Counter-intuitive and self-negating intellectual objects
How science and religion bend our minds
Re-Assembling Reality #27f, by David A. Palmer and Mike Brownnutt
In Re-Assembling Reality #27b, we talked about how, in the way science is currently practiced, the intellectual objects of science tend to eliminate the agency of persons from their models. On the other hand, personhood, both of humans and of metahumans, is a central concern in religious intellectual objects.
Religious intellectual objects strive to provide clear, consistent, and logical written accounts of the nature of the personhood of their metahumans and humans, the relations between humans and metahumans, and the relations between human persons. In fact, to a great extent, religious intellectual objects focus on personhood.
Counter-intuitive intellectual objects
But, similar to the intellectual objects of science, those of religion are often radically counterintuitive. This means that they are contrary to our intuitive, nonreflexive way of thinking. Mathematical equations, for example, are completely alien from our everyday experience of the world. Many scientific laws violate our normal experience of the physical world — — what is called “naïve physics” or “folk physics.” We need at least a dozen years of systematic scientific training in order to properly understand and internalize the counter-intuitive nature of scientific knowledge.
One example is the weirdness of quantum systems being in two different states at once. But even classical mechanics has laws that are just plain weird. The only reason we think they are not is that, through years of training, we have been taught to ignore our every-day experience. Take Newton’s First Law of Motion. It tells us that, if an object is moving, it will keep on moving, unless a force acts on it. But our daily experience tells us the opposite: if you set anything in motion it will stop moving unless a force acts on it. This is why you have to keep your foot on the accelerator pedal of your car, and why you have to keep pedaling on your bike. It is why two strong people will sweat and grunt and swear to move a wardrobe, rather than pushing it gently and watching it glide across the floor. Experience says things stop unless you make them go. Physics says things go until you make them stop.
Similarly, the “Theory of Mind” or “folk psychology” that becomes part of the natural cognitive disposition of infants during the early years of their life [1], makes us give metahumans the same qualities and attributes as the typical humans that we experience. For example, the Greek god Zeus is very typically human with his emotions of joy and anger, his unrestrained desires and extramarital affairs, his fits of rage and also his limitations, since he can be tricked and fooled. Greek philosophers, on the other hand, constructed an abstract, intellectual concept of God that has practically nothing in common with Zeus and has no personal relationship with humans. While the depictions of Zeus that we find in children’s books on Greek Myths and in popular culture can be understood with our unreflexive Theory of Mind, a rigorous philosophical training is required to understand the Gods of Greek and Western philosophy.
In the Bible, God is often depicted in very human terms: he walks with people, he has emotions of anger, love and jealousy. But in the intellectual objects of theology and philosophy we find the concept of an absolutely transcendental God, creator of the Universe, who is all-powerful, all-knowing and all loving. Such statements violate our intuitive understanding of personhood: the persons we know and are used to dealing with can’t create things out of nothing, they have limits to their power, they don’t know everything, and they have a hard time loving their dearest ones, let alone all beings. It’s impossible for us to imagine such a God. A lot of intellectual training and reflection is required to try to understand the theological concept of God and its implications.
Similarly, most of the world religions have radically counterintuitive accounts of the self. They often claim that what you experience as yourself on a daily basis, with all your selfish desires and natural inclinations, is not your true self, or even that your sense of self is an illusion. Your true self, it is often claimed, is that part of you that has divine virtues in the “image of God”, your “higher self”, your “Buddha-nature”, or even that you have no self at all. These propositions are so radically counterintuitive that understanding them requires both intellectual training and practices of prayer and / or meditation that change the mind’s relationship and experience of itself and the world.
One consequence of this is that there is often a great distance between religious intellectual objects and the way people have living relationships with metahumans according to their intuitive Theory of Mind and the ideas, customs and practices prevalent in their culture. When observing or interviewing religious practitioners, sociologists and anthropologists usually discover that the way they think and practice their religion is often very different from the objectified forms of orthodox teachings and theology. The vast majority of people in the world relate with their metahumans with little or no knowledge of religious doctrines and theology.
The same tension, of course, exists with scientific knowledge. Studies have shown that, when tested on a simple question that offered a choice between contradictory intuitive and scientifically correct answers, more than 80% of people with advanced training in probability and statistics, provided answers that aligned with intuitive heuristics but “violated the dictates of probability theory.” [2]
Both scientific and religious disciplines aim to educate and train the mind so that the “counter-intuitive” ideas contained in intellectual objects become second nature, a new intuition. One of the parts of training as a scientists is to train your intuition. You want to look at a wave function and, without having to go through the calculation, have a pretty good idea of what you expect it to do. You get a quantum intuition. The better the training, the less counter-intuitive the theories become. Similarly, many forms of religious training aim to make you intuitively and effortlessly identify with a radically new concept of self: without going through doctrinal arguments in your mind, you would spontaneously act in a way that aligns with your “true spiritual nature”, that is, for example, “freed from the attachments and illusions of the self”, or that is “in conformity with the will of God”.
Self-negating intellectual objects
The counter-intuitive nature of many religious intellectual objects is such that many of them have their own self-negation built into them. Central to the teachings of most religions is the idea that the ultimate reality is beyond human comprehension and description: any intellectual object will ultimately fail, because divinity or the ultimate reality, by definition, cannot be objectified.
In the self-negation and admitted limitations of intellectual objects, we find an important distinction between scientific and religious intellectual objects. Newtonian mechanics, for example, does not obviously contain within its own formulation the condition for its own limits. To find the limits of Newtonian mechanics, we must either test it against the physical world (and see that it has empirical shortcomings) or dig deep into the mathematics (and see things like Gödel’s call for humility). Newtonian mechanics has limits, but it is not obviously self-negating.
By contrast, religious cosmologies and theologies often contain within their own formulation the condition for their own limits. When they place persons at their core, those persons, when treated as persons — by definition— resist objectification. Moreover, when such cosmologies talk about the ultimate reality itself, they often — in cases such as apophatic theology or mystical traditions — put their own limits front and centre of their methodology. In this respect, they are explicitly self-negating.
“The Dao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Dao” (Laozi, 1).
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.”(Is. 55:8–9)
Thus, we find the paradoxical situation in most major religious traditions, of:
(1) people engaging in relations with humans and metahumans according to a folk psychology or pre-reflexive Theory of Mind;
(2) intellectual objects that describe the human self and divinity in ways that often radically contradict our pre-reflexive Theory of Mind;
(3) teachings that point to the limitations of our intellectual objects. These teachings suggest that it is impossible for us, through the human intellect, to understand the full reality of God, Dao, Dharma, Brahman, or any other formulation of the ultimate reality.
In the same way, physicists have
(1) an un-reflexive view of electrons,
(2) a counter-intuitive view of electrons, and
(3) an acceptance that all their views of electrons fall short of reality.
And science can (and should) simultaneously embrace all three. In the case of religion, there are different ways of handling the tension between these three approaches.
— One way is to emphasize one to the exclusion of the others: choose between mindless piety, intellectual dogmatism, or mystic renunciation.
— Another way is to embrace the dynamic tension with humility: to commit to relationships as persons, to work with our intellect within an epistemic community, and to stand in awestruck wonder at the infinite greatness of the divine.
[1]Robert McCauley, Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not. Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 76–82.
[2] Tversky, A. and D. Kahneman. “Extensional versus Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment.” In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin and D. Kahneman eds., Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgement. Cambridge University Press, 2002, 19–48, p. 26, cited in McCauley, Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not, p. 128.
This essay and the Re-Assembling Reality Medium series are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core Curriculum Course CCHU9061 Science and Religion: Questioning Truth, Knowledge and Life, with the support of the Faith and Science Collaborative Research Forum and the Asian Religious Connections research cluster of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
