Common Sense Duality

This is an Edge article by Paul Bloom, professor of psychology at Yale University … 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.

In this article on the topic of Mind, he tackles the issue of Common Sense Dualism ... a concept close to me; in my book en.light.en.ment I have an essay DUALITY. I have often written that I can't perceive of a world without dualism, which describes us as a “machine made from meat”, where the mind is simply another (material) organ. I believe in the distinction of body, mind and soul. This is Bloom’s foreword to his article:

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.

I reckon! Bloom says in his article “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.” Myself, I believe in a universal consciousness, to which our own higher consciousness relates like the drop to the ocean.

These are some (edited) excerpts from the article entitled Natural-Born Dualists (which is rather lengthy, this is only the first third of it):

“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. 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.”