THE GOOD SAMARITAN
Being able to understand others as having goals is a powerful mind-reading tool. It allows us to interpret other people’s actions as being purposeful and also allows us to anticipate what they might do next. Consider the following sequence of events as if watching a silent movie. Our intrepid climber approaches the steep hill and begins his ascent of the slope. Halfway up the hill, the climber comes to a level where he stops momentarily before resuming his journey. On top of the hill, another person is waiting. Suddenly this other person charges down the hill, blocking our climber’s progress and forcing him down the remaining slope with repeated shoving. What’s going on here? Is this about a land dispute? Or maybe they are dueling for the hand of the maiden who dwells at the top of the hill? What most people assume is that there is a clash of interest and that the two are not friends. In another version of the movie, instead of hindering our climber’s ascent, another individual comes along and helps the climber up the slope. Again, a fertile imagination could construct a feasible explanation. Is he a Good Samaritan who helps climbers up the hill?
Actually, the two events are computer animations used by Yale psychologists to investigate the origins of human morality.24 The various players in these mini-dramas – the climber, his assailant, and the Good Samaritan – are in fact geometric shapes with eyes simply moving around a computer screen. But when you watch these sequences, you cannot help but see them as purposeful individuals with goals and personality. At work here is the anthropomorphism that we described in the last chapter. Even simple geometric shapes seem alive if they move by themselves, taking paths that seem purposeful. Our anthropomorphism endows the shapes with humanlike qualities of mental states. By hijacking the rules for the movements of living things and applying them to objects, we effectively make them come alive.
Just like you or me, the twelve-month-old babies watching these sequences also judge the nature of each shape as good or bad based on the way it behaves. Long before we have a chance to teach infants about good and bad people, infants are making these judgements by simply watching social interactions. First, the climber is seen as purposeful with the desire to reach the summit. The assailant who forces the climber back down the hill is nasty, whereas the one who helps the climber is nice. We know this because if the helper or hinderer suddenly changes behaviour, babies notice the switch. Babies know something about the nature of the individual players. Not only that, but when later offered a replica toy of the helper or hinderer to play with, almost all babies choose the helper doll. Babies prefer to play with the Good Samaritan.25
If, after pushing the climber downhill, the hinderer is painted so that it now looks like the Good Samaritan, babies are not fooled by the change in outward appearances. They know that deep down it is still a nasty piece of work because they are surprised if it suddenly starts helping the climber again. Babies know that appearances may be deceptive and that being bad is a deep personality flaw. As the saying goes, ‘A leopard can’t change it spots.’
SECRET AGENTS
Whether it’s heroic geometric shapes, animated toys, or contingent Russian shapkas, mind design forces us to treat such things as if they have purpose and goals. Our natural tendency to assume that people’s behaviours are motivated by minds allows us to predict what they might do next. This is what Dan Dennett calls adopting ‘the intentional stance’. When we adopt the intentional stance, we detect others as agents. An agent here is not James Bond, but rather something that acts with purpose. We attribute beliefs and desires to agents, as well as some intelligence to achieve those goals.26 This could be an adaptive strategy to ensure that we are always on the lookout for potential prey and predators. By adopting the intentional stance, you are giving yourself the best chance in the arms race of existence to find food and avoid being eaten.
However, the trouble with assuming an intentional stance is that it can be wrongly triggered. Things that don’t have intentions but seem to – because they either look as if they are alive (movements and faces) or behave as if they are alive (respond contingently) – make us think they are agents. We are inclined to think that they are purposeful and have minds. There’s a company in Somerset where I live that makes a vacuum cleaner that has a face painted on the front called a ‘Henry’. Actually, it’s called the ‘Numatic HVR 200–22 Red Henry vacuum cleaner’, but people know it as ‘Henry’ for short. From reading the customer reviews on the Amazon website, where you can buy the vacuum cleaner online, it seems to be a fine little sucker. What is surprising is the way people describe the vacuum cleaner. Henry is not referred to as a machine but rather as a ‘he’, ‘a loyal servant’, and so on. As one customer put it: ‘We’ve had our Henry for about 14 years. He cleans the house, the car and DIY dust without a complaint . . . and he’s always smiling. How many of your household appliances do you apologize to if you accidentley [sic] bang it on a corner as you go around?’ Henry clearly triggers a very strong intentional stance in his owners.
FIG. 10: The ‘Henry’ vacuum cleaner. © NUMATIC INTERNATIONAL LTD.
I don’t think anyone really believes that Henry is alive or has feelings. But the vacuum cleaner does illustrate how easy it is to adopt the intentional stance. This may not be such a bad thing. After all, when we are trying to understand and predict events in the world, adopting an intentional stance gives us a useful way of framing information and doing things. For example, let’s say my car breaks down one day. Confronted with this, I have to plan a course of action to fix the problem. What’s troubling her? Maybe she wants a service. The old girl needs a face-lift. Dennett gives another good example.27 Gardeners trick their flowers into budding by putting them in the hothouse so that they think it is spring. The intentional stance is just a comfortable way of talking about and interacting with the natural and artificial world. But as we saw in Piaget’s animism in children, this way of thinking emerges early and may support a supersense that there are secret agents operating throughout the world. It is supernatural because it represents the over-extension of the intentional stance from real agents with minds to objects that cannot have this kind of mental life. Certainly we slip into this supernatural way of thinking remarkably easily. We may laugh it off, but as the saying goes, there is no smoke without fire. It must have some influence on our reasoning, lurking there in the back of our minds. The very same processes that led us as babies to seek out potential agents in the world continue to fool us as adults into thinking that the world is populated with purposeful and willful inanimate objects.
GHOSTS IN THE MEAT MACHINE
Whether we are reading our own mind or inferring the mind of others, we are treating minds as separate from bodies. This idea that the mind exists separately from the body is known as ‘dualism’. In his book Descartes’ Baby, Paul Bloom heralds an impressive avalanche of work to argue that humans are born to be intuitive substance dualists.28 Substance dualism is the philosophical position that humans are made up of two different types of substances, a physical body and an immaterial soul. Our mind is part of this soul that inhabits our body. The separation of the body and mind – or the ‘mind–body problem’, as it is known – is one that keeps philosophers and neuroscientists awake at night. Let me explain why.
Each of us experiences our mental life as distinct from our body. We can see how our bodies change over the decades, but we feel that we remain the same person. For example, I think I am still the same man I was in my late teens. I sometimes still behave that way. Our knowledge, experiences, ambitions, priorities, and concerns may change over the years, but our sense of self is constant. This is one of the most frustrating aspects of ageing. Old people do not feel they have aged; only their bodies have. And what’s worse is that Western society is increasingly ageist. We treat old people differently and patronize them. But old people feel they are generally no different from when they were young. When we look in the mirror, we can see how the ravages of time and gravity have taken their toll on our bodies, but we still feel we are the same self. We may even change our beliefs and opinions with time, realizing that some punk music was actually pretty awful, but we don’t experience a change in the person having those beliefs or opinions. That’s because we cannot step outside of our mind to see how it looks from a different perspective. We are our minds.