KIDS SAY THE DARNDEST THINGS (ABOUT NEUROSCIENCE)
Here’s an interview with developmental psychologist Paul Bloom, from Edge.org. He claims that children are “natural-born dualists”: that there is an innate intuition of duality between bodies (/brains) and minds.
One story Bloom tells is that, after quizing his six-year-old son about the relationship between his brain and his mind, his son claims that he dreams, he imagines and loves his brother and so on, but his brain does none of these things. Bloom also bring in data on infant cognition, to show that infants come with certain fundamental ontological categories pre-installed (catgories like object-persistence, person, gravity, etc.). The further claim that the mind/matter distinction is one of these basic categories doesn’t seem well supported, but then I wasn’t sufficiently impressed to read his actual research data.
Bloom is skeptical about the possibility that materialism will ever take root in common sense, because dualism is just too darned common and sensible — it’s built into our neural architecture.
This is wrong. Intuitions and common sense are, more often than not, just the trivialities of language reified. When Bloom says that his son has dualist intuitions, what he’s really observing is that his son recognizes that the sentences “My brain is dreaming” or “My brain loves my brother” are deviant utterances; they don’t make sense to contemporary English-speakers. The non-sense of these statements has nothing at all to do with some essential configuration of our psychology, and even less to do with basic distinction in nature. The further step of projecting these linguistic preferences back onto pre-linguistic infants is even more absurd.
But the fundamental error, the axis mundi centering the constellations of Bloom’s embarassing conceptual blunders, is in thinking that a materialist should talk as if he is identical with his brain. When his son claims that the brain doesn’t dream or love his brother, he calls it a “misunderstanding” of the relevant neuroscience data. He makes the bizarre claim that talking about our bodies in possessive form (“my body”, “my brain”) testifies to our common-sense dualism. “These are things that we possess, that we are intimately related to—but not what we are,” he writes. Unfortunately, he fails to notice that we also talk about “my mind”, “my soul” and even “my self”.
This tendency to believe that materialists should identify exclusively with their brains is rooted, I suspect, in Descartes solipsistic identification of himself as a “thinking thing” in his Meditations. (Bloom’s most recent book is titled Descartes’ Baby.) It turns out that it’s our brains which are responsible for thinking, so we must therefore be our brains. This is an error; We are not thinking things, we are things being thought.
Language is constantly evolving, especially (I predict) given the advent of large-scale written conversation. There is nothing necessary about dualism, except insofar was we may need to talk about ourselves as social creatures when engaging in social practices. It’s a valuable metaphor which I fully embrace in casual conversation, while, as a 21st-century philosophical dilettante, I completely deny that minds are made of mind-stuff.