focusing on the soul, then, leads to moral concern. This can expand the circle.

Then there is the more sinister side, the shrinking of the circle. One route to this is what happens when you see someone solely as a body, and one emotion that supports this construal is disgust. Paul Rozin has done a lot of work showing how, as Charles Darwin first said, disgust is an adaptation towards veering us away from bad meat, and so it is naturally triggered by animals and animal waste products. And so some things are universally disgusting: Rotten meat, feces, urine, blood, vomit. But disgust can readily extend to people. People, after all, are made of meat.

It has been long observed that every movement designed to stigmatize or malign some group - Jews, black, gays, the poor, women - has used disgust. Once you get somebody to view a group of people as disgusting, the attention shifts away from them as people, as moral individuals. They become soulless bodies, and the circle closes in to exclude them.

This response to soulless bodies is one reason why I call my recent book, "Descartes’ Baby". The more obvious reason for the title is that I claim that people are mind-body dualists, and so they naturally hold a philosophy that's most famously associated with René Descartes. In this sense, we are all Descartes’ babies. But there is another reason for the title that relates to disgust and similar emotions.

It is based on a story that was told about Descartes after he died. Descartes was never popular; he had a lot of enemies when he was alive, and even more after he died, and the story about him is weird and faintly nasty. It was known that Descartes had an illegitimate daughter, Francine, who died when she was five years old; this was said to be the greatest tragedy of his life. The story went that Descartes was so struck with grief that he created an automaton, a mechanical doll, built exactly identical to his dead daughter. The two were inseparable. He took this mechanical doll with him wherever he went. It was kept in a small trunk, and wherever he slept she was by his side. The story is that Descartes was crossing the Holland Sea, and the captain of the ship became very curious about the contents of this trunk that Descartes always had by his side. One night the captain crept down to his cabin while he was sleeping and opened up the trunk. To his horror the robot Francine arose. The captain, struck with revulsion, grabbed her, dragged her up to the deck of the ship and threw her overboard.

I like this story because it captures how disturbing—in some cases, revolting—we find a body without a soul. It is a nice illustration of the emotional pull our common sense dualism could have. But it also raises a serious problem. Common-sense dualism is wrong. There is no consensus as to precisely how mental life emerges from a physical brain, but there is no doubt that this is its source. If by ‘soul’, then, you mean something immaterial and immortal, then souls do not exist. All of us are soulless bodies, no less than the robot Francine. In this sense too, we are Descartes’ babies.

~~~

Some scholars are confident that people will come to accept the scientific world-view, and reject the notion of an immaterial soul. I am much less optimistic.

People do believe all sorts of things that violate common sense. Some philosophers have argued that everything in the world is made of water, others that there is no such thing as pain. It has been claimed that there is no objective morality, and that the external world does not exist. Some people think that thermostats have beliefs; others argue that rocks have a form of consciousness. Some suggest that each brain contains two conscious entities (one for each hemisphere), and some doubt that consciousness even exists. We can add to this list of crazy views what Francis Crick called ‘the astonishing hypothesis"—the view that dualism is wrong, that mental life is the product of a purely physical brain.

People might sincerely believe these things. (I certainly believe the last one.) But such beliefs exist at a different level than gut feelings. They are more fragile, and less embedded in our everyday lives. The most severe moral relativist, if he were to see someone murder a child, would feel that it is very wrong indeed. A radical behaviorist can’t help but wonder what other people think of her; and there really are no atheists in foxholes. People can reject dualism at a conscious level, but the intuitive sense that body and soul exist is here to stay.

What about the more modest proposal that people will come to reject dualism at an explicit conscious level? In the domain of bodies, after all, most of us accept that common sense is wrong. We concede that apparently solid objects are actually mostly empty space, consisting of tiny particles and fields of energy. Perhaps the same sort of reconciliation will happen in the domain of souls, and it will come to be broadly recognized that our dualist belief system, though intuitively appealing, is factually mistaken. Perhaps we will all come to agree with Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett and join the side of the "brights" [*]: those who reject the supernatural and endorse the world-view established by science.

But I am skeptical here too. The notion that our souls are flesh is profoundly troubling to many, as it clashes with religion. Dualism and religion are not the same: You can be dualist without holding any other religious beliefs, and you can hold religious beliefs without being dualist. But they almost always go together. And some very popular religious views rest on a dualist foundation, such as the belief that people survive the destruction of their bodies. If you give up on dualism, this is what you lose.

This is not small potatoes. The insights of neuroscience are a much harder pill to swallow than, say, evolutionary biology. A religion such as Judaism or Catholicism might survive even if it comes to reject a literal account of God creating man and animals. But it cannot survive the rejection of the immaterial soul. Pope John Paul II was clear about this. A few years ago, he famously conceded that our bodies may have evolved, and that the Darwinian theory of evolution might well be true. But he drew the line at souls, stating that theories "which consider the mind as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man." Over 300 years ago, a philosopher named Henry Moore expressed this view in even sharper terms, writing: "No spirit, no God."

When people hear about research into the neural basis of thought, they learn about specific findings: this part of the brain is involved in risk taking, that part is active when someone thinks about music, and so on. But the general assumption underlying this research, that of the physical origin of mental life, is not generally appreciated, and it is interesting to consider how people will react when it is. The clash between dualism and science will not easily be resolved, and the stakes are high. The same sorts of heated controversies that raged over the study and teaching of evolution over the last hundred years are likely to erupt over psychology and neuroscience in the years to come.

Reality Club Discussion

jesse_bering's picture
Jesse Bering
Psychologist; Associate Professor, Centre for Science Communication, University of Otago, New Zealand; Author, Perv

Touché to Bloom, who, in the face of centuries of systematically addled philosophical and religious rhetoric on materialism, dualism and, God forbid, that variant of dualism, occasionalism (which provides for an interactionist proviso of divine inspiration of will), has begun to breathe new life into these old intellectual headaches by putting infants' and children's souls, or at least their conceptions of souls, under the experimental knife. This is precisely where they've belonged all along; and shame on the rest of us developmental psychologists for not having the gumption to do it much sooner. Social psychologists, like Wegner, though not deliberately couching such work in pseudo-religious terms until recently, started looking at these sorts of empirical questions decades ago.

The implications of common-sense dualism aren't necessarily pleasant ones, but they're critically important. I say they're not pleasant not because the data are beginning to reveal a series of ineluctable disproofs of true souls, the absence of which can never really be established but which most of us simply take as self-evident, but rather it's just sad to know that even infancy isn't completely characterized by a zombie-like insouciance, which would be nice to experience at some point in our lives – at least, while sober. (When Sartre said that Hell was other people, he wasn't referring to their bodies).

Yet I'm suddenly struck, and troubled by, the image of Bloom in his admirable search for the illusion, delicately carving up the intentionality system – where he suspects the image of the soul to be housed – with the steady hands of a surgeon (much unlike Descartes' clumsily scratching at his pineal gland). I'm troubled because upon serving up to us these veridical truths, which I believe them to be, on a cold, sterilized surgical tray, that large contingent of lay theologians and fools (take your pick) who we all know so well as our family and friends, if they really understood what Bloom was getting at, would be quick to knock it away while casting reductionist aspersions on it.

Then again, perhaps this isn't much of a problem at all because, as he well knows based on the pessimistic tone of his interview, Bloom's endeavor to map the cognitive anatomy of dualism is forever doomed to be obscured by the illusion itself, fated to remain in the elitist provenance of cognitive scientists. These people (present company included) are often as prepared to handle the humanistic applications of common-sense dualism as a bunch of blind men on a battlefield are prepared to fight war. I've found myself befuddled by precisely such applications, when, fresh from graduate school and presenting my findings on the cognitive bases of afterlife beliefs to a religious audience (we all make mistakes early in our careers), a doubtful priest asked what he was to tell his parishioners; that their beliefs in literal immortality were fantastical byproducts of their inability to simulate their own nonexistence? My clever response was an involuntary shrugging of my shoulders. (By the way, if you're an extinctivist, or otherwise doubt that cognitive biases are behind 'mature' afterlife beliefs, consider the difficult-to-wrap-your-head-around fact that you will never know that you've died.)

But this put me to thinking that, indeed, there really is something intrinsically unsatisfying about the reality of materialism, and so it is up to us researchers who've started getting our hands dirty with the abstract guts of the soul to know what to do once we've killed it altogether. It's nice to know that someone like Bloom's got his hands in the mechanics of this illusion with me, fishing around, and so now the real question becomes, once the empirical evidence for common-sense dualism (or intuitive, folk, or naïve dualism, if you prefer) stacks up beyond the Brights' mere beautiful soliloquies, and the good skeptics have each been run off by the developmental data, what then?

marvin_minsky's picture
Marvin Minsky
Mathematician; computer scientist; Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT; cofounder, MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; author, The Emotion Machine

Regretfully, I'll violate this usually sound principle:

"Don't pay any attention to the critics. Don't even ignore them!" — Sam Goldwyn

Except for just this one remark: Almost everything Bloom says seems sound, except that everyone should be repelled by the ancient (and probably innate) tendency of both infants and adult psychologists to see the world in dumbbell terms. I will be more tempted to read the rest of his stuff when and if he reaches the stage of tri-viding things into three or more realms.

jaron_lanier's picture
Jaron Lanier
Computer Scientist; Musician; Author, Who Owns The Future?

This would all be so much easier if one set of beliefs had clearly demonstrated itself to lead to better human behavior at large scales. Religion has brought us the inquisition, the Buddhist sarin gas cult, al Qaeda, the Peoples' Temple cult, and so on, but reaction against religion has brought us Stalin and the Cultural Revolution. In terms of numbers, I think atheists/materialists probably killed more people than religious fanatics in the last hundred years, though it seems as though they might have a hard time keeping up in the coming years.

This grimmest of competitions must be assessed if one metaphysics is to be promoted over another. Is there any pragmatic angle on the dualism debates?

Maybe. Is it possible that modern religiosity is defined in part by "Science Panic?"

While it's true that biology and information science are on the verge of closing in on results that cut very close to the most intimate human experiences, it's also true that the popular press tends to overstate progress, and there are multitudes of people awaiting the day when a professor from the Ivory Tower or worse, a corporation that has licensed his ideas, will be able to redesign the genetically-influenced beliefs and desires of children or realize other science fiction terrors. Is it possible that dread of this imminent attack on human identity can help explain the simultaneous worldwide emergence of religious extremist movements? While religious fanaticism has never been absent from human affairs, something unusual seems to be going on now. Religious extremists have become unusually powerful in American Christianity, Israeli Judaism, Indian Hinduism, and so on, all at the same time, to say nothing of what is going on in Islam.

Isn't this precisely the moment when scientists ought to learn some tact? Why not try to make friends instead of announcing to the world that we know better? I applaud Paul Bloom for displaying sensitivity to this problem, though I'm afraid I don't see things quite his way.

What sort of program might scientists adopt to decrease the chances of destructive levels of Science Panic?

My thoughts:

Avoid condescension. Perhaps people need to be comforted, but comfort must be offered humbly by an equal, not a know-it-all. We're all in this human condition together.

Be very careful not to over-state. Reformers have to live by higher standards than those they hope to reform. In the dualism debates, it's important to not speak as if something is understood merely because it ought to eventually be understandable. Tone matters. Maybe someday there will be a better understanding of the mental mechanisms of self, and it will turn out that these are so wondrous that scientists are the ones who sound the most enthralled and mystical. Assessing something before the details are known makes it sound duller than it probably is. That has been true of every aspect of the natural world I've learned about and it would surprise me if the self turned out to be any different.

Be honest that philosophy is hard. There isn't just one dualism. There are those who hope to live after death, or who believe in God, and Bloom addresses their beliefs. But there is also the simpler dualism, based on the existence of awareness or experience in itself, which doesn't equate to either God or afterlife. That kind of soul is the only thing that is not reduced if it's an illusion, and I can just report to you I have it. I wrote a funny paper once suggesting that you could only detect the experiential kind of soul in one special case: A professional philosopher will reliably take a position on dualism based on whether she has internal experience or not. There's a danger that a researcher who doesn't happen to have this weird internal experience thing will sound ridiculous when declaring that it's an illusion to someone who does have it.

Pity us poor rational dualists. We have internal experience and yet no beliefs about God or Afterlife. We have more to lose. What I wonder: Are you absolutist non-dualists pretending not to have experience in order to soften the terror of your own deaths?

paul_harris's picture
Paul Harris
Victor S. Thomas Professor of Education, Harvard University

Paul Bloom argues that: (i) many adults are dualists—they believe in the separate functioning of the mind/soul and the body; (ii) such dualism has its roots in infant cognition; and (iii) that given this natural predisposition, we will find it difficult to abandon a belief in the soul despite advances in neuroscience.

This is a neat story but I don't believe it. I think the debate is—and should be—between two different forms of dualism: secular dualism and religious dualism. It should not be between thoroughgoing materialism and religious dualism—as implied by Bloom. Secular dualists claim that: mental states are different from, but dependent on, brain states; mental states cease at death given their dependence on the brain; there is no soul—if, by that, is meant a set of psychic processes that survive death. Religious dualists claim that there are some special mental states—those involving the soul—that are ultimately independent of the brain and survive death. Ongoing research, including some of our own, points to the existence of secular dualists as well as religious dualists.

First, we find that most professed non-believers assert that all processes (mental, as well as bodily) terminate at death. By contrast, professed believers claim that only bodily processes cease at death—some kind of spiritual/mental existence continues.

Second, if a belief in the soul had its origins in infancy then a belief in the afterlife should be widespread in childhood. Yet, in our research we find that that many elementary school children insist that all processes, mental as well as bodily, cease at death. These 'discontinuity' judgments are especially frequent if the death is placed in a secular, medical context. It is only when the death is framed in religious terms that they acknowledge that some processes—especially mental processes—survive death.

Third, contrary to Bloom—or at least contrary to Max—most older elementary school children do not assume a disconnection between their identity and their brain. Say we ask them to contemplate a brain transplant with a pig. The pig, we tell them, gets their brain and then the pig is asked: "Are you 8-year-old Max or are you Garby the pig?" Most 8-year-olds assert that the pig will reply: "I'm 8-year-old Max."
In sum, many children and some non-believing adults acknowledge that their thoughts, sense of identity, and mental processes, while not identical to brain processes, are dependent on brain processes, and will cease when they die. They are secular dualists.

So, how does a belief in the soul arise? My guess is that religion—like Bloom—sets up a false opposition: materialism, on the one hand versus religious dualism on the other. Ordinary folk—who have the defensible intuition that mental processes are not identical to brain processes—resist materialism only to fall into the hands of religious dualism. They should stay where they are—and just re-assert their secular dualism. They have nothing to lose but their souls.

pascal_boyer's picture
Pascal Boyer
Anthropologist and Psychologist, Washington University in St. Louis; Author, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought

Paul Bloom's research does not just show that we are dualists, committed to an immaterial mind or soul that has no simple ties to the physical world, but also that we are, in a deep sense, incurable dualists. However scientifically literate we may become, our intuitions are still firmly rooted in commonsense dualism. This may be unfortunate if you think that people's commitment to what is patently untrue is always a Bad Thing. But in this case I think the alternative is equally unpleasant. Our sense of morality is grounded in the notion of uncaused volition—I want what I want because I want it, and that's that—and therefore in our idea of an immaterial soul. Naturally, you could build a morality based on scientific fact rather than dualist fiction, you could be a moral being and literally think of your thoughts as patterns of neural activation, but... that would be so difficult to maintain, so against the grain of our intuitions, that few if any people could sustain this kind of thought for any time at all.

Paul Bloom's arguments also point to the extraordinary mystery of our ordinary thoughts, to the fact that commonsense thinking is anything but banal. Consider this: because we are dualists, we think we have (or rather we are) an immaterial mind that floats about with no physical implementation. We think of our brains as something we use. Now we also think of our bodies as things that are governed by our thoughts: when I want to raise my hand, lo and behold, it does rise. How is that possible? How could our thoughts have an influence on meat and bone stuff? The interesting thing about that is not the question itself (it is entirely created by dualism and once you abandon dualism it vanishes) but the fact that no-one is bothered by the question. That is, there is a wide gap in our commonsense world-view, and unless we are born or made philosophers, we just don't care .

Another fascinating consequence of Bloom's research is that it explains more clearly why we have religion the way we do. There is one (misguided) view of religion that is, unfortunately, widespread among intelligent people and especially scientists. I call it the "sleep of reason" interpretation. According to this view, people have religious beliefs because they fail to reason properly. If only they grounded their reasoning in sound logic or rational order, they would not have supernatural beliefs, including superstitions and religion. I think this view is misguided, for several reasons; because it assumes a dramatic difference between religious and commonsense ordinary thinking, where there isn't one; because it suggests that belief is a matter of deliberate weighing of evidence, which is generally not the case; because it implies that religious concepts could be eliminated by mere argument, which is implausible; most importantly, because it fails to explain why religion is the way it is. Religion is not a smorgasbord of irrefutable beliefs. It generally boils down to two kinds of notions, either of immaterial spirits or gods, or of artifacts with intentional powers. In both cases religion is grounded in the powerful dualism that is part of our commonsense world view, as described by Paul Bloom.

paul_bloom's picture
Paul Bloom
Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Yale University; Author, Against Empathy

I appreciate the remarks on my interview by Jesse Bering, Pascal Boyer, Paul Harris, Jaron Lanier, and Marvin Minsky. The main issue that energized commentators was the relationship between common-sense dualism, religion, and science, so I will focus most of my response on this issue.*

As Jaron Lanier points out, there are dualists and there are dualists. The dualism that I discuss is that the soul—which houses memories, desires, and consciousness—is immaterial; it is distinct from the body. This is the view articulated by Rene Descartes, but it is also expressed by Plato, Aquinas, and Augustine, as well as by many others.

And it is mistaken. As Pascal Boyer puts it, dualist fiction clashes with scientific fact. Lanier uses the phrase "the dualism debates", but while there is no consensus as to precisely how mental life emerges from a physical brain—different variants of physicalism and functionalism duke it out—the physical basis of experience is not a matter of debate, at least not within contemporary science and philosophy.

Lanier insists that he is himself a dualist, but he is using the term in an unusual way, to just mean that he has internal experiences. I would have thought that everyone has experiences (I certainly do!), but, in any case, this is not the sort of dualism I'm interested in. I have a similar reaction to Paul Harris' "secular dualism", the view that mental states are different from, but entirely dependent on, brain states. Whether or not this sort of property dualism is scientifically tenable depends on precisely what one means by "different from", but, in any case, my claim is that people are dualists in a much stronger sense. We are Cartesians; we think of body and soul as genuinely different substances.

Religion is not logically dependent on this sort of body-soul split. In fact, some religious frameworks explicitly disavow dualism, proposing, for instance, that afterlife involves the resurrection of the body, including the brain. Conversely, you can be a dualist without being religious. A common-sense dualist might not believe in God, miracles, heaven, karma, prayer, or anything else we typically associate with religion. A common-sense dualist might not even believe in an afterlife. Young children are dualists, but start off with no understanding of death, and hence no notion of life after death.

On the other hand, once we do learn about death, it is our common-sense dualism that makes it possible to believe in an afterlife—to believe that our souls (our selves) can end up in another body, or in paradise, or hell. This is the sense in which Harris' term "religious dualism" is apt—certain core religious beliefs are rooted in our Cartesian intuitions. This perspective on the relationship between dualism and religion is very much in sympathy with the general theory of religion outlined in Pascal Boyer's comments (which is not surprising, given how much I was influenced by his work on the topic.)

Harris is not convinced that people really are natural-born Cartesian dualists. Consider, however, that beliefs in immaterial beings and life-after-death shows up in every human culture. Even in modern communities, most people believe in God and believe in souls. Harris' explanation here is that belief in the soul is a consequence of religion. But this raises the obvious question: Why is it that humans are predisposed to construct religions that endorse dualism?

Actually I think a belief in souls often exists despite religion. David Myers pointed out to me that most mainstream Protestant theologians reject the idea of an immaterial soul, but he observes that the "people in congregational pews" have a very different view; they are dualists. In his book, The Problem of the Soul, Owen Flanagan gives an example from Catholicism: In 1999, Pope John Paul II stated that heaven and hell were not places where souls reside, but rather states of life involving being in relation with God or out of relation with him. The response by many devout Catholics was not submission to Papal infallibility—it was to wonder if the aged pope was losing his mind.

But what about the 10% of Americans who deny the existence of heaven, or the 3% who do not believe in a (immaterial) God? I would argue that even those who explicitly deny the existence of souls accept them at a deeper level. It underlies certain intuitions that we have about causality, morality, and personal identity.

As an illustration, consider our intuitions about brain-transplants. Harris is certainly right that adults and older children (though perhaps not younger ones) recognize that the self goes with the brain. If not, then movies such as Steve Martin's The Man With Two Brains, as well as many cheesy science-fiction flicks, would be incomprehensible. So yes, I recognize that if you scoop out my brain and put it in the body of a pig, then I would be that pig. Does this mean that we are actually not Cartesians, that we believe that mental processes are dependent on brain processes?

Hardly. After all, presumably Descartes himself would have this same intuition. This is not because he believed the self is the brain; it is because he believed that the self occupies the brain. When people say that the brain is the "seat of the soul", they mean this in quite literal way: the brain is where the soul sits. Because of this, the soul follows the brain, just like I would follow if you moved the chair upon which I am sitting.

In support of this analysis, note that children distinguish between what their brain does and what they do. In my interview, I gave an example from my son Max, but the general conclusion is backed by systematic research (by John Flavell, Angeline Lillard, and others). The brain is not responsible for all of mental life. You use your brain to solve math problems, for instance, but it is you that falls in love.

This understanding might not be so different from that of many adults. As I mentioned in the interview, people are often surprised to discover that certain parts of brain are shown to be active—they "light up"— in a brain scanner when subjects think about religion, sex, or race. This surprise reveals the tacit assumption that the brain is involved in some aspects of mental life but not others. Even experts, when describing such results, slip into dualistic language: "I think about sex and this activates such-as-so part of my brain"—as if there are two separate things going on, first the thought and then the brain activity.

This dichotomy was nicely expressed by the comedian Emo Phillips when he said: "I used to think the brain was the most fascinating part of the human body, but then I thought: 'Look what's telling me that!'."

Also if we really did think that mental life is the product of brain processes, then it would be incomprehensible that the soul could leave the brain. But in fact, even young children can understand stories in which someone leaves his body in a dream, or where a frog becomes a prince, or an evil villain takes control of a superhero's body. And they readily accept stories in which grandma dies but her soul ascends to heaven. The soul can leave its seat.

~~

Lanier worries about the proper way to convey the insights of psychology and neuroscience, and he makes the provocative suggestion that the recent surge of religious extremism around the world is a response to the irresponsible presentation of recent developments in biology and information science, leading to the fear that science is going to destroy our most cherished values—a form of Science Panic.

I am skeptical. Even assuming that there are more religious fanatics now than there were twenty or forty years ago—and I have my doubts; religious fanaticism is like crime in the streets or disrespect by teenagers, it always seems to be at its worst right now—there is no reason to think that it has anything to do with science. (Of all the causes of September 11, irresponsible science journalism has to be quite low on the list.) This may be rough on our egos, but most religious fanatics pay no attention to all of the exciting research that we do. If Science Panic exists at all, it is going to be limited to the educated non-fanatics who take science seriously enough to worry about it.

I do not know the answers to Lanier's question about whether the world would be better off with more religion or less religion. I also need to think more about Boyer's claim that our moral intuitions—which we certainly would not want to lose—rest on our idea of an immortal soul. While I do think that our dualism has profound implications for our intuitions about right and wrong, my own view is that we would morally be better off as materialists. But this is a topic for another time.

In any case, I think Lanier is exactly right when he counsels: "Avoid condescension". To me, this implies that we should tell people the truth about what we have found, without exaggeration or sugar-coating. I cannot think of anything more condescending than withholding the facts out of concern that people would be unable to cope with it.

(This would be reminiscent of Jack Nicholson's classic portrayal of a colonel being cross-examined in the movie A Few Good Men.

Jessep (Jack Nicholson): You want answers?
Kaffee (Tom Cruise): I think I'm entitled to them.
Jessep: You want answers?
Kaffee: I want the truth!
Jessep: You can't handle the truth!)

How will this news about dualism go over? Not well. For everyone, denying the existence of the immaterial soul is unnatural and counter-intuitive; for many, it is personally upsetting and ethically repellent. I love Jesse Bering's story of when a priest demanded to know how to tell his parishioners that their belief in immortality is due to a limitation in their cognitive apparatus: "My clever response was an involuntary shrugging of my shoulders". I would shrug too.

In support of this pessimism, consider that, at least in the United States, attempts to communicate evolutionary theory could fairly be viewed as a great failure. Polls reveal that for every American who believes in Darwin's account of evolution, there are five others who endorse the Biblical alternative. Science has lost by a landslide. And I think it is a lot harder for people to give up on the soul than to give up on creationism. The origin of species, however interesting, is about the past, but the question of the immaterial soul concerns the future—your future, and the future of those you care about. It is one thing to deny the literal truth of religious texts; it is worse to actually expel people from heaven. Dualism might be, as Boyer puts it, incurable.

On the other hand, just as there are different dualisms, there are different ways to believe in dualism. People might be able to segregate their common-sense dualism from the rest of their beliefs, and only give into them it in certain specific contexts. A scientist can sincerely believe that the brain is the source of mental life … and just as sincerely pray for the souls of her dead parents. Harris' observation that people have different intuitions about life-after-death depending on whether the question is framed in religious versus medical contexts is consistent with this.

This benign schizophrenia might not please the scientific purist—or the theological purist, for that matter. But we are never going to rid ourselves of common-sense dualism. And so this sort of epistemological divide might be best anyone could hope for.

~~

* I'm afraid that I will need a bit more detail from Marvin Minsky in order to understand his comment, and respond to it. He seems to have taken offense where none was intended—I was agreeing with the position of his that I quoted, not attacking it. As for his assertion that I think about the world in dumbbell terms, this might well be true, but it would be helpful if he gave an example or two.

mark_jay_mirsky's picture
Mark Jay Mirsky
writer and founder and editor of Fiction Magazine

Paul Bloom's essay on "Natural-Born Dualists" is one of the most provocative and disturbing articles that I have read in the last few years. I have been wrestling with it now for several weeks and sending it on to others, wondering what its conclusions imply. Turning over the remarks about men and women as mental constructs, and the sense of disgust that viewing the human being as a creature without a soul seems to evoke, one sees a world of mass post-dualism and wonders what this bodes for human society. It's already gotten into the marrow of the fiction I am writing, dreaming.

A vote of gratitude to Edge for publishing this.