Some consider mind–body dualism irrefutable evidence for why there must be supernatural powers operating in the world. The mind is seen as the causal agent but, for that to be true, the mental must be capable of controlling the physical. That would require supernatural powers, since such an arrangment would violate the ontological boundary between the mental and the physical. How else could nonmaterial minds control material bodies? However, most of us don’t recognize this position as dependent on the supernatural because minds controlling bodies is the intuitive default of our developing mind-reading of others, as well as our natural experience of our own minds.
The scientific position on substance dualism is that there is no separation of mind and body. It’s an illusion as false as the invisible square we saw earlier. Humans are conscious automata. Our bodies generate our minds. When our body dies, so does our mind. But the conscious automation theory is both too unnatural and too repulsive to be accepted by most people. Furthermore, the impression that we have voluntary free will operating within our minds may also be an illusion. Free will requires someone or some ghost inside our heads making the decisions, and that simply gets us into an endless loop. Who is inside our head, and so on, and so on?
So the natural position, based on personal experience, is to assume a separate mind inside the body and not to worry about how the immaterial could control the material. Once we buy into the independent existence of mind and body, there is no limit to what the mind can do. If the mind is separate to the body, it is not constrained by the same laws that govern the physical world. It can leap great distances, travel through solid walls, never age, and travel forwards and backwards in time. In short, misconceiving the mind lays the foundation for many of the beliefs in both religious and secular supernaturalism. In the next chapter, we examine how misconceiving bodies also prepares the ground for our supersense.
CHAPTER SIX
FREAK ACCIDENTS
ON 4 DECEMBER 1980, Stella Walsh, an innocent bystander, was accidentally caught in the crossfire of an attempted armed robbery at a discount store in Cleveland, Ohio. In her day, Stella had been the top athlete in women’s field and track events, setting twenty world records and winning both silver and gold medals for the 100-metre sprint in the 1932 and 1936 Olympics. Although resident in the United States, she represented her native Poland in the Games and was awarded that country’s highest civilian medal, the Cross of Merit. Everywhere she went, huge crowds turned out to celebrate her victories. In 1975 Stella was inducted into the US Track and Field Hall of Fame. Five years later, a stray bullet in a parking lot ended the life of this once-famous sporting legend.
It was not Stella’s tragic death that was to cause a sensation, but rather the results of her autopsy. The sixty-nine-year-old former women’s athlete was not exactly who everyone thought she was. She was a he. Despite having been married and living life as a woman, Stella had male genitalia.
Initial reactions to the reports of this discovery led to outraged claims of sporting fraud and cheating. Stella was not a cheat because, technically, she was not entirely a man. She possessed both male and female chromosomes. Stella had a condition known as ‘mosaicism’, which makes an individual genetically both male and female. Her case was regarded as one of the reasons the International Olympic Committee decided to abandon gender determination tests prior to the 2000 Sydney Games. It’s just too difficult to distinguish between males and females, and genitals don’t maketh the man.
Mosaics such as Stella Walsh are rare, but it is not their rarity that fascinates us. It was not her sporting fame and untimely death that dominated the headlines at the time, but her being a ‘freak’. There are many rare and bizarre medical conditions, but only those that challenge our beliefs about what it means to be a human are called freaks. It’s a cruel term that we use to isolate those who do not fit our concepts of what it is to be a human.
During the Victorian era and early 1900s, freak shows were common. In what would now be regarded as politically incorrect entertainment, it was perfectly respectable to pay to see medical oddities. Conjoined twins, bearded ladies, microencephalics, dwarfs, giants, and albinos were all paraded as wonders of nature. Before the advent of modern medicine, many suffered gross disfigurement and physical abnormality through a variety of congenital disorders and progressive diseases, some of which are largely treatable today.
Famous freaks became celebrities, such as Joseph Merrick, ‘the Elephant Man’, who was a regular on the Victorian London social scene.1 Others, such as ‘Aloa, the Alligator Boy’, enjoyed minor fame trawling through the Dust Bowl towns of the American Midwest during the Great Depression.2 Many of the acts were billed as part-human, part-animal monstrosities. They were abominations who crossed the boundaries between beast and man.
Although freak shows are now long gone, their publicity memorabilia and postcards are still highly collectible today. I keep a small collection as a poignant reminder of how the sensibilities of society have changed. While it may be no longer acceptable to gawk at physical abnormality, modern confessional TV reveals that we are still fascinated by the more deviant members of our society.
Human freaks challenge our view of the living world. We expect people to look a certain way and be a certain size and shape, and individuals who do not fit these expectations are deemed unnatural. When they have properties that violate our boundaries for grouping the world, they become freaks. For example, bearded ladies, hermaphrodites, and various transsexual combinations contradict our naive biological concepts about what it is to be a man or a woman. Our obsession with genitalia may be motivated by sexual interest, but they are also conspicuous markers for males and females. Whenever genitals are missing, diminished, shared, or on the wrong body, the individual’s identity is questionable. Likewise, those endowed with above-average sexual characteristics are judged to be more of a man or more of a woman. Size does matter in this judgement, rather than number. Those unfortunate enough to have multiple penises or vaginas and anything other than two nipples or breasts are generally regarded as freaks.3
FIG. 12: Aloa, the unfortunate ‘Alligator Boy’. AUTHOR’S COLLECTION.
Where do we get our biological concepts? In this chapter, we are going to look at how the child constructs an understanding of the living world by applying the same intuitive theory-building we saw with minds and objects.4 Children begin by organizing the world and sorting it into categories. In trying to explain what they observe, they naturally assume that the living world is permeated by invisible life forces, energies, and patterns that define which categories things belong to. This is the stuff that animates matter and makes living things unique. Just like the intuitive theories of the mind that we saw in the last chapter, intuitive biological theories of life lead us to assume a number of ideas that lay the foundation for supernatural thinking.