God Soul Mind Brain

intentional agent that was expressing anger. Lacking any better explanatory theory, we had better appease the agent by burning ox hair. But if a scientist comes along and explains the phenomenon differently, we’ll accept the newer theory.” I am not suggesting such a cognitive process of deductive and inductive inference (although some cognition may be involved). When viewed from the perspective of logical inference, the whole proposition seems ridiculous and feeds our false sense of modern-day superiority. I am suggesting that the perceptual machinery in the human brain automatically constructs models about the mental states and intentions that underlie events. We are built to do it. We do it all the time. We can’t help it. It is our heritage as social animals. Lacking any other competing explanation, and sometimes even in the face of competing explanations, those models of intentionality prevail. As a result the Trojans wouldn’t have theorized about a river spirit. They would have perceived the presence of the spirit and its anger, and felt that it was real.

Ghosts

    There is currently an extensive industry for the exorcism of ghosts. Within a few seconds I was able to find eight sites on the Internet advertising exorcist services. If someone feels the presence of a spirit haunting his house, he can hire one of these many professionals. Rationalists may scoff at this superstitious belief; but the rationalists have failed to realize that it is not just a belief. It is a creeping feeling that another mind is present. It is a perception . It is the social machinery in the brain constructing a model of a mind. What is the ghost but a model of a human mind, complete with emotions and perhaps even an agenda, constructed inside the brain of the person who lives in the house? The model is constructed by putting together information: a creaking here, a blurry shadow there, noticing a drawer open when it should be closed, the cognitive expectation of a ghost. The result is a potent feeling of mind, even though there is no corresponding body for the perceived mind to inhabit. In a sense, from the perspective of the person who lives in the house and calls the exorcist, the ghost is as real as the soul of any living, breathing neighbor down the street, because it is constructed out of the same stuff. In both cases, the perceived soul is a model constructed by the social circuitry in the brain.

    My aunt once told me that when she wakes up in the middle of the night and looks at the digital clock, if the numbers are symmetric (for example 11:11, or 12:21), it means that one of her dead relatives is in the room. Here is her reasoning, as far as I understand it. The symmetric number display is so unlikely that, to her, it eliminates a purely physical or coincidental explanation. Therefore she resorts to an intentional explanation. A spirit or intentional agent must have woken her up at that moment with the goal of communicating its presence to her. At those times, she actually feels the ghost in the room with her. Sometimes it has a friendly feel (Grandma Margaret) and sometimes it has a dreadful, angry feel (Great Aunt Beth complaining about her bunions).

    As long as we are on the subject of hauntings—my sister Lisa told me a bizarre ghost story. Her pet rat died of old age one day. Later that night when Lisa was in bed, she heard the rat rustling about his cage in the dark and chewing seeds. The sound evoked in her a full-blown percept, a physical certainty that her rat’s spirit was haunting its erstwhile cage. She could feel it to be true. Yet at the same time she did not believe in ghosts of any kind, human or rodent, and hoped that a rational explanation would present itself in the morning. (It did. Some mice had gotten into the cage to eat the left-over food.)

    In a sense, the world as we perceive it truly is divisible into the physical world and the spirit world. Both worlds are constructs in the mind. Both are populated by models: models of objects, models of apples, models of chairs, models of people, models of dogs and cats and computers and rats and coffee cups. We experience the models, not the real things. But one class of model, computed by one set of brain circuits, is based on physical objects that obey simple cause and effect, whereas the other class of model, computed by social brain circuits, includes intentionality, awareness, agenda, emotion, and other mental properties. The duality of the human