The soul? It may all be in your mind by The Boston Globe Reposted from: http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/10/18/the_soul_it_may_all_be_in_your_mind/
Everything you think you know about the soul is wrong. So says Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, who researches why people are religious. Bloom has written that humans are "natural dualists," seeing our physical bodies as separate from our supposedly nonphysical minds and souls. It's a legacy in part of the great French philosopher René Descartes, a religious man who believed our thoughts survived the death of our brains, says Bloom. The problem, Bloom believes, is that this dualism is inaccurate. Brain science increasingly shows that "the qualities of mental life that we associate with souls" - memory, self-control, decision-making - "are purely corporeal; they emerge from biochemical processes in the brain," he wrote in a 2004 piece for The New York Times. That holds for morality, too; work he has done with Yale colleague Karen Winn shows that babies have some understanding of right and wrong even before they learn to speak. Our physical brain, in short, is our soul. Dualism doesn't explain everything about why religion arises, but it explains a lot, and it need not discomfort religious believers, says Bloom, who describes himself as culturally Jewish but religiously atheist. His latest project: a book on pleasure. Excerpts from a recent interview follow. *Q. What's the evidence that we're "natural dualists?"* These sorts of views are universal. In every society, the vast majority of people believe in supernatural beings, spirits without bodies. And in every society, the vast majority of people believe that they'll survive the death of their body. There are a lot of studies on children's beliefs about life after death and supernatural beings like God. What we have so far suggests that these [beliefs] come in very early, as early as you can study them. *Q. What evidence proves dualism is wrong?* To study dualism need not presuppose that it's mistaken. Some people in the cognitive science of religion are themselves people of faith. I don't believe dualism is true, because there's a scientific consensus that hard-core dualism, which says that people can think without using their brain or that memories will survive the death of your body, is just flat mistaken. Your mental life is a product of your brain. *Q. We know this from brain scans that look at parts of the brain lighting up in response to different [stimuli] - you can watch people think about a topic and watch parts of their brain light up?* That's the most modern demonstration. But the idea that thought is the result of the physical brain comes from work that's hundreds of years old. We've known that a blow to the head can affect your memory, your willpower, your conscience, your sense of right and wrong. We know that Alzheimer's, strokes, and diseases of the brain can profoundly affect your mental life. It's a tenuous view to say that the part of me that chooses right from wrong has no physical basis. If that were true, you wouldn't expect getting smashed on the head, alcohol, or heroin to affect your will and your knowledge of right and wrong. I think there is a right and wrong. I don't think you need to appeal to a supernatural capacity to explain it. *Q. You view the possible existence of a soul [as], "I don't think it's true, but I have to keep an open mind?"* Yes. It's like saying, cars don't run by gasoline; cars run by a hidden power we don't know anything at all about. Well, it could be true, but it sure seems like gasoline. Is it possible, in a scientific conference a thousand years from now, we discover it's not the brain at all? Yeah, it is. We could discover it's not gasoline at all, either. *Q. What are the implications of this dualism, and its limitations, for religion? Obviously, you're not suggesting theologians hold a going-out-of-business sale.* In fact, some theologians respond to this research with delight. According to many theological views, we have an inborn appreciation of God and souls. This is part of God's gift to us. There's nothing in my work that in any way should trouble anybody who's theologically inclined. Though often, they say a belief in a single God is natural, and that's probably wrong. Many more cultures believe in multiple gods. *Q. How's your book on pleasure coming?* I hope to get it to my publisher in about six months. I have a lot to say about the pleasures of religion. I talk of the social functions of religion, the reassuring function of religion, the rituals of religion that give many people great joy. And the experience of transcendence. Religions give you a feeling of going beyond the material world. 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