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The Michael Shermer Show, 308. The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason About Human Nature (3)

308. The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason About Human Nature (3)

1 (24m 11s):

Yep. So part of the package as homo sapiens, you can teach chimp all the sign language you want, but their capacity for communication being sign language is very limited compared to human language. Right?

2 (24m 24s):

Right. Exactly. Yeah. And, and so there are certain things that we do because we know we can't fly, we can walk and there are certain things that we know, but virtue of our human genome.

1 (24m 38s):

Right. So with dualism, are you arguing that it's, we're kind of, I think Paul Bloom used the term we're natural born doulas, you know, babies, if the, if the alligator puppet mus the little mouse puppet and then, you know, you ask them, where's the mouse? Oh, it's off with its mommy now and it's lonely or whatever, it's hungry. They still, they think that the little mouse that's dead is still somewhere. Its essence continues on.

2 (25m 7s):

Well, Paul Bloom brought this another wonderful book by Paulus called The Cards Babies, in which he made the claim that we are in fact inherently dualist. And it's not because, you know, we are dualism has any evolutionary advantage. Obviously it does not, but rather we are likely inherently dualist because of and unfortunate accident. The unfortunate accident is the fact that on the one hand we have innate knowledge of what objects are and what they behave. And we think that objects, for instance, only move by contact. They can't move spontaneously. On the other hand, we have understanding of what people are and how they behave and you know that the person has goals and ideas and you have a theory about the minds of the, of others.

2 (25m 58s):

And you know that people do not need to obey intuitive physics. So they don't need to move. Only if somebody comes and bumps into me, I can just decide that I come and, and move by this, by myself. So people in, in intuitively and spontaneously explain the behavior of agents, of people and of objects by different principles. And the thing that agents can violate intuitive physics, I can come and move by myself. And it's this tension between those two core systems that is of intuitive physics and theory of mine that leads us to become dualists. So this is just an unfortunate consequence of these two systems of core knowledge rather than, you know, an active selection for.

2 (26m 41s):

I don't think that would make sense.

1 (26m 43s):

Hmm. So just a byproduct of our cognition, just the way the, the hardware is wired up

2 (26m 48s):

Yep. Yeah. Of the specific innate systems of cognition that we're equipped with.

1 (26m 54s):

Yeah, yeah. Often think of it sometimes as the fact that the brain does not detect itself operating. So the schizophrenic that hears voices and their auditory tracks are active, they hear the voices out there, not, not in here, right? The person that has a sense presence, you know, I wrote about these, these solo climbers and sailors and so forth that are out there by themselves for days on end and they, they sense somebody else in the tent with them or on the ropes with them or whatever you're doing, and they talk to them, they have a conversation with this imaginary person and so on. To them it's very real. We know it's oxygen deprivation or fatigue or sleep deprivation or whatever that's triggering this brain chemistry changes, but the brain doesn't detect itself making those changes.

1 (27m 40s):

So it can only interpret it as out there, right? So that in part explains, I think in part explains dualism. It just feels like I have a mind floating around up there and I don't sense my brain doing anything. I don't even really know I have a brain unless I actively think about it.

2 (27m 57s):

Yeah. Cognition is full of illusions of any kind, you know, visual illusions, linguistic illusions. We, what we know is how our mind projects things to us. You don't need to be as schizophrenic to show those projections.

1 (28m 11s):

Right? Well, this is why I always liked Oliver s Sachs's books because it, it showed when things go wrong in the brain, that's where we can tell, oh, that's what was going on. And that spot there, that's now dead from a tumor or stroke or whatever, you kind of back engineer what, how the brain is working when it's not working properly. So you mentioned, okay, theory of mind. Oh, let's, let's talk about dualism a little bit more. So

2 (28m 34s):

We're building the storm, right?

1 (28m 36s):

Yes.

2 (28m 37s):

We are building the perfect storm for listeners. Yeah.

1 (28m 40s):

Yes, yes, yes. But please continue jump in if you have some more thoughts on that.

2 (28m 45s):

So, so shall I, do you want me to try to introduce that to, to it up for you?

1 (28m 49s):

Yes, please, please.

2 (28m 51s):

So, so we talked about essentialism. So when we risen about innateness, we are consulting intuitive essentialism. When we're thinking why the dog is the way it is, we're saying, oh, it has this essence that lies in the body. When we think about why a person is the way it they are, we also think about there must be some inherent essence that they have that lies in the body. The problem though is that when we think about a person, we don't think only of a body, we also think about a mind as we said, we are also dualist and we think that what we know is not in the body, but rather it's somewhere else. It's some something ephemeral that is part of the mind.

2 (29m 33s):

So the problem is, if we think that what's innate is in the body, but we think that there is some stuff that is outside the body, and knowledge is outside the body, then knowledge cannot be innate. It is in the wrong place for being innate according to what our intuitive cognition tells us. And that's how people become empiricists.

1 (29m 55s):

Hmm. Right? So even in the language we use, like if I say, well, I hurt my arm, well I am my arm, I am my body, I, there's no me. And then the arm, like they're separate, right? But it's hard not to say that, you know, whatever, or even a thought of a recent example of this with the trans movement, where some people are saying, I feel like I'm in the wrong body. Well, that's dualism, right? I mean, there is no you and your body, you're just your body. The whole thing is all one package. It's a, it's monism, not dualism, but intuitively it feels like a dualistic system. There's two different things going on there.

2 (30m 35s):

You know, I think we need to separate things. So I think that when people say that what they mean is they mean below the, the body below the the head, so to speak, right? So, so there is a coherent notion that a trans person refers to, but if you ask where is the self and is it part of the mind or is it part of the body? We actually have done some research on that. And the answer is it's really confusing because it's really both. So yeah. But there is in fact a notion of the self that is outside the body. That is why so many cultures believe in the afterlife. It's something that you find in extremely prevalent across cultures that there are some, you know, supernatural beings.

2 (31m 21s):

D they need to persist after death. There are all kinds of gods and and so forth. Yeah. So this is something that for a dualist, that's exactly what you would expect,

1 (31m 32s):

Right? It feels like myself, however that's defined all my memories, all my thoughts, my point of view looking out through my eyes. That entity, if you say, well, imagine it doesn't exist anymore, I can't, is to imagine something you have to be alive, sentient aware. And so if you, it's like saying stop being aware. Well how do you know concentrate on being non concentrating or concentrate on not unaware. I don't even know how you do that, right? So I wonder if you think it's just impossible to imagine not existing once you exist, that's it. And when you're not, when you're no longer existing, you're not imagining anything wondering, oh this is what it's like, be dead.

1 (32m 16s):

Well

2 (32m 17s):

We, we ask people this question in the lab and we ask them, so tell us which of the following traits, psychological traits are likely to exist in the afterlife. We give them some things that describe what you know and other things that describe your emotions and other things that describe, you know, you can sit and walk and what they're telling us and we're telling them, well, we don't know whether the afterlife exists, but tell us what you think. Suppose it exists, what is going to persist? People think that the stuff that you know will persist more likely so than the stuff that you know, your emotions and your actions. So what you connect readily to the body, you think that emotions are somewhere in your face.

2 (32m 58s):

You think that sitting using your legs, therefore you think that, well, if the body is gone, then these things will gone. But the mind is not and knowledge is in the mind, therefore it can persist in the afterlife. So that's part of our intuitive dualist cognition.

1 (33m 16s):

And again, you think this is more likely a byproduct of the hardware rather than an evolved adaptation. You know, there's some people that speculate belief in the afterlife is an adaptive feature because then it reduces anxiety about, you know, the awareness of death and that sort of thing.

2 (33m 34s):

It might, it might be, but I think you don't need to go there. I think you can explain just by the two other, by the two adaptiveness of its engines. And the engines of dualisms problem suggested is intuitive physics on the one hand and theory of mind on the other. And it's, each of those systems is only adaptive. It's only adaptive for a child to know, you know, what is an object is what is the body of their mother. Look at their mother as a, a single entity as opposed to say, if you only see my tors now know that I also, you know, if, if you saw my legs separately, that that's the same person.

2 (34m 14s):

That is certainly adaptive. It's also adaptive to understand that people read the minds of others and to reason about how it makes a what makes me behave. So those are the adaptive things that you need to assume. You don't need anything else to explain how dualism arises.

1 (34m 31s):

Hmm. Right? You write about in the book of the, of the mirror test, you know, Rama's mirror test with patients that have lost an arm and they still sense that the arm is there and people even that are whole with two, two arms. But you put the mirror box in there and you have the rubber arm and you brush the little rubber arm and pretty soon they, they feel as if they can sense that. So that would, assuming you know, the patient without an arm. So the sense I have right now of like moving my fingers and I can see in space where my hand is that isn't here, it's, it's up here. It's somewhere in the neural tracks going up there in the brain itself.


308. The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason About Human Nature (3)

1 (24m 11s):

Yep. So part of the package as homo sapiens, you can teach chimp all the sign language you want, but their capacity for communication being sign language is very limited compared to human language. Right?

2 (24m 24s):

Right. Exactly. Yeah. And, and so there are certain things that we do because we know we can't fly, we can walk and there are certain things that we know, but virtue of our human genome.

1 (24m 38s):

Right. So with dualism, are you arguing that it's, we're kind of, I think Paul Bloom used the term we're natural born doulas, you know, babies, if the, if the alligator puppet mus the little mouse puppet and then, you know, you ask them, where's the mouse? Oh, it's off with its mommy now and it's lonely or whatever, it's hungry. They still, they think that the little mouse that's dead is still somewhere. Its essence continues on.

2 (25m 7s):

Well, Paul Bloom brought this another wonderful book by Paulus called The Cards Babies, in which he made the claim that we are in fact inherently dualist. And it's not because, you know, we are dualism has any evolutionary advantage. Obviously it does not, but rather we are likely inherently dualist because of and unfortunate accident. The unfortunate accident is the fact that on the one hand we have innate knowledge of what objects are and what they behave. And we think that objects, for instance, only move by contact. They can't move spontaneously. On the other hand, we have understanding of what people are and how they behave and you know that the person has goals and ideas and you have a theory about the minds of the, of others.

2 (25m 58s):

And you know that people do not need to obey intuitive physics. So they don't need to move. Only if somebody comes and bumps into me, I can just decide that I come and, and move by this, by myself. So people in, in intuitively and spontaneously explain the behavior of agents, of people and of objects by different principles. And the thing that agents can violate intuitive physics, I can come and move by myself. And it's this tension between those two core systems that is of intuitive physics and theory of mine that leads us to become dualists. So this is just an unfortunate consequence of these two systems of core knowledge rather than, you know, an active selection for.

2 (26m 41s):

I don't think that would make sense.

1 (26m 43s):

Hmm. So just a byproduct of our cognition, just the way the, the hardware is wired up

2 (26m 48s):

Yep. Yeah. Of the specific innate systems of cognition that we're equipped with.

1 (26m 54s):

Yeah, yeah. Often think of it sometimes as the fact that the brain does not detect itself operating. So the schizophrenic that hears voices and their auditory tracks are active, they hear the voices out there, not, not in here, right? The person that has a sense presence, you know, I wrote about these, these solo climbers and sailors and so forth that are out there by themselves for days on end and they, they sense somebody else in the tent with them or on the ropes with them or whatever you're doing, and they talk to them, they have a conversation with this imaginary person and so on. To them it's very real. We know it's oxygen deprivation or fatigue or sleep deprivation or whatever that's triggering this brain chemistry changes, but the brain doesn't detect itself making those changes.

1 (27m 40s):

So it can only interpret it as out there, right? So that in part explains, I think in part explains dualism. It just feels like I have a mind floating around up there and I don't sense my brain doing anything. I don't even really know I have a brain unless I actively think about it.

2 (27m 57s):

Yeah. Cognition is full of illusions of any kind, you know, visual illusions, linguistic illusions. We, what we know is how our mind projects things to us. You don't need to be as schizophrenic to show those projections.

1 (28m 11s):

Right? Well, this is why I always liked Oliver s Sachs's books because it, it showed when things go wrong in the brain, that's where we can tell, oh, that's what was going on. And that spot there, that's now dead from a tumor or stroke or whatever, you kind of back engineer what, how the brain is working when it's not working properly. So you mentioned, okay, theory of mind. Oh, let's, let's talk about dualism a little bit more. So

2 (28m 34s):

We're building the storm, right?

1 (28m 36s):

Yes.

2 (28m 37s):

We are building the perfect storm for listeners. Yeah.

1 (28m 40s):

Yes, yes, yes. But please continue jump in if you have some more thoughts on that.

2 (28m 45s):

So, so shall I, do you want me to try to introduce that to, to it up for you?

1 (28m 49s):

Yes, please, please.

2 (28m 51s):

So, so we talked about essentialism. So when we risen about innateness, we are consulting intuitive essentialism. When we're thinking why the dog is the way it is, we're saying, oh, it has this essence that lies in the body. When we think about why a person is the way it they are, we also think about there must be some inherent essence that they have that lies in the body. The problem though is that when we think about a person, we don't think only of a body, we also think about a mind as we said, we are also dualist and we think that what we know is not in the body, but rather it's somewhere else. It's some something ephemeral that is part of the mind.

2 (29m 33s):

So the problem is, if we think that what's innate is in the body, but we think that there is some stuff that is outside the body, and knowledge is outside the body, then knowledge cannot be innate. It is in the wrong place for being innate according to what our intuitive cognition tells us. And that's how people become empiricists.

1 (29m 55s):

Hmm. Right? So even in the language we use, like if I say, well, I hurt my arm, well I am my arm, I am my body, I, there's no me. And then the arm, like they're separate, right? But it's hard not to say that, you know, whatever, or even a thought of a recent example of this with the trans movement, where some people are saying, I feel like I'm in the wrong body. Well, that's dualism, right? I mean, there is no you and your body, you're just your body. The whole thing is all one package. It's a, it's monism, not dualism, but intuitively it feels like a dualistic system. There's two different things going on there.

2 (30m 35s):

You know, I think we need to separate things. So I think that when people say that what they mean is they mean below the, the body below the the head, so to speak, right? So, so there is a coherent notion that a trans person refers to, but if you ask where is the self and is it part of the mind or is it part of the body? We actually have done some research on that. And the answer is it's really confusing because it's really both. So yeah. But there is in fact a notion of the self that is outside the body. That is why so many cultures believe in the afterlife. It's something that you find in extremely prevalent across cultures that there are some, you know, supernatural beings.

2 (31m 21s):

D they need to persist after death. There are all kinds of gods and and so forth. Yeah. So this is something that for a dualist, that's exactly what you would expect,

1 (31m 32s):

Right? It feels like myself, however that's defined all my memories, all my thoughts, my point of view looking out through my eyes. That entity, if you say, well, imagine it doesn't exist anymore, I can't, is to imagine something you have to be alive, sentient aware. And so if you, it's like saying stop being aware. Well how do you know concentrate on being non concentrating or concentrate on not unaware. I don't even know how you do that, right? So I wonder if you think it's just impossible to imagine not existing once you exist, that's it. And when you're not, when you're no longer existing, you're not imagining anything wondering, oh this is what it's like, be dead.

1 (32m 16s):

Well

2 (32m 17s):

We, we ask people this question in the lab and we ask them, so tell us which of the following traits, psychological traits are likely to exist in the afterlife. We give them some things that describe what you know and other things that describe your emotions and other things that describe, you know, you can sit and walk and what they're telling us and we're telling them, well, we don't know whether the afterlife exists, but tell us what you think. Suppose it exists, what is going to persist? People think that the stuff that you know will persist more likely so than the stuff that you know, your emotions and your actions. So what you connect readily to the body, you think that emotions are somewhere in your face.

2 (32m 58s):

You think that sitting using your legs, therefore you think that, well, if the body is gone, then these things will gone. But the mind is not and knowledge is in the mind, therefore it can persist in the afterlife. So that's part of our intuitive dualist cognition.

1 (33m 16s):

And again, you think this is more likely a byproduct of the hardware rather than an evolved adaptation. You know, there's some people that speculate belief in the afterlife is an adaptive feature because then it reduces anxiety about, you know, the awareness of death and that sort of thing.

2 (33m 34s):

It might, it might be, but I think you don't need to go there. I think you can explain just by the two other, by the two adaptiveness of its engines. And the engines of dualisms problem suggested is intuitive physics on the one hand and theory of mind on the other. And it's, each of those systems is only adaptive. It's only adaptive for a child to know, you know, what is an object is what is the body of their mother. Look at their mother as a, a single entity as opposed to say, if you only see my tors now know that I also, you know, if, if you saw my legs separately, that that's the same person.

2 (34m 14s):

That is certainly adaptive. It's also adaptive to understand that people read the minds of others and to reason about how it makes a what makes me behave. So those are the adaptive things that you need to assume. You don't need anything else to explain how dualism arises.

1 (34m 31s):

Hmm. Right? You write about in the book of the, of the mirror test, you know, Rama's mirror test with patients that have lost an arm and they still sense that the arm is there and people even that are whole with two, two arms. But you put the mirror box in there and you have the rubber arm and you brush the little rubber arm and pretty soon they, they feel as if they can sense that. So that would, assuming you know, the patient without an arm. So the sense I have right now of like moving my fingers and I can see in space where my hand is that isn't here, it's, it's up here. It's somewhere in the neural tracks going up there in the brain itself.