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.
Internalized Beliefs I 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
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Rutgers the State University of New Jersey
137 notes
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Internalized Beliefs I
Rencontrer les enseignants
Prof. Daniel M. OgilvieProfessor of Psychology
Psychology
Prof. Leonard W. HamiltonProfessor of Psychology
Department of Psychology
Professor Sheldon Solomon is a tough act to follow.
First of all, I look like crap in short pants.
>> [LAUGH] >> He's got great legs.
And he flashes them around in the middle of the winter way up in northern New York.
He actually taught a seminar for
adults a couple years ago and in the winter and
as a gift, they took up a collection and bought him short pants, I mean long pants.
I think he threw them away because that's his outfit.
As I say, it's a tough act to follow because
well rehearsed words just flow out of his mouth.
But I say [BLEEP] it.
>> [LAUGH] >> I learned that from him.
>> [LAUGH] >> That's one of his words.
The show's gotta go on.
I want to tell you a little bit about psychology, the discipline of psychology.
And I'll reflect on the way the discipline is divided up at Rutgers.
We've got a good psychology department, and at the graduate level,
it's divided up into four areas.
There's neuroscience.
They keep on changing their name, but I'm stuck with the old one.
Neuroscience.
Professor Hamilton is in that discipline.
Look at neurons, how the brain is wired, how neurons fire, when the do fire,
they don't, look at neurotransmitters.
It's a whole discipline in and about, of itself.
Then there's cognitive psychology.
Cognitive psychologists, they do lots of things.
They look at learning and memory.
Sensation and perception.
How do we perceive things?
What are the various processes involved in making decisions?
And these areas aren't too separate from each other.
So people in cognitive psychology gotta make use,
some use of people's work in brain science and neuroscience.
Then there's clinical psychology.
And clinical psychology is you know, psychopathology.
You learn about psych,
most clinical psychologists they want to have a practice.
They want to cure people.
They want to be involved in the clinical domain of treating people.
At Rutgers, mostly it's, they take a behaviorous approach.
In other words, the idea is you learn to not see things correctly,
or you learn to feel bad about yourself and the process
they get engaged in is how can you unlearn that and learn new skills.
It's very much a reinforcement tradition of
behaviorism and they don't deal much with psychoanalytic psychology.
You can pick that up in other institutions.
And then finally there's social psychology.
And social psychology focus is on how do other people influence you?
Or how do people influence each other?
It's a very, very large and robust discipline at this point.
Particularly at Rutger's, we have a lot of people who do really,
really good work in that area.
We used to have a developmental psychology program.
So, we had five areas.
But that vanished under the leadership of one of our leaders years ago.
And so,
the developmental psychologists now have been dispersed within these areas.
The brain develops, language develops, that's part of cognitive psychology.
Psychpatholgy develops and people develop socially.
People have asked me, well, what are you?
Hey, hey, what are you?
I'm a personality psychologist.
And it's really, really good
to be a personality psychologist because you don't have to be a member of anything.
There is a field called personality psychology which I don't
subscribe to much.
It's mostly to look at traits and how traits develop and
inheritance in traits and what traits get you in trouble,
what traits are useful, particularly in this society.
And the cultural relationship between culture and traits.
Not real interesting to me, although I respect the people who are in it.
So what area do I belong to that I just described?
They put me usually in social psychology, because there's no other place for me.
But I would be probably just as comfortable in some of the areas
if they would have me.
So it's a good life.
I'm not a member of any particular tribe.
Remember when we talked about tribes?
Although they tried to squeeze me into the general domain of personality psychology.
But I like what Sheldon Solomon said about his
discipline and Becker's definition of what he does.
He looks at why people do what they do, when they do that.
That fits me perfectly.
I look at why did people do what they do, when they do it.
It's been a good life.
And, particularly, I like to operate in the gaps.
I know what people are studying but I always look at what aren't they studying?
What is not being given attention?
So for quite awhile I looked at a very complicated matter of the mapping,
the internal representations of people's
representations of themselves with other people.
We made some progress on that but the funding fell through and
the technology was heavy duty.
And Mike, one of my colleagues who was working with me retired and
so, I couldn't carry the load myself.
So I turned attention to something else that was not being studied.
I called it the undesired self.
The undesired self.
This is at a time when the discipline of social psychology and
personality psychology were obsessed with the ideal self.
You've heard about the ideal self.
You can generate you're own ideal self, an image of how you'd like to be in
one year or five years, into your career or into your marriage.
You have images of what like that would be, and
you brush them up so that it looks pretty good.
Really attractive.
The literature was flooded with the discrepancy between how I am now and
how I like to be and want to be in the future.
Was nice.
But I looked at it and I said, well,
there's got to be something else going on here.
And I call it the undesired self.
How you don't want to be.
And the difference between the ideal self and
the undesired self was the ideal self, for people your age,
and usually you're the subjects in these studies, is the future self.
I'd like to be, my ideal self is just right around the corner.
Or give me ten years.
I gotta get through medical school first, and then an internship, then I'll have my,
then the ideal self will be there.
The undesired self, however, you've already experienced it.
You know what it's like to be in a bad mood, to feel as though nobody likes you.
That you have no friends or you did something really embarrassing.
It's an experienced self, so I started a study in the discrepancy between
me now and me at my worst, instead of me now and me as my ideal self.
We'll get to a lecture on that in a couple of weeks, I think.
Then I got interested in fantasies of flight.
Now, who's interested in fantasy of flight?
It's not something that is
terribly important, but it was an interesting phenomenon to me.
And Professor Solomon mentioned it the other day.
He and his colleagues picked up some ideas from that book.
And verified the way they massage it into something you have to do for
to your management.
They were very nice, but they made me a co-author of that paper.
I still don't have any idea what they did.
It makes no sense to me whatsoever.
But it's interesting, because I was able to pick up, do some life studies.
We did life study of J.M. Barrie.
J.M. Barrie is author of Peter Pan, plus lots of other things.
But Peter Pan is his most notable work.
You all know about Peter Pan.
And I looked into, well, what did Peter Pan mean to him?
What psychologically was being expressed by
Peter Pan from his own life and his own experience?
I had a lot of fun with that.
But that ran its course.
People said,
well when are you going to come out with your second book on fantasies of flight?
I'm not!
I said everything I had to say about it, but then I found something else
that was much more important than fantasies of flight, much more, maybe,
significant to look at, that nobody was looking at, and that was soul beliefs.
That led to this course, Causes and Consequences of Soul Beliefs.
And part because I noticed that almost everybody has a belief about the soul.
Almost everybody that I knew at that time,
their lives were guided by their beliefs about the soul.
Particularly, their beliefs about the soul
at being a candidate for either good place or a bad place after life.
Very important topic.
Nobody was studying it.
Why did it become such a taboo topic?
And that's the advantage I had by not being strongly affiliated
with any particular tradition or tradition of thinking.
And fortunately, in my background it wasn't
as important as it is now to identify yourself in a specific
area, specializing in a specific topic within that area.
I'm really sorry to see that happen.
People feel the need to specialize too early.
So I'm a big advocate of general education.
Of arts and sciences.
I really recommend that you take
full advantage of what's offered here at Rutgers in different
disciplines, and nibble at some of these disciplines.
In part because students come to me and say,
okay, this is where I am, what should I do next?
Because, what should I do next?
And then after that, what next?
And I'm thinking, should I really tell them?
What I would tell them is a lot of it's luck.
Lot of where you go it's just luck.
But it's not just luck, it's having
the background to take advantage of the opportunities that are there.
Of opportunities that just crop up that most of us miss.
We miss opportunities everyday.
Remember yesterday, for some of you?
You have a friend who looked really good, done something different with her hair,
or his hair, or he just got a haircut and you didn't say a thing.
You didn't say, hey you look good.
No, passed up that opportunity.
And that's kind of a minor opportunity.
It could have been a major opportunity for that person, but
if you have a good background and you look around, you're going to find
opportunities that would be staring in your face and you wouldn't recognize it.
If you weren't trained enough to sort of look around and
take advantages of opportunities.
Particularity of opportunities to be of value to other people.
Okay.
I'm going to go back to that.
We're going to talk about the anatomy of internalized beliefs.
And this does have a lot to do with our beliefs about the soul.
This is not off topic.
And it's like a rock.
I will elaborate on that in a few minutes.
Darwin.
Nor should we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation
of a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and
perhaps inherited effect on their brains not fully developed.
And this is the important part.
That it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God as for
a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear of snakes.
He's saying that over time a belief in
God becomes like, instinctive.
Well, we're not so much concerned in this course about belief in God,
although it's a very prominent part of, in many instances,
our belief in the soul and the afterlife of the soul.
They're generally connected.
But you notice we don't talk very much in this course about God.
We talk about some beliefs, and
that's our primary focus of attention.
So, we're wondering here, is Darwin suggesting a God gene?
Well, probably not, because genes hadn't even been discovered
at that point in the history of these ideas.
We might be predisposed, he might have noticed a predisposition
to believing in God because so many people did believe in God, and still do.
Is he suggesting that we have inherited an inclination to believe in God?
And he probably is, but let's go back to quote for a moment.
He talks about constant inculcation of a belief in God.
For those of you who were born and
raised in a particular religious orientation,
I doubt that your inclination of that belief was constant.
I suggest it was probably timely.
The lessons were timely,
based on maybe some questions that you ask rather than constant inculcation.
I doubt that anybody sat down with you day after day,
to give you religious lessons.
They were more prestigious in that regard.
Okay, this is suggesting that we have inherited an inclination.
Maybe. In modern science, that would mean
that ancient men and women who believed in God were more fit.
Than disbelievers.
You know how that works.
They were more fit than disbelievers, and that is fit to pass on their genes.
You understand that part.
They survived and thereby passed on predispositions to believe.
It's not an easy question to answer, it's not an easy area to get into, but
we have dabbled into that in various ways, various readings, and various lectures.
But Darwin also spoke about brains not fully developed.
Brains not fully developed and part of the mission of this course,
is to delve into the issue of how brains not fully developed become.
Become fully developed.
That's part of the neuroscience.
The great thing about this course for me is that it's interdisciplinary in nature.
So we're learning, along with lots of other things, how the brain develops.
Okay.
We're born with certain instincts.
You don't have to learn how to have a startled reaction as an infant.
If you're willing to do this, go over to St Peters, one of the local hospitals and
go to the nursery.
And, don't let the nurse catch you.
Al lright, I mean, yeah go in, I mean, this is, no don't do it.
But if you were to do it, this is what you do.
You go to the nursery and you know, there's lots of babies there and
you open the door and you slam it and you know what, they all go like that.
And nobody sat down and told them that that would be normal.
It's instinct.
And the startle reaction, same thing.
Startle reaction.
You don't have to learn that.
Sucking reflex.
When an infant's born, nobody sits down to say you know,
to get fed you've gotta suck.
They're suckers from the beginning.
[SOUND] A baby's like this, that's what they'll do.
They'll move their lips over there and start sucking.
We're hard wired to suck, and that's how infants survive.
And then we have learned behaviors.
I mentioned this before.
I have never stuck a fork into an electrical outlet,
because I was told not to do that.
I said you'll fry your brains out, or what ever the lesson was,
so I learnt, I won't do that.
Sunscreen, you get Basal Cell Carcinoma, on your nose.
I mean, some of you notice that I have this thing on my nose.
I used to tell people that's because my mother shot me with a pistol when I was.
But no, no.
It was basal cell.
And you don't want that to happen, so I put sunscreen on a lot.
We learn language.
And guess what?
We don't all learn the same language.
We have a predisposition to learn language, but
we learn the language of our culture, of our family.
We learn to believe in Santa Claus, some of us.
Most people here, probably it's not an unfamiliar word.
Believe in Santa Claus.
And many people believe fervently in Santa Claus until somebody says,
well, I hope I'm not breaking the news to anybody here, that, think about it.
He couldn't possibly visit every home in your neighborhood,
let alone every home in the world.
Many of us have been taught to believe in God.
We weren't born believing in God.
We were probably born with a predisposition
to believe in supernatural events.
Other than being born with some instincts, babies are born,
I'm going to show you some babies here.
Those are babies.
We're going to see these babies from time to time.
But guess what.
They're born stupid.
Every one of them.
>> [LAUGH] >> That one particularly.
Babies are born stupid.
It's a harsh reality.
We'll get back to that a little bit later.
But they can quickly learn,
normally born with some instincts.
But they're born with the capacity to learn.
You learn about Santa Claus.
Cause yeah, people tell you Santa,
you better be good because Santa Claus, you know, is keeping the list.
If you're really good, you'll get something good.
If you're not bad,
you're going tp get an old burned out sweater that you picked out of the trash.
So we learned about God.
And we learned about God's love for us and how he wants us to be good.
And there's some similarities between Santa Claus and God.
They're both adult males, usually.
It's hard to depict God, because there's various versions of it.
There's some famous depictions of God and
some people say that's probably not, it's probably a woman.
Or that can't be, it's probably just a force.
Any rate.
They're bearded, sometimes.
They know everything about you.
That's one thing that we're told that they have in common.
Usually you don't say, Well, God and Santa have this thing in common.
They're clearly kept separate.
And they're omnipresent.
They're always around.
Not in person, but Santa Claus is keeping a list and
if he's keeping a list then he must know something about what you do.
He knows when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake.
He knows when you've been good or bad, so be good for goodness sake.
You know that, yes!
They're omnipresent, but they different terms of omnipotence.
Omnipotence.
Very different.
Get a new iPod from Santa for being good, versus life for
ever after in a very nice place courtesy of God.
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