Monday, February 4, 2013

Intrinsic Belief in Souls

I have a hypothesis as to why we believe in souls.

Anthropologists have studied most cultures in the world.  They make some very specific observations and try to take notice of all the things we generally take for granted.

One of those observations is that every culture in the world has a belief in some immutable essence in anything that is alive.  For example, there's one particularly famous thought experiment in which you tell somebody the following story:



Say you have a raccoon.  Some crazy veterinarian decides to make him look particularly cool by painting him black and giving him a nice, white racing stripe.  She then concludes that he would get a great survival advantage if he had a way to spray vile-smelling liquid at his predators.


Then, you show this person a picture of a skunk and ask them whether the animal is still a raccoon, or if it has become a skunk.  Anybody over the age of, say, five will insist that it's still a raccoon, no matter what has happened to its appearance.


On the other hand, if you take a bunch of chairs, throw them against the wall to break off their legs and backs, nail the seats together into a large flat board, then put a leg on each of the four corners, and nail to each leg another leg to double their lengths.


Everybody will tell you it's no longer a bunch of chairs, it's a table.  Because inanimate objects don't have the same kind of unchangeable essence as living things...

Another commonality between every distinct population of humans is that they all have some sort of folk biology.  Every group of humans on Earth will take careful observations of living things around them, make judgments about how they grow and how fauna/flora change from season to season, year to year.  These are all changes that are carefully kept track of in cultures closely intertwined with natural environments.  Such curiosity has evolved into thorough methodical scientific exploration in developed nations, and is still present in isolated tribes in entirely rural locales.

Do you think these are related?  In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker makes the argument that this signifies a module in the human brain that is conserved throughout the species.  The purpose of his argument is to suggest that, alongside pages worth of other human nature commonalities, there is an innate neurological module to process language.  He proposes that when a trait is present in every member of the species, it must be constructed from some genetic factor that is shared by every normally functioning member of that species.

Therefore, there's something about the human mind that directs it to identify and categorize living things.  There's an innate, structurally standard drive to think about living things in a certain way.  That perception includes the notion that living things do not change their identity.

There must be some reason for this to be the case. There must have been some reason to think of living things as inherently different from inanimate objects.  Importantly, this way of thinking must be at least practically consistent with the natural world, otherwise it would lead to incorrect assumptions that could lead to death.  Imagine you're a member of a tribe that has just expanded its territory to a new forest.  There are new species of flora there.  Take, for instance, a bush that has a certain kind of berry that is green in the spring.  Your cousin happened to eat such a berry when you were foraging with him, but you didn't eat one because you had already found a particular shrub that you enjoyed eating already.  He was the adventurous one.  Minutes after he ate the berry, he started vomiting blood and perished.

Now let's see all of this ties together:  In the summer, a couple months after your brother died from eating that dreadful green berry, you are foraging again and notice that, at the same location that you found those death-inducing fruits, you find a bush of red berries that look entirely different.  What do you do?  Eat the berries because they look different?  Or assume that there's something beneath the experience that means more than what it looks like?  Based on geographical location and a basic understanding that plants generally don't walk around in the course of a few months (it probably takes longer for that to happen), you can ensure some great modicum of safety by not choosing to eat those berries, and instead telling your tribemates that they shouldn't eat berries that look like those red ones you see before you.

But what is that underlying essence that makes the berries the same between being red and green?  What do you call it?  What would you call the underlying essence that makes a tadpole the precursor to a frog, as opposed to an entirely different species?

I'm sure you're familiar with the tendencies of many cultures around the world, generally in very low-tech, natural environments, to assume that every living thing has a soul.

I'm also sure that you're familiar with the fact that every living thing on this planet has a genome that gives rise to its being - a genome that stays constant, regardless of what you do to the organism for which it codes.

Now you understand what I'm getting at, right?  If not, let me drive the point home as Socratically as I can.

There is generally a tendency for our cognitive processes to gives us, as individuals, better models of the reality we live in.  Our perceptual systems pretty consistently monitor our surroundings in a way that delineates objects that are, in fact, consistently connected.  Gestalt psychology studies the way in which we bring together features to make non-summational wholes.  We understand the thoughts of those with whom we communicate in daily conversation, which are generally pretty consistent and accurate.  We understand the feelings of strangers, even when they're in situations we've never ourselves been in.

Our thoughts mirror reality.

But are our representations realistic, or functional depictions of what is around us?  How much of our presuppositions are simply working models that are computationally similar between each individual of humankind?  We all work pretty much the same way, so we draw inferences from a lack of information.  Language is the most salient example of a human activity that depends on neurological similarities to create meaning out of arbitrary events.



The letters on this page are only letters in your mind - a real-world description of what you see would more accurately call the phenomena you refer to as letters as a bunch of pixels formed by a computer screen.  An even more precise real-world description would be that they are oscillating photons generated at locations that are specified by a series of processors that are running according to the physical constraints of circuits that are physically and electrically connected to those photon-generating locations.

They're words in your mind, and that works.  You're a person.  You live in the realm of ideas.  You existence as a person is possible because an animal of the human species has a brain that works really, really hard to come up with a whole bunch of logical, coherent thoughts.  That animal obeys the laws of physics.  But you simultaneously participate in the world of concepts.

As a scientist, I choose to perceive things in a way that is completely consistent with reality.  I pay try to pay close attention to the event that give rise to my perceptions, and understand those phenomena in conjunction to what I think about the world.  I understand words, and I hear them as the gestalts of many acoustic events.  By understanding the computational system of language is the same between me and my conversational partners, and by roughly understanding the big-picture process by which that computational system moves between ideas and physical events, I have a rudimentary idea of what language is.  My perception is consistent with reality.

As a devout student who's fascinated by human evolution, I try to take note of any perceptions that are pretty consistent throughout humanity and find their correlates with real world explanations.  I am motivated to find the correlates between reality and our perceptual behavior.

My goal in this line of thought has been to find the common thread between the fact that living things all share the characteristic of being coded by an immutable genome, the fact that all human societies are curious about living things to the extent that they make methodical observations about everything about them, and the fact that every human culture has some belief in a soul.  I believe that there is strong reason to believe in a closely one-to-one relation between real concepts and perceptional concepts, if simply because any evolutionarily conserved conceptualization is more likely to propagate if it accurately reflects patterns that are consistently true in the real world.  From an anthropological perspective, it makes the most sense to assume that widely conserved behaviors are the result of selective pressures, and that the characteristics of our species have arisen from truth consistently acting on our species for every moment of our existence.

To this end, I believe that our belief in an immutable soul is simply the perceptual equivalent of every species' possession of a generationally constant genome.

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