My friend and colleague Neil Levy has inaugurated the first edition of a journal devoted to a new field, Neuroethics, the first edition of which is available to all for free here.
Neil has a convincing introductory editorial, arguing that advances in neurobiology call into question and in other ways illuminate the nature of ethical reasoning. In particular it challenges the notion of personal responsibility, and indeed of personal identity in action. Moreover it can along with other new disciplines such as comparative primatology illuminate traditional philosophical topics such as the nature of morality.
As Inigo Montoya said, there is too much to explain, so I will pick out one comment made by Neil en passant: "it is possible that substance dualism is the innate default view of human beings", and riff off that.
Substance dualism is the view that the universe is composed of two stuffs: the physical and the mental (or spiritual, etc.), and that these comprise minds. The claim this is the default view of humanity is often made. I wonder if it is true, though.
Exhibit one: early Hebrew doctrines. Prior to the Hellenisation of the middle east with the Ptolemies and the Exile of the Jews in Babylon, the default view that can be reconstructed (say, from Ezekiel) is that humans are physical objects which have the "breath of life" (ruach) in them, and if they are resurrected as Ezekiel said, you need to reconstruct them as physical objects. The notion of a bodiless spirit is absurd to them.
Likewise, the notion of a spirit is not found in every society. The distinction between body and mind is one that seems to have, largely one or a few originations in the history of civilisation, and which spreads with the major world religions and philosophical traditions. I suspect it arose with Zoroastrianism or some similar religion, and in the Indus Valley, or in one that influenced the other.
Consequently, Europeans, when they encountered other societies such as the Plains Indians or the Mesoamerican city states, tended to reinterpret what was said in terms of the substance dualist categories, and ascribed spirit where something that might have been more physical was conceived of. For example, ruach is a physical thing, but back-interpretation by Hellenised Jews and Christians made it a synonym for a Plato-like spirit (which he might well have acquired directly or indirectly from Indus Valley religious influences).
What does seem to be pretty well the default view is that animate things are distinct from inanimate things in virtue of some motivating force (which is the view of psuche, translated as "soul", that Aristotle had; distinct from pneuma, meaning "breath" just like ruach, which is the specific force that animates bodies and distinguishes living from nonliving things). Modern work, such as that described in Susan Gelman's The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought, shows that children naively expect different behaviours of living objects than of nonliving objects. But this does not commit them to being substance dualists (nor, I think, is the sense of "essentialism" used by Gelman and others the same thing that is meant when discussing Aristotle's essentialism).
In any case, I am pleased this journal is about, and wish it well. Here's the first issue table of contents:
- Introducing Neuroethics - Neil Levy
- Neuroethics and the Problem of Other Minds: Implications of Neuroscience for the Moral Status of Brain-Damaged Patients and Nonhuman Animals - Martha J. Farah
- Neuroimaging and Inferential Distance - Adina L. Roskies
- Neuroenhancement of Love and Marriage: The Chemicals Between Us - Julian Savulescu and Anders Sandberg
- Psychopharmacological Enhancement - Walter Glannon
- Neuroethics and Nanoethics: Do We Risk Ethical Myopia? - Sheri Alpert
- Will Working Mothers’ Brains Explode? The Popular New Genre of Neurosexism - Cordelia Fine
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Thank John. That looks like a cool journal.
Wouldn't that rather be nefesh than ruach? ruach is and was rather a storm or a roar, quite distinct from "breath" even if conceptually related.
But I certainly agree. It is especially puzzling how "god's roar" ("Der Braus Gottes" in Buber/Rosenzweig's translation, a made-up word from German "brausen"/to roar which has no genuine noun form except the verbal noun), ended up as a hovering spirit!
^_^J.
I'm not a Hebrew scholar, but the term is indeed ruach. It is perhaps used of the breath of God because it is a mighty wind, or something similar.
I can't find the link I was hoping for, but the lack of ancient Jewish dualism was recently promoted in Robert Alter's book of Psalms.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/10/01/071001crbo_books…
He notes that nefesh is usually translated as "soul" but is literally breath or life. (He also sometimes translates it at throat). This radically alters the meanings from other translations and removes the heavy dualism in the psalms.
On the neuroethics perspective, it will be interesting to see if this can be better than the good Dana Foundation books or if it's just providing a place for same people to put the same articles into a peer-reviewed journal. There is already significant overlap is authors/editors
http://www.dana.org/news/danapressbooks/detail.aspx?id=5478
Thanks for publicising the journal, John. I'm actually involved in some experimental work which is relevant, though it will test only if dualism is the default view in a group of (Western) subjects. Paul Bloom suggests that dualism is innate in *Descartes' Children*, though I think his evidence is susceptible to an alternative interpretation. On the methodological point (which you make implicitly) I agree entirely: we ought to be looking at the historical and ethnographic evidence in order to answer this kind of question, given that the development of any phenotypic trait will always depend upon environmental input, so that innateness (assuming we can make sense of it; had I been writing for a philosophy of biology audience I might have used different terms) cannot be tested directly.
So: the historical evidenece...I am aware of the claims that the ancient Hebrews were not dualists. The claim seems to rest on their view that destruction of the body would destroy the person, so that no resurrection would be possible. Yet God itself seems capable of appearing in different forms (eg, burning bushes), which suggests dualism to me. Here are two possibilities: the view that the animating force is distinct from the body is innate; the view that the animating force is seperable from the body is innate. I take it you are committed to (1) but not (2)? If the difference is just that the animating force is only conceptually distinct, but not (necessarily) capable of surviving the destruction of the body, I would argue that this is dualistic enough to count.
BSCI: the papers in the book to which you linked themselves mainly appeared in peer-reviewed journals.
I'm surprised Semir Zeki wasn't asked to contribute.
John and bsci (thanks for the link!), that was indeed was I was thinking of. The problem is not only that nefesh and ruach have been totally altered by Western metaphysics, but have also been "metaphysicized" into a different direction by Jewish mystics. Both nefesh and ruach are solidly "physio-physical" concepts in the Tanakh, and the translation of nefesh as "throat," or rather nasal tract, and of ruach as storm/wind are actually pretty decent. Dualism came late to dinner indeed. In modern Hebrew, though, you'd be hard put to find the physical connotation of nefesh in a dictionary, while that of ruach is alive and kicking.
But I don't want to sidetrack too far here, this new magazine is really an interesting read.
^_^J.
Neil, sorry, it slipped my mind: most of these "dualistic" signifiers are linguistically (or rather semantically) induced and break down in ancient Hebrew texts, for all practical purposes. One has to always be aware of the fact that our whole descriptive repertoire is so thoroughly formed by Western metaphyhsics (Plato) that it is virtually impossible to read/write/voice/translate any utterance about non-dualistic concepts without having duality surreptitiously slip in again through the backdoor.
And I don't think you should mix the "nature of god" with human nature in the Tanakh. With respect to the former, the different textual strata differ massively in this respect. (Yet I personally don't think there's dualism involved either, but I have to admit I'll have to ponder your burning bush argument for a while.)
^_^J.