The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (25 page)

NOTES

I
NTRODUCTION

1
.
In many courtrooms across the Western world with slightly more serious cases on the docket, my little act of rebellion would be translated as a breach of the Bible-handed oath “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” And in the ancient Hebrew world, there was the similar “oath by the thigh”—where “thigh” was the polite term for one’s dangling bits—since touching the sex organs before giving testimony was said to invoke one’s family spirits (who had a vested interest in the seeds sprung from these particular loins) and ensured that the witness wouldn’t tell any fibs. I rather like this older ritual, in fact, as it’s more in keeping with evolutionary biology. But in general, swearing to God, in whatever way it’s done, is usually effective in persuading others that you’re telling the truth. We know from controlled studies with mock juries that if a person swears on—or better yet, kisses—the Bible before testifying, the jury’s perception of that person’s believability is significantly enhanced.
     Psychologically speaking, there’s a lot happening when we swear to God like this—at least when we do so sincerely. At the top of that list is the assumption that, whereas you can fool your fellow man, you can’t fool God. Only God
knows.
Pierre Bovet, a Swiss psychologist working in the 1920s, reasoned that the significance of God’s omniscience is first grasped by children when they realize that their parents aren’t as all-knowing as they once thought. That is to say, at some point in early childhood, every kid figures out that even the smartest mothers and fathers can be deceived through treachery and lies. Not so, God. According to Bovet, God therefore becomes something of a brighter bulb, replacing the rather dim, or at least fallible, parental figure.
     An experiment conducted by Justin Barrett and his colleagues lends some support to Bovet’s assumptions. In this study, children were shown that a closed saltine cracker box actually contained a bunch of rocks. After the perfunctory “you got me” laugh, they then were asked what their mother would think was inside the box if she saw it sitting there (no shaking allowed) and also what God, or an ant, or a tree, or a bear would think. Three-year-olds were egocentric and answered “rocks” for all of these characters. They figured that if they knew something, everyone else must know it too; it doesn’t matter if you sip lattes while driving your Subaru, shed your leaves in late September, have a brain smaller than a dust mite, or played Job like he was a mouse at your paws. Developmental psychologists have, in fact, long known that, prior to the age of about four or so, children have difficulty taking the perspective of another person; rather, it’s as if the entire world were looking through their own eyes. Older children, in contrast, distinguished between what these characters could and couldn’t know. Whereas God was privy to the rock secret, they reasoned, the others would be duped just like they had been into thinking there were crackers inside. (Well, except for the bear, which a few clever children reasoned could smell that there wasn’t any food.) What’s especially interesting about these findings, the authors point out, is that “for children to ‘get God right’ all they had to do is keep answering like a young 3-year-old,” hinting that our natural egocentrism makes us “developmentally prepared” to conceptualize God’s all-knowing mind. Justin L. Barrett, Rebekah A. Richert, and Amanda Driesenga, “God’s Beliefs versus Mother’s: The Development of Nonhuman Agent Concepts,”
Child Development
72 (2001): 50–65.

2
.
In one of the very few theoretical papers to explore the question of our closest living relatives’ existential concerns, psychologists Jack Maser and Gordon Gallup surmised two decades ago that fear of death is the major motivational force behind God beliefs. “The organism, which is aware of itself, and bearing witness to the demise of its associates, should be able to take the next logical step and conceive of a nonself, or its death.” Furthermore, “chimpanzees have minds. They may even be able to conceive of a God, but without foreknowledge that they will die, there is no great motivational reason for the notion of God to be a paramount feature in their lives.” Maser and Gallup, “Theism as a By-product of Natural Selection,”
Journal of Religion
70 (1990): 515–32.

3
.
Miguel de Unamuno,
Tragic Sense of Life,
trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch (Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2007), 55. Originally published in 1912.

4
.
Richard Dawkins,
The God Delusion
(London: Bantam, 2006), 172.

C
HAPTER
1

1
.
Rosamond Kent Sprague, ed.,
The Older Sophists: A Complete Translation by Several Hands of the Fragments in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, edited by Diels-Kranz. With a New Edition of Antiphon and of Euthydemus
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972; Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001), 32.

2
.
Ibid., 39.

3
.
Ibid., 37.

4
.
Nicholas Humphrey, “The Society of Selves,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences
362 (2007): 745–54.

5
.
This is certainly not to say that other social species cannot experience loneliness. A dog tethered to a tree and neglected by its owner undergoes great anguish. Domesticated canines, through generations of artificial selection, are designed to live social lives alongside human caregivers. And as the psychologist Harry Harlow’s notorious 1960s research on socially deprived rhesus macaques amply demonstrated, most primates also suffer symptoms of severe psychological distress if physically removed from others for extended lengths of time. (Harry F. Harlow, Robert O. Dodsworth, and Margaret K. Harlow, “Total Social Isolation in Monkeys,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA
54 [1965]: 90–97.) And humans are no exception. The effects of solitary confinement on prisoners, for example, may include memory loss, severe anxiety, hallucinations, and delusions. Yet by contrast to the type of “intersubjective” loneliness we’re interested in here—in which other minds are insufferably just out of reach—in these more conventional cases of physical loneliness the socially isolated organism is maladapted to survive in a climate of complete social deprivation.

6
.
W. B. Yeats (1949), quoted in Christopher Ricks,
Keats and Embarrassment
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 64.

7
.
Gorgias may have been the first
official
solipsist, but it’s doubtful he was the first human being ever to stumble naively upon such thoughts. In his book
Kinds of Minds
(1996), the philosopher Daniel Dennett reports that roughly a third of his undergraduate students claim they spontaneously questioned the presence of other minds—long before they ever heard of the formal concept of solipsism. For example, these students will describe, at a specific, abrupt moment in their childhood, how they cast skeptical glances at those around them, searching the eyes of others for an irrefutable glimmer of a “soul.”

8
.
Daniel M. Wegner, Betsy Sparrow, and Lea Winerman, “Vicarious Agency: Experiencing Control over the Movements of Others,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
86 (2004): 838–48.

9
.
Gordon G. Gallup Jr. and Steven M. Platek, “Cognitive Empathy Presupposes Self-awareness: Evidence from Phylogeny, Ontogeny, Neuropsychology, and Mental Illness,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
25 (2002): 36–37.

10
.
Fernando Pessoa,
The Book of Disquiet,
trans. Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2002), 268. Originally published in 1916.

11
.
Paul Bloom,
Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human
(New York: Basic Books, 2004), 177–78.

12
.
Peter Koval, Joonha Park, and Nick Haslam, “Human, or Less than Human?”
In-Mind
(April 13, 2009), www.in-mind.org/issue-8/ human-or-less-than-human.html.

13
.
Many other thinkers, of course, preceded Dennett in the question of other minds (Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, Sir William Hamilton, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell, to name just a few). But it was Dennett who first began piecing together the evolutionary story behind this capacity to reason about thought, recognizing it to be as much a matter for evolutionary theorists and biologists as it was for philosophers.

14
.
Daniel C. Dennett,
Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness
(New York: Basic Books, 1996), 26.

15
.
Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl,
The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn
(New York: Morrow, 1999), 5.

16
.
Jane Goodall, “Learning from the Chimpanzees: A Message Humans Can Understand,”
Science
282 (1998): 2184–85.

17
.
“A Self Worth Having: An Interview with Nicholas Humphrey,”
Edge: The Third Culture
(June 30, 2003), www.edge.org/3rd_culture/humphrey04/ humphrey04_index.html. Ironically, this important contribution to our understanding of human cognitive evolution happened in the shade of a family tree with a very famous branch attached to it. Although he’s not a direct descendent of Charles Darwin, Nicholas Humphrey comes very close to it, being able to trace his genealogical history to the most famous scientist of all time. As he explains it, Humphrey’s grandmother’s brother Geoffrey Keynes married Charles Darwin’s granddaughter Margaret Darwin.

18
.
David Premack and Guy Woodruff, “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
1 (1978): 515–26.

19
.
Frans B. M. de Waal, “Cultural Primatology Comes of Age,”
Nature
399 (1999): 635.

20
.
As quoted by C. Dreifus, “Going Ape,”
Ms.
9, no. 5 (August–September 1999): 48–54.

21
.
Charles Darwin,
The Descent of Man
(New York: Modern Library, 1982), 445. Originally published in 1871.

22
.
Roger S. Fouts, “Apes, Darwinian Continuity, and the Law,”
Animal Law
10 (2004): 99–124.

23
.
Ibid.

24
.
Derek Bickerton, “Darwin’s Last Word: How Words Changed Cognition,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences,
31 (2008): 132.

25
.
Frederick L. Coolidge and Thomas Wynn,
The Rise of
Homo sapiens:
The Evolution of Modern Thinking
(Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 192–93.

26
.
Daniel J. Povinelli, Jesse M. Bering, and Steve Giambrone, “Toward a Science of Other Minds: Escaping the Argument by Analogy,”
Cognitive Science
24 (2000): 509–41.

27
.
Daniel J. Povinelli and Timothy J. Eddy, “What Young Chimpanzees Know about Seeing,”
Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development
61, no. 3 (1996).

28
.
Christophe Boesch, “What Makes Us Human (
Homo sapiens
)? The Challenge of Cognitive (Cross-Species) Comparison,”
Journal of Comparative Psychology
121 (2007): 227–40 (italics added).

29
.
Brian Hare, Josep Call, Bryan Agnetta, and Michael Tomasello, “Chimpanzees Know What Conspecifics Do and Do Not See,”
Animal Behaviour
59 (2000): 771–86.