![]() Were the contemporary dualism debate merely academic, we might reasonably choose to ignore it. Eyesenck famously observed, can be "just as ordinary, pig-headed and unreasonable as anybody else, and their unusually high intelligence only makes their prejudices all the more dangerous." Some, moreover, are prone to a perilous folly: the confidence - despite the long and what-should-be chastening history of science, littered with beliefs once coddled, then discarded - that they have, eureka, arrived at conclusive knowledge. Scientists, after all, as the noted British psychologist H. Sometimes, though, intuitions are right and interpretations of evidence (especially the lack of it) wrong. Or, as they might say back at the University of Chelm, since the soul seems perceptible only through the brain, the brain, perforce, must be the soul. ![]() Joining the call to re-educate and enlighten the backward masses is Professor Bloom's admirer at Harvard, the gifted psychology professor Steven Pinker, who, in a newsmagazine essay of his own, mocks those who think of the brain as "a pocket PC for the soul, managing information at the behest of a ghostly user." Professor Pinker advises us to set aside such "childlike intuitions and traditional dogmas" and recognize that what we conceive of as the soul is nothing more than "the activity of the brain." "They emerge from biochemical processes in the brain." "The qualities of mental life that we associate with souls are purely corporeal," he asserts confidently. The boy's father, though, knows that his son's intuition is wrong. He pities those who, like his six-year-old son, insist on pretending that there is an "I" somehow separate from the physical cells of one's body and brain. Like Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom, the author of a new book, "Descartes' Baby," about, as its subtitle puts it, "what makes us human." In a New York Times op-ed, Professor Bloom lamented human beings' stubborn commitment to "dualism," the philosophical idea that people possess both physical and spiritual components. The Chelm tale idea is inspired not by hopeless simpletons but by celebrated scientists. Besides, he explains to the townsfolk, as anyone can plainly see, what seems to be his face clearly resides in his mirror. The resident philosopher sagely informs his fellow citizens that since he can't perceive his own face directly he must not have one. It would seem a promising premise for story about Chelm, Jewish folklore's fabled town of the clueless.
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