Reviews
Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human by Paul Bloom
icywaterfall's review against another edition
4.0
Humans have evolved to think in intuitively Cartesian terms in making a distinction between the res extensa (bodies) and the res cogitans (selves, souls, minds). We have the twin capacities to reason about physical, material objects and a different way of thinking about minds and people. People treat objects and people differently; but while the human capacity for understanding the physical world is no so different from other species, the human capacity for mindreading is qualitatively different from that of any other species. We see the world as comprising bodies and souls, and we understand different things by these different terms.
- WHY ARE WE INTUITIVE DUALISTS? Autistic children extend the physical modes of understanding to people, when they should understand them as agents with souls. For ‘normal’ people, they extend their capacity for mindreading to the object realm. (Which is why movies made by Pixar are so popular; we’re good at projecting our emotions onto things that have none.) Humans always put things that we experience into categories. Why? A perfect memory, one that treats each experience as a distinct thing-in-itself, is useless. The whole point of storing the past is to make sense of the present and to plan for the future. Without categories, everything is perfectly different from everything else, and nothing can be generalised. We categorise so that we can learn. So what makes a category the ‘right’ one? Appearance is a useful beginning; but there is a difference between appearance and reality. And one way to get at the ‘reality’ of a situation is to know what the essences of something may be, despite the variation in appearance. Essentialism is a human universal because it’s an adaptive stance to take towards the natural world. For natural kinds, the essence is seen as some internal property; for artifacts, the essence is seen as the creator’s intention; all categories are believed to have essences.
- WHAT MAKES ART ART? What sorts of things to people think of as art? Some things are definitely art, others definitely not, others are maybe. So there must be some notion of what art is. What makes art art has to do with particular sorts of intention. We judge something to be an artwork if we believe that it was intended to be seen in the same way that we see other, already existing artwork. This definition is bulletproof; once an artist makes something with the intent that it be seen as an artwork, then it is an artwork. But why value art if art is completely useless? Several reasons: we like art because:
It’s pleasurable to engage in displays of status and power; any moron can gawk at a Rembrandt, but appreciating ‘modern art’ takes a special expertise.
It’s pleasurable because of our basic systems of perception and emotion; there are certain things that we enjoy looking at, and if we can’t have the things themselves, we’ll settle for a representation. Also there are certain formal properties that some art has, aspects of balance and form and colour that look good to the eye.
There’s an intellectual appeal; art can give rise to the same pleasure as an elegant mathematical proof, a clever argument, or a brilliant insight.
A priceless masterpiece becomes worthless if it is found to be a forgery; why? Our understanding of history and origins is relevant to our enjoyment in every domain that one can think of. Art isn’t special in this respect. Our pleasures are related to how we see the nature of things, and this includes their history, their origin. An adequate theory of the psychology of art needs to acknowledge that there are two ways to look at any human creation, including artwork. This corresponds to the two ways of seeing the world. One can see art as seeing, where one responds to its perceptible properties, but one can also see art as art. When we do this we see it in terms of the performance that has given rise to its existence; we attempt to reconstruct its history, including the intentions of the artist. This determines the name we call it and the category we place it in, and also our aesthetic reaction, sometimes overriding our more primitive mode of seeing the object as a mere object. So a picture of an ugly thing can be beautiful.
- MORALITY; The roots of morality are innate; our moral feelings are adaptations. Emotions enable us to set goals and rank priorities; you couldn’t do anything without emotions. Empathy is the foundation for all that follows. We are constituted so that in the normal course of affairs, our empathetic response to the pain of others leads to compassion, and this often leads to our helping them. But the problem with morality based on kin selection and reciprocal altruism is that it’s too local. Humans possess a moral understanding that transcends our innate endowment. When it comes to morality, there are universals (killing a healthy baby is wrong), and there are views particular to cultures. There is much to the idea that morality is a post-hoc justification, reason being a slave to the passions; but at the same time, humans also possess reason and an enhanced ability to take the perspective of others. Vegetarianism illustrates this; cows have no political clout; the existence of people who hold this position shows that there is more to moral competence than simply soaking up the views of the people around you. There is no evolutionary advantage to feeling the pain of distant strangers; and yet, our enhanced social intelligence allows us to reason about how other people will act and react in situations that don’t yet exist. The expansion of the moral circle occurs because of several considerations. Children grow to be more leftist (generous in their moral perspective) if they are brought into increased contact with other individuals, interact with them in situations where cooperation leads to mutual benefit, are exposed to stories that motivate them to take the perspective of distant others, and are exposed to the moral insights of previous generations.
- DISGUST: there is good reason to believe that disgust has a lot to do with food and eating; disgust is an emotion revolving around meat and meat by-products, substances that carry risk of disease and contagion Disgust is at root a biological adaptation that evolved as a result of the benefits it gave our ancestors long ago. There is both an innate and a learned aspect to disgust; although some things (feces) are universally repellent because they are always bad for you to eat, there is going to be some variation as well, since the danger level of certain foods in a given environment cannot be specific by natural selection. Rozin suggests that disgust developed from the protection of the body against certain foods, to the protection of the soul from certain thoughts, behaviours, people, etc. But this is too cognitive; disgust is limited to sensual domains, to a class of things that strike our senses in a certain way. It’s not a thoughtful cognitive process. Further, calling people disgusting is a way to dehumanise them, make them less morally worthy of saving. Disgust is a response to people’s bodies, not their souls. If you see people as souls, they have moral worth: You can hate them and hold them responsible; you can view them as evil; you can love them and forgive them, and see them as blessed. They fall within the moral circle. But if you see them solely as bodies, they lose any moral weight. Empathy does not extend to them. And so dictators and warmongers have come across the insight, over and over again, that you can get people to commit the most terrible atrocities using the tool of disgust. When you love a person, you see the person not as a body but as a soul.
- LAUGHTER: What makes us laugh? Perhaps we laugh when there is incongruity between what we expect and what actually happens. But this isn’t right, since many incongruous situations aren’t funny. Perhaps the essence of humour involves a shift in perspective; the punchline doesn’t make sense within the original frame of reference but it does within another one. But these jokes aren’t funny. Perhaps jokes are also wicked towards a particular person. But it’s too simple to see humour as a shifting frame of reference with a dash of cruelty; what kind of cruelty? Loss of dignity; laughter can serve as a weapon, one that can be used by a mob. It’s contagious and involuntary and has great subversive power; but it can also be playful and establish friendship. Several factors make something funny: a shifting frame of reference (incongruity between set up and punchline), and a loss of dignity.
- GODS, SOULS, AND SCIENCE: We don’t feel as if we are bodies; we feel as if we own bodies. People who think that humans are nothing more than meat-machines might be sincere in their beliefs, but at the gut level, souls exist. You can doubt you have a brain; but this doesn’t make it true that brains and thoughts are separable. Children are dualists in the same way that they are essentialists, realists, and moralists. We see the world as containing two distinct domains: physical objects, and mental states and entities, or bodies and souls for short. People intuitively believe that souls can survive the destruction of the body, and this is a natural consequence of our intuitive Cartesian perspective. I can easily imagine my body being destroyed; but not my mind or soul. Are we correct when we divide the world up into two separate realms of body and soul? There is no reason to doubt that the world does contain bodies as we understand them (to be material entities that move through time and space); but what about souls? At the core of our attribution of souls is a belief in the existence of entities with mental lives. Their actions are not to be explained in terms of brute physical forces, but are instead the results of what they know and desire. What people get wrong is in separating the world of the body from the world of the soul; the mind really does emerge from living matter. All thought is the result of biochemical processes, and damage to the brain leads to mental impairments, destroying capacities as central to our humanity as self-control, the ability to reason, and our capacity for love. There may be a soul, but it isn’t distinct from the forces of matter. Cognitive scientists believe that emotions, memories, and consciousness are the result of physical processes. Common sense tells us that our mental life is the product of an immaterial soul, and this intuition gives rise to the deeply reassuring idea that the soul can survive the destruction of the body and brain.
- WHY ARE WE INTUITIVE DUALISTS? Autistic children extend the physical modes of understanding to people, when they should understand them as agents with souls. For ‘normal’ people, they extend their capacity for mindreading to the object realm. (Which is why movies made by Pixar are so popular; we’re good at projecting our emotions onto things that have none.) Humans always put things that we experience into categories. Why? A perfect memory, one that treats each experience as a distinct thing-in-itself, is useless. The whole point of storing the past is to make sense of the present and to plan for the future. Without categories, everything is perfectly different from everything else, and nothing can be generalised. We categorise so that we can learn. So what makes a category the ‘right’ one? Appearance is a useful beginning; but there is a difference between appearance and reality. And one way to get at the ‘reality’ of a situation is to know what the essences of something may be, despite the variation in appearance. Essentialism is a human universal because it’s an adaptive stance to take towards the natural world. For natural kinds, the essence is seen as some internal property; for artifacts, the essence is seen as the creator’s intention; all categories are believed to have essences.
- WHAT MAKES ART ART? What sorts of things to people think of as art? Some things are definitely art, others definitely not, others are maybe. So there must be some notion of what art is. What makes art art has to do with particular sorts of intention. We judge something to be an artwork if we believe that it was intended to be seen in the same way that we see other, already existing artwork. This definition is bulletproof; once an artist makes something with the intent that it be seen as an artwork, then it is an artwork. But why value art if art is completely useless? Several reasons: we like art because:
It’s pleasurable to engage in displays of status and power; any moron can gawk at a Rembrandt, but appreciating ‘modern art’ takes a special expertise.
It’s pleasurable because of our basic systems of perception and emotion; there are certain things that we enjoy looking at, and if we can’t have the things themselves, we’ll settle for a representation. Also there are certain formal properties that some art has, aspects of balance and form and colour that look good to the eye.
There’s an intellectual appeal; art can give rise to the same pleasure as an elegant mathematical proof, a clever argument, or a brilliant insight.
A priceless masterpiece becomes worthless if it is found to be a forgery; why? Our understanding of history and origins is relevant to our enjoyment in every domain that one can think of. Art isn’t special in this respect. Our pleasures are related to how we see the nature of things, and this includes their history, their origin. An adequate theory of the psychology of art needs to acknowledge that there are two ways to look at any human creation, including artwork. This corresponds to the two ways of seeing the world. One can see art as seeing, where one responds to its perceptible properties, but one can also see art as art. When we do this we see it in terms of the performance that has given rise to its existence; we attempt to reconstruct its history, including the intentions of the artist. This determines the name we call it and the category we place it in, and also our aesthetic reaction, sometimes overriding our more primitive mode of seeing the object as a mere object. So a picture of an ugly thing can be beautiful.
- MORALITY; The roots of morality are innate; our moral feelings are adaptations. Emotions enable us to set goals and rank priorities; you couldn’t do anything without emotions. Empathy is the foundation for all that follows. We are constituted so that in the normal course of affairs, our empathetic response to the pain of others leads to compassion, and this often leads to our helping them. But the problem with morality based on kin selection and reciprocal altruism is that it’s too local. Humans possess a moral understanding that transcends our innate endowment. When it comes to morality, there are universals (killing a healthy baby is wrong), and there are views particular to cultures. There is much to the idea that morality is a post-hoc justification, reason being a slave to the passions; but at the same time, humans also possess reason and an enhanced ability to take the perspective of others. Vegetarianism illustrates this; cows have no political clout; the existence of people who hold this position shows that there is more to moral competence than simply soaking up the views of the people around you. There is no evolutionary advantage to feeling the pain of distant strangers; and yet, our enhanced social intelligence allows us to reason about how other people will act and react in situations that don’t yet exist. The expansion of the moral circle occurs because of several considerations. Children grow to be more leftist (generous in their moral perspective) if they are brought into increased contact with other individuals, interact with them in situations where cooperation leads to mutual benefit, are exposed to stories that motivate them to take the perspective of distant others, and are exposed to the moral insights of previous generations.
- DISGUST: there is good reason to believe that disgust has a lot to do with food and eating; disgust is an emotion revolving around meat and meat by-products, substances that carry risk of disease and contagion Disgust is at root a biological adaptation that evolved as a result of the benefits it gave our ancestors long ago. There is both an innate and a learned aspect to disgust; although some things (feces) are universally repellent because they are always bad for you to eat, there is going to be some variation as well, since the danger level of certain foods in a given environment cannot be specific by natural selection. Rozin suggests that disgust developed from the protection of the body against certain foods, to the protection of the soul from certain thoughts, behaviours, people, etc. But this is too cognitive; disgust is limited to sensual domains, to a class of things that strike our senses in a certain way. It’s not a thoughtful cognitive process. Further, calling people disgusting is a way to dehumanise them, make them less morally worthy of saving. Disgust is a response to people’s bodies, not their souls. If you see people as souls, they have moral worth: You can hate them and hold them responsible; you can view them as evil; you can love them and forgive them, and see them as blessed. They fall within the moral circle. But if you see them solely as bodies, they lose any moral weight. Empathy does not extend to them. And so dictators and warmongers have come across the insight, over and over again, that you can get people to commit the most terrible atrocities using the tool of disgust. When you love a person, you see the person not as a body but as a soul.
- LAUGHTER: What makes us laugh? Perhaps we laugh when there is incongruity between what we expect and what actually happens. But this isn’t right, since many incongruous situations aren’t funny. Perhaps the essence of humour involves a shift in perspective; the punchline doesn’t make sense within the original frame of reference but it does within another one. But these jokes aren’t funny. Perhaps jokes are also wicked towards a particular person. But it’s too simple to see humour as a shifting frame of reference with a dash of cruelty; what kind of cruelty? Loss of dignity; laughter can serve as a weapon, one that can be used by a mob. It’s contagious and involuntary and has great subversive power; but it can also be playful and establish friendship. Several factors make something funny: a shifting frame of reference (incongruity between set up and punchline), and a loss of dignity.
- GODS, SOULS, AND SCIENCE: We don’t feel as if we are bodies; we feel as if we own bodies. People who think that humans are nothing more than meat-machines might be sincere in their beliefs, but at the gut level, souls exist. You can doubt you have a brain; but this doesn’t make it true that brains and thoughts are separable. Children are dualists in the same way that they are essentialists, realists, and moralists. We see the world as containing two distinct domains: physical objects, and mental states and entities, or bodies and souls for short. People intuitively believe that souls can survive the destruction of the body, and this is a natural consequence of our intuitive Cartesian perspective. I can easily imagine my body being destroyed; but not my mind or soul. Are we correct when we divide the world up into two separate realms of body and soul? There is no reason to doubt that the world does contain bodies as we understand them (to be material entities that move through time and space); but what about souls? At the core of our attribution of souls is a belief in the existence of entities with mental lives. Their actions are not to be explained in terms of brute physical forces, but are instead the results of what they know and desire. What people get wrong is in separating the world of the body from the world of the soul; the mind really does emerge from living matter. All thought is the result of biochemical processes, and damage to the brain leads to mental impairments, destroying capacities as central to our humanity as self-control, the ability to reason, and our capacity for love. There may be a soul, but it isn’t distinct from the forces of matter. Cognitive scientists believe that emotions, memories, and consciousness are the result of physical processes. Common sense tells us that our mental life is the product of an immaterial soul, and this intuition gives rise to the deeply reassuring idea that the soul can survive the destruction of the body and brain.
bibliocyclist's review
3.0
"The senselessly cruel mother here is Mother Nature."
Consider the different ways in which one can die:
Aged
Bleeding
Executed
Found dead in the streets
Grief
Killed by several accidents
Lethargy
Mother
Plague
Poisoned
Suddenly
Vomiting
Wolf
"The art world was our conceptual oyster, and we ate it raw."
(It must be hard to be a psychopath—so much effort, all the time.)
St. Augustine was greatly influenced by Cicero's vivid image of Etruscan pirates' torture of prisoners by strapping a corpse to them face to face. This, Augustine maintained, is the fate of the soul, chained to a physical body as one would be chained to a rotting corpse.
Consider the different ways in which one can die:
Aged
Bleeding
Executed
Found dead in the streets
Grief
Killed by several accidents
Lethargy
Mother
Plague
Poisoned
Suddenly
Vomiting
Wolf
"The art world was our conceptual oyster, and we ate it raw."
(It must be hard to be a psychopath—so much effort, all the time.)
St. Augustine was greatly influenced by Cicero's vivid image of Etruscan pirates' torture of prisoners by strapping a corpse to them face to face. This, Augustine maintained, is the fate of the soul, chained to a physical body as one would be chained to a rotting corpse.
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