Hood, Bruce - Supersense

Marjaana Lindeman at the University of Helsinki has recently tested this dual model of belief and reason and the role of naive intuitive theories. 57She investigated intuitive reasoning and the supersense in more than three thousand Finnish adults. First, she asked them about their supernatural beliefs, both secular and religious. Then she assessed their intuitive misconceptions. She asked them questions about animism, teleological reasoning, anthropomorphism, vitalism, and core conceptual confusions they had about physical, biological, and psychological aspects of the world – all the sorts of areas that children naturally reason about by themselves that sometimes lead to misconceptions. She asked questions like. ‘When summer is warm, do flowers want to bloom?’ or ‘Does old furniture know something about the past?’ Finally, she asked them which style of thinking they preferred – intuitive gut reactions or well-thought-out analytical reasoning.

When she compared adults with a strong supersense with those who were more sceptical, Lindeman found that believers were more likely to misattribute properties of one conceptual category to another. For example, they were more likely to say that old chairs know something about the past (attributing mental property to inanimate objects) or that thoughts could be transferred to others (attributing physical properties to mental states). They were teleologically more promiscuous and inclined to animism as well as anthropomorphism. They were also more vitalist and had a sense that things are connected in the world. Were they less educated? No. These were university students. What’s more, they scored just as high as the sceptical students on other measures of rationality. Rationality and supernatural beliefs can coexist in the same individual. These students were SuperBrights who simply preferred, or were more inclined to rely on, their intuitive ways of thinking.

Finland may have one of the highest rates of atheism in the world, but this large study of adult students proves that educated people do not neatly divide into those with a supersense and those without one. When people rely on their fast, unlearned gut responses, they are inclined to use their supersense, and it’s something that is easily triggered in most of us.

WHAT NEXT?

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

– Corinthians 13:11

Throughout this book, I have been arguing that beliefs in the supernatural are a consequence of reasoning processes about natural properties and events in our world. This includes a mind design for detecting patterns and inferring structures where there may be none. Our naive theories form the basis of our supernatural beliefs, and culture and experience simply work to reinforce what we intuitively hold to be correct. This is why the sense of being stared at is such an interesting model for the origin and development of supernaturalism. Children are not told that humans can detect unseen gaze. In fact, it’s not something they readily report that they can do. Nevertheless, young children and many adults think that vision works by something leaving the eyes. So when they experience episodes of seeming to detect unseen gaze, this belief simply emerges naturally as an unquestioned ability. It is not even considered supernatural by most people. Children were not told to think this. This model shows how the combination of intuitive theories, pattern detecting, and eventual support from culture produces a universal supernatural belief.

I think that something very similar may be going on for other supernatural beliefs. The notion of psychological contamination we examined in earlier chapters emerges naturally out of psychological essentialism, which has its roots in our naive biological reasoning. Again, this way of thinking is not something that we teach our children. Intuitive dualism and the idea that the mind can exist independently of the body is another. All of these ways of thinking are both naturally emerging and yet supernatural in their explanations of the world.

As we noted earlier, some have argued that adult supernaturalism is a product of religious indoctrination of our children. However, I hope I have convinced you that the various secular supernatural beliefs we have examined throughout this book seem to arise spontaneously without necessarily being started by religion. Most importantly, some beliefs remain dormant, whereas others that are not regarded as supernatural grow in strength. This occurs even in highly educated adults. We can all entertain weird and wonderful beliefs about the world.

We may put away childish things, as Corinthians suggests, but we never entirely get rid of them. Education can give us a new understanding and even progress to a scientific viewpoint, but development, distress, damage, and disease show that we keep many skeletons in our mental closet. If those misconceptions involve our understanding of the properties and limits of the material world, the living world, and the mental world, there is a good chance that they can form the basis of adult supernatural beliefs.

As children discover more about the real world, they should progress to a more scientific view of the world. Clearly, this does not necessarily happen. Most adults hold supernatural beliefs. The supersense continues to influence and operate in our lives. It may even give us a sense of control over our behaviours. As we saw in the opening chapters, many of our actions, whether we are avoiding a cardigan, demolishing a house, touching a blanket, or engaging in exam rituals, give us a psychological way of dealing with things. Without these beliefs, we may feel vulnerable. We may not even be aware that a supersense is influencing our lives, and yet it clearly does.

So, can we ever evolve out of irrationality? Why would such a way of viewing the world continue to flourish in this age of reason? Will the human race ever become ultimately reasonable?

I don’t believe so. There is one final piece of the puzzle that I have been hinting at throughout the book that now needs to be considered. It moves beyond the question of origins and asks: are there any benefits of the supersense? After all, if science has the potential to elevate the human species to new levels of achievement, why do we still succumb to a supersense? Part of the answer is that it may be unavoidable, as I hope you will now appreciate. Another reason is that the supersense makes possible our capacity to experience a deeper level of connection that may be necessary for humans as social animals.

Even though humans have the capacity to reason and make judgements, I think that we will always regard some things in life as not reducible to rational analysis. That is because society needs supernatural thinking as part of a belief system that holds members of a group together by sacred values. In the final pages, I will explain how this supersense forms the intuitive rationale for the sacred values that bind our society together.

CHAPTER TEN

WOULD YOU LET YOUR WIFE SLEEP WITH ROBERT REDFORD?

IN THIS BOOK, I have proposed that humans are compelled to understand the nature of the world around them as part of the way our brains try to make sense of our experiences. This process starts early in childhood, even before culture has begun to tell children what to think. Along the way, children come up with all manner of beliefs about the world, including those that would have to be supernatural if true. These ideas go beyond the natural laws that we currently understand and hence are super natural. Whether it is a disembodied mind floating free of the body, a sublime essence that harbours the true identity of people, places, and things, or the idea that people are all connected by tangible energies and hidden patterns, these notions are all intuitive ways of thinking about the world. We persist in these beliefs despite the lack of compelling evidence that the phenomena we think are real do in fact exist. Culture may fuel these beliefs with fantasy and fiction, but they burn brightly in the first place because of our natural inclination to assume ‘something there’, as William James put it. Culture simply took these beliefs and gave them meaning and content.