The idea of an immaterial soul somehow connected to our physical bodies is hard to resist, and not just because it lies at the heart of many religions or because of great thinkers such as Descartes. We all begin life as "natural-born dualists" who "see the world as containing both physical things, which are governed by principles such as solidity and gravity, and immaterial minds, which are driven by emotions and goals." Even those of us who grow up to accept that "we are material beings" - "that the conscious self arises from a purely physical brain" - still use the language of dualism in phrases like "my brain". Throughout this brilliant book Paul Bloom describes these intuitions and challenges some of our most basic assumptions, drawing on discoveries from developmental psychology, clinical research and neuroscience to show the many ways in which we "understand and respond to the minds of other people."
"Babies prefer to look at faces more than just about anything else" and, by their first birthday, they are social beings. Before their second birthday, children "not only understand that people have desires, they also know that others' desires might differ from their own." Three-year-olds can tell the difference between an intentionally and an accidentally created object - they can "think about things in terms of design and purpose" and are beginning to display the "promiscuous teleology" that both enhances and frustrates our understanding of the world. Four-year-olds typically succeed at the "false-belief task" in which they must "reason about another actor's mental state." To pass this test, "you have to hold in your mind two conflicting pictures of the world": the world as it really is and the world as it is imagined by someone else. Throw into the mix the acquisition of language and we can see just how much is going on in those first few years.
It's hardly surprising that child development doesn't always run smoothly. Autistic children, for example, typically show impairments in communication and imagination and, most of all, "in the ability to interact appropriately with others." Psychologists have coined the term "mindblindness" to describe the most extreme form of autism, in which "people are seen as nothing more than objects". Bloom recounts an experience while working with autistic children as a teenage counsellor: "a severely impaired seven-year-old boy walked up to me and placed his hands on my shoulders" in what appeared at first to be a spontaneous act of affection. But then "he tightened his grip, jumped up... and started to climb". The boy was using Bloom as a ladder.
While autistic brains respond to faces as if they were objects, normal brains have a "tendency to ascribe intention to inanimate objects" - we anthropomorphize. Babies can ascribe mental states to geometrical shapes that are moving in a purposeful way and "young children are prone to see much of the physical and biological world as existing for a purpose, consisting of artifacts created by a divine designer". Even sophisticated theologians are seduced by "the argument from design". Resistance to Darwin's theory of natural selection - which explains "complex and adaptive design without positing a divine designer" - is not only rooted in scripture but in our psychology: we are "so hypersensitive to signs of agency that we see intention where all that really exists is artifice or accident".
This essentialist way of thinking - ascribing to objects "a nature that transcends their appearance" - "appears to be a basic component of how we think about the world". It "drives us to search for the deeper nature of things" and perhaps underpins our near universal religious impulse as well as our natural curiosity about the world. Modern science, however, is often counterintuitive: evolutionary theory, for example, "violates hardcore essentialism, as it conflicts with the notion that species have immutable essences (they do not, they evolve)".
These fascinating insights into what makes us human prepare the ground for Bloom to explore the idea "that the roots of morality are innate" rather than handed down on tablets of stone. Empathy, for example, emerges very early, and "by the time children are about two years of age, they care about others and will act to make them feel better." Within another year the child gets truly moral and can experience pride, shame and guilt. As we grow and mature, our "enhanced social intelligence allows us to reason about how other people will act and react in situations that do not yet exist, so as to plan and assess the consequences of our own actions." Seeing these situations "from another person's point of view" is crucial for our moral sense.
Eventually, unless trapped by narrow religious or social custom, we "come to transcend our innate, parochial, moral sense" and seek ways to expand "the original moral circle" defined by "kin selection and reciprocal altruism". One hugely important endpoint of such a process is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which represents tremendous moral progress. "In both morality and science, each generation has the advantage of the insights of all the generations that have come before" (contradicting writers like John Gray, who have a rather more dismal view of humanity).
Some consider the Golden Rule to be the pinnacle of moral achievement, forgetting that such a crude principle is compatible with, for example, slavery, "so long as you restrict the moral circle so that the Golden Rule does not apply to those you would take as slaves". The good news is that we can work towards expanding our moral circle, through recognizing our mutual interdependence, having increased contact with diverse groups, persuading with images and stories, and gathering moral insight. Bloom admits that, for some, the "notion that our souls are flesh is profoundly troubling" but he ends on a positive note: "only now, with the converging work of philosophers, psychologists, and evolutionary theorists, is it possible to be a morally optimistic materialist."
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