What part of our “soul” makes us human, and what other parts connect us to the rest of creation? When we look more closely at questions such as these, the relationship between religious and scientific questioning become more complex. What kinds of religious statements are subject to scientific scrutiny, and which are not? How can we tell?
Professor Julien Musolino, Ph.D., is a Franco-American cognitive scientist at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where he studies the capacities of the human mind as well as the history and development of science. He is also the author of the book The Soul Fallacy.
Geoff Mitelman: Welcome to Sacred Science, gleaning wisdom from science and religion. I’m Rabbi Geoff Mitelman, the founding director of Sinai and Synapses, and sitting here in his office in Philadelphia is Professor Julien Musolino, who is a Professor of Philosophy and psychology at Rutgers University. It is wonderful to be able to talk with him. I read his book The Soul Fallacy several years ago. It explores questions surrounding religion and science in so many interesting ways. So, Professor Musolino, Julien – wonderful to be able to be sitting with you here this afternoon.
Julien Musolino: Thanks very much, Geoff. It’s a pleasure to meet you, and I’m delighted to be with you on the show.
Geoff Mitelman: And I want to start, because I was so struck by your book – on the soul fallacy, which is a really complicated and nuanced question – because when we use the word “soul,” it means so many different things. It has a particular religious connotation; it has a particularly, often very Christian, connotation. But you also say there are some scientific claims that can be made about that.
So, I’d love to start by exploring: When you talk about “the soul fallacy,” when you say the word “soul,” what exactly are you referring to, and what are we trying to unpack here when we say that word?
Julien Musolino: Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s true that a lot of the concepts that we use in our everyday language can be ambiguous, broad in scope – mean different things to different people. So, one has to be careful, as you point out, to try to be precise about what we mean.
So, you’re right. The term “soul” can be used in so many different contexts. We can use it metaphorically. For example, you can say, you know, “These poor souls didn’t see it coming before the Titanic sank.” Or you can say that “James Brown has soul.” Or you can talk about the soul that will survive the death of your physical body and ascend to heaven and be judged.
So, how does one proceed, then? The way I was thinking about this is that there’s one kind of soul that seems to have really captured the attention of a lot of people – in the US, but also around the world. And you can find out about it in different ways. You can find out about it through polls that are run, through empirical studies. You can also ask people whether they think they have a soul. And if they say yes, you can ask them, “What is it? How does it work?” And so, of course, doing it that way has the merit of being empirically driven. You say, “Look, this is the kind of soul that most people believe in.”
And it’s also very interesting, because it’s linked to certain ideas. So, to be more precise now, what you find, if you ask that question, is that most people believe that they have a soul which has three main properties. The first one they’ll tell you is that their soul is non-physical or immaterial – in other words, distinct and different from the physical body you can touch and see.
The second property is – people don’t say it that way, but what they say I translate as meaning that their soul is psychologically potent. In other words, they think that it contributes to their psychological functioning. It gives them free will, moral compassion, consciousness – maybe the ability to fall in love. And people are quite explicit about that.
And finally, perhaps most important, it’s the kind of soul that is thought to be immortal. So, when you die, it somehow carries your consciousness into the afterlife, and then you’ll be able to reunite with your loved ones.
So, that’s the soul that I was interested in – again, because it’s very interesting. If it’s true that we have such a soul, then the implications are formidable – it means that we’re not immortal, and so on and so forth. And it happens to be a kind of soul that many, many people believe in. There are a few other things to say about this soul. It also seems to be – of course, there are variations, so you can add things like “Will it be judged on what basis?” – but these three core components, of “immaterial,” “psychologically potent” and “immortal,” are really fundamental. And you find that to some degree in many religious doctrines that sort of tell you that you have such a thing, and that it’s important. And it’s also something that, at least in the U.S., is defended very strongly by certain people – they’re sometimes called religious apologists – who write about it in public – you know, in popular books – to say, “Look, yes, we do have such a soul.” And even science supports this claim.
And so that’s the soul I’ve been interested in. It doesn’t mean that it’s the only soul one can talk about. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t other interesting notions. But that’s the notion I decided to focus on, also because it turns out, as you mentioned at the outset, most people think when they tell you about their soul that it has nothing to do with science – it’s a religious claim, maybe a metaphysical claim, maybe a philosophical claim. It turns out – and that’s, I think, what makes it very, very interesting – that it is, above all, a scientific claim. And from that conclusion, which we can discuss a number of things follow that I think are quite important. So that’s sort of the genesis of the interest in that particular kind of soul. And that’s why I decided to write about it.
Geoff Mitelman: I think what’s really challenging about trying to think about a soul as uniquely human – because that’s also something that you explore in a lot of ways, “What makes humans unique?” and “Are humans unique?” – is that if humans are unique, then there’s a binary distinction – “these things have souls; these things don’t.”
And what’s challenging – and this becomes really difficult, particularly for people who are more right-wing in a lot of ways, thinking about, for example, abortion – that children, when they’re conceived, there’s a soul there. Trying to be able to say, “Well, this has a soul, this does not have a soul” – does the soul come in at six weeks? Does the soul come in at 20 weeks? Does the soul come in at 39 weeks?”
Or, thinking about it from an evolutionary perspective, if we think in 2021, which is when we’re recording this, that we have souls – well, the people 500 years ago… what about 2,000 years ago? What about 200,000 years ago? What about 3 million years ago? There’s never a clear distinction of, “This was a no, now it’s a yes,” because so much of these questions are analog rather than digital.
Julien Musolino: Yeah. So, you make two very interesting points. The first one is that it’s true that, at least in public discourse, this notion kind of pollutes debates about women’s reproductive rights, for example. So, if we have a soul that makes us human, then whenever ensoulment happens, then if you terminate the pregnancy, then either you’ve killed the soul (which is horrible), or you can hear – if you read the arguments that are proposed by some theologians – if ensoulment isn’t immediate, then what you do by terminating the pregnancy is worse, because you prevent that little entity from ever being connected to its soul. And that’s a worse crime. So, either way, it’s terrible.
So, yeah, certainly – at least in the U.S., I mean, the U.S. is sort of exceptional – the landscape is changing, but the U.S. is exceptional among wealthy nations in terms of how religious it is, or at least overtly in the culture, and the impact it has on our national politics. So, yeah, you hear these arguments all the time. These debates are rehashed every election cycle. So that’s one thing for sure.
The other one is the question of how we distinguish ourselves, humans, from other animals. And you’re right that for the longest time, the distinction was, “We humans are special in that we have a a special kind of soul,” a rational soul for Aristotle, or soul, for Descartes. And that’s what makes us humans. And so, in Descartes’ time, in the 17th century – so, Descartes’ philosophy was that other animals, non-human animals, are machines, automata, that basically don’t have souls, and therefore, when they seem to suffer, it’s just reflexes, they’re not feeling anything really. And people used to burn cats alive for enjoyment. I don’t know if the average person would say, “Look, they don’t have souls, so who cares?” But the idea was in the air.
And so, you’re right now if you think about the question in modern terms – one of the important things we’ve learned from science is the ideas that Darwin proposed in the 19th century that different species were not created separately from each other. So, we don’t have what used to be considered a ladder, like the great scale of nature, Aristotle’s ladder and the Scholastic ladder, with God at the very top, then the angels, then people and other animals. Now we have a tree of life, and all the branches are connected to the trunk. And the origins are basically unique, which means that the distinction between humans and non-human animals is not as clear-cut and binary as it used to be.
And so, of course, this radically alters the question. In fact, it’s a powerful argument against this notion of a soul. It’s funny – if I can share an anecdote, I’ve had many debates with different people of different, you know, orientations, coming from different disciplines. I have a colleague at Rutgers who is a linguist, but is a very, very devout Christian, and believes wholeheartedly in the soul, unlike the overwhelming majority of us scientists. And so, somebody in the audience raised the question at some point – said, “Look, you know, I assume you accept evolution.” He’s like, “Yeah, all right.” “So, at what point?” And he said, “Oh, there’s a very easy answer.” He said something like – I don’t remember how long ago – but there’s a time in history called in human evolution called the Great Leap Forward in which we seem to, the human ancestors, seem to really become modern behaviorally. And my colleague said, “That’s when God gave us a soul.” Okay, sure, why not? But that’s a completely arbitrary answer. And so, yeah, that [is what] modern biology poses. It’s not the only discipline. Physics also poses fundamental challenges to this notion. So does neuroscience. So does psychology.
And it’s this convergence, I think, of different disciplines that have led the overwhelming majority of modern scientists to simply abandon the notion. In fact, they don’t even think about anymore. If you look at the vast literature, whether it be neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, psychology – nobody mentions the soul as a live hypothesis. You might allude to it for its historical relevance, but nobody in the mainstream sciences says, “Look, I’m trying to work out the details.” The idea is just gone. But it’s still there in the culture, of course.
Geoff Mitelman: Well, so I think one of the things that often happens in conversations about science and religion is there are some who will say they are absolutely in complete opposition and conflict always – and I don’t accept that that’s always the case. And then there are some people who say, “Well, they’re separate, right? I’ve got the science on the one side and the religion on the other,” and – at least in a lot of people who buy into Stephen Jay Gould’s non-overlapping magisterial – “I can have my soul very happily over here and the science can be over here.” And I think most people, if they don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, it works until it pushes down.
Where do you see the challenge of bringing science to be able to talk about religious questions? Are there questions in your mind that religious people, religious language, is perfectly reasonable to use in a religious perspective, but in fact the science may actually push that and break it down?
Julien Musolino: Yeah. That’s another great question. I think it all depends on the nature of the claims that people make. So, if people who are religiously inclined make claims that are in fact verifiable scientifically… to give a very concrete example, suppose you say, “Look, my religion tells me that the earth is 6,000 years old.” Now, you can scream all you want that this is a religious question. If you think about the claim for a second, you realize that that’s a perfectly legitimate scientific claim that turns out to be false. The Earth isn’t 6,000 years old.
Then, of course, you can play a game that says, “Well look, that’s not what I meant.” You know, I’ve had students do this. Amazingly, a few years ago I had an argument – I mean, not a bad argument, sort of an interesting argument – with a small seminar, about 20 undergraduate seniors, I don’t know. Half of them thought that, yeah, the question of the Earth is a completely subjective question and there’s no real good answer to it. And they said, “Look, some people claim it’s 6,000 years old. Some people claim it’s a few billion years old. How do we know?” It’s quite interesting. So, at some point, I asked one of them, I said, “Well, how old are you?” And she said, “I’m 20.” I said, “No, you’re 35.” And then she started to get the point, that maybe there’s a bit more to how old something is than a matter of opinion.
So, back to the main idea. To the extent that a religious system makes claims about the natural world – either people, or anything, or the universe – that are scientific claims, then yes, that’s going to be a conflict, insofar as the answer isn’t the best possible scientific answer.
But notice, in this regard, a very interesting asymmetry that I think is very telling. When scientists in various disciplines stop understanding – so take, say, astrophysicists; there are things they don’t understand – obviously, it’s not the end of science. Well, what you’d never see them do is turn to the theologians and say, “Guys, we can’t figure it out. Please help us.” That never happens, right? There’s a reason for that. And the reason is that science is, for better or for worse, however imperfect it is, the best way we have developed as a species to get some approximate answers as to how the world works. So, if, within the context of science, we can’t figure out the answer, then nobody else can. If the physicists don’t know exactly what happened before the Big Bang or whatever, then nobody else knows.
And same thing with human psychology. If some psychological question escapes the analysis of neuroscientists and psychologists, then that’s it. Nobody else knows.
So, insofar as religion, again, makes claims that don’t conflict with what science says, that are not themselves scientific claims – yeah, they can coexist very, very peacefully. So, for example, if you say things like “You have to be nice to other people, obey the golden rule” – yeah, that’s great. There’s nothing wrong with that. You know, “give money to charity, treat others with respect” – perfectly fine. The minute you start to say things like “homosexuality is a sin because it’s unnatural and the Bible says blah, blah, blah,” then you’re making claims that are scientific. “Unnatural” means, you know – “so that’s that.” I think that’s the fundamental problem.
Geoff Mitelman: And I think there are a couple things that have become very challenging, of not just the question of the soul, but generally the religion and science discussion. One is that generally, religious texts were not written and designed to be scientific textbooks as we understand science right now, right? The Bible was not written with an understanding of “Let me have a telescope and a microscope and FMRI machines,” right? That was not the way in which these texts were written, and that’s not why they were written in this kind of way.
And I think one of the other real challenges that’s happened is – at least particularly with the soul – is how much of a Greek influence it’s been, because that influenced both Judaism and Christianity, which then impacted much of the Western world. But this idea of Aristotle, of the soul and this versus that, and good versus evil, and Plato, and thinking about the Platonic ideal –that’s become so influenced that we can’t untangle the way, for example, the Torah talks about these kinds of questions.
Julien Musolino: Yes, it’s true that in the West, Plato and Aristotle have had an enormous influence, to put it mildly. I mean, the whole scholastic movement was basically a way to try to reconcile Christian doctrine with Neoplatonism and Aristotelian thinking. So, until roughly the advent of the scientific revolution, there were two kind of sources of knowledge in the West. One was the Bible, the other one was Aristotle. And if the answers to your questions weren’t part of either, then they were just questions not worth asking. But of course, if we move – if we think about the questions in a broader context, it’s not just within these traditions that you have notions of souls. You can go way back before all these developments – so, to say, ancient Egypt – and they had conceptions of the soul already. And you can look at Hinduism and other. […] doctrines, even in much smaller folk religions, you have notions like spirits. And so, they’re not quite the same as a soul, but in some sense, they share something fundamentally similar.
So, what’s a soul if you think about it? A soul is – you know, to simplify somehow – it’s simply a person, because the soul can be judged and can see and that doesn’t have a body. So, it’s basically like a disembodied mind. What’s a spirit? Same thing. So, you find these recurring themes not just in the big monotheistic religions, but in various systems – and I think it’s not an accident that you find that.
And the reason, I think, is that psychologists have discovered that this kind of dualism – so, dualism of mind and body – is very intuitive to human beings. It might be the way we’re somehow designed by evolution – a Creator – to apprehend the world. If that’s the case, then it’s not a surprise then that these notions manifest themselves as broadly as they do, across cultures, across time. Now, of course, then they’re embellished differently depending on the circumstances. So, it’s “spirit,” versus a “soul,” versus “something that can be reincarnated.” But it’s variations on an important core theme.
Geoff Mitelman: And what’s become very interesting to me – and this is something that we talk a lot about through Sinai and Synapses – which is that for a long time, the role of religion, for, as you mentioned, thousands of years, the role of religion was Truth with a capital T, until the scientific revolution came, and that said, “Here’s a better, more accurate way to actually understand the world that’s going to match the natural phenomena that we’re seeing.” So, religion – at least, more liberal religion – shifted and talked about ethics. Like, religion – “We’re all about ethics.” And over the last maybe 40, 50 years, people said, “You know what, you can actually be religious and not be a good person. And you can also be a good person and not be religious.”
And so, religion has now become – at least in more liberal traditions – a focus on meaning. How do I find meaning, connection, and relationship, and joy? And actually, I think there are some scientific claims that come into there as well. Like, how do we actually find meaning in this world? There is some research that says doing things that are going to be fulfilling is going to be more meaningful than just sort of playing around on social media.
But, I think that in some ways, it forces religion to play defense a little bit. But I also think, in a lot of ways, that is a positive for religion, because it needs to adapt in the way that everything sort of evolves and changes in response to whatever the pressures are on its environment. And if religion is a source of capital-T truth – that’s problematic if it conflicts with what our scientific research is suggesting here.
Julien Musolino: Yeah. I mean, another role for religion that you can think about is the sort of social component, bringing people together. So, think about the various ceremonies that are religious – you know, weddings, baptisms. Simply going to church plays a certain function. It creates cohesions between groups, and so on. And so, yes, that can be positive, of course.
Yeah, the search for meaning. I mean, there’s not just one source of meaning. If people find it meaningful to think of certain spiritual ideas, then great – that’s wonderful. Why not? I mean, I think we should be very, very broad.
Notice, though, that, back to science, as you said, purpose and meaning are properties of minds – of human minds, presumably. And as such, they can be studied as any other […] morality – why we are moral creatures. What’s the scope of our moral systems? That’s also something that could be studied and has been studied. There’s a very interesting area called moral cognition. These things can be studied scientifically, and ultimately with the hope of shedding light on what brings people meaning and what brings people less meaning. I mean, some things are obvious, some things are less obvious, right? Likewise for morality. So, why do we behave the way we do? What shaped our moral systems? Then, of course, there’s a separate question with morality, which is not a descriptive question. So, what we are talking about is a descriptive question like “How do we behave?”
What’s the basis of our morality? That’s describing how people are. And there’s a prescriptive question which is “What should it be?” What kind of rules and laws and practices, to the extent that they impinge on the well-being of others, should we devise, and why? But there, again, science has to play a central role, because trying to understand what works and doesn’t work in terms of policy – trying to understand what makes people suffer or not suffer – these are scientific questions. So, science is quite central, it turns out, to our modern way of life.
Geoff Mitelman: Well, and you are alluding to something that I think is really critical, which is the difference between an entity and a process. And if something is essentially good or essentially evil, that ends the discussion, right? We’re immortal or we’re not; this political party is good or this particular political party is evil. And having that as this dualism – which I think is probably very much who we are as human beings – really can be very deeply counterproductive, as opposed to being able to say, “This is a process, we’re going to try this, this experiment either scientifically and we’re going to find out this is actually going to be more or less accurate. It’s not. Is it accurate or not? But is this a better explanation or a worse explanation? Is this political policy going to be more effective and get the goals that we want or less effective? And I think we actually talked with Rabbi Brad Artson on here a few weeks ago and talking about process theology, of the way that we understand, “I think of soul as something that grows and develops and can help us become better human beings” – and so, not saying “This is my soul and the essential element of who I am is going to stay forever.” For some people that can be very reassuring. But I also think that creates more problems than it solves.
Julien Musolino: Yeah. So, you know, we, as people, change over time. And some obvious ways – we look older as time goes by. And we change because we come in contact with different people, we learn about different ideas. And so, if now people are free to label various parts of the world or processes however they want, if some people want to call that a soul, then so be it. It’s not metaphysically very ambitious – it’s just providing a label to something we all agree on. Yes, of course we change, and so, sure. There’s nothing – but you see, that’s an example here where it’s a much less metaphysically ambitious kind of claim. It’s simply labeling something that everybody would pretty much agree on.
The trick though, of course, is that because notions like soul are really polysemous and can mean so many things to so many people, the minute you use the word, it has certain connotations for other people that are going to blend in what they think it means, and it gets sort of complicated. And what I’ve discovered, moving out of the Ivory Tower into the public domain – in the Ivory Tower, we try – not always succeed – when you’re working scientists, to be precise about what you say about what you claim, because otherwise, you can’t do science without precision. The minute you move into the public domain, there’s a challenge there because certain distinctions have to be made. The words we use are often ambiguous. So, it’s not easy.
Geoff Mitelman: I mean, think about the example of using “pro-life” and ensoulment in this kind of way, of “pro-life” meaning something very specific for one particular community, when in fact it could mean trying to be able to help everybody from cradle to grave, and help people flourish in life. And if I say I’m “pro-life” in that kind of way, that’s going to totally miss the point for the population that I’m trying to talk to.
Julien Musolino: Yeah, where here, you talk about politics, where the aim isn’t truth and accuracy – the aims are different. So, sure, that’s probably a reason why a certain kind of position is called “pro-life.” But if you examine it, and if you examine the people that claim to be “pro-life,” the position falls apart very quickly because it’s riddled with contradictions. I don’t just mean regular folks, who, for maybe very good reasons, think one way or another. I’m talking about presumably cynical political leaders who use these notions for political purposes. So, on the one hand, you see them scream that they’re pro-life. On the other hand, they invade entire countries in violation of international law, killing hundreds of thousands of people, displacing more, destabilizing an entire region. How on earth is that pro-life? It isn’t. And so, the hypocrisy is just astronomical in this case. So, you can see right away that you can’t take these – at least, like I said, when certain people in positions of power make those claims, you can’t take them seriously.
It’s different if you’re some regular person who – people should be free to do what they want to do. If they want to keep the babies that they have and not terminate the pregnancies, then it’s their choice – so, you know, if they’re sincerely, pro-life, then so be it. But I think there’s a big distinction between these people and the people that occupy different spheres of political structure and power.
Geoff Mitelman: Well, this leads to a slightly different question – although linked a little bit – because one of the things that you talk about and write about a lot, is the difference between humans and non-humans. Are we different in degree or are we different in kind? And that’s a more challenging question than I think people recognize. So I’d love to spend a couple minutes thinking about this. How do we distinguish, and – or even should we distinguish – humans from non-humans? How do we even do that scientifically if we’re going to throw away the “I’m a human and so I have a soul versus my cat, which doesn’t”? How do we tease this out this distinction here?
Julien Musolino: As you say, it’s a really interesting question. It’s not an easy question either. There used to be a pretty straightforward answer, as you said. So, if you go back to Aristotle, for example, [he] was a naturalist of sorts. He was not exactly Platonic in his beliefs. But he made a distinction. So, one of the many things he was trying to understand is what makes the difference between things that we perceive to be alive and things that we perceive not to be alive. So, rocks, on the one hand, not alive at least, so we think intuitively: plants, animals, people – alive. What’s the difference? And for Aristotle, the difference was that the things that were alive were endowed with some kind of process or some kind of, you know, thing, that Aristotlean principle that Aristotle called “soul.” And there were different souls for different things.
And the theory was interesting because the souls – you can think of them as circles that were included in one another. So, at the bottom of the hierarchy, you have plants that needed to grow, and eventually they would die – so they had “nutritive” souls. And then you go one step higher and you have animals. They also need to eat and to survive; they can do more things than plants. So, they had “sensitive” souls. Then, at the top of the hierarchy – we’re back to this idea of the ladder or scale of nature – at the very top, at the pinnacle, you have people. Yeah, people like plants and animals have to eat. They can move, they can do things, they can sense. But they also have rational powers, abstract thought, they can do mathematics and so on and so forth. So, okay, rational soul.
So that was the distinction back then, and this continues in somewhat similar form all the way to the beginning of the scientific revolution and beyond. For Descartes, as we discussed, the difference between humans and non-human animals was possession of a soul, which was essentially a mind of a certain kind. So now Darwin comes on the scene – 19th century – and these notions of the Cartesian soul were abandoned earlier in intellectual life. But so Darwin comes along and now, “Okay, we’re all animals.” As de La Mettrie, one of the 18th-century materialists, would say it – we’re all machines of sorts, biological machines.
So now, what do we do? One thing we can do is engage in a thought experiment and imagine that a Martian were to visit Earth and was interested in the various organisms that populate Earth. Let’s restrict our attention to humans and non-human animals. Let’s forget about the plants and the minerals for a second. The Martians would collect evidence, observe, and then they would go back and say, “Look, here’s what we discovered.” What would they [say]?
There are many things they could discover, but one of the interesting observations they could make goes something like this. They could say, “Look, all these things called animals – from bees all the way to humans – they seem to need to look for food and find food. They all do that. However, only the humans have developed this really intricate system, which is part art, part science, called cooking and cuisine.” That’s one difference, right?
Then they would say, “Look, many juveniles in different species engage in pretend play, to kind of play with each other and everything.” And not all species do that, but some do. “But only humans have taken these games to the next level and codified them with complex rules and competitive environments.” And we have the Olympics, and we have all kinds of sports.
Then you can look at the social animals. So, we’re not the only social creatures. So, what social creatures – whether they be ants or bees or chimpanzees – what they need to do is, they need to somehow organize their groups or societies. Humans do, but only humans seem to have developed these sort of intricate political systems, with institutions and systems of laws and so on and so forth.
And then, finally, they would observe, for example, that all animals need to understand something about the nature of the physical world around them so that they don’t, like, fall off cliffs or fly into trees. Humans, too, but only humans, have developed that understanding into an explicit system of abstract rules and principles that allow us to now make claims and discover truths about how the universe started, and so on and so forth.
Okay, so that’s what the Martian would discover. And then the question would be, now, “Okay, how can we explain that?” And of course, out of that comes the fact that human beings have now populated the entire globe. We control our environment. We send probes into outer space. So, we’re clearly different, in a meaningful sense, than other animals.
So now the question is, “How do we explain that? Okay, now that’s tricky. The question is, “What level of analysis?” We’re complex organisms, and you can talk about people at different levels of analysis. You can say, “Look, we’ve mapped out the human genome, so we know the sequence of genes that is the human sequence.” We can map out – let’s say, “Look, let’s map out the chimpanzee genome.” You’ll find differences between the human genome and the chimpanzee genome. So now you say, “Look, here are some differences.”
But how do you connect that to being able to develop science, cuisine, and fly into space? The causal link is so indirect that it’s not very meaningful. Now, one way, one intermediate level – or you can just say, “Look, here are the observations” – but there are so many observations. There has to be something perhaps that these things have in common. Maybe there’s a small set of differences or principles that allow us humans to transcend these domains in the way that animals don’t – so, cuisine, science, law, mathematics, and everything.
And so, one level to look at is the mental level. And by that, what scientists mean is for the creatures that have brains (not the rocks and stuff), it’s a way of looking at the brain / body at some level of abstraction, and trying to formulate principles and structures that can explain why organisms behave the way they do.
So there, now, you can say, “What are the differences? What are the differences that make human mental life different from animal mental life?” Now, when I talk about animal mental life, I don’t mean to say that animals have conscious thoughts, like “Gee, why am I sitting here?” But to explain what animals do – and we’ve discovered a lot about so called animal cognition – they can do a lot of complicated things. You have to postulate something like a mind, right, which is, again, a completely naturalistic way to talk about their nervous system.
So, I think I’m going to give you a very broad and general sort of approximate answer. And then the whole question is to try to unpack this. And that’s a current scientific project that people in many disciplines are trying to pursue and answer. So, one observation that Descartes made –which is quite interesting, because, you know, he was thinking about human reason, right? And he thought this was basically the rational soul. But the observation that he made was that human reason – I’m paraphrasing what he said – is a universal instrument that can be applied to kind of any contingency. So there seems to be a kind of creativity, flexibility, breadth of scope that human thought has that animal thought seems to not have.
So, I think one useful analogy – it’s approximate, imperfect, but useful – is to think in terms of apps on your cell phone. So, people know what I’m talking about. We all have cell phones. So, you can have apps for almost anything under the sun. You can have a calendar app, you can have a map that tells you how many calories you’ve burned. These are different apps, notice, for different specific purposes. So, you can think of the minds of creatures as being composed of these different apps that are installed more or less by evolution.
So one app is – we can call it some kind of “intuitive physics app.” You have to understand something about the physical world – otherwise you’re going to fall off cliffs and fly into trees. Okay, we have an intuitive physics app. So, other animals have it, we have it. You have to be able to distinguish food from non-food. So maybe you have some kind of intuitive biology app, right? Okay, so animals have these different apps, but they’re kind for specific purposes. They don’t really talk to each other.
What humans seems to have – on top of these apps that we have, too – is some kind of master app that we can use to create other apps. So we can use that app to develop other apps, if the need arises, for almost any purpose that we want. Again, this is not perfect, but it seems to broadly characterize this creative sort of open-ended aspect of human cognition.
Okay, now the question is, “Well, what is it? What is that app?” So, you might say, well, maybe – so, people often point to language. They say, “Look, it seems that Descartes already thought that this was completely, uniquely human.” I’m not going to go into the details – they’re interesting. Still, today, most scientists think that language – human language – is sort of unique in the animal world. So, other animals can communicate, but they don’t have a system that is like human language, which is what’s called a discrete combinatorial system, where you can take a fixed number of concepts and combine them and express a sort of potentially indefinite number of thoughts – understand, because the system is compositional, an indefinite number of thoughts.
So, that’s a powerful app to have, because it allows us to now cooperate in new ways. It gives us cumulative culture. Eventually, when you can start writing language down, then you have records and so on and so forth. Now, I’m not saying that the only difference between us and them is language, but it is one difference for sure.
So, that’s what scientists are trying to figure out. They’re trying to flesh out this idea that the mental apps that we have are different, that we might have these more powerful apps – mental apps – compared to other animals, that have given us science and law and mathematics and so on and so forth.
Geoff Mitelman It’s almost like having metacognition, of not just being able to…
Julien Musolino: We do, right?
Geoff Mitelman: Not just like, “Oh, I need to be able to eat,” but “How do I want to be able to go about doing this?” There’s a great book by Robert Sapolsky.
Julien Musolino: Yes, Behave.
Geoff Mitelman: Yeah – well, he had Behave, but he also had, before, Why Don’t Zebras Get Ulcers? Because zebras don’t have to worry about existential questions. And as we think about these pieces, that creates a whole new level of thinking. And in fact, the rabbis talk about this a little bit, and they say that “The human beings have three elements of the animals and three elements of the angels” – is how they described it. And like the animals, we reproduce and we need to eat and we have all our bodily functions.
But one of the things that – at least the rabbis, they talked about with the angels – but being able to speak and understand… that was something that was different than what other animals were able to do. And that’s, I think that’s actually quite a deep insight to be able to have 2,000 years ago, 2,500 years ago – being able to really say, “Well, wait a second – there are pieces that, by the way, that we are exactly like animals in some ways. And there are pieces where we are different here.”
Julien Musolino: Yep. I mean, interestingly, one of the arguments that Descartes used to invoke his so-called second substance – so basically his mental substance, his “soul” – is precisely the kind of creativity that you see, at least, in language. So, it’s called the creative aspect of language use. The argument is fascinating. So, the idea is that Descartes was working within what was called the very beginning of the scientific revolution – what was called the “mechanical philosophy” – in other words, that the world, including people, was understandable intuitively as some kind of giant mechanism. So, you know, he was inspired by the automata in the Royal Gardens that were hydraulically powered. And, you know, you’d push the pedals, some water inside would do something, and things would move and do all kinds of things. So that was mechanical – you can understand intuitively. “Yes, I get it. If water flows this way, it’s going to alter this part. If you pull here, it’s going to do that.”
Okay, so then his idea was, “Look, we can understand a lot of the human body and its functions in those kinds of mechanical terms” – different arrangements of parts. So, we had one of the first theories of the reflex in mechanical terms. He was wrong because his analogy was hydraulic and not electrochemical. But, okay, he had the right mechanical idea.
But then he tried to push the ideas further. How much can you explain with the mechanical philosophy? And, in particular, he started to think about what’s called the higher mental faculties – like, say, language. And there he thought, “Look, what’s unique about language and special is its creativity.” We can produce an unbounded number of sentences, potentially our use of language. I’m not using Descartes’ terms now, but Chomsky’s terms – our use of language is stimulus-free. So, what this means is that if I flash a flashlight in your eyes, I know exactly what your pupils are going to do. You can’t help it. So, the stimulus predicts the response very precisely and accurately. But if I show you the painting in the back of my office and I try to predict what you’re going to say, I just can’t. You might say something like “I hate it,” or “Okay, let’s move on to, now talking about science and non-science” – I don’t know. The relationship between the stimulus and the response is much, much more complicated.
And yet, language is appropriate to situations, not random. Now Descartes is asking himself: How can a mechanical entity do that? It would seem to have to be able to place itself in a potentially infinite number of configurations, which is impossible. And so, he proposed a second substance, his res cogitans, which was the soul, which was able to do those things.
So, the connection between the soul, somehow, interestingly, and these higher-level mental faculties, was right there. And his insights – I mean, now we say, “No, this is not how it works.” But the insights were penetrating, and they’re still relevant today. We have explanations for some aspects of it. So, unboundedness, now we understand in modern linguistics through recursive functions. But the creative aspect of language use is still – if you listen to Chomsky, he’ll tell you “We’re still as in the dark as Descartes was in the 17th century.” That doesn’t mean we have a soul, but that means we don’t understand.
Geoff Mitelman: Right, doesn’t mean that it’s not understandable. It just means that we don’t understand it yet.
Julien Musolino: Or maybe that it’s not understandable by humans. It’s also possible.
Geoff Mitelman: What’s also interesting – this is linking to a conversation we had with Annie Murphy Paul, who has a new book out called The Extended Mind – and the role that we have of thinking outside of our brain, of the role of gesture and the role of technology, and the problem of using a machine as the analogy for the brain, and why that doesn’t work so much right now anymore. And what struck me, both in our conversation and some previous conversations that we’ve had, is the role of both the physicality and the non-physicality of all of these different elements, of language, of our brain – that our mouths create the words that we have. There is a physical piece of the way that we are speaking. And there’s also something that is – I don’t want to say non-physical, but I’ll say non-physical – the words that are coming out, there’s no record of them. There is a record here in the zeros and ones, but if you’re just having a conversation, you’re not recording it. That’s lost to history.
And one of my favorite passages from rabbinic literature – there’s a conversation where there’s the character of Judah ha-Nasi, who is the redactor of the Mishnah, who is in conversation with – he’s described as Antoninus, who was representative of the Roman emperor, but he never actually had a conversation. But they’re sort of like the rabbi and the guy who represents Greek and Roman thinking, in that they have a conversation about one of the things that we very first talked about at the very beginning of this conversation, which is this idea of the soul being immortal and separate from the body. And Antoninus says that both the soul and the body can free themselves from judgment, because, when you die, the body can say, “Look, I’ve been sitting here like a stone, I haven’t done anything.” And the soul can say, “No, look, I’m up here up in the ether, I can’t have done anything.”
And Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi says, “You know what, I’m going to give you an example.” And he gives an example of two people. One is blind and one can’t walk. And they want to steal some figs. And what they did is they put the person who couldn’t walk on the shoulders of the blind man. And so together, they were able to steal the figs.
Julien Musolino: Clever. Clever.
Geoff Mitelman: Yeah. And they said, that’s what’s going to happen when we die – that you can’t separate out the body and the soul. Things can actually only happen when there’s a link of the physical and the non-physical. And I think, for me, that’s a very important element of trying to say that I don’t, for example, accept that the soul or the mind is something separate from what our physical body is, that it’s a result of the processes in our physicality, and there’s tremendous value and power in it. But it’s not something separate from our bodies; it’s not something separate from our physicality. And I think that’s something that’s also linking to these questions of language, of how do we understand what language is – that language is also something that is very deeply connected to our physicality, and there are elements of it that have tremendous power that is not physical.
Julien Musolino: Yeah. So, you raise a very interesting set of questions that have recently – through work that I’m doing with some of my graduate students – sort of been on my radar screen, more so than usual. And that’s the difference between what we can call commonsensical or intuitive notions versus scientific notions. And so, I’m saying this because you mentioned the term[s] “material” and “immaterial.” So, these notions used to have a more precise definition. Again, we go back to Descartes. Descartes had a way to formulate the mind-body problem, which is, “Look, what’s material is very clear. It’s what’s extended in space.” It was his first substance, what he called res extanza. “And what’s immaterial is what’s not extended in space.” So he had a pretty clear-cut definition of “material” and “immaterial” – anchored, of course, in our intuitions.
This was abandoned. The history is – real quick. It’s very, very interesting. When Newton came on the scene – 1687 was the publication of Principia. You may have heard this, you may have read this, that he was dismayed at his own discovery when he talked about gravity, because it seemed to fly in [the face of] his Cartesian intuitions. So, he wrote something like that. He said, look, “That this agent, gravity, can operate at a distance instantaneously without the mediation of anything physical is to me so great an absurdity that you can’t really believe that.” So he was really dismayed by that, because it defied intuitions that for things to happen in the physical world, you needed some kind of contact. So, contact mechanics was the physical theory of Descartes.
But then, what Newton did, in a sense, is he sort of lowered the expectations of science – in the following sense. The early scientific revolution – so, Descartes, Galileo – the aim was to understand the world, of course, but to understand it intuitively in terms of mechanisms that you can really grasp. Like, “Okay, I get it, if you pull here, it’s going to do that. It’s obvious why it would do that.”
But now, you have this notion of a force that acts at a distance that is completely counterintuitive. And that really bothered Newton. In fact, he even wrote himself in the Principia – he said, look, he didn’t want to commit to whether that agent that he called gravity was material or immaterial. So, he was still in the grips of this Cartesian idea that some things are material, some things are immaterial. Nowadays, these questions don’t arise anymore. We don’t talk in science about things that are material or immaterial because the notions are not precise enough. Intuitively, they make sense, right? Intuitively, we tend to think that, “Yeah, that’s material, right?” But something that I can’t really see, can’t touch, that might be immaterial. but it’s not a scientific concept. And so, you don’t see scientists or physicists nowadays worry about, “Well, is the, is a Higgs field material or immaterial?” Who cares? It’s just a label, right, that corresponds to some vague intuition that we have.
And so, scientists don’t worry about this anymore. So, one way to think about this is if you want to push scientists about what’s material or immaterial, physical or non-physical, they’ll say, “Look, whatever we propose in our theories for the purposes of scientific explanation, that’s part of the physical world. It’s part of…” So we’ll call it physical, let’s say, right?
This dichotomy between physical and non-physical is interesting intuitively, but doesn’t have any kind of scientific teeth. And so, it can create a lot of confusion, because now you ask yourself, – well the body is physical – sure, intuitively it is. How about information? Is it physical? I don’t know. My intuitions are maybe, maybe not. But then, as you say, to record it, you need some physical medium, right?
So, philosophers still worry about that question, but working scientists don’t worry about the question anymore. In fact, they don’t really worry much about the ontological status of the scientific concepts that they propose. The only difference, I think, the main difference between scientific concepts and intuitive ones, is that scientific concepts are much more – at least in the mature sciences; in psychology, sometimes you wonder – but they’re much more precise. They’re defined precisely, very often mathematically. There’s no ambiguity about what you mean, because when you say “material” now – okay, people have different intuitions.
But the thing that’s tricky, though, is the following. So, you notice that often we preserve the same word. So take the notion of the energy. We talk about energy in sort of everyday life – “Geoff has a lot of energy.” “The energy in the room is palpable.” So, we talk about it; we know what we mean. But physicists also talk about energy. They talk about kinetic energy, they talk about chemical energy. But what they mean is something quite different and much more precise. And that can create a lot of confusion because it’s the same word.
Geoff Mitelman: Right. And I think that’s a real challenge about the science and religion discussion, where I think there’s a responsibility, both of scientists and religious leaders – and people who identify as religious – of not overgeneralizing. And I think one of the things that I really feel strongly about is that religion shouldn’t be making scientific claims that are falsifiable, right? Like, I think that’s a big problem. And I also think that there are times when scientists make a claim that is outside of their wheelhouse.
Julien Musolino: Interesting. So, I’m curious if you have some examples in mind about that.
Geoff Mitelman: So, you know, I don’t know if he’s ever going to be on the show, but I find that, for example, Richard Dawkins’ work on science and evolution is brilliant. I think he’s one of the best educators about science and biology and evolution. I think that his theology is very weak. I’m not going to turn to him for theological questions because he’s not a theologian, right? And so, when he will make arguments about “God doesn’t exist,” the God that he’s talking about is also not the God that I accept and believe in. And so, it becomes too broad of a definition of “What the problems are of religion? What the problems are of God?” If you say, “This is the problem with this particular view of God,” then yes, I think that’s an accurate piece. But then saying, “…And therefore all of religion forever is, is poisoned” or – it might have been Hitchens who had said that.
Julien Musolino: Yeah, “religion [god] is not great.”
Geoff Mitelman: Right.
Julien Musolino: That was Hitchens’ book. Yeah.
Geoff Mitelman: Yeah, right. And I think that’s an element that is – where I see many scientists having tremendous humility about what they do and what they do know, and what they don’t know and what they claim and what they don’t claim. And actually, most scientists that I converse with have, I would say, so it’s neutral valence toward religion. There’s very rarely a very positive view of religion, but it’s not as vocal a negative view of religion as I think is perceived in American society right now. And I think that’s an important caveat, of being able to say, “This is the limit of what I’m arguing for.” And I want to make it clear that I’m not arguing – and I think you did this very nicely with The Soul Fallacy – like, “I am defining this in this way, and I’m not saying that all these other things are wrong; I’m saying this particular one definition is problematic, and here’s why.” And I think that’s an important step to be able to take.
Julien Musolino: No, I agree. I think in general that in, certainly in scientific discourse, but perhaps even all the more so in public discourse, precision is paramount. If you don’t have that, then as you said, you have all kinds of silly arguments that follow. People get upset about the wrong things. But it’s not easy, again, in part because of the facts of the notion of God. God means so many different things to so many different people. Are there common threads? Sure. But still, you can have God – so you hear people say, “God is love.” That’s a very different kind of claim than the claim that there’s some entity that created the earth in the last […] So it’s tricky. Yeah. The New Atheists – so you mentioned Dawkins, Sam Harris, the late Christopher Hitchens, Dennett – they’re interesting. I mean, I tend to agree with at least their conclusions – so either that a certain kind of – let’s say, a theistic God, I think, is very unlikely to exist. A deistic God, nobody has any idea. Now you want to God to be something else? Perfectly fine. That’s nothing wrong with that. If you want to call love “God,” then great, that’s perfectly fine.
By the way, Sean Carroll, who is someone who I think is really great that you might want to get on your show – you know who he is, right?
Geoff Mitelman: Yeah, very much so.
Julien Musolino: …has a talk that people can watch on YouTube called “Why God is Not Explanatory.” So again, he’s trying to not say that the notions are useless broadly, but simply that scientists don’t use them because they’re not explanatory – they don’t explain much. And he goes over the different types of God that one can come up with – God as a metaphor, God as a being that has causal powers. He’s a very good, deep thinker, and very clear. But the new atheists sort of – notice “new,” because of course atheism is old and they were… in fact, it’s kind of interesting, because I reread not too long ago, Burton Russell’s why I’m Not a Christian. It’s all there. So, I guess he was the “old atheist.” And now the New Atheists – they’ve come on the scene and have talked about these ideas. So, it’s interesting, because it’s true that the US is unusually religious – there are plenty of studies that show that – again, unusually religious given how wealthy we are. You have high levels of religiosity in countries that are, you know, less wealthy. But the U.S. is special – although it’s changing. The so-called “nones” are a category that’s sort of growing.
So, seeing people who are prominent sort of openly challenge religion kind of made a splash, because it hadn’t been done for a while. And they were, as you said, very vocal and they were… you know, is this something I would do? Not really. I mean, you might say, “Yeah, but you wrote a book called The Soul Fallacy.” Yeah, but the tone was different. But, I mean, they did what they did. I’m not sure I agree with the tone necessarily. But, you know, sometimes people do things for strategic reasons – so, you say something that’s very abrasive and provocative, and yeah, you kind of call attention to the cause. But look, they do what they want to do. Who am I to judge, you know?
Geoff Mitelman: Well, that’s why this was such a fun conversation, to be able to explore these questions in a nuanced and complicated, but still very deep, way. So, thank you so much for taking the time here this afternoon. If people want to follow you, they can follow you at Twitter. @JulienMusolino, correct? Your full name?
Julien Musolino: I don’t spend much time on social media. I do two things on social media, if I can say this very quickly. I love videos and pictures of cute animals, and I’m interested in good content, like somebody mentioning a great book. Very often I get book ideas. But that’s about it. I don’t get involved in debates, arguments. I don’t complain about, you know, academia – whatever. I don’t spill personal details like, “Oh, look, you know, my cat made a mess on the carpet. How dare she?” But, yeah, people want to follow me, given those caveats, they should feel free.
Geoff Mitelman: And to be able to read your book as well, which you can buy wherever you find books, “The Soul Fallacy.” And you can follow us at @SinaiSynapses, and you can follow me on Twitter. I’m @RabbiMitelman, and we will be taking a week off here as we’re getting ready for the July 4th weekend. But Professor Musolino, thank you so much for taking the time here this afternoon, and thank you all for joining us here for a wonderful conversation.
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