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Humans are exquisitely sensitive to judging others, even though we are often unable to say exactly what it is about them we are noticing.
consider sex with animals. Like many others, I had thought bestiality to be universally taboo until I discovered that intercourse with donkeys is acceptable in the northern Colombian town of San Antero, where adolescent boys are alledgedly encouraged in this practice. They even have a festival to celebrate this bestiality; particularly attractive donkeys are paraded in wigs and makeup.
Rozin identified at least four reasons why we refuse to touch evil items, and he found that adults endorse each of these reasons to varying degrees. We do not want to be seen to undertake an action that the majority would avoid. Any item associated with a killer is negative, and thus wearing it produces associations with the act of killing. We believe that there is a physical contamination of the clothing. We believe that there is a spiritual contamination of the clothing.
One reason children make these sorts of mistakes is that they make sense of everything from their own perspective. Piaget recognized that young children are so caught up in their own worldview that they interpret everything in the world according to the way it relates to them. Piaget called this “egocentrism” to reflect this self-obsessed perspective. The sun does appear to follow you around, as it is always there when you look over your shoulder.
Young children do not readily make the distinction between things that have been created for a purpose and those that just happen to be useful for a purpose. For example, if I can use a stick for prodding, I may be inclined to see sticks as having a purpose. In other words, sticks exist as something for me to use.
This way of thinking leads the child to what has been called “promiscuous teleology.”42 Teleology means thinking in terms of function—what something has been designed for. This way of thinking is promiscuous because the child over-applies the belief of purpose and function to everything.
As we saw in the last paragraph, promiscuous teleology may incline the child to view the world as existing for a purpose. That’s why the creationist view of existence is so intuitively appealing.43 Most religions offer a story of origins and purpose, which is why creationism fits so well with what seems natural at seven years of age. Maybe that’s the origin of the Jesuit saying “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.”
There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and good-will to everything, that hurts or pleases us. Hence…trees, mountains and streams are personified, and the inanimate parts of nature acquire sentiment and passion.45
As Arthur C. Clarke pointed out, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”50
Children may not conjure up cookies, pencils, and imaginary friends, but that may be because they understand the limits of their own abilities. They may be less sure about the extraordinary power of others or mysterious magical boxes. This is where culture steps in to shape our beliefs. Again, others’ testimony becomes important in supporting supernaturalism, and this is particularly powerful on the playground.
Modern humans have the scientific name Homo sapiens, or “thinking hominid,” but as Nick Humphrey has pointed out, the label for modern humans is more appropriately Homo psychologicus.58 Most of our brainpower and the skills that separate us from other animals derive from our capacity to be psychological—to assume that others have minds and reason.
As children discover more about the true nature of the world, they increasingly understand that many of their intuitions are wrong and would only be possible if the supernatural were real. But when others share the same sorts of misconceptions, such beliefs become socially acceptable, despite the lack of evidence or what rational science might say.
Building on David Hume’s “We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds” observation that we encountered in the last chapter, Guthrie presents the case that our mind is predisposed to see and infer the presence of others, which explains why we are prone to see faces in ambiguous patterns.
Seeing faces leads to inferences of minds. Those minds may have malevolent intentions against us.
So movement and faces lead to the inference of intentional purpose.
Gaze is part of a general range of social skills called joint attention.21 When humans interact socially, they do so by sharing the same focus of interest.
Our anthropomorphism endows the shapes with humanlike qualities of mental states. By hijacking the rules for the movements of living things and applying them to objects, we effectively make them come alive.
Our natural tendency to assume that people’s behaviors are motivated by minds allows us to predict what they might do next. This is what Dan Dennett calls adopting “the intentional stance.” When we adopt the intentional stance, we detect others as agents. An agent here is not James Bond, but rather something that acts with purpose. We attribute beliefs and desires to agents, as well as some intelligence to achieve those goals.26
However, the trouble with assuming an intentional stance is that it can be wrongly triggered. Things that don’t have intentions but seem to—because they either look as if they are alive (movements and faces) or behave as if they are alive (respond contingently)—make us think they are agents.
Substance dualism is the philosophical position that humans are made up of two different types of substances, a physical body and an immaterial soul.
The dualist philosopher René Descartes proposed that the mental world must control the physical one through the pineal gland deep in the middle of the brain, which he called the seat of the soul.31
Feelings are like an emotional barometer of change that we can compare from one moment to the next. It makes a lot more intuitive sense to say that I am a lot happier than I was yesterday than to say that my body and brain are producing different types of mood experiences from one day to the next.
My hunch is that most adults also think the mind can exist without the brain. They may know the scientific position that the mind is a product of the brain, but as we saw with people’s understanding of natural selection, knowing the correct answer does not make it feel right.
Neuroscience tells us that the physical brain creates the mind. Our rich mental experiences, the sensations, perceptions, emotions, and thoughts that motivate us to do anything, are patterns and exchanges of chemical signals in the complex information-processing of a biological machine.
Psychology is the scientific study of the mind, but the mind does not exist in any material sense. Rather, the mind is the natural operating system that runs on the input and output of the brain’s activity. We can study its operations, but we would be wrong to think that the mind occupies a material existence independently of the brain.
The scientific position on substance dualism is that there is no separation of mind and body. It’s an illusion as false as the invisible square we saw earlier. Humans are conscious automata. Our bodies generate our minds. When our body dies, so does our mind.
misconceiving the mind lays the foundation for many of the beliefs in both religious and secular supernaturalism.
Human freaks challenge our view of the living world. We expect people to look a certain way and be a certain size and shape, and individuals who do not fit these expectations are deemed unnatural. When they have properties that violate our boundaries for grouping the world, they become freaks.
Businessmen can pay up to $6,000 to eat tiger penis in the belief that it will improve their virility and life energy.39
So I would argue that the behavior of the toddler toward his grubby blanket and the obsession of a fanatical collector to own original memorabilia reflect the same human tendency to see objects as possessing invisible properties that originate from significant individuals. By owning objects and touching them, we can connect with others, and that gives us the sense of a distributed existence over time and with others. The net effect is that we become increasingly linked together by a sense of deeper hidden structures.
SUPERNATURAL BELIEFS ARE not simply transmitted by what people tell us to think. Rather, I would argue that our brains have a mind design that leads us naturally to infer structures and patterns in the world and to make sense of it by generating intuitive theories.
I think the supersense will persist even in a modern era because it makes possible our commitment to the idea that there are sacred values in our world. Something is sacred when members of society regard it as beyond any monetary value.
All of our sacred values convey a common sense of connectedness that joins us to each other and to our ancestors. In this way, we are extending ourselves to the rest of humanity from the past to the present.
