Dualism

The Original Sin of Cognitivism

William R. Uttal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135608590
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Directed to scholars and senior-level graduate students, this book is an iconoclastic survey of the history of dualism and its impact on contemporary cognitive psychology. It argues that much of modern cognitive or mentalist psychology is built upon a cryptodualism--the idea that the mind and brain can be thought of as independent entities. This dualism pervades so much of society that it covertly influences many aspects of modern science, particularly psychology. To support the argument, the history of dualism is extended over 100, 000 years--from the Paleolithic times until modern philosophical and psychological thinking. The questions regarding this topic that are answered in the book are: 1) Does dualism influence the scientific theories of psychology? 2) If so, should dualism be put aside in the search for a more objective analysis of human mentation?

CHAPTER

1

Introduction

1.1 THE THESIS

Scientific psychology has long sought to achieve a level of objectivity comparable to the other sciences. Indeed, in an effort to separate its methodology and contributions from its philosophical forebears, it has sometimes been accused of an extreme form of “method envy” resulting in what Koch (1992), presumably tongue in cheek, described as physicophilia, to wit:

Experimental psychologists have traditionally suffered from a syndrome known as hypermanic physicophilia (with quantificophrenic delusions and methodico-echolalic complications … (p. 264)

As modern instrumentation and mathematical-statistical tools evolved in their sophistication, it has seemed to many observers that psychology cum physics has been approached, if not achieved. However, embedded deep within the implicit structure and assumptions of modern scientific psychology lay conceptual entanglements with the theological and philosophical past that are not so easily unraveled. I believe these vestigial entanglements, although largely unappreciated, still play an important role in the conduct of a huge amount of psychological research, specifically in any mentalist approach. This book is about the profound and significant relationship between the primitive fear of death and the resulting dualisms on the one hand and modern mentalist theories on the other.

There are several reasons why psychology is still struggling after centuries to be acknowledged as a natural science of the same power as physics or chemistry. Some of the reasons are epistemological; it is still a matter of debate just how far we can go in explaining cognitive processes as opposed to just describing behavior (see Uttal, 1998). Even more fundamentally, it is still uncertain just how accessible mental activity may or may not be (see Uttal, 2000). There is ample, although not overwhelming, evidence that the enormous complexity, nonlinearity, and complex interaction of both the neural and cognitive domains pose what may be intractable problems of analysis and explanation for anyone with the temerity to study human mentation. Thus, there may be fundamental barriers of explanation for a science of the mind (if not of behavior) preventing broad acceptance of psychology as a valid scientific undertaking. Indeed, it does not take any substantial exposure to the councils of engineers, attorneys, politicians, and both biological and physical scientists to appreciate a deep reluctance on the part of many to include psychology within the rubric of the natural sciences or to accept its findings as compelling guides to policy decisions.

Another reason that scientific psychology confronts resistance to general acceptance within the scientific community is its persisting confusion with the work of its predecessors—namely, philosophy and theology. The problem arises from the simple fact that the subject matters of each of these fields of inquiry overlap to a substantial and perhaps irretrievable degree. Psychology, philosophy, and theology¹ all seek to deal with and make sense of mental activity. In particular, with a few exceptions (one notable exception, of course, is a more or less extreme behaviorism) all three types of scholarship are in part concerned with the study of intrapersonal sentient awareness—our consciousness of our own being—however broader their domains may be. The approaches taken by each field, however, are not identical nor are their methods, no matter how common the subject matter—the mind/soul/spirit/ego—may be for all.

The joint problem faced by all three fields of study, is that this common subject matter is of such enormous importance and general relevance to so many aspects of human existence that its study and consideration could hardly be constrained to any one alone. There is no rational, logical, or intellectually compelling way to dissuade philosophers, theologians, and psychologists from considering such questions as: How do we think? What are the future evolutionary prospects of our consciousness? Does some aspect of mind persist after bodily death? Is mind purely a brain process? The search for understanding of the fundamental nature of the human mind is of supreme importance to scholars and lay persons alike from many different callings and for many different reasons.

Each approach, of course, has its limitations; philosophy typically struggles from a lack of appreciation of what the more objective and less speculative scientific schools have discovered. Likewise, the methods of scientific psychology are constrained and limited in their ability to answer all of the questions that inquisitive humans ponder. Theology, on its part, suffers from any semblance of objective analysis and must, in the final analysis, fall back on intuitions, beliefs, and faiths that cannot be substantiated by anything considered acceptable evidence or compelling logic by either science or philosophy. Thus, regardless of their own particular individual limits and constraints, it is easy for one approach or the other to make the case that the others are incapable of solving problems of such enormous magnitude. Philosophy suffers from a paucity of facts; psychology from inadequate methodology; theology from a pervasive and ultimately destructive strategy of creating unfounded and unsubstantial hypothetical entities; and all three are convinced of the pervasive illogic or incompleteness of the other two. The very answerability of some of the most fundamental (or most easily asked) questions is itself rarely questioned.

The historical range of approaches to the study and consideration of mental activities is, therefore, enormous and justifiably so. It is hard to imagine any aspect of human existence that would not be touched in one way or another by a deeper understanding of human mentation. The primeval urge of humans to understand and preserve their essential selves and their world cries out for the most speculative theological answers even in the presence of solid contradictory scientific evidence. It is hard for conscious and curious humans to ignore this cry. The ubiquitous presence of theological ideas among what most certainly is the vast majority of human beings living today attests to the compelling power of that urge. It is equally hard to imagine how any of the many different aspects of human mentation could avoid influencing psychological science or philosophy, or for that matter almost any other aspect of human life.

The converse is also true—the prevailing concept of the mind is always heavily influenced by developments in other human activities. As history has repeatedly demonstrated, the concept of the mind continuously evolves under the influence of developments in many other fields of endeavor including, the economic, social, technological, scientific, religious, political, military, and educational. Obviously, even the most objective and esoteric scientific interpretations of the nature of mental activity persistently and deeply interact with many other aspects of our society. In doing so, they both reflect their central importance in any explanation of human existence just as the subject of mind subjects itself to influences and pressures to which few other topics in the natural sciences are subject.

This book explores the history and impact that one central and persisting idea—dualism—is having on scientific psychology in the 21st century. In particular, it is concerned with the specialized and restricted question of the influence of nonscientific attitudes and beliefs (particularly those forthcoming from current theological and philosophical thinking) on our theories concerning the nature of the mind. The argument, in a nutshell, is that a primeval “fear of death” created an age-old search for antidotes to the unacceptable horror of the cessation of one’s personal mental existence. This search led inexorably to deeply embedded supernatural ideas that often do not rise to the level of consciousness of modern psychological scientists yet still may have profound effects on both theory and experimentation.

More specifically, this book is concerned with the nearly universal theological and frequently (though not universal) philosophical solution—dualism—to what has come to be called, in modern terminology, the mind-body problem. Dualism proposes a second kind of extraphysical or supernatural kind of reality beyond raw physicalism. Such a dualism, it is argued here, pervades a surprising amount of modern, quasi-scientific thinking about the nature of cognitive processes albeit very often in a cryptic and unacknowledged form. The core of the argument is that modern dualisms, emerging from age old awarenesses of the brevity of life, tend to force our thinking about mind in such a way that mental processes become confused with tangible and analyzable objects.

Supernatural dualisms, it is further suggested, create a universe in which the rules of a naturalistic physical science are supplanted by supernatural processes. Wherever such a dualism is embedded in the logic of a science, however cryptically, mythical entities and factual distortion of the science become not only possible but also likely. The issue is thus raised: What damage has been done to a scientific study of the mind by deeply embedded dualisms operating below the ken of modern psychologists?²

To answer this rhetorical question I trace the history of the paleoanthropological, biological, historical, religious, and philosophical concepts of life and death and show how each has had profound effects on what are believed to be even the most pristine and objective theories of the mind. The historical chain starts with fear of death and ends with a cryptodualism that seems to permeate much of mentalist psychology. I argue that there is a chain of intellectual evolutionary development that passes through this primitive fear to animisms, then polytheisms, then monotheisms, then a kind of detheologized modern philosophy, and finally to a superficially sanitized cognitive psychology.

At the outset of this discussion, the fact must be acknowledged that this topic may be anathema to many “hard nosed” psychologists. Despite a long history of conferences on the relation between psychology and religion, many of my colleagues argue that we should keep our science free of the intrusion of such “philosophical” contaminants in order to produce a truly objective science of mentation. I argue, on the contrary, that deep within our most fundamental assumptions can be discerned the substantial impact of primitive attitudes toward death and, specifically, the difficulty that is embodied in dealing with the cessation of our own personal consciousness. The balm that is applied to this problem is the generation of a conceptual model of dual realities—physical and mental—that profoundly impacts on the nature of even some of our proudest “objective” theories.

1.2 ORGANIZATION OF THIS BOOK

In this book, it is argued that there is a virtually irresistible chain of logic (as well as illogic) from the most primitive awareness of death through the history of sophisticated theological beliefs through current philosophy to some serious misemphases in the modern science of psychology. In particular, I argue that the residual traces of dualist escape hatches from the terror of the termination of personal existence have erroneously led to the cognitive mentalisms that dominate scientific psychology today. The result is that all mentalisms including current “cognitive” psychologies as well as their introspective predecessors commit the same error—assuming, a priori, that intrapersonal mental activity can be accessed, analyzed, and reduced as if it were a tangible object composed of more or less fixed component modules. This model—mind as interpersonally accessible and analyzable object—exists in contradiction to mind as intrapersonally inaccessible unified process. The price paid for such a fundamental misconception is that the usually cryptic axiom of dualism inhibits the development of a truly scientific psychology based on a purer kind of objective and public observation of interpersonal behavior. Following this introductory chapter, the problem is dealt with in a number of different ways.

Chapter 2 considers the distant, prehistoric past of the Paleolithic period during which the first signs of a cognitive awareness of death appears. Archeology and paleontology now have begun to provide some, although highly equivocal, evidence about primitive behavior that can be interpreted as reflecting early awareness of the great discontinuity between living and dead organisms. This chapter makes the case that the main root of historical theologies and, ultimately, of erroneous psychological theories, is to be found in the emerging self-awareness of one’s individual physical mortality.

Chapter 3 carries the review forward into the Neolithic period where the evidence is much more compelling. The artifacts are more numerous, the transparency of their meaning in terms of the supernatural more clear-cut, and the interpretive leaps less drastic. The sheer abundance of human Neolithic remains is so much greater than the relatively rare Paleolithic finds that a much clearer picture of early cognitive activity can be discerned.

Ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Paleoanthropology of Dualism
• 3 The Neolithic Archeology of Dualism
• 4 The Early Written History of Religious Dualism
• 5 Modern Religious Dualisms
• 6 Modern Philosophical Dualisms
• 7 Dualism and Psychology
• 8 Summary and Conclusions
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index