Pharyngula

Posted by: Carlie | October 29, 2009 6:38 AM

Autoplay, you say? My Flashblock add-on says otherwise.

Posted by: toomanytribbles | October 29, 2009 6:58 AM

excellent video.
i need to pinch it.

Posted by: Carlie | October 29, 2009 7:44 AM

Andyo - it does, but I just have to click on it and then it would play. I've found Flashblock to be incredibly annoying in conjunction with sites that are ALL FLASH, but after a couple of weeks of use I've added exceptions to the all sites I visit most so the annoyance level keeps going down.

Posted by: Dan S. | October 29, 2009 7:49 AM

@Max - promiscuous teleology FTW!

Posted by: Bruce Hood | October 29, 2009 7:58 AM

Thanks for posting this video. I hope this clears up some of the misattribution that concerns my work. Readers might want to check out the book, "SuperSense" for a fuller exposition of the thesis.

Posted by: Epinephrine | October 29, 2009 8:15 AM

I'm going to be picky and complain about the video (and I get that it's hard to say exactly what you mean). I found the line "trying to find the evidence that these beliefs come from within the child," a little misphrased.

Generate Hypothesis? check.
Look for the evidence that I'm right? Not exactly how it works. Sure, there's some of that, but there's also the important question of whether the hypothesis is falsifiable and designing experiments that would show whether the hypothesis was wrong, not just accumulating some evidence that it is right.

I assume that he means more than just looking for evidence that he's right, but it'd be nice to hear it.

Posted by: Hank Fox | October 29, 2009 8:39 AM

I liked that. One small part of it really caught my attention: Hood's mention of the idea some people have that they can sense when they're being watched.

I've heard that a lot over the years, and it's a common theme in fiction. But it's also one of those things that always snagged my attention, in that I heard people say they experienced it, but *I* never experienced it.

Likewise with ghost stories -- everybody I knew had one, but I didn't have one.

All the years of my childhood, I assumed there was something wrong with me, that I wasn't lucky enough, or sensitive enough or something, to have had these experiences.

I can remember the feeling when I finally realized -- well into adulthood -- that there wasn't anything wrong with me, that people were just making that stuff up. That there wasn't any such thing as ghosts (or having the hair on the back of your neck rise because you knew you were being watched).

The realization gave me a little boost of confidence, and that was good, but the bad part was it also really affected what I thought of all those people who'd told me their ghost stories. My good friends, my cousins, my brothers, even my parents, were just making stuff up! Damn.

Anyway, nice video, Bruce.

Posted by: Matt G | October 29, 2009 8:42 AM

I've had a similar experience, Max. I am a scientist by training, but recently began teaching science to middle school children It is amazing the far out explanations they have for things, and the bizarre things they think are true. Perhaps the origin of these thoughts are indeed the child's own mind, and culture (especially religious culture) simply reinforces it.

Posted by: John E. Shuey | October 29, 2009 8:55 AM

While Dr. Hood's observations are spot on, his conclusions baffle me.

He does not address why, although as we move from childhood to adulthood we shed other myths and misconceptions regarding the world, we cling to the religious/supernatural ones.

Because of this, I am still more inclined toward the evolutionary explanations then I am to Dr. Hood's.

Posted by: Thorne | October 29, 2009 9:10 AM

@ Hank Fox #14:

My good friends, my cousins, my brothers, even my parents, were just making stuff up! Damn.

Not necessarily, Hank. I had a "ghostly" encounter, about 35 years ago, and I can well understand how some people could be taken in by what I saw. It was a cold night, late October or early November in NJ. There was a full moon, naturally. There were some small clouds, occasionally slipping past the moon. The cold air was almost still, only a very light, intermittent breeze. Little patches of mist would build up, then be pushed over the ground by the breeze. When caught at the edge of one's vision they were quite startling, and could easily be mistaken for classic ghosts. So don't think of them as making stuff up. It's probably more a case of misinterpretation.

Posted by: Uncomfortable Ray | October 29, 2009 9:34 AM

So I think the conclusion actually supported is that physics is unintuitive, and it's harder to learn than religion as a result -- this shouldn't really shock anyone. That said, the way it is phrased, I suspect it may be misinterpreted by religious people to support this "I was born searching for Jesus" idea a lot of them seem to have.

Other thoughts: I don't think the misconception about vision is as far off as it seems. We think of seeing something as kind of reaching out with our eyes and grabbing an image of the thing. The only part of this that is actually wrong is the reaching out part. When we focus on an object, we manipulate the lenses of our eyes to make the image fall on our retina rather than just above or below. So the image we are grabbing isn't out in the world, it's inside our eye. But it's rarely useful to think of the image and the thing it represents as separate objects, hence the misconception.

Also:

He does not address why, although as we move from childhood to adulthood we shed other myths and misconceptions regarding the world, we cling to the religious/supernatural ones.

Posted by: JBlilie | October 29, 2009 9:40 AM

littlejohn:

Regarding the human tendency to believe in the supernatural, why are some of us immune? Even as a toddler, religious stories struck me as transparent bullshit. I believed, vaguely, in Santa and the Easter Bunny, but there was evidence for them: toys under the tree and candy in the basket. I didn't simply take my parents' word for it.

Wow, you were an unusual child!

Posted by: James Sweet | October 29, 2009 9:45 AM

That said, the way it is phrased, I suspect it may be misinterpreted by religious people to support this "I was born searching for Jesus" idea a lot of them seem to have.

Bruce Hood (that's the guy in the video) has had boatloads of trouble over this. Believe me, he is most definitely not a godbot -- he defined himself recently as "an AAA (apathetic atheist/agnostic-depending on how you define your god that you want me to reject)". hehehe...

He says everything about his theory is made much more clear by his book, but I still haven't had a chance to check it out from the library so I can't yet attest to that.

Posted by: Rorschach | October 29, 2009 9:55 AM

Kema @ 21,

Like we say, "I have a body" instead of "I am a body." And we say things like "my hands, my teeth, my feet" as if they're outside of us

I am a body ? Let me ponder that one for a minute....
Damn self-awareness, confuses the shit out of us supercharged primates doesnt it...:-)

Posted by: Tray | October 29, 2009 10:06 AM

Interesting... instead of paedomorphosis we have paedoideology. It is strange how some people even as children have the ability to spot BS while so many otherwise intelligent adults just don't seem rational. With the upcoming ease of sequencing someone needs to test educated atheists and believers and see if they can find a common-sense gene.

Posted by: ennui | October 29, 2009 10:25 AM

Much better link here, plus the rest of the Fascination series.

I'm taking the YouTube link down, sorry for any inconvenience.

Posted by: Nick Husher | October 29, 2009 10:39 AM

Just curious, how else could you refer to them? I get the distinction between "having a body" and "being a body" but I'm having trouble envisioning a context where one could determine which of those outlooks a person has by hearing them talk about their hands.

I am a body, a body which has parts that I may refer to discreetly with possessives. The body as a whole possesses the parts, and the parts possess the body. It's circular, but it's the only way I can make sense of it. I would say that my mind--that set of systems in my brain that control abstract reasoning and conscious motor function--is also a part of my body.

There was an interesting RadioLab a year or so back which explored this concept and they spoke to a researcher in the field of neuro-imaging. This researcher was convinced that we decide on actions unconsciously and only become aware of them as we've begun to act on that decision. The delay was some considerable amount of time--a few hundred milliseconds or something. I never followed up to see if the idea was accurate, but it does get you thinking that about how the conscious mind is in many ways just "along for the ride" as your brain keeps you alive and homeostatic.

Posted by: Rieux | October 29, 2009 10:44 AM

Sorry, my link @ #35 went to page 4 (of 4) of that article. Here's page 1:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200512/god-accident/

Posted by: Dr. I Needtob Athe | October 29, 2009 10:57 AM

A significant root of both superstition and religion is the inability to comprehend randomness. Superstitious casino gamblers can't grasp that past outcomes have nothing to do with future outcomes, and so will attempt to exploit patterns in the outcomes of dice and roulette wheels. Also, people feel that whenever something fortunate happens by pure chance, they must "thank God", or "thank their lucky stars". They simply cannot conceive that there is nobody to thank for a random event that turns out in their favor, nor is it a predictable consequence of anything they did, or indeed anything that happened in the past.

It's probably a consequence of evolution. You can see similar behavior in other animals. We all seem to be driven by an unconscious knowledge of the principle of cause and effect, and so we look for it everywhere, even where it doesn't really apply.

Posted by: SimonG | October 29, 2009 11:10 AM

I don't recall ever believing in Father Christmas. I think I was just too rational a kid, and the combination of playing Father Christmas in a school play at age 6, and recognising the handwriting on the presents never encouraged me to believe.
I also don't really remember believing in god(s), despite being brought up in a moderately religious home and going to Sunday school every week. (Although it took me a while to realise I didn't believe and was just going through the motions.)

However, despite a keen interest in science I was quite willing to buy into the idea of psychic phenomena, pyramid power and the like. It was quite a while before I completely grew out of that sort of thing: it was a gradual process rather than any sudden realisation.
Perhaps one contributary factor was voracious and indiscriminate reading. At 10 or so it was quite difficult to tell the difference between science and gibberish.

Posted by: Paul Burnett | October 29, 2009 11:20 AM

Matt G (#16) wrote (about innocent school children): "It is amazing the far out explanations they have for things, and the bizarre things they think are true."

You have exactly described all intelligent design creationists, including the dupes and minions of the Dishonesty Institute.

Posted by: Alverant | October 29, 2009 11:23 AM

Reminds me of a recent Jesus & Mo comic.

As long as people have been asking the big question there were other people willing to pretend they know the answers.

Posted by: Cliff Hendroval | October 29, 2009 11:27 AM

A few months ago I was driving home when I was startled and frightened by a scary-old-man/monster (sort of like Freddy Krueger) standing by the side of the road in the woods near my house. Once the jolt of fight-or-flight chemicals subsided from my consciousness (about a second or two, I guess) I realized that it was just a tree stump in an odd patch of shadow. I'm familiar with pareidolia, but I was definitely curious how my brain chose that particular interpretation of an ambiguous visual stimulus; I don't watch horror movies, and I've never had a conscious fear of, well, scary old men.

One of the things that has fueled my skepticism all these years is that I know how easily I can be fooled. Stage magic baffles me, three-card-monte dealers always fool me, and I know my memory is not a video recorder. I can be fooled, and that means other people can be too...just because they see/hear/remember something a certain way doesn't mean that's what actually happened.

Posted by: lose_the_woo | October 29, 2009 11:45 AM

There seems to be a point in everyone’s life when they begin to clue in to the truth about the world (Santa Claus isn’t real) and—to way oversimplify—some people decide the truth is important, and others decide that play-pretend is more important.

Generally, I agree. However, it is very common to see xtians claim that they have the truth. They really love to wave that banner around. Even their facile response to the (brilliantly clever imo) Darwin fish emblem is an attempt to trumpet to everyone that they know the real truth. So it seems to me that pursuing truth is held in high regard by them. They just delude themselves into thinking that they're not playing make believe, but honoring the truth of what they think they know.

Posted by: jolly wahlstrom | October 29, 2009 11:59 AM

When I was a child, my grandmother lived with us while she was rapidly becoming senile. It was obvious she was no longer the same person but she was. It took many years for me to fit that information into my other experiences and realize that our minds are just our bodies. I did ask my mother, who forced me to go to Catholic Sunday school and church, which version of my grandmother would be going to heaven? She never liked my questions.

Posted by: James Sweet | October 29, 2009 12:15 PM

I remember an episode of Malcolm in the Middle and they documented how superstitions develop. The dad was bowling a perfect game and whenever he striked (struck?), he repeated whatever had naturally happened before-- saying gesundheit, unzipping his fly, whatever.

Oh, I remember that! Yeah, that was really clever. At first it was just a couple of little quirks, but by the end he had accumulated this whole bizarre ritual.

Man, that was a better show than I think I gave it credit for at the time...

Posted by: Knockgoats | October 29, 2009 12:34 PM

Mind you you're not very likely to be pounced on by a hungry predator these days - Peter G.

Evangelists? Muggers? Chuggers?

Posted by: llewelly | October 29, 2009 12:53 PM

Off topic - vandalism targets both gays and those who support separation of church and state.

Posted by: RamblinDude | October 29, 2009 1:12 PM

lose_the_woo

So it seems to me that pursuing truth is held in high regard by them

I don’t agree. I think pursuing the “TRUTH!” is held in high regard by them. It’s not the same thing. Something has gone askew in their way of thinking for them to do this, and deep down, underneath thought, they know that what they are pursing isn’t the “truth.” In some way, at some point, they’ve given up and settled for a simplistic world view that they know isn’t real. Even the hardcore believers. We all tend to operate within the field of thought, however, and it’s easy to think one’s self into a state of confusion when there is so much confusion in the world.

What I'm saying is, the fanaticism is contrived. There’s thinking and talking and arguing and blogging and preaching and praising—and then there’s what’s really going on in people. I suspect that just about everybody is far more savvy about what is and isn’t true than they admit to themselves. Everyone’s an atheist in a foxhole—until they have time to think. That’s when then mental gymnastics start.

Posted by: Stephen Wells | October 29, 2009 1:23 PM

@55: how exactly did you turn "current physics can't yet explain X" into "X is magic"? Aren't we allowed to discover things?

All the evidence we have is that consciousness is a kind of mental process. Sure, there are lots of neurochemical details not yet known, but there's no evidence for magic.

Posted by: Sastra | October 29, 2009 1:31 PM

IanW#55 wrote:

And just how do they do that within the confines of known physics? If known physics was all there was, we should be unaware automatons.

No; you're guilty of a greedy reductionism here, and an inability to consider multiple organized layers of active phenomenon, and emergent properties. This popular pseudo-problem might be an example of our human tendency towards short-circuited, concrete thinking.

Posted by: RamblinDude | October 29, 2009 1:35 PM

Matt G,

My little nephew (maybe 4-5 at the time, now nearly 7) came home from school one day babbling some creationist nonsense he had picked up from a classmate. I told him it wasn't really that way, but nope, it was right, he was certain of it. Fortunately he gets it now, thanks in large part to... dinosaurs!

I’ll bet the charisma of his classmate had a lot to do with it.

Posted by: Sastra | October 29, 2009 1:44 PM

Ramblin'Dude #58 wrote:

I suspect that just about everybody is far more savvy about what is and isn’t true than they admit to themselves.

I used to be very interested in psychic phenomenon. I read a lot of books which recounted what seemed to me to be irrefutable evidence -- and I wondered why none of this stuff had gotten any Nobel Prizes, or generated major interest in physics, chemistry, and so on. It didn't make sense. So I wanted to read what the critics said about psychic powers. I got some books by scientists.

I realize now that I really did believe in ESP. I took it so seriously that I wanted to discover if it was true or not. Now, most of the people I know who insist that they know that ESP is real, have absolutely no interest in reading what the critics say. They only read the books that support their view, and marvel at the close-minded blindness of those scientists who ignore this evidence. No, they don't want to know why they ignore the evidence. They don't want to have to analyze facts. They have their feelings.

They take their feelings a hell of a lot more seriously than they take ESP. At some level, I suspect they either realize it's crap, or don't care whether it is or not. Play-acting in a romance is preferable to finding out something they'd rather not know. Better a comforting fable, than a hard truth.

Posted by: Stephen Wells | October 29, 2009 1:54 PM

@67: I think you and IanW are equivocating between the idea that we can't know what anyone else's consciousness is like- which is probably true and will always be that way- and the idea that consciousness isn't objectively detectable as a phenomenon or explicable physically. They're very different propositions.

Inasmuch as consciousness is something we have in common it's susceptible to objective rational enquiry. Only inasmuch as it's utterly personal and unique is it not so susceptible. Since we're at least capable of discussing it, and since it seems to happen in minds [that are happening in brains] that have quite a lot in common through common ancestry, I'm sure there's a lot of commonality to enquire into.

Posted by: RamblinDude | October 29, 2009 2:05 PM

Sastra,

I realize now that I really did believe in ESP. I took it so seriously that I wanted to discover if it was true or not.

Exactly! As you gained life experience, you began to see the contradictions with your worldview. I used to be the same way, in fact. When Edgar Cayce talked, I listened. After all, many of his cures and home remedies actually worked! I sort of halfway believed that he really did get his information from the astral plane (and wouldn’t that be cool!)

But what makes one person get serious-minded about getting to the truth, and another person not? I don’t know, but it sure seems to be complicated.

Posted by: AJ Milne | October 29, 2009 2:33 PM

Mm hm. I sorta see two really interesting if disparate general areas in the psychology of religion--and understanding both, methinks, is critical to understanding why religions survive and propagate--and ultimately what they do to people and to cultures. The one is about the social psychology of the phenomenon: how people are influenced by others, the motivations behind that influence, the effects of that influence. The other is about the intrinsic kinks in the brain that make religions possible, that may even in a sense serve as the original germinal cause of many given religions...

I would take gentle issue with only one statement that really struck me in the video: re 'I don't think we're indoctrinating children to believe in ghosts', I'm not sure we can exactly say that. This implies to me there's generally no social component, there, and I think that's saying too much. I do think there frequently is. The stories we tell them may well have influences upon what they consider acceptable explanations even absent explicit descriptions of ghosts. And note that certain religions, at least, explicitly *do* indoctrinate people to believe in certain ghosts in particular...

What is to fair to say, however, is that at least some people would probably believe in ghosts quite absent such social influences, as well, and this may well be where those ideas came from in the first place. Mind body dualism may well be a common--and thus in a sense natural--cognitive misstep that could theoretically arise de novo even in someone who'd never had the idea even implied to them by any outside influence. The more general error of attributing agency to things which have none, likewise. But the pervasiveness of such beliefs is such that I find it very difficult to believe we've yet really proved this especially rigourously. And I also suspect it would be very, very difficult to do... It's safer to say: there's a reasonably strong case this is a common and *probably* intrinsic feature of the way our brain works. And in the current context, you very well might as well treat it is though it is, in any case. Because from a practical point of view, given the cultural context, it might as well be, anyway.

Posted by: ctgopks | October 29, 2009 2:39 PM

A story my parents told about me as a toddler was this: One of my (Texas Baptist) aunts was carrying me around my grandmother's yard, pointing at things and saying, "God made that tree; God made that flower," etc. According to their account, I looked under the eave of the garage and asked her, "Who made that light bulb?" Whether accurate or not, the story points out an apparently natural inclination to investigate things I have always had, which developed into a passion for learning as my brain developed its capacities for abstraction and manipulation of mental objects.

These days (and for a long time) when I try to talk to someone who believes too much woo, I just have to invoke Jesus (not my lord and savior), as in, "Jesus Christ! Get me the f*%# out of here!

I think it is possible we will have to fight the fight in every generation. The religiony types are all full of, "I don't get why you won't even consider it!" I could respond rationally and nicely, that I would consider it if there were new (or any) data, but lately my exasperated answer is, "Again? Seriously?" They seem always to imagine that somehow I made it to age 50 without ever considering religionists' claims. What ev.

Posted by: Schi-Chi | October 29, 2009 2:43 PM

unfortunately i don't have sound where i am so can't watch the video right now. But if the basis is "supernatural short cuts" wouldn't that be an argument for religion? It's more natural to believe in it than not. (Kind of like reproduction - it's not really rational to do it on any grounds)

The question is this: from where does the obligation come from for people to want to de-naturalize their beliefs? Is it morality? Is it truth? If so, where do morality and truth come from (ie, do we not root these things ultimately in nature?).

Does anyone have a satisfying explanation? I can admit that one solution is to just achieve a consensus within a group to say that overcoming natural inclinations towards a deity is a positive thing. And that's just what often happens in atheistic circles. But consensus isn't persuasion.

Posted by: Everbleed | October 29, 2009 2:57 PM

Little John #13...

Ditto.

I too never believed.

Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | October 29, 2009 3:07 PM

An infant in their bed looking up at a mother or father may very well be the subconscious beginnings of theism.

It may also be the subconscious beginnings of "oh my! everyone is a giantism".

Its a much better claim than "God was invented so someone can control others" as if we enjoy being bossed-around so much we (theists) have permitted it for hundreds of thousands of years.

Well there's a myopic thought. People have been subjugating people since societies began. Religion is just another tool to do that. It's a fine answer for why religion was created.

But Michel Omfray says fear of death is the cause of religion rather than "parent=God" or "God put me in charge". I dont think science/religion will ever stop asking "who dunnit" and how and why.

Fear of death isn't a bad answer to the question. But the organization and promotion of that fear is what gives us the institutionalized religions we know today and throughout man's recent history.

Posted by: KemaTheAtheist | October 29, 2009 3:18 PM

Just curious, how else could you refer to them? I get the distinction between "having a body" and "being a body" but I'm having trouble envisioning a context where one could determine which of those outlooks a person has by hearing them talk about their hands.

@41 mentioned that other languages to make a distiction, but I don't think that's the point here.

Saying "my feet" and such just points out that we treat parts of ourselves as if they're not ourselves, as if we own the things like they're objects. It's not that we should be refering to them differently.

It's like you own a car and you call it "my car." Part of being a body is that hands are part of that body, not outside of it, so saying "my hands" implies an ownership of an object that is not yourself. If we had considered ourselves to "being a body" instead of "having a body" from the start, we would probably not refer to our hands, feet, etc the same way we do today.

Posted by: Sastra | October 29, 2009 3:36 PM

Schi-chi #76 wrote:

But if the basis is "supernatural short cuts" wouldn't that be an argument for religion? It's more natural to believe in it than not.

This of course is how the religious are trying to spin our discoveries: "see, God made our brains receptive to Him!" The problem with that approach is that this isn't how the explanation works. We're not finding some weird, unknown part in the brain which seems to have been built for one purpose -- finding and communicating with God.

Instead, we're discovering how cognitive errors lead naturally to superstitions -- all superstitions -- and that supernatural beliefs can be explained in terms of ordinary evolutionary adaptive mechanisms. This is why we would believe in the supernatural even if it doesn't really exist. To add on the tag ...but it does anyway, you know is completely unnecessary.

I think one thing which usually distinguishes the skeptic from the True Believer is that the skeptic is more aware of how easy it is for us to fool ourselves, and make mistakes. If you think in scientific terms, you think about cross-checking and testing your assumptions as objectively as possible. Our first thoughts and gut-feelings are not reliable just because they were easy-come. Nature isn't a person, and didn't make us naturally perfect.

The spiritual folk, on the other hand, usually assume they have some special, subjective, direct access to truth known as "trusting your intuition." They call their sloppy assumptions "inner wisdom" and strangely think it arrogant to doubt themselves, or their own experiences, or their own interpretations and recollections of their own experiences. What they consider to be the "virtue of faith," we consider to be the "flaw of intellectual dishonesty" hiding under human hubris.

Weird story: I once tried to illustrate our tendency to anthropomorphise inanimate objects to a woo-filled friend by admitting that I sometimes talk to the teddy bear on the bed, even though I know it's a stuffed toy, and can "feel like" it's a person who heard. I do it for fun, and look at it whimsically, as part of an overactive agency detector in an evolved brain. She, however, drew the opposite conclusion: maybe my feelings were trying to tell me something: the teddy bear was really alive, and could think and hear me, and I just "knew this." I shouldn't ignore the evidence of my own inner feelings. Then she went into animism, cosmic consciousness, the ancient wisdom of indigenous people, etc. etc. She's neo-pagan. I thought I was safe assuming she recognized that Winnie-the-Pooh can't really hear us, and thus she'd accept my point at at least one level. I was wrong. sheesh

The question is this: from where does the obligation come from for people to want to de-naturalize their beliefs? Is it morality? Is it truth? If so, where do morality and truth come from (ie, do we not root these things ultimately in nature?).

I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but I think Dr. Hood and others dealing in this area would probably say that that's an ill-formed question. The whole point is that there is no "obligation" to start believing in the supernatural. The sloppy thought mechanisms are the default, the path of least resistance -- at least, when we are children. Disbelief in the supernatural requires more maturity, more effort, and more education. Or, perhaps re my post #59, ACH education.

Posted by: RamblinDude | October 29, 2009 3:42 PM

During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities. These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.

What a fun game Christianity is.

This demonizing of Halloween has been around for a long time. The devil is everywhere, always trying to lead you astray, and he’s a supergenius at camouflage. Ooooh, scary.

Posted by: KOPD | October 29, 2009 3:47 PM

I guess the way I see it, though, English is too vague for one to assume that using the word "my" with a body part implies that the speaker intended ownership. If I say "my hand" it could either be "the hand that is part of me" or "the hand that belongs to me" and there is no way at all tell the difference. Nor is there another way to phrase it in less than 7 words. Therefore I reject the notion that using the word "my" with a body part points out that the speaker is treating their body as an owned object. The word is used for different things, so taking it to mean one of those over the other with no other context is an assumption, even if one of those is more likely than the other.

It looks like maybe you are saying that the fact that the grammar is the way it is now is because historically we have had this idea of dualism. Yet you still say "Saying 'my feet' and such just points out that we treat parts of ourselves as if they're not ourselves, as if we own the things like they're objects." My point is that in the present it doesn't point that out at all. It only points out that I speak English and have no other way to refer to my hands than as "my hands." It's a holdover from the philosophy of earlier speakers of the language. Many current speakers of the language share that philosophy, but it is not the case for all of them. Unless and until the language changes, English speakers are stuck saying "my hands" no matter how they feel about dualism.

Posted by: KemaTheAtheist | October 29, 2009 4:05 PM

saying "my hands" implies an ownership of an object that is not yourself - KemaTheAtheist

No it doesn't, or "my wife", "my home town", "my employer" etc. would all imply ownership.

Actually, it does, to some degree

When you get married you expect your wife to not do certain things and to do others. This is in part because in someway you consider her to be yours. You expect her to not cheat on you, steal your money, etc. It's not a complete ownership, but in a weird way at least part ownership is implied. The second you even become boyfriend and girlfriend (or bf/bf or gf/gf) that kind of control is implied and it works that way unless it is explicitly stated otherwise. Even if you just have someone you refer to as a "fuck buddy" you still expect that they'll be responsible outside of intercourse with you so they don't get a disease elsewhere and give it to you.

When in your hometown, you consider yourself superior to outsiders I'm sure. All the phrases "not in my town," "this is my street," "this is my 'hood," etc all imply literal ownership. Why do you think gangs kill eachother if someone even walks into "their" part of town?

When it comes to an employer though, that relationship is generally switched. You are owned by whatever company hired you. You do what they say, or you're fired. It is sometimes vice versa if you have a valuable enough skill set, but let's look at the military. Do you know what the "G.I." in G.I. Joe stands for? "Government Issue." Just like a gun or a helmet or clothes is G.I., so is the soldier. You are a piece of equipment to them.

Sorry, knockgoats. The second you use "my" whatever, you're implying some amount of ownership and control of that person or thing even if that is also reciprocated in part to the other party as well.

Posted by: SEF | October 29, 2009 4:18 PM

@ Sastra #84:

The sloppy thought mechanisms are the default, the path of least resistance -- at least, when we are children. Disbelief in the supernatural requires more maturity, more effort, and more education. Or, perhaps re my post #59, ACH education.

Not in everyone. Some of us were apparently born very different from normal humans.

The desire to not be sloppy was natural; the importance of establishing truth was recognised naturally; the need to make the extra effort was naturally obvious; and hence the sort of extensive maturity and education required by the majority was superfluous.

Some of us never fell for the Santa Claus, tooth-fairy and various religious stories in the first place. In my real life environs I'm unique (in this and in more, quite possibly related, ways!), but other people on this thread seem to be reporting being similarly different from the norm - at least on their non-belief having been natural for them all along.

Posted by: Kagehi | October 29, 2009 4:20 PM

Gah.. Ok, we using sign ins today? Because TypePad is going to a page of errors, instead of singing in. Sigh..

Anyway, every time I hear these kinds of arguments:

"So (I would say) even if consciousness is a property of the physical world, anything that can never be measured -or objectively detected- is out of the reach of science."

All the various computer programs made in the last less than 10 years come to mind, which use "simple" AI, with fuzzy logic, and no set pattern of behavior, which produce simple, but unpredictable, unexpected, and unquantifiable, results. Everything from intentional emergent properties in AI enemies, to the make your own monster things in games as old as Black & White. Hell, just every Windows OS, once its been running for a year and has gotten its innards tarred up. Same applications, same hardware, supposedly the same OS, yet, somehow, merely using the things a bit different can make one act like its possessed, and malfunction, and another one work almost as good as when it was brand new installed. We *understand* that worse than we do the brain, in some ways, and unlike the brain humans designed the hardware and software in them. If you have to "add something" to physics to explain complex emergent systems, then computer programmers have some seriously explaining to do, to the big spook in charge of this "something". lol

Posted by: Kel, OM | October 29, 2009 4:33 PM

I'm really looking forward to reading this book. When I heard about it on SGU then on Point Of Inquiry, I almost immediately went and ordered it.

Posted by: Sastra | October 29, 2009 4:38 PM

SEF #92 wrote:

Not in everyone. Some of us were apparently born very different from normal humans.

I wouldn't say "normal" -- maybe just "average." It's probably a continuum, from those who can't wrap their minds around dualism at all, to those who see agency and meaning in every shadow, and consider the material world to be an illusion, and a chosen one at that.

I read somewhere that they found that relatives of the schizophrenic had a higher-than-usual tendency to fall under a category called "schizo-typy." Like the schizophrenic, they have major problems telling fantasy apart from reality, but, unlike schizophrenics, it's not a major problem. That is, they've learned to work along with the culture and channel the 'voices in their heads' into socially acceptable -- and even socially beneficial -- forms. They're psychic, or spiritual, or religious, and they function just fine.

One evolutionary psychologist theorized that, to the extent that it's genetic, schizophrenia may have been selected for as a byproduct of schizotypy, which could have been highly valued, and thus the family line as a whole might have more surviving offspring. People who are just a 'little bit' psychotic would be the priests, shamens, wise women, mystics, who go beyond garden-variety dualism and claim to contact the 'other side," and tribes may have held them and theirs in high esteem.

Well, I said he 'theorized,' but that might be better put as 'speculated.'

Posted by: SEF | October 29, 2009 4:53 PM

@ Sastra #98:

You're talking about something else now. Quite possibly this.

Posted by: MadScientist | October 29, 2009 5:00 PM

@Hank Fox #14: I've often had a creepy feeling like someone was just tickling the hair on the back of my neck - that is what people refer to as feeling that someone is watching them. How a tickling of neck hair can be associated with vision is beyond me. Anyway, for reasons I no longer recall, I also associated that with a "feeling of being watched" (I don't know if I learned that from people around or if it was an incorrect association I developed on my own) - perhaps because sometimes when it happens there happens to be someone staring at me. However, in the vast majority of circumstances there was no one watching, so by the age of 8 I discarded that silly notion. Other people may be prone to the confirmation bias though. In a related theme, we must ask: why do some animals get nasty when you look at them (including apes like humans).

Posted by: Peter G. | October 29, 2009 5:01 PM

"Do you know what the "G.I." in G.I. Joe stands for?" All this time I was laboring under the impression that G.I. stood for "general infantry" and not "government issue". Oh well at least I've got lots of company in this error like the entire U.S Army.

Posted by: Sven DIMilo | October 29, 2009 5:07 PM

Where do people get those crazy ideas about religion and the supernatural?

From their spouses?

Posted by: Jadehawk, OM | October 29, 2009 5:21 PM

hmmm... the "I can tell when someone is watching me" seems to me to be an outgrowth of the fact that most people can indeed tell if someone (or some sufficiently large animal) is nearby, even when they can't consciously hear or see them (that includes of course false positives, because that's how our brain works, especially when already stressed), because almost no one can get somewhere without making lots of really small noises in the process. That this is mostly the case can be very easily seen when someone for some reason doesn't notice that there's someone nearby, either because they're too preoccupied with what they were doing, or the other person is a sneaky one, and nearly jump out of their skin when they realize there's someone right behind them.

Posted by: Jerry Short | October 29, 2009 6:20 PM

@71 and related comment(er)s: I am paying my first visit to this site and am staggered by the levels of complexity in your discussions. Never daunted by ignorance, however, I would like to offer an observation and see what reaction it provokes.

As I read through the comments on consciousness, how to measure it, how to describe it, and so on, I was reminded of what seems to me to be an analogous topic in mathematics: Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. To start us off, let me quote from the Wikipedia (fount of all knowledge and wisdom!) article on Godel:

"The basic idea at the heart of the incompleteness theorem is rather simple. Gödel essentially constructed a formula that claims that it is unprovable in a given formal system. If it were provable, it would be false, which contradicts the fact that in a consistent system, provable statements are always true. Thus there will always be at least one true but unprovable statement. That is, for any computably enumerable set of axioms for arithmetic (that is, a set that can in principle be printed out by an idealized computer with unlimited resources), there is a formula that obtains in arithmetic, but which is not provable in that system."

How would you evaluate the value of the analogy?

Posted by: Kamaka | October 29, 2009 6:40 PM

SEF @ 100

Very enlightening transcript, SEF.

Posted by: Jerry Short | October 29, 2009 6:43 PM

@88 and associated comment(er)s: We must be careful about relying on English alone for dealing with any issues as serious as the ones on this site. For example, before being too certain that "my hand" implies "I am a body" or any similar assertion, we need to investigate how other languages would express the implication. We should at least use other European languages, but ideally we should also study the proposition as it is expressed in Chinese, Tagalog, Farsi, and other non-Indo-European languages.

Different languages structure different realities. As a convenient springboard, start with Wikipedia. "The linguistic relativity principle (also known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) is the idea that the varying cultural concepts and categories inherent in different languages affect the cognitive classification of the experienced world in such a way that speakers of different languages think and behave differently because of it."

My read on the connection between the hypothesis and the discussions on this site is that we must not insist that the King James Version is the only way to God's Word. (No, no, no. I'm talking about language!)

Posted by: lose_the_woo | October 29, 2009 6:49 PM

My opinion is that humans just need to get over the "specialness" of consciousness. IMO it's an answerable question, one that lies at some level in the study of emergent properties. The day will come when we reverse-engineer the brain and it's software and apply the approach to other kinds of hardware. We're already doing that with rat brains. IMO it's only a matter of time.

Just a speculation though, perhaps the mind consists of distinct systems monitoring each others state. Just like the 5 senses confirm or rule out inputs from each other (a scientific endeavor!), maybe consciousness emerges from the internal cross-checking and validation of inputs and reaction states.

Posted by: Biology Blogger | October 29, 2009 7:21 PM

I don't believe in a hereditary "God gene", or else I would be writing in this comment to ask PZ to repent his blasphemous, victimless crimes. Though it could be a common random mutation, who knows. But I am ready to say organized religion survives on childhood indoctrination, and if it was not for this, they would not exist anymore.

Posted by: Luke Vogel | October 29, 2009 7:51 PM

If you like that, you may like Bruce Hood's book, SuperSense.

Here's part of a review of Bruce's book by Michael Shermer from Science.

>"Bruce M. Hood’s marvelous new book, SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable. In an account chock full of real-world examples reinforced by experimental research, Hood (a cognitive psychologist at the University of Bristol) builds a theoretical model to explain how the mind comes to sense that there is something beyond the natural world, something supernatural.…..Hood knows that the supersense is all pervasive. For that reason, his book is an important contribution to the psychological literature that is revealing the actuality of our very irrational human nature."

http://brucemhood.wordpress.com/about-supersense/

I like Bruce's ideas, and they work well with Shermer's work with ideas on what he call's "Patternicity" and "Agentcity"

"Agencity - Why people believe that invisible agents control the world" - http://www.michaelshermer.com/2009/06/agenticity/

"Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise" - http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=patternicity-finding-meaningful-patterns

Shermer's arguments should seem familiar to regular readers of his work over the past decade. I like Pascal Boyer also, I see him mentioned and Scott Atran's "In God's We Trust". One I plowed through fairly recently was David E. Comings "Did Man Create God" which could be a difficult read at times but worth it (has very helpful summaries within chapters).

Here's a helpful and excellent review of Comings' book by Tim Callahan (author of The Secret Origins of the Bible).

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_kmske/is_4_14/ai_n31500362/?tag=content;col1

>"The main body dealing with the neurological and genetic origins of the innate spirituality of human nature explains why unreason often prevails in so many ideologically based arguments. As a physician, neuroscientist, and behavioral and molecular geneticist, he is well qualified to explain the effects of the physical structure of our brains on our thought processes."

Posted by: Luke Vogel | October 29, 2009 8:29 PM

Yikes, I'm way late. "Oooh, sniny"

Ha! I just saw The Humanist magazine cover today.

Posted by: Cannabinaceae | October 29, 2009 9:31 PM

On the Godel's theorem business: while I think it has relevance in terms of whatever symbolic processing goes on in the brain (and heck, maybe in the actual sensation of conscious awareness) in general, I don't think it has much specifically to do with the origin of religion.

The "false positives" mentioned above - you're hunting/gathering through the forest, and every little twitch of a leaf could be prey or predator; you pay extra attention briefly to rule it more or less worthy of further attention - foster the assigning of agency to just about any happening. So the H. erectus brain, for example, is, as a survival mechanism, inherently vulnerable to systematic manipulation involving fear and agency.

Posted by: Gruesome Rob | October 29, 2009 10:40 PM

Halloween candy infested with demons

My wife was wondering what had me laughing so hard.

Posted by: IanW | October 29, 2009 10:53 PM

An analogy: In principle, one could describe a baseball game in terms of particle interations, at the level of a complete physical description. And we could say "no physical process that we can understand has hidden 'winning' properties.

Yes, that's the functional argument. It fails (in this analogy), because winning is an objectively observable part of the system. Subjectivity or consciousness, is not observable in any system except your own, assuming you are conscious being. And there is no way of anyone else knowing that for sure. I assume that you are conscious like me - and I think it's a good assumption, but it's still an unscientific assumption based on a sample size of one.

Not only can objective science not explain subjectivity, but it is a valid philosophical proposition that science may never be able to do so.
I don't think that's a valid position at all, it's epistemological gerrymandering. It's saying that any conceiveable materialist explanation of subjectivity is de facto inadequate; it doesn't satisfy me that it's describing what is really important about subjectivity, which is its subjective subjectiveness

Here I might give in a bit. It's conceivable I suppose, that the discovery of some neural correlate might point the way to a new physics. But I would still maintain that current science cannot explain consciousness, because it is not an objective property of any system in the universe - it's existence is only observed by one observer. Until it becomes objective somehow, it will remain unexplainable.

And just how do they do that within the confines of known physics? If known physics was all there was, we should be unaware automatons.
No; you're guilty of a greedy reductionism here, and an inability to consider multiple organized layers of active phenomenon, and emergent properties. This popular pseudo-problem might be an example of our human tendency towards short-circuited, concrete thinking.

IanW says, "If known physics was all there was, we should be unaware automatons."
Really? And on what do you base that conclusion.

Because everything in current physics is objective - observable by more than one observer. A purely objective system can have no subjectivity. And it is not a matter of functional emergence, in the same sense that a unicorn cannot emerge from a collection of water molecules. There is no coherent, explainable way to get from water to a unicorn, just as there is no way to physically explain how subjectivity can emerge from a bundle of objective processes. If you doubt me, be my guest and try to explain it. Remember, this is objective science. You can't just say "It's magic!".

Posted by: SteveM | October 29, 2009 11:59 PM

Start with batshit and add whatever refinements you like and you've still got batshit.

You seem to have missed the point of my distinction between theism and religion. It is like the difference between the conman and the conned. The conman is exploiting the conned's gullibility. "Religion" (the institution) exploits the believers' psychological need for an all powerful parent to protect them from a world they don't fully understand.

Posted by: Cthulhu's minion | October 30, 2009 12:48 AM

For those with opera 10, cutting on the turbo feature will stop autoplaying videos.

Posted by: Aquaria | October 30, 2009 4:23 AM

I remember an episode of Malcolm in the Middle and they documented how superstitions develop. The dad was bowling a perfect game and whenever he striked (struck?), he repeated whatever had naturally happened before-- saying gesundheit, unzipping his fly, whatever.

It seems like 99% of baseball players do something similar when they come to the plate. Ichiro Suzuki of the Seattle Mariners always does deep knee bends before stepping into the batters box, holds the bat straight out at the pitcher, tugs on his sleeve, and does a little pouncing kitty wiggle with his butt.

The worst offender is Pablo Sandoval of the SF Giants. He does a slide when he approaches the batters box, steps back, taps dirt off his shoes with the bat, adjusts the straps on his gloves, hits his helmet with his bat a couple of times (no, I'm not kidding), then finally gets to the plate. He has a couple of more rituals before he finally settles down and gets ready to swing. His superstition dance has gotten so complicated that the SF TV announcers have commented on how it's almost out of hand, and that he needs to scale back the ritual before he gets in trouble with umps.

IIRC Sandoval was the best hitter the Giants had this year, but he obviously doesn't realize it's because he's a good hitter by nature, training and discipline rather than his rituals affecting his play. That's the part I've never gotten about superstition: For people who actually know how to do something, superstition negates their often hard-earned, or even genes-inspired, ability, their investment of time and energy, and their dedication and willpower.

Let's face it: Ichiro and Sandoval have a gift that most of us don't have with eye-hand coordination and athleticism, but they also probably did more to develop their abilities than the rest of us were willing to commit to. How many of us would have put up with a parent pushing us to hit 500 balls a day every day when we were kids, like Ichiro did? That surely played a much bigger role in his becoming one of the great hitters of our day than his sleeve tugging ritual ever did.

Posted by: KemaTheAtheist | October 30, 2009 10:32 AM

@109

Carlie, you're taking that in far to much the wrong way. The last thing I said was "...that is also reciprocated in part to the other party as well."

So, to be clear, I'm not talking about a literal type of ownership like some muslims take with their wives. I would never advocate that.

I do assert that a relationship still does imply reciprocated ownership in that there are certain things you expect of a spouse because of the use of "my wife/husband/fiance". The very definition of "my" is to assert ownership of something.

Not cheating, for example, would be something I expect of a spouse. Not spending money in a joint account when that money is needed for morgage and such. That kind of control over my actions I do fully give to my fiance.

But, it's also in our language. For example, "I give you my heart." (Exchange "heart" for any of the following: soul, mind, body.) Those types of colloquialisms imply some abstract form of ownership because they symbolize giving part of yourself to the other person. It's taken as a sign of trust that you would give something as important as your "heart" or "soul" to someone in expectation that they would never hurt you.

@91 and other various similar comments

I think "my X" can imply association with or relationship to X just as much as ownership.

And even subordination.
"my boss" "my President" "my King" "my master"

I disagree in that, relationships like that imply that in some way one owns the other and vice versa. Again, I wasn't talking about a literal ownership like someone owning a slave. But, the very definition of "my" is to assert ownership of something.

Even in subordinate situations, a relationship like that still implies reciprocated ownership. You expect your king (president/government/etc) to do things for you... keep an army, provide roadways, emergency services, etc and in turn you pay taxes. Personally, you have no control over a king or president, but in a large group you do because if the King or President doesn't do a good enough job people are going to hate him, revolt, assassinate, or re-elect him to fuck shit up for another 4 years and basically let him put himself in a position to be considered of the worst leaders ever.

Posted by: ivo | October 30, 2009 10:33 PM

kopd #29:

And we say things like "my hands, my teeth, my feet" as if they're outside of us.

Just curious, how else could you refer to them? I get the distinction between "having a body" and "being a body" but I'm having trouble envisioning a context where one could determine which of those outlooks a person has by hearing them talk about their hands. (...)
Boy, do I have something to think about now, though. And here I thought I was not a dualist.

In some (many?) languages, such as Latin or Mandarin Chinese, one uses different grammatical constructs to say "my hand" (or even "my mother") compared to "my house". In other words, the "belonging" of a hand to me is not the same kind of belonging of an object.

At this point, I would love it if a knowledgeable linguist showed up to explain to me the wonderful variety of genitive/possessive expression... a statistic across all languages could also be illuminating.

... so where's "my" linguist?

Posted by: ivo | October 30, 2009 11:13 PM

ups, wrong about the Latin. Sorry, I misremembered and posted too quickly. This is still true for Mandarin though, and I bet various other languages.