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December 20, 2005
Letter to The Atlantic Monthly on modularity theory
I sent the following letter to The Atlantic in response to an article by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom.
I agree with Paul Bloom (December Atlantic) that the basic error in supernatural belief is the undue separation of mental from physical properties. Ghosts, immortal souls and God do not exist, because there are no souls without bodies: the mental depends on the physical for its existence. I also agree that it is our capacity to separate mental and physical properties that makes this error possible. However I think that Professor Bloom's explanation for that capacity is dubious.Bloom believes that infants possess separate neurological systems (what psychologists call "modules") for processing thoughts about the mental and the physical. Since the systems are separate and confined to their own subject matter, this is supposed to explain why their outputs needn't be correlated in the way they ought to be.
But this explanation seems exceedingly baroque. Why do we need separate modules for the mental and the physical to explain the possibility of imagining the separation of the two properties? If someone erroneously believes that men can fly, and separates the
"flight" property from birds while projecting it onto men, does this mean there is a special, separately evolved "flight" module?Why not just chalk up the possibility of this separation to the general human capacity for abstraction, which permits us to imagine just about any two properties in isolation? It makes far more sense to say that our general power of abstraction evolved independently, owing to its obvious survival advantage as the source of rational thought, leaving in its wake the tolerable side-effect of the possibility of erroneous abstraction.
My explanation above does nothing, of course, to explain the pervasiveness of the religion error. But, I think, neither does the Bloom's theory. Why, after all, are he and his friends able to resist the innate lure of Cartesianism, while others cannot? Granted, social pressure cannot explain the possibility of belief in an error, but it can explain its motivation—and that can explain the pervasiveness. People believe in religion, I think, not primarily because it is comforting (often it is not), but because they fear social disapproval. God isn't a biological accident; He's a result of peer pressure!
To prepare the letter, I actually read most of Bloom's book, Descartes' Baby. It's a good example of a modularity theory of folk psychology, which my dissertation project is quite opposed to. This is a good topic to start my blog with, because it shows why one needn't resist the supernatural by resorting to naturalization. That is exactly what is happening with Bloom. He wants to explain away theistic belief, so he naturalizes it via a biological mechanism. The trouble is that he also would need to naturalize his own atheism. And why won't that explain it away?
Oh, and by the way, Bloom says that he thinks his six-year old son is wrong to think that thinking is what he does, while his brain just "helps him out." I think his son is right. We don't need to reject the commonsense view of the mental in order to reject the Cartesian dualist view that the mind is separate from the body. And we shouldn't. This is a general theme of my dissertation: first person observation trumps naturalization proposals any day.
Posted by Ben at December 20, 2005 04:45 AM