Throughout history, the vast majority of people around the globe have believed they have, however defined, a “soul.” While the question of whether the soul exists cannot be answered by science, what we can study are the causes and consequences of various beliefs about the soul and its prospects of surviving the death of the body. Why are soul and afterlife beliefs so common in human history? Are there adaptive advantages to assuming souls exist? Are there brain structures that have been shaped by environmental pressures that provide the foundation of body/mind dualism that is such a prominent feature of many religions? How do these beliefs shape the worldviews of different cultures and our collective lives? What is the role of competing afterlife beliefs in religion, science, politics, and war? This course explores several facets of this relatively unexplored but profoundly important aspect of human thought and behavior. The course consists mainly of 70 to 80 minute lectures, typically broken up into 3 segments, recorded from a course offered by Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences. These videos include slides and some embedded video clips. Most lectures are accompanied by slides used during the lecture, also including recommended reading assignment which may provide additional opportunities to reflect on your studies. Due to the lengthiness of this class and natural progression, the online course has been separated into 3 units, this is Unit 3.
The Human Spark Part C
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From the course by Rutgers the State University of New Jersey
Soul Beliefs: Causes and Consequences - Unit 3: How Does It All End?
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Rutgers the State University of New Jersey
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From the lesson
The Human Spark
Meet the Instructors
Prof. Daniel M. OgilvieProfessor of Psychology
Psychology
Prof. Leonard W. HamiltonProfessor of Psychology
Department of Psychology
>> And of course, the shared belief that is probably most universal and
certainly the major part of this course is our religion.
And you can't see the scale here, I'm sure, but Catholic Christianity,
Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Hindu, Judaism and so on.
And if you look at the map of these major religions,
what you see is that, first of all, it's not universal.
So that you might want to be hoping that your color is the correct one,
if there are real differences in these beliefs, but
the other interesting thing is that they fill geographic regions.
And look at this, how they fill political regions.
So these are clearly things, where there are lots of things tying the culture and
the shared belief together and most of that is language and
the way people choose to cooperate and create governments and things like that.
So certainly, the religious beliefs are very much influenced by
the way people get together and cooperate and form their tribes.
[COUGH] Way back early in the course, Professor Ogilvie
talked about Pythagoras back in the sixth century.
Who came up with a very clever insight and
that's that souls unlike bodies
can occupy the same space.
And much more recently in an article that you read,
Bloom argued that we are natural dualists that children
just naturally tend to come to the idea that the body and
the mental processes are different.
So when end up with our personal theories and we don't talk about it much,
but we probably have some kind of a theory of body.
I don't know whether it's a theory or not, but
we do recognize early on that we have a body and
that the body can be uncomfortable or the body can be comfortable.
The body can be hungry and so on and so forth.
And I think in the same way that we have a theory of mind, we
have a theory that other people's bodies work the same way that our body does.
It just seems so obvious that we don't really think about it much.
Theory of mind is not so obvious and not so easy and
certainly one of the advanced features of the modern
human mind is the ability to have this theory of mind.
The ability to not only have our own representation
of the world around us, but to think about other people and
to imagine that their mind works the same way as our mind and
then we have a shared line of communication.
And we become very comfortable with interpreting
the thoughts of other people and expecting them to do
certain types of things again based on our language.
There are lots of different ideas about souls,
old, ancient, historical ideas, modern ideas.
There's been a progression of the way humans think about ideas.
What happens to the soul after death?
When do we get the soul from the beginning?
Is it at the time of conception?
Is it at the time of birth?
Is it when we're 14.5 years old?
There are all kinds of different ways to think about this non-physical soul, but
there are some things that we actually know through our observation and
that we can actually think about and record and understand it and
I want to talk a little bit about some of these.
When somebody that we love or hate dies,
we have an opportunity then to think about them in
a way that we hadn't thought about them before.
And in almost every case,
the body is pretty quickly whisked away after somebody dies.
Dennett calls this the corpse problem.
Corpses are not very pleasant to be around,
whether they're a human corpse or the corpse of some other creature.
They very quickly become unpleasant,
because of the decomposition and all of this other stuff.
So the body is almost always in all cultures and
all religions whisked away in some manner often
ritualized, but whisked away pretty quickly and
no longer present, but whatever you want to call it.
The soul, the mind, the spirit,
the essence of that person remains and
continues abiding in the minds of other people and
we say things like they will never be forgotten.
But we still have a very clear image
of that person's mind that person's essence,
their soul, because it doesn't go away like the body does.
And we even have our own judgement days and
we usually take that opportunity and certainly the newspapers and
radio and TV take that opportunity to make pronouncements.
She was a great humanitarian.
He was the scourge of the earth.
So we go through and do a little capsule summary,
sometimes called an obituary, but
we do a capsule summary of the essence of that person.
And we can often revise the history of these people and say things like,
wow, it turns out that all that niceness was just kind of superficial.
He only acted like he was being helpful.
And sometimes, we go back to historical figures and
find out something new about them.
Find out something new about Mark Twain or Thomas Jefferson or
something and then we reevaluate the way we were thinking
about their souls and we also project them into the future.
So we will take somebody's mind or soul or essence and
imagine what they would do if they were here today.
What would Lincoln do?
What would Jesus do?
And so on and so forth.
So we maintain the interaction and the contact and
the memories of these individuals in a very powerful way.
So what happens is that the minds and
souls of these individuals become very much intertwined
with our own thoughts as we go through our daily lives.
They continue to be a part of us for as long as we remember for
as long as we remember those individuals.
And we use them in the same way often,
that we did when the person was alive to help us to
chose our behaviors and guide our things.
When parents die, the children,
often no matter how old they are,
they continue to imagine and rely on the thoughts and
advice of things of their parents.
So the children will continue to do that and
we continue to do that with other people that we read.
And now with language, we have the ability to record that and
make it last even longer.
So it doesn't have to last as long as we remember,
it can last as long as the words are written down.
And we've quoted several times a quote from Dan Gilbert
about planning our future and nexting and all of this type of thing.
And he said a nature has given us a greater gift, it has not been named.
And the way I got that quote kind of demonstrates
the essence of the modern human mind,
because Dan Gilbert had that idea.
I don't know Dan Gilbert and wrote it down in a book.
Professor Ogilvie read that book and
spotted that idea and because Professor Ogilvie
has a theory of my little mind, he thought that I would be interested in that.
So called me into his office and told me about it.
And I said cool, I'm gonna steal that and use it in my slides too.
So the influence that we have,
our written language record really
becomes a fossil of our ideas.
A fossil of our souls and our minds and can go on and
continue for generations and we can end up being,
because of the memories of other people and the things that we leave behind us,
the physical record of our mental processes.
That our mental process, our mind,
our soul can become nearly immortal right here on Earth.
So, is there any reason to be surprised that so
many people find it so easy to believe that these souls will continue?
That it's not just our record, but our soul and
the soul of the people around us that we love and
hate are going to continue forever and perhaps be in one place or another.
And all of this very complicated interacting that we have
with each other, the records that we keep,
the memories that we keep are very much a part of the modern human mind.
And I think is the human spark, the difference between us and
our ancestors that went off in some different direction and didn't survive.
Thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
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