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 2.
Biology of Thou Shalt Not (Part A)
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En provenance du cours de Rutgers the State University of New Jersey
Soul Beliefs: Causes and Consequences - Unit 2: Belief Systems
131 notes
Rutgers the State University of New Jersey
131 notes
À partir de la leçon
The Biology of Thou Shalt Not
Rencontrer les enseignants
Prof. Daniel M. OgilvieProfessor of Psychology
Psychology
Prof. Leonard W. HamiltonProfessor of Psychology
Department of Psychology
We had a little lower bar for news back in the late 1970s and
this particular quote I've look on a lot of women with lust.
I've committed adultery in my heart many times.
This is something that God recognizes I will do and
I have done it and God forgives me for it.
This was in a Playboy magazine interview with then President Jimmy Carter.
And it raised quite the stir across the nation
that our President would have such thoughts floating through his mind.
Well my guess was that the President wasn't the only one having such
thoughts floating through his mind at the time.
I suspect all of our presidents have at one time or another.
But it's kind of an interesting
introduction to what we're going to talk about today.
Talking about the things that go through our minds.
How they get filtered, and how we can begin
to get a little different view of ourselves and
our behavior by looking at some of the brain mechanisms
of the thoughts that go through our minds.
We have a lot of rules for good behavior and we've seen them coming up over and
over again as we've gone through the course.
And obviously most of you people have been exposed to them for
as long as you can remember.
And I find it kind of interesting from a scientific perspective
that many of these rules that we have are not so
much rules for good behavior, which would be one way of doing it.
But they are rules for things that we should not do.
Thou shalt not do this, thou shalt not do that.
So, they're rules for trying to keep us away from bad behavior.
And certainly one of the more famous sets of such rules, are the Ten Commandments,
that Moses supposedly brought down from the mound.
And my reading of them, obviously in English translation,
is that seven of the ten, at least,
are thou shalt not, shalt not do this, shalt not do that.
And Dennett,
the philosopher whom you've seen and heard about on numerous times throughout
this course, has some interesting perspectives about that.
Because we've talked about a lot of beliefs
that God is all-seeing and
all-powerful.
Even more so than Santa Clause knows when your sleeping, knows when your awake,
knows what your thinking.
So that kind of puts a big umbrella over our behavior.
That not only do we have to be good, but
maybe we ought to also be thinking good, as it were,
and to avoid these things, such as President Carter
admitted to avoid these things in his heart, he said.
Kind of interesting, not in his brain, but in his heart he had these thoughts.
Little children have a lot of ideas
about the watchers over their behavior.
And I don't know whether you people were much exposed to Mister Rogers or not.
But Mister Rogers spent a good deal of time.
And I really liked that show.
And I was sorry when my children grew up, and
it became embarrassing not to watch Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street anymore,
because I think they're both very good shows that
speak directly and appropriately to little children.
But, a couple of themes in Mr. Rogers came
through the show over and over again, and
one of them was that you didn't have to worry about being sucked down the drain.
Because that was not going to happen when you flush the toilet or
when the plug is taken out of the bath tub.
And the other is that he kind of made a point
on several occasions that he didn't
say it like this but, what goes on inside your head can stay inside your head.
That other people can't really read your mind,
but of course we can read minds to a certain extent,
and that's one of the powers of all of this.
But in one of Dennett's books
he spends a good bit of time talking about
behavior that we as individuals engage in.
Behaviors that we do in privacy not always in privacy alone.
Sometimes it can be in the privacy of a group
that we know that mom is not watching.
And he actually uses the example of masturbation but
there would be many examples of behaviors that devoutly
religious people will sometimes engage in, in front of God,
if they believe that God is watching their behavior,
things that they would not dream of doing in front of mom.
And so he finds this a little bit curious,
that people can assign these powers to God,
always watching, all-knowing.
And yet mom who's not exactly always watching and all-knowing,
but supposedly would not do something in front of them.
So one of the questions is why do we care what other people might think?
But the other question is are we naturally prepared to not do things.
Are we naturally prepared to not do things?
And I know this is kind of a complicated.
Double negative type of thing and I can assure you that I appreciate
the difficulty of thinking about things that have a not in them,
because I spent a good deal of my professional research
life doing research on inhibition on not doing things.
And it will wrap your brain in knots when you try to talk about it intelligently or
try to write about it intelligently,
because it's difficult to keep track of these things.
And we see a lot of those types of things in the various laws and
propositions that we vote on every year or two or four.
However, often these things come up.
I think in California, they come up every two weeks,
where they have some kind of a [LAUGH] proposition about not doing something.
And you sit there and read it and read it and then you read the interpretive
statement and you're still not sure that you understand,
whether the not means you should vote for it or against it.
So these are difficult things and I'm kind of apologizing in advance for
some of the concepts that are going to be a little slippery to
hang onto as we go forward in today's class.
So we're going to be talking,
mostly about something that's technically referred to
in the scientific literature as behavioral inhibition.
And the formal definition of that is withholding
a response when a behavior is either punished or
no longer rewarded, so you can think about that for a little bit.
Some things, some behaviors that we engage in,
that we may have engaged in as children or
you may be engaging in them as adults and
that behavior is punished.
And yet, we continue to do that behavior that would
be a failure to withhold a response in the face of punishment.
And another version of that, another whole arena
where these things can happen is that we may have been,
for some period of time, engaging in behavior or
a set of behaviors that are rewarded.
We do this and we get a reward.
We do this and we get a reward.
And now, either gradually or all of a sudden perhaps,
the reward is no longer there.
And yet, we continue engaging in the behavior
unless we are able to withhold That response.
In some cases, these are just remarkably simple,
like putting money into a vending machine out here and pushing the button.
We expect to get something when we put money in the machine and
push the button and if we find the machine,
that is jammed in some way and is no longer working.
Most of us, only have to put money in the machine.
I don't know, maybe 15 or 20 times before we stop doing it.
Well, no it's a lot quicker than than.
We put the money in once or twice at most and so we respond readily
to those very obvious expected contingencies in the environment and
withhold the response and it all seems quite natural and
quite simple, because it is in simple situations like that.
But Pavlov was really the first to see
inhibition as a basic element of our behavior,
as a basic element of our behavior.
And as you all know, he did a lot of work with dogs in his early experiments.
He's one of the best known scientists in history.
I suspect by name recognition,
he ranks right up there with Einstein as a famous scientist.
You don’t have to go to college to know about Pavlov and his salivating dogs.
We actually have a dog in class today, I believe,
a seeing eye dog in this particular case, but
dogs are very good subjects for experiments because they're smart.
They're domesticated, we are familiar with their behavior.
So Pavlov sort of naturally fell into the study of dogs.
And one of the things that he realized early on,
that he had to deal with was not just the positive
aspects of this behavior as we might label it.
Hear a bell, have food put in the mouth.
Hear a bell, have food put in the mouth.
And now all of a sudden, wow, this bell is really something nifty,
because it is a signal for some positive thing in the environment.
And it's very possible that in Pavlov's first experiment
of ringing the bell and giving the dog food, its very possible
that that was the absolute first dog in the history of dogdom.
The first dog would salivate in response to hearing a bell,
because it only makes sense if that relationship has been established.
So that was a very important discovery that Pavlov
made that we can make a brand new evaluation,
if you will of some, otherwise, neutral stimulus
in the environment based on our experience.
And Pavlov didn't talk directly much about this, but
we're really making an emotional response to things that have been
associated with something else in our environment.
And he and later other brain scientists who were
studying different things, very soon had to make
the important assessment really of our behavior and
of the activity of the brain right down to the level
of the activity of individual neurons in the brain.
They almost never work only in one direction,
that they all have a plus and a minus.
Now you can imagine a car that only had a motor and an accelerator.
It would be kind of a dangerous car, because it's kind of good to have
not only something that will move the car forward, but something that will stop it.
And not only that, it's also useful to have a car that will go backwards and
something that will stop it.
And so these kinds of opposing systems, positive and
negative, positive and negative are really critical
to the way organisms and their nervous system operate.
And this basic principle that we can see in individual nerve cells inside
the brain is a principle that applies to our most complex behavior.
As well.
It's a theme, a biological theme that runs through our behavior.
I've listed a few examples here.
An unruly horse.
This is an old picture, I don't know exactly how old it is.
But it was back in the early days of electricity.
And the realization that you can
have immediate punishment of some inappropriate behavior by an unruly horse,
and get it to stop that behavior.
The next diagram there shows a picture of a box of rat poison.
Rats have been companions, if you will,
of humans throughout most of our human hood and
rat hood, and so it's been a constant battle to try to get rid of rats so
they don't eat our storage of food.
One way of doing that is to poison them.
But almost inevitably there will be some small segment of the population
of rats that will eat some of the food, but not enough of it to be poisoned.
It makes them sick and
their brain then shifts, so they don't eat that food again.
So it's very difficult to develop a procedure that will get rid of rats by
poisoning because they shy away from the food in the future.
Getting a little bit more experimental here.
You can teach a rat a very simple task walk up the stem of this maze,
turn left you get a reward, if you turn right you don't.
And within a few trials, you will have a rat that will just go
racing down the aisle and skid around the corner to the left to get the food.
Can learn that in just a few presentations.
Now, you test the rat's inhibition, and
you can do this in a couple of different ways.
You can either stop giving the food altogether, or
you can switch it to the other side.
And see how long it takes the rat to make that change in behavior to withhold
this previously rewarded response, and it takes a while.
It usually takes longer than it did to learn the task in the first place,
to learn to get rid of that response and maybe even reverse it.
So these are the types of measures
of inhibition that have made their way into the laboratory.
We have some other examples of that and Pavlov and other researchers
have seen this in many different situations outside of the laboratory.
But it's easily demonstrated within the laboratory,
too, that if you have learned to do something, and
now that something is no longer rewarded, or it's actually punished.
We still have within us that urge, if you will,
the power, the motivation to do that initial response.
And it's easily recognized in speed events like a 100 yard dash
or a swimming event that's a length or two of the field.
So you have the athletes in the block there.
They're ready to go.
So they have two very strong competing behaviors going on in there.
One of them is saying, go, go, go, go, go, and the other one is saying,
wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, because you don't want a false start.
And it's very easy to disinhibit that response,
that the crowd has to be quiet because if you have the runners waiting for
the signal to go and somebody sneezes or somebody yells, they're gone because you
have taken away their active withholding of that response.
So we have a bunch of examples here of behavioral inhibition.
We have developed procedures for testing those in the laboratory.
Once we have done that,
we have recognized the importance of them in our everyday behavior.
And.
Can then go on to study it in the laboratory.
Hold on, can any of this stuff be relevant to soul beliefs?
Well certainly
during the years that I spent studying this,
I would have to say that I never once thought about the term soul
beliefs and that had to be something that I would learn from professor Ogilvy.
And the importance of this and
how it kind of draws a lot of other things together here.
But I need to make the case for this,
that these laboratory studies of behavioral inhibition have something to do
with soul beliefs and with our belief systems in general.
So suppose we can make the case based on solid scientific evidence
that we have brain mechanisms of behavioral inhibition, and
that these brain mechanisms are among the most recent and
most sophisticated systems that we have in our brains.
And suppose we could make the case again based on evidence that these
behaviors mediate the defining features of mature and
socially acceptable behavior.
Good behavior, behavior that doesn't stray out of line.
Keeps us from doing the thou shalt nots.
And that these may lie at the core of what we have recently
termed emotional intelligence.
And that they importantly provide a filter,
a biological filter between right and wrong.
I think Professor Mussolino, in his last lecture,
made a very clear and eloquently stated point about observable facts,
facts that have been observable back in the day of Pavlov.
Facts that were observable back in the day of Descartes,
facts that were observable back in the day of Aristotle, and probably long before.
Facts that stay the same.
There are things that people and other creatures do.
But our explanations for those have evolved and become more sophisticated so
now we have a better way of understanding some of these things.
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