One of the more amusing applications on Facebook is “My Questions”, in which you can post a simple question on your profile and invite friends to answer it. The app comes with some pretty dumb suggested questions, but I’ve had fun with several of my own, particularly “How far do you live today from where you were born?” and “What’s the most adventurous CD/download you’ve bought recently?”
Today I decided to ask the big one. No, not “Do you believe in god?”, or “UFOs?”, or life after death. (And not “Boxers or briefs?”, either!) I’ve decided that the fundamental question is this:
Dualist or monist? (“Dualist” – mind/spirit/soul and body/brain are separate entities; “Monist“: it’s all physical, “Minds are what brains do”.)
In part, I’m drawn to this question because I’ve been reading Nicholas Humphrey’s excellent book “Leaps of Faith: Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consolation“. It came out in 1996, but I’ve only just got round to it. Humphreys is unusual in being a philosopher who is also a professor of psychology (or should that be the other way round?). Rather than taking on the questions of religious faith directly, he concentrates on the question of belief in the paranormal.
One of the great surprises in the book is that he refutes the view of the primacy of personal experience. It is widely held that the main reason why people hold counter-intuitive, unpopular, or counter-evidentiary beliefs is because they have had some personal experience which trumps the rules of reason and evidence. (“I never believed in ghosts until I saw one.”) Humphreys presents compelling data to show that this is at best a secondary factor. People are actually very skeptical about their own unusual experiences; they place far more weight on the reported experiences of others, particularly if they’re in a group of “true believers”
One of the things I’ve been puzzling over for a number of years is what (if any one thing) is the root cause of religious belief. Is it deference to authority (from parent via induction to a super-parent)? Is it anthropomorphism and intentional ascription (to thunder, the sun, etc.)? Is it rationalizing death by imagining continued life? Or it is purely cultural, with imagined (but knowingly fictional) stories taking on the authority of tribal rituals? I’ve recently come to the conclusion (which I think is Humpheys’ position, too) that the root cause is a personal dualism: that the most economical way in which we can model and make sense of our own existence is through dualism. And of course culture reinforces this. The fact that every single scientific and medical discovery of the last three hundred years endorses the monist viewpoint is unlikely to shift the cultural needle around the dial very much.
The fact is that even the most hard-core monist is likely to relax in the company of fictional dualism and supernaturalism. From H.P.Lovecraft to “Harry Potter” to “The Matrix” to Stephen King, to “Star Wars”: we accept these ideas as an integral part of our culture and social psychology. But there is a price to pay. It seems likely that every time someone accuses science of draining the magic out of life, it’s because they cannot distinguish between the cultural and the scientific. It seems obviously silly to me: do we, as a society, appreciate art, poetry, and beauty any less than our 17th century forebears? It seems unlikely, in spite of three centuries of relentless scientific discovery.
In any case, Humphreys’ book is well worth reading for many other reasons. His critique of the paranormal is devastating – if ESP is real, why doesn’t it affect the results of routine eye examinations?! If these are natural processes, why do they only show up in tawdry huckster settings? Good fun, and lots to think about.