Natural-born dualists

Humans are born dualists, with a propensity to believe in life after death, according to Is God an Accident? by Paul Bloom in last December's Atlantic.

Dualists, for the purpose of this post, believe that our minds/souls are separate from our bodies/brains. Are you a dualist? Try this thought experiment: they've perfected teletransporters, just like in Star Trek. You walk into a booth in your home city, press a button and your body is scanned down to the last bit of information before disappearing and reappearing, complete in every detail, in a similar booth on the other side of the world.

A dualist hesitates about pushing the button: Sure, my body and brain will emerge intact and unchanged. But what about me? My essence-soul-consciousness? What will happen to that?

A non-dualist, having been convinced that nothing of him/herself is left behind, pushes the button: Everything there is of me is material. There's nothing else to be transported, so what's the problem?

Back to the article. Bloom makes a pretty good case that children are innate dualists. In one experiment, most children believed that a storybook mouse, after being eaten by an alligator, would continue to have feelings and desires. Later on in life, most of us skate over the dualism issues as in, for instance:

* Shrek 2, when an ogre and a donkey are transformed into a human and steed, respectively;
*Star Trek, the episode where a villain occupies Captain Kirk's body to take control of the Enterprise;
* Tale of a Body Thief, in which Anne Rice has a vampire and human swap bodies for a day.

It's not that we totally buy these body-switching plots, rather that most of us don't find them completely loony. Every time I use such innocuous phrases as my brain or I really let myself down, I'm reinforcing my natural dualist instinct.

Once you've accepted dualism, it's a short step to believing that "we" survive as souls--destined for heaven, hell, another body--something rather than nothing.

The following month (January), Atlantic published a slew of responses to the article, including my favorite: It's much easier than all this, said the letter writer (I'm paraphrasing). Way back when, a few humans started burying their dead to prepare them for a possible afterlife--which was so much more sanitary than leaving disease-ridden corpses around. And here we all are, mostly descended from the hygienic afterlife-believing folks who flourished at the expense of their moldy cousins.

Nice!