We have handled with equanimity the concept that the Earth is not the center of the universe, though some good fellows who championed that idea when it was new suffered mightily for doing so. Most of us, even the redoubtable Catholic Church, have accepted that evolution explains animal diversity and even the emergence of humans, although there are some who for religious (not scientific) reasons are kicking and screaming in refusal. Science cannot itself take on the existence of gods, for that is not a scientific question, nor is the existence of an afterlife. But souls; now there is something that science, and especially modern neuroscience, might go to work on. In _Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human_ (Basic Books), Paul Bloom takes an even more basic approach, hardly mentioning such technological wonders as the scanners that show brains at work. He examines a wealth of clever experiments on babies and children to answer about babies the question posed more often about disreputable politicians: "What do they know, and when do they know it?" The answers provide an entertaining and informative evaluation of what we might be able to tell about souls.
René Descartes promoted "dualism": the body exists, and it is a machine of meat which, when it is alive, is coupled with an immaterial soul. This, according to Bloom, is a natural view; evolution itself has made us into dualists. We are wired to perceive material objects and mental manifestations as separate entities, and so naturally we think of the two as separate realms. But that we evolved that way is not an argument that it is the right way to think of things. From the very beginning, experiments show, babies treat the world as dual. Bloom goes on to explain experiments that show that children have inborn knowledge of fairness that is at the heart of our ability to get along with others. "... Our moral feelings are no less adaptations than our taste for sweet foods and our perception of solid objects." We are from an early age able to empathize with the pain of others, which leads to compassion and to helping them; it's all commendable behavior, and no less so because we come into the world hard-wired to perform it.
We perform it because it pays to perform it, and it simply gives us a reproductive advantage. Empathetic people (and those with altruism and other laudable traits described here) are most successful at working in societies, and we are social animals. What's more, they will be more effective in understanding and raising children, and so the behavior will be passed on. Bloom is clearly a materialist, not a dualist, but wisely avoids any attempt to prove the issue. What he has done instead is not to examine if dualism is justified, but merely why belief in it is so prevalent. The belief that objects are not really solid is just as fundamentally unnatural as the belief that mind is an emergent physical property of the brain. This could be heavy stuff, and philosophers have argued heavily for centuries one way or the other. But Bloom has a diverse array of interests, and includes discussion of such subjects as slapstick humor, autism, modern art, and disgust. Those familiar with Noam Chomsky's claim that we have special "language organs" in our brains that make us linguistic creatures will find that idea mentioned here, but vastly expanded to show our "physics organ" and "social organ". Throughout Bloom has illustrated his arguments with summaries of his own or others' experiments on babies. Those who would expect a materialist also to be a pessimist will be disappointed; he declares himself to be a "morally optimistic materialist," and gives examples of moral improvement (like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) that would have made little sense to our forebears. Not bad for a bunch of natural-born dualists.
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Top reviews from other countries
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- Chi Hui Yang ZhangReviewed in the United Kingdom on July 10, 2016
I feel the author did not develop his brilliant idea (that we are born dualists who see the ...
- Amazon CustomerReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 6, 2004
Inaccurate and imprecise
- PipistrelReviewed in the United Kingdom on November 6, 2007
Roots of the infantile
