Hood, Bruce - Supersense

When pre-school children were asked in a 2004 study about a mouse that had been killed and eaten by an alligator, they agreed that the brain was dead, but they thought the mind was still active. 39They understood that bodily functions like the need to eat and drink would stop, but most thought the mouse would still be frightened, feel hungry, and want to go home. Even adults who classified themselves as extinctivists – those who think the soul dies when the body does – said that a person killed in a car crash would know that he was dead. 40Our rampant dualism betrays our ability to understand that body and mind are tethered together in an inseparable union. When our body packs up, so should our mind. We cannot know we are dead.

Only as children start to learn about what makes something alive do they begin to understand the opposite process of what makes something dead. As we will see in the next chapter, a grounding in biology emerges late in development, and only then do children start to appreciate the mechanics of death. 41But understanding the mechanics and inevitability of death does not get rid of the belief in the immortal soul. Religion and secular supernaturalism encourage such beliefs, but we must recognize that the concept of the immortal soul originates in the normal reasoning processes of every child. For example, children raised in a secular environment may express fewer afterlife beliefs than children raised in a religious household, but they still retain notions of some form of mental life that survives death. 42We do not need to indoctrinate our children with such ideas for them to persist. 43It appeals to our supersense to think that we can continue to exist after our deaths.

WHAT NEXT?

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. But the mind has no real existence substantiated in the physical world. 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.

However, that’s not what we experience when we consider ourselves. We are real, and we exist in the real world. When we think of ‘I’, we do so in terms of our mind. We experience our mind as an individual motivated by beliefs, desires, emotions, regrets about the past, concerns about the present, and plans for the future. We experience our mind as occupying the machine we call our body. We see our bodies as structures that can deteriorate but we rarely see the structure of our own minds. Even after mental illness, periods of delusion, or temporary intoxication, we usually explain changes in our mind as a result of ‘not being ourselves’. This is because we are our minds. The body does not create us. Rather, we are the one who controls it. The philosophical position of substance dualism is the natural way to experience our conscious mind as distinct and separate from our bodies.

Some consider mind–body dualism irrefutable evidence for why there must be supernatural powers operating in the world. The mind is seen as the causal agent but, for that to be true, the mental must be capable of controlling the physical. That would require supernatural powers, since such an arrangment would violate the ontological boundary between the mental and the physical. How else could nonmaterial minds control material bodies? However, most of us don’t recognize this position as dependent on the supernatural because minds controlling bodies is the intuitive default of our developing mind-reading of others, as well as our natural experience of our own minds.

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. But the conscious automation theory is both too unnatural and too repulsive to be accepted by most people. Furthermore, the impression that we have voluntary free will operating within our minds may also be an illusion. Free will requires someone or some ghost inside our heads making the decisions, and that simply gets us into an endless loop. Who is inside our head, and so on, and so on?

So the natural position, based on personal experience, is to assume a separate mind inside the body and not to worry about how the immaterial could control the material. Once we buy into the independent existence of mind and body, there is no limit to what the mind can do. If the mind is separate to the body, it is not constrained by the same laws that govern the physical world. It can leap great distances, travel through solid walls, never age, and travel forwards and backwards in time. In short, misconceiving the mind lays the foundation for many of the beliefs in both religious and secular supernaturalism. In the next chapter, we examine how misconceiving bodies also prepares the ground for our supersense.

CHAPTER SIX

FREAK ACCIDENTS

ON 4 DECEMBER 1980, Stella Walsh, an innocent bystander, was accidentally caught in the crossfire of an attempted armed robbery at a discount store in Cleveland, Ohio. In her day, Stella had been the top athlete in women’s field and track events, setting twenty world records and winning both silver and gold medals for the 100-metre sprint in the 1932 and 1936 Olympics. Although resident in the United States, she represented her native Poland in the Games and was awarded that country’s highest civilian medal, the Cross of Merit. Everywhere she went, huge crowds turned out to celebrate her victories. In 1975 Stella was inducted into the US Track and Field Hall of Fame. Five years later, a stray bullet in a parking lot ended the life of this once-famous sporting legend.

It was not Stella’s tragic death that was to cause a sensation, but rather the results of her autopsy. The sixty-nine-year-old former women’s athlete was not exactly who everyone thought she was. She was a he. Despite having been married and living life as a woman, Stella had male genitalia.

Initial reactions to the reports of this discovery led to outraged claims of sporting fraud and cheating. Stella was not a cheat because, technically, she was not entirely a man. She possessed both male and female chromosomes. Stella had a condition known as ‘mosaicism’, which makes an individual genetically both male and female. Her case was regarded as one of the reasons the International Olympic Committee decided to abandon gender determination tests prior to the 2000 Sydney Games. It’s just too difficult to distinguish between males and females, and genitals don’t maketh the man.

Mosaics such as Stella Walsh are rare, but it is not their rarity that fascinates us. It was not her sporting fame and untimely death that dominated the headlines at the time, but her being a ‘freak’. There are many rare and bizarre medical conditions, but only those that challenge our beliefs about what it means to be a human are called freaks. It’s a cruel term that we use to isolate those who do not fit our concepts of what it is to be a human.

During the Victorian era and early 1900s, freak shows were common. In what would now be regarded as politically incorrect entertainment, it was perfectly respectable to pay to see medical oddities. Conjoined twins, bearded ladies, microencephalics, dwarfs, giants, and albinos were all paraded as wonders of nature. Before the advent of modern medicine, many suffered gross disfigurement and physical abnormality through a variety of congenital disorders and progressive diseases, some of which are largely treatable today.