Who's Afraid of Reductionism?
The Study of Religion in the Age
of Cognitive Science
Edward Slingerland
This paper aims to defend the application of tools and knowledge drawn
from the natural sciences to the study of religion from the common
charge that such approaches are overly α
reductionistic.,,
I will argue that
"reductionism" is ultimately an empty term of abuse—any explanation
worthy of being called an explanation involves reductionism of some
sort. Drawing upon the Work of Charles Taylor, I will try to explain what
"good," non-eliminative! reductionism—one that recognizes the reality of
complex, emergent human-level structures of meaning—might look like.
I will also argue that these human-level structures of meaning should
not be seen as possessing special ontological status, but rather must be
understood as grounded in the lower levels of meaning studied by the
natural sciences, instead of hovering magically above them. Practically
speaking, this means that scholars of religion need to start taking
seriously discoveries about human cognition being provided by neuroand
cognitive scientists, which have a constraining function to play in
the formulation of theories in religious studies. Moreover, adopting a
"vertically integrated" approach—grounded in a post-dualist, embodied
pragmatist perspective—will help the field of religious studies to get
beyond the unhelpful, and intellectually paralyzing, social constructivist
dogma that continues to inform most of the work in our field.
Edward Slingerland, Associate Professor of Asian Studies Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought
and Embodied Cognition, The University of British Columbia, British Columbia, Canada. E-mail:
edward.slingerland@ubc.ca. Portions of this article are adapted from Slingerland 2008, Ch. 6, used
with permission of Cambridge University Press.
Journal of the American Academy ofReligiont
June 2008, VoL 76, No. 2, pp. 375-411
doi:10.1093/jaarel/lm004
© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Academy of
Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Advance Access publication on March 29, 2008
376 Journal of the Amerìcan Academy ofReligion
M Y ATTENTION WAS RECENTLY caught by an essay in JAAR by
Russell McCutcheon (2006a) that focused on the issue of reductionism,
framed in the context of the always fraught relationship between
religious insider and outsider. Against certain scholars of religion, such
as Robert Orsi, who are guided by the Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1959)
dictum that "no statement of a religion is valid unless it can be acknowledged
by that religion's believers" (42),1
McCutcheon points out that
any interesting work of scholarship involves what Wayne Proudfoot
calls "explanatory reduction" (741). This is true whether we are talking
about Paul Courtright's (1985) psychoanalytic reinterpretation of the
Ganesh story, Jeffrey KripaTs (1995) exploration of homoerotic themes
in Hinduism (737) or—despite his claims to the contrary—Robert
Orsi's (2005) analysis of the deeper, hidden intellectual baggage that
drives contemporary American members of the AAR (738), or the God
of the Pentecostals as a symbol of the power of the universal sacred
(740-741). To reject reductionism tout court would involve,
McCutcheon suggests, "the end of the human sciences as we know
them" (736).
THE POSTMODERN FUNHOUSE OF MIRRORS
I entirely agree with this sentiment, but found myself at a loss when
it came to reconciling it with the thoroughly social constructivist framework
within which it was formulated. Elsewhere in the essay,
McCutcheon argues that "all acts of signification ... are a translation of
one set of claims into a language that is itself no closer than any other
to some presumed authentic source of the Nile" (742), and echoes
Baudrillard's claim that all we ever have is representations, "each competing
for the chance to stand in for a Real that never was present to
begin with" (743). The manner in which this sort of social constructivism
has become the basic background dogma of our field was brought
home to me by the subsequent exchange between McCutcheon (2006b)
and Courtright (2006), where both prefaced their comments by approvingly
citing the words (the Word?) of J. Z. Smith. McCutcheon declares
that, whatever our differences concerning the relative status of religious
insider versus outsider, as scholars of religion we all "follow J. Z. Smith
and agree that it is history ... all the way down" (2006b: 756).
We were taught this by J. Z. Smith, and Clifford Geertz, and Judith
Butler, and all of the other theorists assigned to us in graduate school
1
Cited in McCutcheon (2006a: 722).
Slingerland: The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science 377
theories and methods courses—the idea that "history goes all the way
down" is a deeply engrained truism in most of the core humanities
departments, with only philosophy and perhaps rogue historians still
valiantly trying to pin down the ever-receding "Real" that Baudrillard
has informed us never existed. It is easy to understand why we, as scholars
of religion, have become stuck in this postmodernist dead end.
Impressed by the postmodern critique of Enlightenment ideals, objectivism
no longer strikes us as a viable option; left without a theoretical
basis for establishing certain knowledge, we appear incapable of extracting
ourselves from the social constructivist quagmire, where the only
standard for debate appears to be winning the tide of more social-constructivist-than-thou.
What has always puzzled me, however, is how
absolute conviction in the "truth" of social constructivism can coexist
with responsible, thoughtful scholarship—such as that evinced by
McCutcheon and Courtright—that itself makes no sense in the light of
social constructivism. It is hard to understand the Academy's continued
insistence on historical and linguistic accuracy, coherence of argumentation,
and textual and material evidence if, "in fact," all we are really
doing is wandering around aimlessly down an endless hallway of distorting
mirrors.
To be sure, for decades there have been humanities theorists
arguing that both old-fashioned Enlightenment objectivism and its
twin, postmodern constructivism, are predicated on a metaphysical
dualism that needs to be transcended if we are to get, in Richard
Bernstein's phrase, "beyond objectivism and relativism" (1983). So far,
though, most attempts to shake off dualism have generally ended up
getting no further than absorbing the natural world into the social. The
philosophical hermeneuts and Rortian neo-pragmatists lead us back
into a never-ending, hermetically sealed circle of conversation, Bruno
Latour's "amodernism" (1993) dissolves into a morass of vague neologisms,
and Bourdieu's otherwise promising attempt to focus attention
on somatic knowledge is ultimately unable to get beyond the body as
nothing more than a passive storehouse for socially constructed habitus—a.
"living memory pad" (1990: 68) or "depository of deferred thought"
(69). Traditional humanists continue to accept a world divided between
an inert kingdom of dumb objects, governed by deterministic laws, and
the realm of the free and unconstrained spirit—a metaphysical divide
expressed most clearly in German, where the sciences of mechanistic
nature {Naturwissenschaften) are distinguished from the sciences of the
elusive human Geist {Geisteswissenschaften). Within the confines of
such a divided world, it is difficult to see how we humanists can ever
378 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
escape the solipsistic fate of Borges, endlessly and onanistically spinning
stories inside of stories.2
This piece is motivated in part by the odd spectacle of otherwise
quite thoughtful and analytically gifted scholars genuflecting before the
altar of social constructivism before proceeding to make arguments that
lose all of their bite if we take such constructivism seriously. I agree
wholeheartedly with McCutcheon that reductionism is the bread-andbutter
of what we do as humanists, but would want to push his defense
of "explanatory reductionism" beyond the mind-body divide in order
to defend an embodied approach to human culture—one that can actually
break us out of the endless cycle of contingent discourses and representations
of representations.
EMBODYING THE HUMANITIES
What I am going to be referring to as the "embodied" approach to
the study of culture involves a loose collection of scholars who see the
human mind and its products as part of the physical world, not as hovering
somewhere above it, and who are therefore committed to breaching
the cordon sanitaire that has traditionally divided the humanities and
natural sciences.3
This embodied approach claims no privileged access to
eternal, objective truths, but argues that commonalities of human embodiment
in the world can result in a stable body of shared knowledge, verified
by proofs based upon common perceptual access. By breaching the
mind-body divide—by bringing the human mind back into contact with
a rich and meaningful world of things—this approach to the humanities
starts from an embodied mind that is always already in touch with the
world, as well as a pragmatic model of truth or verification that takes the
body and the physical world seriously.
One of the inspirations for the embodied approach is the growing
consensus coming out of the cognitive sciences that metaphysical
dualism is not only philosophically problematic, but also empirically
untenable: that the mind is the body, and the body is permeated
through-and-through with mind. Consciousness, under this understanding,
is not a mysterious substance distinct from matter, but
rather an emergent property of matter put together in a sufficiently
complicated way. Furthermore, it suggests that the manner in which
2
Borges (1999: 324), quoted approvingly in McCutcheon (2006a: 743).
3
For some representative introductions to the embodied approach, see Arbib (1985), Johnson
(1987), Clark (1997), Lakoff and Johnson (1999), Pécher and Zwaan (2005), Gibbs (2006), and
Thomson (2007).
Slingerland: The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science 379
we engage in the study of consciousness and its products—that is,
the traditional domain of the humanities—should be brought into
coordination with the manner in which we study less complex (or
differently complex) material structures. This is the insight behind the
arguments for an explanational continuum extending equally through
the natural and human sciences that have recently and prominently
been offered by, for instance, the ethologist E. O. Wilson with his call
for "consilience" (1998), the evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and
Leda Cosmides with their argument for the need for "vertical integration"
(1992), and the neuroscientist and linguist Steven Pinker with
his critique of the humanistic dogma of the "Holy Trinity" (the Blank
Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine) (2002).
When it comes to religious studies, the embodied movement is exemplified
by those who would apply the tools of cognitive science to religious
phenomena—asking, for instance, about the innate cognitive
constraints on religious representation and transmission (Boyer 1994,
2001), the origin and universality of ideological beliefs (Kelemen 1999,
2004), or the reason for disjunctions between religious dogma and everyday
cognitive strategies (Slone 2004). Implicit in the cognitive approach
to religion is a picture of the human person as an integrated body-mind
system following the laws of nature and produced—like all of the other
body-mind systems running around in the world—by evolution.
Although "embodiment" might have a vaguely appealing sound to
most humanists, there are few things that more effectively incite the ire of
religion scholars, anthropologists, literature, and art scholars than the
word evolution—let alone the terms "sociobiology" or "evolutionary psychology."
In religious studies, there has been extremely strong resistance
to those who advocate applying evolutionary analyses or the tools of cognitive
science to the human phenomenon of religion. In order to justify
not engaging with the cognitive sciences, religion scholars often pull out
the "we live in a post-Kuhnian world" canard about how reliable scientific
claims are not possible—when, in fact, there have been a wealth of
pragmatist defenses of empirical inquiry that respond to Kuhn and
provide quite cogent post-objectivist models of science.4
The most
common rallying point against cognitive approaches to culture, however,
is the charge of "reductionism." This is what I would like to focus on
here, because our fear of reductionism gets to the heart of the enduring
appeal of dualism and our resistance to genuinely embracing a nondualist
model of the person. Below I would like to argue that we really do
4
The reader is referred to Haack (2003), Hacking (1983, 2000), and Laudan (1996) in particular.
380 Journal of the American Academy ofReligion
need to embrace such a model, and that we can do so without having to
abandon the intuitions that make vertical integration seem so threatening.
This will, though, involve confronting the genuine strangeness and
distastefulness of the physicalist model of the self—something that is too
often smoothed over by advocates of the embodied approach. It will also
require countering some of the more hegemonic rumblings one does in
fact hear from those with a natural scientific bent, as well as formulating
a more nuanced picture of what counts as "real" for creatures like us than
one usually finds in the writings of cognitive scientists.
TAKING THE BODY (REALLY) SERIOUSLY
The manner in which the embodied approach can break us out of
the dualism that continues to underwrite relativist epistemological
claims is, in my mind, best illustrated by a hilarious satire by Marty
Smith (1987/1993) called "The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook" that has for
years been spreading through the internet in various iterations. It purports
to be the lost diaries of "a young Sartre obsessed not with the
void, but with food," and determined to write "a cookbook that will put
to rest all notions of flavor forever." Some representative entries:
October 6
I have realized that the traditional omelet form (eggs and cheese) is
bourgeois. Today I tried making one out of cigarette, some coffee, and
four tiny stones. I fed it to Malraux, who puked. I am encouraged, but
my journey is still long.
October 10
I find myself trying ever more radical interpretations of traditional
dishes, in an effort to somehow express the void I feel so acutely.
Today I tried this recipeTuna
Casserole
Ingredients: 1 large casserole dish
Place the casserole dish in a cold oven. Place a chair facing the oven
and sit in it forever. Think about how hungry you are. When night
falls, do not turn on the light.
While a void is expressed in this recipe, I am struck by its inapplicability
to the bourgeois lifestyle. How can the eater recognize that the food
denied him is a tuna casserole and not some other dish? I am becoming
more and more frustrated.
Although the target of this satire is the "individualistic constructivism"
of French existentialism rather than poststructuralist theory, the basic
Slingerland: The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science 381
critique of social constructivism is the same. In a certain sensey of
course, the satire is a cheap shot: neither postmodernism nor existentialism
would deny human physical commonalities. What they do deny,
though, is the existence of human commonalities at the level of
meaning—human bodies as inert physical objects may be subject to a
common set of laws, but this has little to do with the lived world of
human significance. It is this latter world that is culturally constructed
(or, for the existentialists, created by the individual ex nihilo), and
despite vague animal preferences for cereal over cardboard or cherries
over stones, it is this constructed world of human mediated experience
that is all that we are really in touch with.
There are powerful theoretical and empirical reasons for thinking
that this view of human cognition is wildly incorrect.5
French existentialists
in their dark Parisian cafés drank espresso with sugar rather than,
say, dog urine, because of evolved and universal human preferences for
stimulants and sugar, and these physical preferences are not different in
kind from our preferences for light over darkness, strength over weakness,
or truth over falsity. The humor-producing tension of the Sartre
satire arises from the conflict between the existentialist assertion of a
universe without meaning and the obvious truths of everyday human
life: certain things taste good, certain things look good, certain actions
make sense, and this ineluctable horizon of significance cannot be
erased by a sea of black coffee or a mountain of Galoises.
This is not to deny the power and poetry of the existentialist
position—one would have to be dead not to be moved by the quietly
courageous and resolutely lucid stance of Camus's homme absurde as
portrayed in the Myth of Sisyphus or The Plague (Camus 1942, 1947).
But Camus's gift as a writer and rhetorician is what in fact invalidates
his basic philosophical point, because—despite his claim that he rejects
any "scale of values" (1947: 86)—the very power of his ideal is derived
from predetermined and universal human values: being awake is better
than being asleep; being clear is better than being muddled; being
strong and courageous is better than being weak and cowardly.
Camus's creativity consists in his effort to recruit these universal
5
See Barkow et al (1992), Buss (2005), Carruthers et al (2005, 2006), Gibbs (2006), Hirschfeld
and Gelman (1994), Pécher and Zwaan (2005), and Pinker (2002).
6
Cf. Charles Taylor's comment regarding Sartre that "self-choice as an ideal makes sense only
because some issues are more significant that others. I couldn't claim to be a self-chooser, and
deploy a whole Nietzschean vocabulary of self-making, just because I choose steak and fries over
poutine for lunch. Which issues are significant, I do not determine. If I did, no issue would be
significant ... To shut out demands emanating from beyond the self is precisely to suppress the
conditions of significance, and hence to court trivialization.'' (1992: 39-40).
382 Journal of the American Academy ofReligion
normative reactions and map them in a quite novel manner: lucidity
consists in knowing nothing for certain, and courage consists in rejecting
those transcendent truths which once were perceived as requiring
strength to defend against unbelief. The mappings are new, but the
sources are probably as old as homo erectus. Similarly, despite postmodernist
social constructivist posturing, the motivations and goings-on at
any given annual AAR or MLA meeting would, with a little bit of background
explanation, be perfectly comprehensible to Pleistocene huntergatherers:
friendship, intellectual curiosity, coalition recruitment,
exchange of adaptive information (including a heavy dose of social
gossip), and an overall direct or indirect goal of achieving security, prestige,
power, and sexual access.7
Despite Camus's anguished claims, there is no absurd gap between
our need for transparent certainty and a dense world devoid of
meaning. The world is reasonable—-not in the sort of transcendent,
absolute sense that Camus rightly dismisses as wishful consolation, but
in an eminently embodied, anthropocentric sense. The process of evolution
ensures that there is a tight fit between our values and desires and
the structure of the world in which we have developed. No appeal to
eternal verities is required to assure us that a cigarette and stone omelet
would make even Malraux puke. Of course, human beings are apparently
unique among animals in possessing the cognitive fluidity and
cultural technology to effect some radical changes in what gives us pleasure,
what we find worth pursuing, and what we deem as meaningful.
But all of this cognitive and cultural innovation is grounded in—and
remains ultimately constrained by—the structure of our body-minds.
THE PROBLEM WITH EMBODIMENT: DARWIN'S
DANGEROUS IDEA
So far, so good—at least for many of us who are tired of spinning
our rhetorical wheels, and would like to move beyond the intellectual
quagmire of strong postmodern relativism. It is important, though, to
fully confront the implications of the embodied model of the human
mind. To wit: the human mind is coterminous with the human body
(especially the brain), and this body-brain is no more than a very
complex physical thing, a product of millions of years of evolution.
Human thought is not a ghostly, disembodied process, but rather a
7
A point made with grace, sympathy, and humor by the novelist David Lodge (1975, 1984,
1989).
Slingerland: The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science 383
series of body-brain states—a series of physical configurations of
matter—each causing the next in accordance with the deterministic
laws that govern the interactions of physical objects.8
Ideas, as physical
states of matter, can interact with one another, blend with one another,
and transform themselves in predictable ways, but there is no superphysical
soul or self, outside of the chain of physical causation, controlling
or overseeing the process. This means that our thoughts and behavior
are, at least in principle, as predetermined and predictable as any
other physical process. It also means that the self as we ordinarily
understand it—as a disembodied something, soul or spirit or mind,
caused by nothing other than itself—is nothing more than an illusion
created by the workings of our embodied brain. This picture of the
human mind/self/soul, the inevitable conclusion of "Darwin's dangerous
idea" (Dennett 1995), is summed up vividly and succinctly in a
quotation from the Italian philosopher Giulio Giorello: "Yes, we have a
soul, but it is made up of many tiny robots."9
The late Francis Crick (1994), who spent the last part of his career
exploring the neuroscience of consciousness, called this idea that "all
aspects of the brain's behavior are due to the activities of neurons"
(259)—that is, that consciousness can ultimately be reduced to a physical
chain of firing neurons—the "astonishing hypothesis." It is, in fact,
more than astonishing: the physicalist view of the human self and the
human mind is alien and profoundly disturbing. However odd, this
thoroughly materialist view of the self must be grappled with because it
is difficult to see what choice we have once we take the decisive step of
giving up our belief in a Cartesian ghost in the machine—of believing,
to put a finer point on it, in magic. Unless we are prepared to invoke
8
Those uncomfortable with the idea of the brain as a deterministic, physical system have pinned
a great deal of hope on the idea that the brain might be a quantum system, and thus not subject to
the constraints of classical physics. Roger Penrose (1989), for instance, has famously argued that
quantum indeterminacy is the locus of human free will. There are two fatal problems with this
strategy. First of all, there is the inconvenient fact that the desired quality of indeterminacy is
present only at the quantum level: once we get up into levels that are humanly relevant, such as
that of neurons or hormones, Laplacian determinism re-exerts its iron grip (see Tegmark 2000 for
experimental data confirming that the brain seems to be functioning as a classical rather than
quantum system). A more basic and fatal problem, however, is that indeterminacy is nothing more
than randomness, which is not really what defenders of strong free will are after (Searle 2004: 24-
25). The human conception of free will requires that this will be determined by something—
reasons, desires, spontaneous impulses, etc. Free will as utter randomness is as horrific a concept at
a human level as the deterministic absence of free will. See Dennett (1995), Flanagan (2002), and
Searle (2004) for more detailed, cogent critiques of the quantum mechanics/free will argument.
9
From Giorello (1997), quoted in Dennett (2003: 1). See Dennett (1995) for a powerful,
comprehensive account of the implications of Darwinism for our model of the self.
384 Journal of the American Academy ofReligion
supernatural belief, it is hard to avoid the conclusion we are "little
robots" all the way down.
This absurd idea of a thoroughly mechanistic cosmos—absurd in
Camus's sense of the word—gets to the heart of humanistic concerns
about reductionism. To begin with, thorough-going physicalism goes
against a very basic and profound intuition that Aere is something
special about humans: everything that we value is predicated on the
conviction that people are not things. To associate people—or peoplelevel
phenomena such as art, literature, and religion—with the realm of
things therefore strikes us as fundamentally wrong. Moreover, qua
humanists, we are also no doubt irked by the implication that we might
be out of a job: what need is there for the Geisteswissenschaften if there
is no more Geisti Are literature and religious studies departments to be
absorbed into neuroscience? Getting some clarity about what is valid
and not valid about charges of "reductionism" will allow us to see how
different levels of explanation can, and must, coexist with one another.
It will also give us a sense of how we can, and must, acknowledge the
reality of Darwin's dangerous idea, while still continuing to live and
work in an environment rich with human meaning.
THE BOGEYMAN OF REDUCTIONISM
To begin with, it is important to realize that any truly interesting
explanation of a given phenomenon is interesting precisely because it
involves reduction of some sort—tracing causation from higher to lower
levels or uncovering hidden correlations. We are generally not satisfied
with explanations unless they answer the "why" question by means of
reduction: by linking the explanandum to some deeper, hidden, more
basic explanans. As McCutcheon argues quite cogently in his essay, this
is why the manner in which even traditional humanist scholars go
about their work is by its very nature reductionistic. Reduction is
what we do as scholars, humanistic, or otherwise, and when someone
fails to reduce we rightly dismiss their work as trivial, superficial, or
uninformative.
When the deeper principles behind things are poorly understood—
that is, when lower levels of causation underlying phenomena we are
interested in explaining are not accessible to our prying—we are often
forced to invent vague, place-holder entities to stand in for the missing
information. Sometimes we are aware that this is what we are doing. For
instance, Mendel could reason about the inheritance of traits without
knowing how information about them was physically instantiated or
transmitted, and Darwin could similarly map out the implications
Slingerland: The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science 385
of natural selection without any clear conception of the substrate of
inheritance. In such cases, there is an implicit faith that the lower-level
entities and processes will eventually be specified; if not, the theory may
have to be abandoned. A discipline can find itself in a dead end,
however, when it has postulated vague, place-holder entities without
realizing that this is what it is doing—when it takes these unspecified
and unknowable entities or faculties to have genuine explanatory force.
This is what I see as the essence of Nietzsche's point in a wonderful
passage where he mocks Kant's analysis of synthetic a priori judgments:
"How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?" Kant asked himself—
and what really is his answer? "By virtue of a faculty" {Vermöge eines
Vermögens)10
—but unfortunately not infivewords, but so circumstantially,
venerably, and with such a display of German profundity and
curlicues that people simply failed to note the comical niaiserie
allemande involved in such an answer. (1886/1966: 18-19)
Nietzsche compares the "explanation" offered by Kant to the answer of
the doctor in Molière's Tartuffe to the question of how opium produces
sleep: "Because it contains a sleepy faculty, whose nature is to put the
senses to sleep." "Such replies belong in comedy," Nietzsche concludes,
and so should we.
The force of the argument of cognitive scientists and evolutionary
psychologists who are pushing for vertical integration between the
humanities and the natural sciences is that the humanities have yet to
genuinely free themselves from this sort of "Tartuffery," and continue
to rely on impressive-sounding but explanatorily empty entities and faculties.
For instance, Tooby and Cosmides note that what they refer to as
the "Standard Social Scientific Model"—social constructivism—is satisfied
by the explanation that the blank slate of human nature gets filled
up by means of "learning," which is about as helpful an explanation as
that living things are made of "protoplasm." Just as the mysterious protoplasm
that featured so prominently in early biology turned out to
consist of a collection of distinct intricate structures with specific functions,
so, Tooby and Cosmides argue, will words like "learning," "intelligence,"
and "rationality" turn out to be blanket terms for what are
really a variety of specific, modular, evolved cognitive processes that
allow human beings to selectively extract and process adaptively
relevant information from the world (122-123).
Lit. "By means of a means."
386 Journal of the American Academy ofReligion
All of us trained in religious studies were weaned on Geertz, who of
course spent most of his career vociferously policing the ontological
divide between the Geisteswissenschaften (the realm of Verstehen, or
uniquely human "understanding") and the Naturwissenschaften (the
realm of Erklären* or mechanistic explanation)—or, to use categories
that he borrowed from Gilbert Ryle, between "thick description" and
"thin description." Ryle had asked us to consider a scenario involving
two boys contracting their eyelids, one in an involuntary twitch and the
other in a conspiratorial wink, claiming that there exists an "immense
but unphotographable difference" between the two (Ryle (1971): 480).
This difference, Ryle argues, can only be captured by "thick description,"
which goes beyond the mere physical to what Geertz refers to as
the "semiotic meaning" of the gesture (1973: 6). This semiotic approach
to the study of human behavior has the effect of systematically denying
any possible substantive role to "thin" bodily or physical processes,
thereby protecting the interpretation of culture from the prying eye of
science by wrapping it in the mysterious cloud of Verstehen.
Although this seems more sophisticated than the answer of the
doctor in Molière, it is structurally quite similar. To begin with, it is
simply not the case that the difference between a twitch and a wink is
"unphotographable"—that is, inaccessible to third-person description.
Human beings can generally distinguish twitches from winks instantly
and effortlessly, in the same way we tell conscious (and thus false) from
spontaneous (and thus sincere) smiles: they involve entirely different
neural pathways and sets of muscles, and the resulting slight difference
in appearance is something to which our minds are exquisitely sensitive
(Ekman 2003). Any complete story of how we tell a wink from a twitch
is going to have to involve an account of an entire suite of functionally
specialized and physically grounded cognitive mechanisms that have for
millennia allowed our ancestors to form coalitions, detect cheaters, and
suss out potential enemies. The fact that any of these steps can be selectively
knocked out by localized brain damage suggests that the empirical
self plays more than just a place-holding role in the process of human
understanding. Following Geertz and invoking mysterious words like
Verstehen to "explain" how we know that a wink is a wink in fact
explains nothing, and misses the point that recognition of the "semiotic
meaning" of this gesture is grounded in an embodied mind that is
amenable to empirical investigation.
Of course, Ryle and Geertz can also be understood as making
the more plausible point that the larger meaning of a particular
wink—Why is this person winking at me? What should I do?—is
embedded in a set of long, complex stories, and that for the unpacking
Slingerland: The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science 387
and analysis of these stories we require the higher-level expertise of
anthropologists, novelists, and historians. Such humanistic work,
however, should not be seen as occurring in an explanatory
cloud-cuckoo land, magically hovering above the mundane world of
physical causation. Human-level meaning emerges organically out of
the workings of the physical world, and we are being "reductive" in a
good way when we seek to understand how these lower-level processes
allow the higher-level processes to take place.
FROM PHYSICALISM TO THE HUMANITIES: LEVELS OF
EXPLANATION
Having sent the bogeyman of reductionism back to its cave, it is
now possible to talk about good and bad forms of reductionism—
because, of course, it is really "greedy" or "eliminative" reductionism
that most humanists have in mind when they bandy about this charge.
In order to distinguish productive, explanatory reductionism from
crudely eliminative reductionism, it is important to get some clarity
about the heuristic and ontological status of entities at various levels of
explanation.
Levels of Explanation and Emergent Qualities
Although no evolutionary psychologist or cognitive scientist would
purport to be an eliminative reductionist, and all give lip-service to the
idea that higher levels of explanation can feature emergent qualities not
present at the lower levels, there is a common tendency to nonetheless
privilege the material level of explanation: we are "really" just mindless
robots or physical systems, no matter how things might appear to us
phenomenologically. There are some very good reasons for this privileging
of lower levels of explanation. To begin with, the physicalist stance
has proven extremely productive, allowing such dramatic technological
developments as supercomputers and pharmacological treatments for
mental illnesses. Moreover, there is an a priori reason for giving precedence
to the physical: the structure of the various upper levels of
explanation emerges out of and depends upon the lower levels, so the
lower levels are causally privileged in this way. Molecules form and
behave in accordance with more basic principles that govern both inorganic
and organic substances, which means that a hypothesis in molecular
biology that violates well-established physical chemistry principles is
wrong, or else a reason for us to rethink our physical chemistry.
It is equally the case, however, that as we move up the explanatory
chain we witness the emergence of what appear to be new entities,
388 Journal of the American Academy ofReligion
which possess their own novel and unpredictable organizational
principles. The field of organic chemistry is based upon principles that
emerge at the level of organic molecules, which cannot be fully
predicted from the perspective of physical chemistry. Similarly, no
amount of intimacy with quantum mechanical principles will allow one
to even begin to predict the behavior of macro-level solid objects. As
Hilary Putnam (1973) famously observed, there are entire fields of
human knowledge, such as geometry, that emerge only once we reach
the level of macro objects. The fact that a square peg 15/16" on a side
will fit through a l"x 1" square hole, but not 1" diameter circular hole,
is a function of the peg's geometric properties; referring to the properties
of the molecules that make up the pegs or the materials from which
the holes are drilled would be heuristically useless.
This mutual dependence and interaction of levels of explanation is
taken for granted in the natural sciences, and is in fact one of the
guiding principles driving natural scientific inquiry. The challenge for
defenders of true vertical integration is hooking the various levels of
explanation in the humanities into their proper—and emergent—place
at the top of this causal explanatory chain.
Weak Versus Strong Emergence: Blocking the Move to
Mysterianism
We are familiar with how the process of evolution and natural selection
has produced more and more complex feeding and fleeing
machines, working at many different layers in the food chain, as well as
wildly diverse strategies of hunting, mating, parenting, and social organization
(Dawkins 1976/2006). Very crude survival machines are buüt to
sense temperature and inorganic nutrient gradients and to adapt their
movements and simple feeding behaviors accordingly. More complex
ones are then built to take advantage of the work already done by these
simple machines in concentrating diffused inorganic nutrients in one
valuable package: they are the first predators, and require more complicated
sensory and behavioral programming to track down and capture
their prey. The prey, in turn, become more complex in response to this
pressure, acquiring the ability to detect and evade predators. At a
certain point in this process of exponentially increasing complexity,
trying to rely on the physical stance—still helpful for dealing with simple
rocks and trees and coconuts—was simply no longer fast enough.
It is at this point that it became more efficient for certain particularly
complex survival machines to begin viewing other complex
survival machines as more than mere objects subject to the laws of
physics: to see them as agents, propelled by invisible "desires," "fears,"
Slingerland: The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science 389
and "preferences." We cannot direcdy observe such mental properties,
but human beings appear to be so constituted as to inevitably and irresistibly
see them constantly at work in the world, and this seems to be
an extremely helpful heuristic—evolution would not have built it if it
were not. As Daniel Dennett observes, for organisms with limited processing
ability and time, the set of short-cut assumptions provided by
postulating the existence of mental entities—the adoption of what he
refers to as the "intentional stance"—provides huge computational
leverage. "Predicting that someone will duck if you throw a brick at him
is easy from the intentional or folk psychological stance; it is and will
always be intractable if you have to trace the photons from brick to
eyeball, the neurotransmitters from optic nerve to motor nerve, and so
forth" (1995: 237).
This set of beliefs related to mental states has come to be referred to
by the broader cognitive scientific community as "theory of mind"11
—
"theory"-like because it goes beyond the available data to postulate the
existence of unobservables, causing us to "paint" mental properties onto
the physical world. Human beings throughout history and cross-culturally
appear to irresistibly see their world as populated by "agents,"
which unlike objects or plants harbor goals and desires, experience
emotions and thoughts, make choices, and are propelled by a special
sort of internal causality we can term "intentionality." From a very early
age, human beings conceive of intentionality as a distinct kind of causality,
and distinguish it from both the billiard-ball contact causation
that characterizes "folk physics" and the ideological, "vitalistic" causation
proper to all living things.12
We would be very surprised if something
we considered an object hopped up and started moving around
on its own, and would be forced to reclassify it as an agent. Similarly,
we expect a plant to slowly grow upward toward the light, but a plant
that moved in (humanly) real time—that, for instance, walked over to
the corner for a drink of water, and then back out in the courtyard to
plop itself down under the sun again—would trigger our theory of
mind (as well as prompt us to keep our doors locked at night).
Under the weak emergence view, the reason we chop up the world like
this—into objects, growing things, and agents—is because this division
has historically worked: agent-like intentionality and mental concepts
11
Perhaps the best recent (and quite readable) introduction to theory of mind is Bloom (2004);
also see Wellman (1990), Baron-Cohen (1995), Spelke et al (1995), and the essays collected in
Carruthers and Smith (1996).
12
For an introduction to and defense of innate human ontology and modularity theory, see the
essays collected in Hirschfeld and Gelman (1994).
390 Journal of the American Academy ofReligion
emerge as useful ways to think about the world once collections of
matter get put together in a certain way.
Although mental concepts such as "wanting" and "believing" are
heuristically indispensable, and present themselves irresistibly to the
human mind as crucial features of causal explanation, most cognitive
scientists believe that there is no reason to see them as composed
of genuinely novel stuff. Unless we are to resort to metaphysical
dualism, it is hard to see what "wants" or "beliefs" could be made of if
they are something other than particular states of neurons and other
cells in our bodies. As Michael Arbib puts it, referring to folk psychology
concepts or "person-talk," they "are useful for encapsulating meaningful
patterns of what our brains can do, but not as describing a
distinct reality" (1985: 115). Opposing this "weak emergence" position
are the advocates of various forms of "strong" or "ontological"
emergence, referred to by Owen Flanagan as the "mysterians" (1992:
esp. 8-11). These include, as we would expect, old-fashioned substance
dualists, who claim that mind and matter are two independent ontological
realms. Descartes is the classic exponent of this position, and—
despite the ill repute into which Cartesianism has fallen in recent
decades—full-blown substance dualists are still fairly thick on the
ground. Those who adhere to traditional religious models of the self are
obviously and explicitly dualistic in this sense, but most secular humanist
substance dualists probably fall into the category of what Patricia
Churchland refers to "boggled skeptics" (1986: 315): it just seems
impossible to believe that any amount of physical complexity could
produce consciousness. John Locke (1690/1975) expressed the boggled
skeptic position quite clearly: "For it is as impossible to conceive that
ever bare incogitative Matter should produce a thinking intelligent
Being, as that nothing should of itself produce Matter" (623). This is
not an unreasonable argument, despite its apparent simplicity: conscious
beings seem to be able to do things that completely fly in the
face of what we know about the behavior of inert matter. The conclusion
that there has to be something else involved is therefore quite
hard to avoid.
A more updated version of substance dualism is the so-called
"property dualism," which argues that things like human "qualia" are
ineffable and possess strongly emergent properties. "Qualia" is a technical-sounding
philosophical term for what is, in fact, a quite folksy idea:
there is a "what-it-is-like-ness" to my conscious experience that is
immediately and exclusively accessible only to myself, and that this
special qualitativeness is what would be left out of any third-person
description of my experience. Thomas Nagel provided the classic
Slingerland: The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science 391
statement of this position in his famous 1974 essay, "What is it like to
be a bat?", where he argued that, essentially, we can never answer that
question: we are not bats, and no matter how much third-person
descriptive knowledge we accumulate about bat behavior and physiology,
we can never have access to the first-person (first-mammal?)
qualia of bat consciousness. A similar argument has been famously
defended for years by John Searle, who argues that no third-person,
purely physicalist account can capture the "original intentionality" or
"ontological subjectivity" that is an essential characteristic of human
consciousness (1983, 1992, 2004). These ideas about original intentionality
or ineffable qualia get to the heart of what makes Verstehen seem
fundamentally different to us than Erklären: we can explain away the
behavior of objects, but human-level meaning can only be grasped by
the free apprehension of a fellow human spirit.13
Despite their intuitive appeal, none of these arguments in favor of
body-mind dualism seems sustainable in the face of modern cognitive
science. To begin with, the qualia "argument," as intuitively appealing
as it is, is essentially an item of faith or bald assertion rather than an
argument per se.14
The one place where a committed dualist might
make a stand is the "boggled" argument, which until quite recently has
been very difficult to refute. The last few decades, however, have seen
the development of a crucial bit of evidence tipping things in favor of
the physicalist view of consciousness: the development of artificial intelligence,
which has finally put to rest the claim that no amount of physical
complexity could produce consciousness-like phenomena. As
Dennett has argued, we have now built machines, which we know are
just machines, that are capable of defeating Grand Masters at chess,
passing the Turing Test—i.e., plausibly holding up their end of a freeform
conversation—and demonstrating many of the powers that were
previously seen as the exclusive province of conscious, intentional
agents. Dennett observes that "the sheer existence of computers has
provided an existence-proof of undeniable influence: there are
mechanisms—brute, unmysterious mechanisms operating according to
routinely well-understood physical principles—that have many of the
competences heretofore assigned only to minds" (2005: 7).
Despite its apparent empirical untenability, we have to acknowledge
that the boggled argument—like faith claims about "qualia" or
13
This is the same intuition behind Robert Orsfs insistence that people are not "data" (quoted
and discussed in McCutcheon 2006a: 721-722).
14
See, especially Dennett (1991, 1995) and Putnam (1999) for eloquent and convincing
critiques of both qualia and Searlian "ontological subjectivity."
392 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
"ontological subjectivity"—clearly taps into a deeply ingrained human
intuition. Why should we want to block these sorts of moves to ontological
emergence if they come so naturally to us, and take so much
work to get awayfrom?Contrary to some doctrinaire physicalists, there
is nothing about physicalism per se that makes it uniquely scientific. If
we had an accumulation of a critical mass of replicable evidence for
existence of some non-physical, causally efficacious, intention-bearing
substance, it would be unscientific not to be a dualist—and of course
we cannot rule out the possibility that such a point will ever be
reached.15
It is just that no one has come up with a story that would
explain how something like a soul could exist in the world as we currently
understand it, although we are, qua human beings, highly motivated
to come up with and to believe such stories. In the absence of an
empirically defensible account of dualism, the explanation of reality
that best enables us to get a grip on the world does not involve ghosts,
souls, miracles, or original intentionality: human beings, like all of the
other entities that we know about, appear to be robots all the way
down, whether we like that idea or not.
THE LIMITS OF PHYSICALISM: WHY WE WILL
ALWAYS BE HUMANISTS
Having hopefully blocked the move to mysterianism or ontological
emergentism, I would now like to address in more detail the issue of
why these intellectual moves are so compelling to us, as well as what
this compulsion does reveal about the special status of human-level concepts.
I think that John Searle is engaging in a bit of philosophical
slight-of-hand when he purports to be a biological materialist, but then
continues to insist upon a special ontological status for human subjectivity.
Searle is, however, a brilliant philosopher with a quite detailed
grasp of the state of the field in the cognitive and neurosciences: why
this refusal to relinquish the idea of two distinct ontologies? And why
two, we might ask, and not three, or ten? In this section, I would like to
I here take issue with Searle's claim that physicalism functions as a modern religious dogma,
accepted "without question" and with "quasi-religious faith" (2004: 48). I agree that many—if not
most—physicalists are dogmatists as well, but dogmatism is not intrinsic to the position. If we are
comfortable jettisoning Cartesian metaphysics and epistemology, physicalism or naturalism can be
defended against the background of a modest, pragmatic conception of truth (see Slingerland 2008,
Ch. 5 for a more extended argument). Wesley Robbins (1994) takes such an approach in arguing
against Alvin Plantinga's (1993) famous position that naturalism is self-refuting: we do not require
analytic certainty in order to conclude that naturalism is our current best explanation of the
universe.
Slingerland: The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science 393
explore the intuition that I think motivates the defenders of dualism in
all of its various forms: the recognition that human-level reality—reality
as seen through the filter of theory of mind—is real for humans, and
that it is so deeply entrenched that no third-person description can ever
completely dislodge it. In other words, we apparently cannot help at
some level seeing a Geist in the machine, which means there will always
be something importantly different about the Geisteswissenschaften.
Why Physicalism does not Matter
Hard-core physicalists such as Dennett are inclined to dismiss positions
such as Searle's or Nagel's as a mere statement of religious belief or
personal sentiment. Dennett and some other advocates of vertical integration
argue that, since intentionality and consciousness are helpful for
certain heuristic purposes, but possess no underlying reality, the rigorous
study of human affairs will eventually be able to dispense with them
entirely.16
A common analogy drawn by those who feel dualism will soon
go the way of bell bottoms and disco balls is the shift in human sensibilities
that occurred with the Copernican revolution. Copernicanism presented
a view of the solar system that contradicted not only Scriptural
authority but the evidence of our senses: the Bible states quite clearly that
the sun moves around the earth, and this also happens to accord with
our everyday sensory experience. Yet an accumulation of empirical evidence
eventually resulted in Copernicanism winning the day—trumping
both religion and common sense—and nowadays every educated person
takes the heliocentric solar system for granted. Dennett argues that the
current physicalism versus dualism controversy is analogous to the early
days of Copernicanism: we are resistant to physicalism because it goes
against our religious beliefs and our common sense, but the weight of the
empirical evidence is on its side. Eventually—after all of the controversy
has played itself out—we will learn to accept the materialist account of
the self with as much equanimity as the fact that the earth goes around
the sun (1995:19).
A basic problem with Dennett's position, however, is that there is a
profound disanalogy between the Copernican revolution and the revolution
represented by physicalist models of the mind. The Ptolemaic
model of the solar system falls quite naturally out of the functioning of
our built-in perceptual systems, but it is not itself part of that system:
we do not appear to possess an innate Ptolemaic solar system module.
16
Cf. Owen Flanagan's comment that since concepts such as the "soul" or "free will" "don't
refer to anything real, we are best off without them" (2002: xiii).
394 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Switching to Copernicanism, at least intellectually, requires us to
suspend our common sense perceptions, but it does not involve a direct
violation of any fundamental, innate human ideas. Physicalism as
applied to human minds does require such a violation, and this has a
very important bearing on how realistic it is to think that we can dispense
with mentalistic talk once and for all. Flanagan characterizes
dualism as something that has troubled us "for centuries" (2002: 8), but
seeing agents as something special goes back for at least as long as
people have had theory of mind—perhaps 100,000 years.17
This is the
psychological fact behind the argument forward by Searle and others
that consciousness is special: it is inescapably real for us.
We Are Robots Designed Not to Believe that We Are Robots
The idea of human beings as ultimately mindless robots, blindly
"designed" by a consortium of genes to propagate themselves, has so
much difficulty gaining a foothold in human brains because it dramatically
contradicts other factory-issued and firmly entrenched ideas such
as the belief in soul, freedom, choice, and responsibility—in short, all of
the qualities that seem to us to distinguish human beings from mere
things. The dualism advocated by Plato and Descartes was not a historical
or philosophical accident, but rather a development of an intuition
that comes naturally to us, as bearers of theory of mind: agents are
different from things. Agents actively think, choose, and move themselves;
things can only be passively moved. The locus of an agent's
ability to think and choose is the mind, and because of its special
powers the mind has to be a fundamentally different sort of entity than
the body. Even cultures that did not develop a doctrine of strong mindbody
substance dualism—such as the early Chinese—nonetheless
believed that there was something special about the mind. As the
fourth-century BCE Chinese thinker Mencius put it, what distinguishes
the heart-mind {xin)-—the locus of agency in human beings—from
other organs of the body is that it issues commands, whereas the other
parts of the body merely follow them (Lau 1970: 168).
It is the mind that is felt to be the locus of human free will, as well
as the dignity and responsibility that goes along with such autonomy.
17
Archaic modern humans have been burying their dead for at least 92,000 years (Bar-Yosef
2006), and elaborate, ritualized burial is as good a litmus test as any of the presence of theory of
mind. When an implement breaks, you throw it away, and the remains of living prey are disposed
of as quickly and conveniently as possible. Special treatment of the human corpse indicates that a
shift has occurred, and the human body is now being viewed as linked to something
fundamentally distinct from objects.
Slingerland: The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science 395
Most of us also have a powerful sense, whether we would be willing to
defend it or not, that this something special about a person is not identical
to the mere collection of their cells: the feeling that the most
important part of a person—especially ourselves and the people whom
we love—might somehow subsist after death presents itself spontaneously
and quite powerfully to human beings, appears to be universal,
and takes quite a bit of cognitive work to overcome. In other words,
although we are obviously capable of entertaining non-dualist ideas at
some abstract level, we seem to have evolved in such a way as to be ultimately
invulnerable to the idea of thorough-going materialism.
The cognitive module producing this fundamental intuition is
theory of mind, which we humans seem inclined to project onto pretty
much anything moving in a particular kind of way: geometric shapes in
a short animation, for instance, or single dots moving around on a
screen appear irresistibly to us to be involved in goal-directed, mentalistic
behavior, and for this reason engage our sympathy (Kuhlmeier et al,
2003; Barrett et al, 2005). Human beings, no matter how professionally
or intellectually committed to physicalism, seem to feel a constant compulsion
to project agency onto the inanimate (Guthrie 1993). We are all
familiar with this experience, having to deal daily with stubborn, diabolical
computers bent on erasing our data or crotchety old cars that
refuse to start. The anthropomorphic drive seems to be universal, and
appears quite early in development. Deborah Kelemen (1999, 2004) has
documented the widespread projection of invisible or supernatural
agency onto the world—what she refers to as "promiscuous
teleology"—in children of various ages and education levels, and argues
that agent-centered, ideological explanations for phenomena seem to
be the human cognitive default position, only gradually, with difficulty,
and incompletely dislodged by mechanistic explanation. We are
obviously capable of withdrawing our projections when we have t o recognizing
that our computer is not really out to get us—but it takes
cognitive effort, which suggests that it does not come naturally and is
not easily sustainable.
It is thus a mistake to say that we will ever completely dispense with
mentalistic concepts, or ever entirely succeed in withdrawing our projections
from the world. For instance, it is a rare cognitively intact
person who can listen to Nina Simone's rendition of the song "Feelm*
Good"18
—a joyful celebration of "birds flying high," "rivers running
18
I Put A Spell On You, 1965; song written by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for the 1966
musical The Roar of the Greasepaint—the Smell of the Crowd.
396 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
free," and "butterflies havin' fun"—without feeling in their bones the
emotional and mental contagion that is constantly taking place between
human beings and their world. The sight of "reeds driftin' on by" can
make us feel calm, and a feeling of calmness can color our perception
of the reeds. Rivers really do seem to run free, and the play of butterflies
cannot help but seem fun to us—even though, qua scientists, we
know at some level that nothing is really going on except water molecules
being drawn downward by gravity and some large insects
engaged in a random feeding pattern. Most importandy, feeling this
kind of resonance between our own concerns and the functioning of
the universe makes us feel really, really good.
This suggest that our promiscuous teleology and overactive theory
of mind play more than a merely accidental and peripheral role in the
economy of the human psyche, and are therefore not as dispensable as
some might think. As die basis of perceiving meaning in the world,
theory of mind would appear to be the foundation of any kind of longterm,
large-scale motivation. I can be moved to engage in short-term,
limited acts—consuming a cheeseburger when hungry or seeking out
sleep when tired—without inquiring into the "meaning" of what I am
doing, but the universal and pervasive tendency of human beings to tell
and hear stories answering the question why suggests that long-term
planning and motivation requires such a sense. This feeling that our
work or our life has a purpose involves embedding it in an at least
implicit narrative, and the agent-centered nature of such narratives
suggests that the human ability to remain motivated over the course of
long-term, multi-step, delayed-gratification tasks may involve the evolutionary
hijacking of reward centers in the brain whose original or
proper domain is interpersonal approval and acceptance. In cognitively
fluid humans, reward expectancy over long-term tasks may be maintained
at least in part by the feeling that some metaphorical conspecific
"up there" is watching and approving or disapproving of our actions, or
(in its modern iteration) a more diffuse, non-theistic sense that what we
are doing "matters"—a conceit that makes no sense unless we project
some sort of abstract, metaphorical agency onto the universe. In severe
depressives, we may see a breakdown of this system: deeply depressed
individuals genuinely do seem to perceive the world as unfeeling,
mechanistic, and meaningless all the way down. The result is not a
feeling of clarity or power, however, but profound behavioral paralysis
and overwhelming suicidal tendencies.1
Evolution is a tinker, and
19
A chilling literary portrait of such a state is provided by William Styron (1992).
Slingerland: The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science 397
when faced with the task of getting live-in-the-moment social animals
to start thinking in more complex and indirect ways about the long
term, it simply co-opted a previously existing and very big carrot and
stick. Pre-human social animals are powerfully motivated to shape their
behavior in such a way as to win the approval and avoid the approbation
of their literal social group. The great cognitive innovation that led
to us—cognitive fluidity, the ability to project from one domain to
another—perhaps also enabled literal social approval and disapproval to
be projected onto a much larger scale: not just our immediate tribe, but
the cosmos itself.
We will thus apparentiy always see meaning in our actionspopulating
our world with "angry" seas, "welcoming" harbors, and
other human beings as unique agents worthy of respect and dignity,
and distinct from objects in some way that is hard to explain in the
absence of soul-talk, but nonetheless very real for us. We will continue
to perceive our work, families, and lives as being "meaningful" at some
inchoate level, and be strongly motivated to make the appropriate
changes whenever we begin to lose this sense.
Qua physicalists, we can acknowledge that this feeling is, in some
sense, an illusion. For better or worse, though, we are apparenüy
designed to be irresistibly vulnerable to this illusion. In this respect,
Appearance is Reality for us human beings. This is where, in fact, we
see the limits of a thoroughly "scientific" approach to human culture,
and need to finesse a bit our understanding of what counts as a "fact"
for beings like us.
HUMAN REALITY IS REAL
Humanists and natural scientists concerned with the issue of levels
of explanation and emergent properties have much to learn from the
work of Charles Taylor. Taylor has grappled with vertical integration
and come away unimpressed, and sees his mission as defending humanism
against the reductionistic threat posed specifically by sociobiology,
and more generally by the broader "naturalistic" bent of the modern
world. We do not have to follow Taylor to his conclusion, which is
essentially to reaffirm the Cartesian gulf between the Geistes- and
Naturwissenschaften, in order to feel the power of his basic position.
His conception of human-level reality provides us with a nuanced,
sophisticated model for understanding the place of the person in the
great physicalist chain of causation.
One of Taylor's most important points in the opening chapters of
his classic Sources of the Self (1989) is that human beings, by their very
398 Journal of the American Academy ofReligion
nature, can only operate within the context of a normative space
defined by a framework of empirically unverifiable beliefs. The
Enlightenment conceit that one can dispense with belief or faith
entirely, and make one's way through life guided solely by the dictates
of objective reason, is nothing more than that: a conceit, itself a type of
faith in the power of a mysterious faculty, "reason," to reveal incorrigible
truth. In addition to the panoply of "weak evaluations"—such as a
preference for chocolate over vanilla ice cream—that we are familiar
with, humans are also inevitably moved to assert "strong" or normative
evaluations. This latter type of evaluation is based on one or more
explicit or implicit ontological claims, and therefore is perceived as
having objective force rather than being a merely subjective whim.
All of the classic Enlightenment values that we continue to embrace
as modern liberals—the belief in human rights, the valuation of
freedom and creativity, and the condemnation of inflicting suffering on
innocents—are strong evaluations of this sort, dependent on an implicit
set of beliefs about human beings historically derived from Christianity,
but reflecting common human normative judgments. Although the
Enlightenment philosophes began disengaging these beliefs from their
expliciüy religious context, and we in the last century have more or less
completed this process, this does not change their status as beliefs. The
"self-evident truths" enshrined in such classic liberal documents as the
Declaration of Independence of the United States and the U.N.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights are not revealed to us by the
objective functioning of our a priori reason, but are rather items of
faith.
Taylor argues that metaphysically grounded normative reactions
such as these are inevitable for human beings. The fact that we cannot
coherentìy account for our own or other's behavior without making
reference to metaphysical beliefs, as well as the fact that they irresistibly
present themselves to us as objective despite our lack of proof for them,
says something important about what it means for a thing to be "real"
for human beings. Although values are not part of the world as studied
by natural science, the fact that value terms such as "freedom" and
"dignity" are "ineradicable in first-person, non-explanatory uses" (57)
means that they are, in a non-trivial sense, real. "[Human] reality is, of
course, dependent upon us, in the sense that a condition for its existence
is our existence," Taylor concedes. "But once granted that we exist,
it is no more a subjective projection than what physics deals with" (59).
For the peculiar type of animal that we are, moral space is as much a
part of reality as physical space, in that we cannot avoid having to
orient ourselves with respect to it.
Slingerland: The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science 399
To do something that would no doubt horrify Taylor—that is,
reformulate his insights within a naturalistic framework—we can say
that our overactive theory of mind causes us to inevitably project
intentionality onto the world: we cannot help but see our moral
emotions and desires writ large in the cosmos. It would be empirically
unjustified to take this projection as "real." Nonetheless, the very
inevitability of this projection means that, whatever we may assert qua
naturalists, we cannot escape from the lived reality of moral space. As
neuroscientists, we might believe that the brain is a deterministic, physical
system like everything else in the universe, and recognize that the
weight of empirical evidence suggests that free will is a cognitive illusion
(Wegner 2002). Nonetheless, no cognitively undamaged human
being can help acting like and at some level reallyfeeling that he or she
is free. There may well be individuals who lack this sense, and who can
quite easily and thoroughly conceive of themselves and other people in
purely instrumental, mechanistic terms, but we label such people
"psychopaths," and quite rightly try to identify them and put them
away somewhere to protect die rest of us (Blair 1995, 2001). Similarly,
from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, I can believe that the
love that I feel toward my child and my relatives is an emotion
installed in me by my genes in accordance with the principles of kin
selection. This does not, however, make my experience of the emotion,
nor my sense of its normative reality, any less real to me. Indeed, this
is precisely what I would expect from the third-person perspective:
the gene-level, ultimate causation would not work unless we were
thoroughly sincere at the proximate level. The whole purpose of the
evolution of social emotions is to make sure that these "false" feelings
seem inescapably real to us, and this lived reality will never change
unless we turn into completely different types of organisms. Completely
extracting ourselves from moral space is as impossible as stopping our
visual systems from processing information when we open our eyes, or
our stomach from registering displeasure when our blood sugar level
drops below a certain point.
THE IMPORTANCE OF PHYSICALISM: WHY PHYSICALISM
BOTH DOES AND DOES NOT MATTER
To the extent that human-level reality will always have a hold on us,
then, we are entitìed to say that physicalism does not matter. This leads
Taylor to conclude that die unavoidability of human-level concepts is
not merely a phenomenological observation, but rather a clue as to the
"transcendental conditions" (32) of "undamaged human personhood"
400 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
(26), and thereby a refutation of any sort of third-person, naturalistic
account of the humanities. If human reality is indeed real for us, why
not follow Taylor and say that it is just as real as anything studied by
the natural sciences?
In short, because it is not. Or, to put this more accurately, human
beings appear to possess an innate empirical prejudice that is so constituted
that, once we have explained something—that is, reduced a
higher-level phenomenon to lower-level causes—the explained thing
inevitably loses some of its hold on us.20
There is an important difference
between literally believing that God created the world in seven
days and thinking that this is a beautiful story that can mean something
to us on Sundays, but must be put aside when we go about our daily
work. Evolution is such a relatively new idea, and its message so fundamentally
alien to us, that its real implications for our picture of human
reality have yet to fully sink in, which is why most liberal intellectuals
continue to believe that Darwinism does not seriously threaten traditional
religious beliefs or conceptions of the self. It clearly does,
however, and once we have begun down the physicalist path, we cannot
go back to the old certainties. This is not merely because it would be
illogical to do so—although it would—but because we just seem to be
built in such a way that we want to deal with and picture the world as
it "really" is, no matter how unpleasant.
We can get a sense of this human "truth" prejudice—really, a preference
for lower-level over higher-level explanation—by thinking about
a typical reaction to a science-fiction movie that was very popular some
years back called The Matrix (1999). For those unfamiliar with the plot,
the protagonist, "Neo," begins to uncover puzzling clues that his everyday
world is an illusion. He eventually discovers that his body and
those of others in his apparenüy real world of "the Matrix" are, in fact,
being maintained in sinister life-support tanks housed in a vast factory.
Their brain activity is being farmed as a source of energy by the evil
machines who created the Matrix—an elaborate virtual world, projected
onto the brains of the bodies in the tanks—in order to fool their prisoners
into thinking that they are free. Neo eventually gets in touch with
a doughty band of humans who have liberated themselves from the life
support tanks and who live crude, uncomfortable, but "free" lives in an
underground refuge called (rather heavy-handedly) Zion.
See Preston and Epley (2005) for a very helpful recent study illustrating the human tendency
to value lower-level explanations that are presented as explanations for higher-level phenomena.
Slingerland: The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science 401
One of the more interesting points in the movie is when a cowardly
informant is induced to betray the inhabitants of Zion and return to
the tanks in exchange for a particularly pleasant illusory life-style: in
the virtual world of the Matrix, he is to be a rich and powerfid man,
with every sensory pleasure one could desire. Most importandy, he will
not remember that this is all an illusion: his fine steak and excellent red
wine will taste just as good as the "real" things would, and the pleasure
he will derive from his new virtual life will be—to him, at least—
inescapably true and powerfully felt. Especially when compared with
the threadbare and uncomfortable life in the bleak underground burrow
of Zion, this seems like a pretty good deal: if you do not know the
Matrix is not real, what difference does it make? If the steak tastes like
steak, why should you care that you are "really" pickled in a tank and
being farmed by evil machines? If your memories are to be perfecdy
erased, why would it matter that you had betrayed your comrades and
your former cause?
It probably would not matter. The important thing, though, is that
we, as human beings, feel that it would—we feel anger with this traitor,
as well as revulsion at the idea of returning voluntarily to the Matrix.
Why? Because, as Aristotie said, we are constituted in such a way as to
desire the Good, and the Good for human beings involves being properly
situated with regard to what we feel to be the "truth." Promised
future rewards that we know to be illusory seem less valuable to us,
even if we are assured that they will seem real when we get them. The
same inchoate instinct that makes life in the Matrix abhorrent to us
makes it impossible to continue to embrace, at least in precisely the
same way, traditional religious ideals that appear to be in conflict with
what we are convinced we now know about the world. And—at least
as long as physicalism remains our current best explanation of the
world—any religious or philosophical belief based on dualism is going
to be in this sort of conflict.
This is where the Copernican analogy is helpful. We quite happily
live our everyday lives in a Ptolemaic solar system, seeing the sun "rise"
and "set" and enjoying the felt stability of the earth under our feet. We
acknowledge, though, that this appearance is an illusion, and that the
earth is really racing through space at 108,000 km/h around the sun.
Why does it matter what is "really" the case, if it makes no difference
to the way we see things? It matters because making important, practical
decisions based on what is really the case, as opposed to what seems
to be the case, works better. Launching satellites or sending off space
probes simply would not work very well unless we suspended our
intuitive Ptolemaic worldview when engaged in this sort of work.
402 Journal of the American Academy ofReligion
The same is true of human-level realities. The realization that the
body-mind is an integrated system is counter-intuitive, but treatments
based upon this insight appear to be massively more effective than
dualism-based treatments—pharmaceutical interventions, for instance,
have arguably done more for the treatment of mental illness in a few
decades than millennia of spiritual interventions, from exorcisms to
Freudian analysis. Recognizing that there is no point at which the ghost
enters the machine allows us to go ahead with stem cell research, and
understanding that personhood is not an all-or-nothing affair helps us
get a better grip on what is going on with severe dementia in the
elderly. Physicalism matters because it simply works better than
dualism, and—once the reality of this superiority is fully grasped—this
is an irresistibly powerful argument for creatures like us.
DUAL CONSCIOUSNESS: WALKING THE TWO PATHS
How can physicalism both matter and not matter? We can answer
this question by returning to Nietzsche's critique of Kant and seeing
how both Niezsche and Kant were right. To take moral intuitions as
an example, we can follow Nietzsche—somewhat updated and put into
the role of an evolutionary psychologist—and see why it is important,
unavoidable, and revealing to ask about the adaptive forces that cause
us to feel the force of synthetic a priori claims, rather than just
experiencing them as unquestioned intuitions. Answering the question
of origins—uncovering the lower-level, ultimate explanations for our
moral intuitions—has important practical implications, but most of all
we just simply want to know. We also need to follow Kant, however,
in recognizing that, no matter what the origins of these intuitions,
they are the spontaneous product of a very powerful, built-in faculty,
the output of which seem inescapably right to us. This means that, as
empirically responsible humanists, we need to pull off the trick of simultaneously
seeing the world as Nietzsche and as Kant, holding both
perspectives in mind and employing each when appropriate. Those
who have allowed the "universal acid" (Dennett 1995) of Darwinism
to finally breach the mind-body barrier thus end up living with a kind
of dual consciousness, cultivating the ability to view human beings
simultaneously under two descriptions: as physical systems and as
persons. On the one hand, we are convinced that Darwinism is the
best account we have for explaining the world around us, and therefore
that human beings are merely physical systems. On the other hand,
we cannot help but feel the strong pull of human-level truth.
Slingerland: The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science 403
We can mine the world's religious traditions for helpful metaphors
for what this kind of dual stance toward the world might be like. Jesus
famously advised his followers to be "in the world but not of it" (John
17:14-15), and the figure of the Bodhisattva in the Mahayana Buddhist
tradition dwells simultaneously in two realms: that of "ultimate" truth,
where there are no distinctions and no suffering and therefore no need
for compassion or Buddhism, and that of "conventional" truth, where
suffering is real and the Bodhisattva is called upon to exercise finely
tuned and deeply felt compassion. My favorite analogy comes from the
fourth-century BCE Chinese thinker Zhuangzi, who describes his ideal
person as "walking the two paths"—that of the "Heavenly'VNatural
{tian) and the human. From the Heavenly/Natural perspective, there
are no distinctions, no right and wrong, no feelings, no truth. From the
human perspective, all of these things are acutely real. The key to
moving successfully through the world, Zhuangzi believes, is simultaneously
keeping both perspectives in mind, seeing the human "in the
light of the Heavenly," and thus seeing through to its contingent nature,
while at the same time acting in accordance with the constraints of
being a human in the world of humans (Watson 1968: 40-41). This
kind of dual consciousness is perhaps what Kant was getting at in a
curious passage from the Groundwork when he declares that we must
"lend" the idea of freedom to rational beings:
Now I assert that every being who cannot act except under the Idea of
freedom is by this alone—from a practical point of view—really free;
that is to say, for him all the laws inseparably bound up with freedom
are valid just as much as if his will could be pronounced free in itself
on grounds valid for theoretical philosophy. And I maintain that to
every rational being possessed of a will we must also lend {leihen) the
Idea offreedomas the only one under which he can act. (115-116)
We have become convinced, qua physicalists, that we are not free, but
in our everyday lives, we cannot help acting as if we were free, lest we
find ourselves exiled from the Kingdom of Ends—that is, no longer
recognizable as undamaged human agents.
CONCLUSION
We should not allow our distaste for physicalist explanations of the
human to turn us into reactionaries. The subject of humanist inquiry is
not the workings of some Cartesian Geist in the machine, but the wonderfully
complex set of emergent realities that constitute the lived
404 Journal of the American Academy ofReligion
human world, in all its cultural and historical diversity. The realization
of the thoroughly physical nature of this reality does not condemn us,
however, to live forever after in an ugly world of things. For psychologically
healthy humans, other humans can never be a existentiaUy
grasped as mere things,21
and our promiscuous projection of teleology
onto the world assures that we will continue to find the whole materialist
universe a rather beautiful place once it is properly understood. The
fact that even the most resolutely physicalist conception of the world
cannot help but continue to inspire awe and an implicit sense of
meaning in human beings is nicely captured in the character of Henry
Perowne, a neurosurgeon and committed materialist, in Ian McEwan's
recent novel Saturday (2005). Prompted by a poem to imagine being
"called in" to create a new religion, Perowne declares that he would
base his upon evolution:
What better creation myth? An unimaginable sweep of time, numberless
generations spawning by infinitesimal steps complex living beauty
out of inert matter, driven on by the blind furies of random mutation,
natural selection and environmental change, with the tragedy of forms
continually dying, and lately the wonder of minds emerging and with
them morality, love, art, cities—and the unprecedented bonus of this
story happening to be demonstrably true. (56)
We have nothing to fear from reductionism, because our innate cognitive
mechanisms ensure that the modern scientific model of human
beings as essentially very complicated things will not lead to nihilism or
despair. As humanists, we are not in fact faced by the stark choice of
either a meaningless, mechanistic universe or an endless, nightmarish
maze of contingent discourses. It is possible to be an empirically
responsible intellectual, and embrace an embodied, vertically integrated
approach to one's subject matter, without losing sight of the inescapable
human reality of this emergent level of explanation. In the end,
acknowledging our inescapable embodiment not only possesses the
excellent advantage of being "demonstrably true," but also cannot help
but enrich our sense of wonder at the dependent and tragic human
condition, in all its felt beauty and nobility.
21
Of course, what counts as "human" is up for grabs, and the idea that every member of the
biological species Homo sapiens is "human" is a relatively recent idea—the category has historically
tended to encompass only one's own tribe. The recurrent reality of genocide, even in our modern
world, serves as a chilling reminder of how quickly and easily groups formerly seen as humans can
be reclassified as "things."
Slingerland: The Study ofReligion in the Age of Cognitive Science 405
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1983
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Boyer, Pascal
1994
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