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[InfiniteNow]

In the video, Thomson references work done in Ireland by Jesse Bering. It was in reference to children, and their beliefs at a young age.

There was a puppet show in which an alligator eats a mouse. Then, the children are asked whether or not (after being eaten by the alligator) the mouse still needs to eat or drink. The children respond, "No." Then, the children are asked whether or not the mouse is still moving around, and they again respond, "No."

Then, the children are asked if the mouse thinks certain things... or whether or not the mouse wants certain things, and the children say, "Yes."

This type of experiment helps us to show our innate division when it comes to applying human mental states and attributions of thoughts and desires to agents with intentions and goals versus physical objects (this division is referred to as "common sense dualism").

Basically, even 5 month olds will startle when a box is moving around the room in a specific pattern, but have no issue with the exact same movements being performed by a human... we are innately common sense dualists, and we somehow are born knowing the difference between agents with intentions/goals and physical objects.


Here's more on the work referenced, work done by Jesse Bering in 2004:


http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/Institu...d,39830,en.pdf

Like Evans & Wellman, Harris & Astuti state that their own research programme on the development of afterlife beliefs reveals a set of findings that in many ways contradict the developmental trajectory reported by Bering & Bjorklund (2004), or at least tells a more complicated story with religious testimony and cultural exposure encouraging such beliefs. Again, however, it is difficult to compare findings across these studies. We deliberately avoided eschatological language in our research design because we were wary of biasing children’s answers through the experimenters’ language and behaviours, and in fact our empirical reports list many of the safeguards we used to protect against such biases (Hughes). In contrast, such language was an important manipulated variable for both Harris & Giménez (2005) and Astuti & Harris (2006).

Furthermore, the coding procedures used to determine whether children attributed continued psychological functioning to a dead agent meaningfully differed between our studies and those described by Harris & Astuti. Our data were coded on the basis of children’s followup answers to the questions rather than their initial yes or no response. We reasoned that a “no” response is inherently ambiguous and should not be seen as clear evidence for non-continuity judgements after death. Young children in our study often answered “no” to the initial questions about the dead agent’s continued capacities (“Can Brown Mouse still see?”), but upon further questioning it became clear that they were nevertheless reasoning in terms of an afterlife (e.g. “…because it’s too dark in the alligator’s belly”). Harris and Giménez (as well as Astuti & Harris, 2006 and Barrett & Behne, 2005) failed to operationalize children’s “no” answers in this way, instead taking them at face value as evidence of an understanding of the non-functionality of the capacity in question.

It is therefore impossible to know whether the findings these authors report is a product of the religious context of the story, as they argue, or is in fact an artefact of their coding procedure. In addition, Harris & Giménez (2005) treated their religious/secular variable as a within-subjects factor, so that all children heard the two death narratives in the same order, first the religious narrative (“Now that Sarah’s grandmother is with God, can she still…”) and then the secular narrative (“Now that Bill’s grandfather is dead and buried, can he still…”). This potential confound of an order effect, where the demand characteristics of the study are so transparent (especially to older children), again makes it difficult to make theoretical inferences based on these data. Finally, the youngest children in the Harris and Giménez study were seven-year-olds, whereas our most robust findings for afterlife beliefs came from the three- and four-year-olds we tested, providing the basis of our nativist claims.

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Several commentaries focussed on the simulation constraint hypothesis (Antony; Cohen & Consoli; Jack & Robbins; Kemmerer & Gupta; Preston et al). To revisit the central thesis of this hypothesis, I claimed that a delimiting phenomenological boundary prevents people from experiencing the absence of certain categories of mental states, such as emotions, desires, and various episteme (the most “ethereal” qualia). Because we can never know what it feels like to be without such states, these natural representational borders encourage afterlife beliefs. When we attempt to reason about what it will be “like” after death—and what it is “like” for those who have already died—we inevitably get ensnared by simulation constraints and reason in terms of a continued consciousness.

There's a lot more really good information (and references) at the above link. :-)





I thought I'd take a moment to share another quote, as well as a reference, from the video, as I understand that some people are either unable or unwilling to use video lectures in these online fora.


From the video (shortly after the discussion of 5-month olds startling when a box is moved around a room using the same motions as a human would make, but does not startle when a human moves in the same way... showing how we are "common sense dualists" from birth):

Children know more than they learn... We come into the world with these systems already in place. It is natural, from very early on, to think of "disembodied minds." Now, you can flip it around and you can understand why this is crucial. If I required a body [to be physically present] to think about [someone elses] mind, that's a real liability... It's burdensome... I need to be able to think about somebody, and think about what's going on inside of them, and what their intentions or goals might be... without them present.

This ability to deal with disembodied minds, something with an obvious selective advantage, has through time brought with it the emergent property of deity. We have the ability to deal with causal agents not physical present, and we are very biased toward attributing a causal agent were there may be none. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that our belief in some life separate from what is actually experienced inside of us... in our body... is the default setting of the human mind, as this ability to predict and rehearse the actions, goals, and desires of others has conferred significant selective advantage... even if those others are unseen and not immediately present.

Another thing about children is that they are causal determinists... What does this mean? Well... any mind that is oriented toward seeing intentions... and desires and goals... is gonna "over-read" purpose. If you ask a child, "What are birds for?" [that child will respond with something like,] "To sing." [If you ask a child] "What are rivers for?" [that child will respond with comments such as,] "for boats to float on." [If you ask a child,] "What are rocks for?" [that child will respond with something like,] "for animals to scratch themselves."

We over-read causality... we WAY over-read causality and purpose.

He then references research done by Petrovich and also Boyer, both in 2009. In that work, it's demonstrated that children will spontaneously invent the concept of god without adult intervention. It shows how these mechanisms with which we're born make us all very vulnerable to religious ideas. He suggests that religious ideas are much easier to accept, and that it is disbelief that is cognitively much more challenging.



More on those works referenced:

Born believers: How your brain creates God - science-in-society - 04 February 2009 - New Scientist

In similar experiments, Olivera Petrovich of the University of Oxford asked pre-school children about the origins of natural things such as plants and animals. She found they were seven times as likely to answer that they were made by god than made by people.

These cognitive biases are so strong, says Petrovich, that children tend to spontaneously invent the concept of god without adult intervention: "They rely on their everyday experience of the physical world and construct the concept of god on the basis of this experience." Because of this, when children hear the claims of religion they seem to make perfect sense.

Our predisposition to believe in a supernatural world stays with us as we get older. Kelemen has found that adults are just as inclined to see design and intention where there is none. Put under pressure to explain natural phenomena, adults often fall back on teleological arguments, such as "trees produce oxygen so that animals can breathe" or "the sun is hot because warmth nurtures life".

How persistent are intuitive (erroneous) beliefs?

According to developmental psychologists like Elizabeth Spelke or Susan Carey, and cognitive anthropologists like Pascal Boyer and Dan Sperber, humans are endowed with inference mechanisms that enable them to acquire knowledge of the world (these inference mechanisms are known by several terms, such as core knowledge, conceptual modules or intuitive ontologies). Sometimes these inference mechanisms are at odds with scientific principles. A well-studied example is impetus physics, the view that inanimate objects, in order to be propelled, have to be laden with a force (impetus) by an agent or another object in order to be set in motion. This impetus physics yields a lot of imprecise predictions: for example, over 50% of adults believe that a ball, being launched by a sling, will continue in a curvilinear path, or that a ball dropped by a running person will fall straight down instead of describing a parabolic path. Newtonian physics, in contrast, predicts a parabolic path, a prediction only consistently made by people with a college training in physics (see McCloskey's 1983 review in Scientific American to get an idea).

However, an ingenious experimental procedure by Kohhenikov and Hegarty (2001), Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8) shows that even expert physicists are guided by the intuitive impetus physics under some conditions.