2 of 3
Related:
Consciousness and memory in fiction, from freelance critic Joseph Conlin
• It's ironic that an article in Skeptical Inquirer on religion and the brain would be authored by someone named Pascal. The article, from the March 2004 issue of SI, is adapted from Pascal Boyer's 2001 book Religion Explained: Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. Boyer challenges the conventional assumption that religion is caused by "the sleep of reason," or the suspension of rational thinking that enables fantastical notions about God and heaven. Now that advances in brain mapping enable scientists to see the brain in action, Boyer says, it is clear that there is no distinct portion of the brain that develops religious beliefs. "On the contrary, religious representations are sustained by a whole variety of different systems," he says, adding that "all these systems are parts of our regular mental equipment, religion or no religion."
Everyone, Boyer says, has a "catalogue" of concepts about agents and objects; religion only tweaks these concepts to the point of imagining interaction with supernatural agents. Religious and superstitious fear of forbidden or impure objects, he says, is related to the general human dread of dirt, disease and danger. "The lesson of the cognitive study of religion is that religion is rather 'natural' in the sense that it consists of by-products of normal mental functioning," Boyer concludes. "In other words, religious thought activates cognitive capacities that developed to handle non-religious information." The good news, we may conclude, is that scientists might come to realize that religion is rational. The bad news is that they, like Damasio, will reduce religion to being purely functional—just a way of getting along in the world.
• If all this thinking about thinking is making your brain hurt, you may have illustrated Robert Fogelin's point in his book Walking the Tightrope of Reason: The Precarious Life of a Rational Animal. The tightrope walker must keep her balance amid "the extremes of relativism and rationalism," as reviewer Kenneth Baker summarized in the San Francisco Chronicle last year. Rationalism says you have to prove something before it's truth; relativism says truth is entirely contingent on context. Not surprisingly, we've tried to rationalize our way out of this impasse, Fogelin writes. "It seems unacceptable that philosophy's demand for rigor could be the source of intellectual disaster. So even though skeptical scenarios have unsolvability written on their faces, the idea persists that there must be some philosophical way to eliminate the skeptical problems they generate. I find success in this direction wholly unlikely." Baker doesn't say how Fogelin advances our understanding of this postmodern snag, but he does say the book warns us to resist indulging in theory and instead become "entangled" in the world.
Related: -John Stackhouse on "Wolterstorff's Philosophical Archaeology," in the current issue of B&C (article available online next week)
-The changing nature of research space, third item here
Elsewhere:
Music and the mind, from the New York Times
The brain, the genes, and depression, from the London Guardian
More on the neuroscience of happiness, from the Times (excerpted here)
Earlier:
The Vision Thing
Part Three: The brain, the soul, and consciousness
Part Two: The completeness and fluidity of consciousness
Part One: Don't believe your eyes
share this page
RSS Feed
