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.
Prelude to Second Half
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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
140 notes
Rutgers the State University of New Jersey
140 notes
Rencontrer les enseignants
Prof. Daniel M. OgilvieProfessor of Psychology
Psychology
Prof. Leonard W. HamiltonProfessor of Psychology
Department of Psychology
All right we're back.
We just viewed, and
I hope you were able to get a sense
of Professor Masolino's argument
that there's no evidence of a soul,
no evidence of a afterlife.
Now, the two lectures that you saw, also,
the students obviously in the course saw them,
and they had very strong reactions.
In terms of reactions, Masolino gets reactions.
Masolino gets reactions, and most of the students who
took this course not only this year, but in the past years when it's been offered,
they come in believing that they have a soul and it's gonna go somewhere.
It's gonna survive their death.
They come in believing that, and guess what?
They leave the course believing that.
The purpose of this course is not to bring
lots of student believers chew them up and spit them out as atheists.
The purpose of this course is to have people, students,
think about some of the assumptions that they have
with regards to the foundation of their world views, that's it.
We want them to think about, bring to mind,
some things they've been told, and some things that they've believed.
Maybe some things that they've believed on their own.
And look at them, become more conscious of them than ever have been in the past.
And in that regard this course has been immensely successful
because evaluation after evaluation after evaluation said this course
led me to think, resulted in my thinking about something.
And actually having the tools to think about something which makes that
the course to me very satisfying.
Now, when they say that I still believe there's a soul and an afterlife
came in believing, leave believing, they're not believing in the same thing.
They have, in some respects, transformed their belief system.
They're not necessarily as confident as they were
before after taking this course.
They're willing to look at the evidence and
sometimes say listen, the evidence is against my belief.
But guess what?
I have decided to continue to believe this anyway.
Even though it might be a figment of my parents imagination,
a figment of my imagination.
I wanna keep it because for the time being it makes me sleep well at night.
It makes me have this idea that there is in fact some day gonna be a family
reunion some place in the sky or in heaven.
Even though they think that's probably not gonna happen,
they consciously now say yeah
it's probably not gonna happen, but it's very pleasant for me to think of that.
And when I read these statements, and have a lot of paper,
lot of reading material, I think well, why not?
The person who's writing this doesn't strike me to be a dangerous person.
Doesn't seem to be somebody who's going to be a member of a radical religious gang
that are troublemakers that wanna go to war with people of their perspective.
So one of the things I've learned in this course is, yeah it's okay.
Some beliefs, soul and afterlife beliefs, yeah they're okay.
They keep people like gets them through the day.
I'm not gonna challenge that.
I will, however, challenge people who have a sense that they're right
and let's get the arms out, and
lets kill those people, who are not right or who are dangerous to us.
>> I think one of the things that this course seems to have done for
a lot of our students is to give them the tools and
maybe even the courage to let some of those ideas slip through that might
normally not have slipped through because they were just reflexively rejected.
And so we've been dealing with kinda
gradually working the case that the brain is in charge of our behavior.
And if we really are meat that thinks and meat that feels,
if we have the biological origins of this, then we can now be in the position,
which is where we're going next in the course, to begin to examine from that
perspective the origins of our thoughts and emotions and decisions.
So we actually know a lot in psychology about emotion though.
We know many of the complex mechanisms of the brain,
and indeed the entire body, of how we
both experience and express our emotions.
And one of the things that Dan mentioned before about Marvin
not being able to feel this is a very important aspect of this
because we have, as humans, the ability to
project ourselves forward in time and imagine various types of scenarios.
And when we do that we also imagine,
quite unconsciously how we're going to feel about that.
Should we engage in that particular pathway of our behavior?
And this is true regardless of the complexity or the details of it so
it can, we would have feelings if we were planning a murder or
if we were planning to buy a birthday card for somebody.
It's all the the same type of system.
So we now can really catalog, pretty much,
the parts of the brain that do that, how we make these types of decisions and
we can pretty firmly anchor that into a biological system.
Then we go on into what I referred to as the biology of thou shalt not.
Most of the tenets of religion are based on,
you can't do this, you can't do this, you can't do this, because if you do,
you're going to end up in a really bad place for a very long time.
So, we're not supposed to steal, we're not supposed to hurt other people, and so
on and so forth.
And irrespective of the particular religion that a culture might have,
or even cultures that don't have any religion,
what we see is a long and gradual process in humans of the development of
brain mechanisms that keep us from doing what are traditionally called bad things.
So these inhibitory brain systems, and one of the reasons why
children act childish is because they don't have the brain systems that allow
them to project themselves into the future in the same complex way that adults do.
So it takes 20 or 30 years for these systems to develop
and they do that quite independently of the particular
types of moral codes that they might be exposed to along the way.
Now all of this
information about the brain, controlling our behavior and
everything is now leading us into kind of a slippery slope,
where we have an increasing number of court cases and
defense arguments that my brain made me do it.
That because of some influence of a brain tumor or some influence of
some developmental trauma that caused the brain to develop in some aberrant way.
Or any of these other things can sometimes now be presented as a defense for
certain types of legal considerations.
Now we don't even come close to answering that in the course but
we do present some of the material, and
it's a good point of departure for discussions for these types of things.
So essentially, what this next section of the course is doing is presenting some
of the biological basis for what we have normally considered to be moral behaviors.
And these tend to develop
irrespective of the moral code that might be within the culture.
So what happens is that at the very least knowing what the brain does,
it gives us a chance to reexamine the origin of our
thoughts and our behaviors in a way that we couldn't before.
>> And near the end of this next unit.
I talk a little bit, Len mentioned the traveling self, but
that's the self that we project out in the future.
And in our society, probably all societies they look at that as the ideal self,
how would you ideally like to be, how would you ideally like to turn out,
what would you like next year to be like?
I reverse it at one point, the lecture is about me reversing that argument that
the ideal self is so important in life satisfaction
by coming up with this concept several years ago called the undesired stuff.
So I guess it's a matter of pride that
I announce that I am the discoverer of the undesired self.
>> [LAUGH] >> Some reputation that leaves me with.
But it's interesting to me that the in our culture we think about
reducing the distance between ourselves now and
our ideal selves as a kind of compass, maybe a bit more moral.
Or you get closer and closer to what we think other people or
what we ourselves think we should be, but
the real player in this is really the undesired self and that is me at my worst.
It's the distance between you now and being at your worst that really
makes a difference in terms of of life satisfaction.
This gets involved in the main topic of the course in this way.
And that is when people are out of jobs, particularly when young people are out
of jobs, when they don't have roles, I mean when you think about ideal
self that is largely in roles, when those roles are not available that's
the time when they're right people are right from being radicalized.
There's no positions.
They can't get married, theres no roles,
they were promised roles and when that happens,
they're very willing to join a mass movement, any kind of movement,
particularly in this instance a religious movement because that gives them a home,
that gives them companionship, that gives them a renewed purpose.
So I continue to keep my eye on the availability of jobs and
when they're not available the availability of roles, when they're not
available that can be a very, very dangerous situation for
radical religious perspectives.
>> And along those same lines, this course, our experience with this course
has been entirely with young people, young college aged people.
So it would be really interesting to see how a more general population,
in particularly maybe a senior population looking back,
will view some of these issues.
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