God Soul Mind Brain

some cases of autism, the social circuits do not function correctly. Autistic people and people with Asperger’s syndrome, a less severe form of autism, have a notoriously difficult time intuiting the mental states of other people. They can try to figure out what someone is thinking and feeling by using propositional logic and sheer cleverness—and many autistic people are extremely intelligent. But the specialized hardware that is tuned to social perception is weakened in these people’s brains, and therefore they lack the immediate intuition into other minds that comes so easily to the rest of us. Cases like these help to make the point that our talent for reading other people’s minds is not a function of general intelligence, but instead depends on highly specialized hardware in our brains that we normally take for granted.

    This book explores three basic propositions. First, when we perceive intentions, emotions, mind, soul , in another person, it is the specialized social hardware in the brain that is responsible for constructing those perceptions. Second, when we sense presences and spirits, ghosts and gods, it is the same hardware again, creating perceptions of mind and intent to explain the events around us. Third, when we perceive the same things in ourselves—our own consciousness, our own soul—again, it is the same specialized social hardware constructing those perceptions. This last proposition is perhaps the most difficult to nail down. How can awareness itself be explained as the processing of information in the brain? It turns out, however, that even this long-sought philosophical—one might say alchemical—understanding of mind falls into place rather neatly when considering the brain hardware that is tuned to social perception.

    The goal of any branch of science is to explain a large range of phenomena in terms of a simple, unifying mechanism. The central thesis of this book is that the experience of self, soul, consciousness, spirit, ghost, god, everything that populates the spiritual world, is a perception of mind and is created by the social machinery of the brain.

Chapter 2

    Perceiving the minds of other people

    Perception is a term commonly used, casually meant, whose meaning is so murky and deep that one is tempted to avoid stepping into the tar pit. But in we must go. The connecting thread that runs through every chapter of this book is the perception of mind . The following three chapters unpack that phrase and lay out the case for how the perception of mind might account for human consciousness and for human spiritualism.

    Instead of beginning with the perception of mind, I will start with a brief account of visual perception because the details are better understood and the concepts are similar. The step from visual perception to social perception will be easy. Throughout the book I will often compare the two.

    The key to understanding perception is appreciating the distinction between it and reality. We do not perceive the world as it is. The brain constructs a simulated world for us, a fake world, a world of enhanced borders and contrasts, a colorized world, a world populated by invented attributes. We experience a banquet of need-to-know information.

    Imagine that you are looking at a red apple on a green tree. (Philosophers of consciousness have a fondness for colors, so I will use the same example.) The underlying brain circuits for color perception have been mapped out in a fair amount of detail from the eye to the cerebral cortex. One of the most remarkable properties of color is that it is an invented attribute computed inside your head. Color is not actually out there. The apple is not actually red. To people who study color perception, this statement is old news. Fashion designers are also well aware of the subjective nature of color. To others, however, the truth about color is bizarre.

    The light that reflects off of the apple has a certain mixture of wavelengths, but there is no simple relationship between wavelength and perceptual redness. The same set of wavelengths might look green to you in a different context, or gray, or blue. Your brain samples the wavelengths coming from the apple, samples the wavelengths coming from the rest of the visual scene, and compares them. The apple looks red in comparison to the leaves of the tree, the sky, the grass. In a flaming red tree with a salmon-pink sky and purple grass—if the entire visual world around you were