God Soul Mind Brain

The intense feeling of reality gives it away. The personality that people feel in Sarah Palin is not a deduction; not a theory; not a reasoned argument; not cognition; not imagination; it is perception.

    It is of course influenced by cognition, and is a good example of the porous border between cognition and perception. Political reasons and arguments shape what people want to believe. Rapidly these arguments turn into a social perception (she feels honest; she feels crafty; she feels warm; she feels brutal) and the perception is relatively resistant to change. People are willing to look at both sides of a theory. It is possible to reason this way or that way about a deduction. But how can you look on two sides of a perception? It is what it is. When you look at a red apple, and someone tells you it is blue, you’re right and they’re wrong. That is the power of perception.

    The information we receive on celebrities is highly scripted, and the scripting is often done by two sides, a pro side and an anti side, leaving the public without any reliable or impartial data. We read a bit here and there, see some interviews and watch some moments on YouTube, and our social circuits go into action and create a model, a soul, a consciousness, a personality for that man or woman. Given the poor quality of the source material, that model is highly unlikely to be correct. Yet we feel as though it were real, as though the personality were radiating out of the TV screen directly into our minds.

    Maybe here is where charisma lies. Charisma is like being a good ventriloquist, only instead of convincing the audience that a puppet is alive and has a personality, your task is to convince the audience that you yourself are intensely alive and have a compelling personality. Your task is to move from the realm of the cognitive to the realm of the perceptual; not to convince people that they understand your arguments, but to convince millions of people who have never met you that they now directly perceive your consciousness—your mental and emotional energy—as if it is radiating out of you through the TV and they are personally receiving it.

Spirits of the weather

    Imagine a lightning bolt hits the ground a few feet away from you in your back yard. In the modern world you are likely to accept it as a meteorological phenomenon. Scary, but physically explainable. Due to moisture and wind, an electric charge accumulates in a cloud. As a result, a glowing plasma of electrons streams down to the ground, super heating the air directly along its path. The superheated air produces a clap of sound.

    In Chapter 1, I noted that the human brain is equipped with two different built-in methods to explain the world. The first method is to find the physical cause of an event. The second is to find an intention behind the event. Many people will see intentionality in the lightning strike. Maybe a malevolent spirit was trying to kill you. More optimistically, a protective spirit might have nudged the lightning aside a few feet to save you. Or maybe it was a warning. A spirit wants you to re-think some aspect of your life or it will kill you next time.

    In a prescientific culture, in which there is no physical explanation for lightning and certainly no physical way to predict it, the only available explanation is an intentional one. A storm or a flood might also be an act of an angry agent. If a tree falls and crushes your hut, maybe a spirit was angry at your family. If a steady rain waters the crops, maybe a spirit is expressing generosity. Anything like the weather or an earthquake or a volcano, that is physically unpredictable, and therefore not easily explained by simple rules of cause and effect, lends itself to an intentional explanation. From a modern scientific perspective we view these beliefs as superstitious and primitive. But to dismiss them misses a deep truth. These spirit explanations are social perceptions. They are the same kinds of perceptions that we experience every day and that the human brain is built to compute. Given a gesture, a motion, an action that has no obvious external cause, the brain computes a possible inner cause—an intention.

    Let me be clear. I am not suggesting that the people of ancient Troy sat down to think and said, “I don’t know physically why the Scamander River flooded and killed a bunch of people. One possible but unlikely explanation is that the river is under the control of, or is itself, an