The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (2 page)

Ultimately, of course, you must decide for yourself whether the subjective psychological effects created by your evolved cognitive biases reflect an objective reality, perhaps as evidence that God designed your mind to be so receptive to Him. Or, just maybe, you will come to acknowledge that, like the rest of us, you are a hopeless pawn in one of natural selection’s most successful hoaxes ever—and smile at the sheer ingenuity involved in pulling it off, at the very thought of such mindless cleverness. One can still enjoy the illusion of God, after all, without believing Him to be real.

Either way, our first order of business is to determine what kind of mind it takes to think about God’s mind in the first place, and one crucial factor—indeed, perhaps the only essential one—is the ability to think about other minds at all.

So, onward we go.

1
THE HISTORY OF AN ILLUSION

G
ORGIAS HAD A
way with words. He was also a bit of a charlatan. While draped, as the story goes, in flowing purple robes, the charismatic former student of the philosopher Empedocles stood before listless hordes of gangly slaves, bored plebes, and the bloated politicians of ancient Greece and gave them all a show. During public debates on the most serious matters of the day—from the rape of Helen, to the economy, to the nature of existence itself—he was rumored to have disarmed his grim-faced opponents with a sudden burst of good-natured laughter. When the other side returned his laughter amicably, he would obliterate the attempts at humor by a return to seriousness, questioning why they were making light of such an important and sobering subject.

On stage, Gorgias achieved astonishing feats of verbal acrobatics and delivered poetic rejoinders said to dumbfound even the most eloquent of his learned adversaries. Although Gorgias’s booming voice had long since vanished from the site of the Olympic Games, where he had once orated before tens of thousands of restless, sweaty forms, one admirer, the Greek lexicographer Suidas, gushed that Gorgias “was the first to give to the rhetorical genre the art of deliberate culture and employed tropes and metaphors and figurative language and hypallage and catachresis and hyperbaton and doublings of words and repetitions and apostrophes and clauses of equal length.”
¹
In the
Phaedrus
(circa 370 BC), Socrates refers to Gorgias as being, “skilled in tricking out a speech.” Even the notoriously hard-to-please Plato couldn’t help but marvel at Gorgias’s verbal skills. “I often heard Gorgias say that the art of rhetoric differs from all other arts,” wrote Plato. “Under its influence all things are willingly but not forcibly made slaves.”
²

To “Gorgianize” became synonymous with bamboozling listeners with seductive wordage. Gorgias charged exorbitant fees for his public performances and was so sought after as a teacher that he was made fantastically rich by the amount he earned from his many pupils. (Just in case anyone doubted his superfluous wealth, he commissioned a dazzling, solid-gold statue of himself and had it erected prominently in the temple at Delphi.) Such was Gorgias’s prowess in persuasion that in the theater at Athens he often boldly provoked the crowd, challenging them to pose to him a question that would leave him speechless. “Suggest a topic,” he would say, paring idly away at his fingernails. But to the very day he died, his tongue refused to tie. At the age of at least 105, Gorgias lay down on his bed and began drifting off to sleep. When a friend asked him if he was okay, Gorgias is said to have responded with characteristic wit, “Sleep already begins to hand me over to his brother Death.”
³

Yet for all his eloquence, there was something that pestered Gorgias throughout his life. In spite of his inimitable ability to domesticate language so that even the most elusive of concepts would play like docile animals at his every command, he was frustrated by the fact that even a wordsmith such as he couldn’t effectively communicate his innermost experiences to another listener in a way that perfectly reflected his private reality. Dressed up in language and filtered through another person’s brain, one’s subjective experiences are inevitably transfigured into a wholly different thing, so much so that Gorgias felt it fair to say that the speaker’s mind can never truly be known. Thoughts said aloud are mutant by nature. No matter how expertly one plumbs the depths of subjective understanding, Gorgias realized to his horror, or how artistically rendered and devastatingly precise language may be, truth still falls on ears that hear something altogether different from what exists in reality.

Gorgias would have found a commiserating fellow scholar in a modern-day (and unusually poetical) psychologist from the London School of Economics named Nicholas Humphrey. “How hard it is to come to terms with this result,” Humphrey laments in “The Society of Selves.” “To have to face the fact of being oneself—one self, this self and none other, this secret packet of phenomena, this singular bubble of consciousness. Press up against each other as we may, and the bubbles remain essentially inviolate. Share the same body even, be joined like Siamese twins, and there still remain two quite separate consciousnesses.”
⁴
To Humphrey, this fundamental and unbridgeable “otherness of others” induces a unique kind of loneliness in human beings—one that, paradoxically, is exacerbated by the physical presence of other people.
⁵
This type of psychological loneliness is perhaps felt most acutely when we are as close to another person’s body as is humanly possible. As the poet William Butler Yeats wrote rather dramatically, “The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.”
⁶

This sentiment that other minds are insufferably just out of reach isn’t all reason for despair, though. One can, in fact, arguably derive a rather pleasing sense of narcissistic control from such an understanding. Each of us, utterly alone, carries the whole world in our heads, and other people exist only insofar as we have minds capable of harboring them. The upside of being alone in the universe, of having sovereign psychological reign, is expressed rather nicely in the poem “Mad Girl’s Love Song” (1953), in which the somewhat lugubrious Sylvia Plath tells us, “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again.”

Actually, Gorgias’s reasoning about the inherent solitude of the individual (and the population-level “societies of selves,” as Humphrey refers to human cultures) has been the plaything of a diverse group of thinkers and writers. Author Thomas De Quincey, in
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
(1821), notes that, “all men come into this world alone and leave it alone.” This is true in a very literal sense. But, if you really think about it, we also take others with us when we die. Because the only knowledge that we have of another person is contained in our heads as a mental representation of that individual, in a sense our own death will steal their lives away too. If the entire universe is all in our heads, so to speak, Plath is justified in her musing that, “all the world drops dead.”

Gorgias went even further than simply noting the illusion of a true intersubjectivity. He concluded that, because other minds cannot be known in reality but only perceived, perhaps they don’t exist at all. After all, one can’t actually see, feel, or weigh another person’s mind; rather, all we can really observe is bodies moving about, mouths talking, and faces contorting. For this reason, Gorgias is still regarded by many scholars as the world’s first
solipsist
—someone who denies, on philosophical grounds, the very existence of other minds.
⁷

Although believing yourself to be the only subjective entity in all the world may sound patently ludicrous, if not mildly psychopathic, in fact such thinking is just as logical today as it was in the fourth century BC, when Gorgias, struck by the impotence of mere words in conveying his reality, declared himself to have the only mind that ever was. Long after the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes, questioning even the existence of his own mind, muttered his existentially consoling
Cogito, ergo sum
(“I think, therefore I am”), the task of proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that other minds exist remains fundamentally impossible. A scientist can no sooner capture and study a mental state than trap a kilogram in a bottle or caress an ounce in the palm of her hand.

Even with all the technological sophistication of today’s brain-imaging equipment, or with the recent discovery of mirror neurons (neurons that fire both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another), other minds still exist only in theory. How would you prove to someone else, incontrovertibly, that you have a mind? Consider that if confronted with Shakespeare’s celebrated plea from
The Merchant of Venice
(1598)—“If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?”—the solipsist might answer, “Yeah.
And?
”

Even in modern Hollywood, the concept of true intersubjectivity is rather hard to get one’s head around. In one of my all-time favorite films,
Being John Malkovich
(1999), a lowly puppeteer played by John Cusack is forced to take on a remedial office job on the “7½ floor” of a low-ceilinged building in New York City, only to discover a wormhole hidden behind a filing cabinet that leads straight into actor John Malkovich’s subjective universe. As members of the viewing audience, we’re told that Cusack’s character (and later, other paying customers given access to this strange wonderland of Malkovich’s head before being vomited out of the wormhole and onto the side of the New Jersey Turnpike) can see and feel what Malkovich is experiencing. But what is supposed to be a merging of consciousnesses can only be portrayed on-screen as Cusack’s character looking through Malkovich’s eyes as a voyeur into the actor’s world. Cusack is a sort of homunculus listening to the muffled voice of its host like a fetus in utero hearing its mother. Later in the movie, when his skills are put to use in manipulating Malkovich’s behavior, Cusack is a puppeteer. But Malkovich’s consciousness is never truly punctured. Rather, the film is about two separate minds in one head; “being” John Malkovich amounts to being inside John Malkovich’s body.

What a multimillion-dollar studio budget cannot do, however, was nearly achieved on a shoestring budget in a psychological laboratory. Harvard University psychologist Daniel Wegner demonstrated that, under certain unusual conditions, people may actually mistake someone else’s mental experiences as their own. In one classic study, participants were asked to dress in long-sleeved medical scrubs and stand before a mirror with their arms behind them. Another person of the same sex, roughly the same size, wearing identical clothes, stood behind a curtain and inserted his or her arms along the participants’ sides, so that when the participants glanced in the mirror, it looked as though this other person’s arms were their own. If participants saw the foreign hand snapping its fingers and were made to feel in control of this behavior, a rather curious thing happened: when a rubber band on this other person’s wrist was snapped against the stranger’s skin, the participants themselves responded with a spike in their own skin conductance in the same wrist area, which was resting, of course, comfortably out of sight behind them.
⁸

The notable exception of some quirky laboratory experiments notwithstanding, we are indeed contained entirely in our own skulls. The only reasonable defense against solipsism is reason itself. Psychologists Steven Platek and Gordon Gallup from the State University of New York at Albany are cautiously optimistic that we’re on fairly safe ground in assuming that other people are just as conscious as we ourselves are. “Because humans share similar receptor mechanisms and brains that are organized roughly the same way,” they point out, “there is bound to be considerable overlap between their experiences.”
⁹

We all have our doubts from time to time—I’ve stared, square in the eyes, my share of somnambulistic students who I would swear were cleverly rigged automatons. But generally speaking, most of us seldom doubt that other people are indeed fellow conscious creatures. In fact, we’re forced to exert far greater effort trying to comprehend solipsism than we are its more intuitive antithesis, which is that the world is continually breathing with conscious activity, infused by those ethereal minds that exist only in theory. That is to say, for most of us, others are more than just ambulant objects fitted out with brains and programmed with behavioral algorithms leading them to act
as if
they were conscious.

Even individuals with a somewhat misanthropic bent cannot help but, occasionally at least, to see other people as deeply psychological entities—compatriot souls being driven by similar likes and desires. A good example comes from Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa’s semiautobiographical
The Book of Disquiet
(1916). Speaking to us through the voice of his alter ego, Bernardo Soares, an accountant aware of his own mediocrity as a midlevel employee but nonetheless someone who secretly relishes his intellectual superiority, Pessoa recalls a particular incident in which his own solipsistic worldview was caused to wobble:

One researcher who has given considerable thought to these sorts of questions is Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom. In his book
Descartes’ Baby
(2004), Bloom posits that human beings are “commonsense dualists.” His central thesis is that, unlike any other species, we’re unusually prone to seeing others as being “more than bodies”—rather, we see bodies as being inhabited by souls. Yet depending on the particular social parameters and the conditions we’re dealing with, we can become more or less likely to see others as objects rather than as fellow human beings. On some occasions, such as the suicide case described by Pessoa, other people’s souls stare out at us so vividly that our thinking is tilted heavily toward seeing them as richly experiential agents like ourselves. On other occasions, however, such as when relations with our neighbors grow sour or during periods of intense sociopolitical turmoil and violence, we’re vulnerable to diminishing other people’s humanity, objectifying other human beings as mere “disgusting” or stock bodies. The Nazi regime’s systematic dehumanization of Jews, Bloom points out, is a case in point: