Chmess, the brain and religion
Dan Dennett’s “contribution” to the latest Philosopher’s Carnival is about doing philosophy. The metaphor he uses, of studying “chmess” (in every way like chess, but the king can move two squares), is intended to show that while analyzing chmess may require prowess, generate papers and positions… it may not be worthwhile. This paragraph stuck out to me, and made me wonder about one of the hot new topics in philosophy of mind / cognitive science–the evolution of religious thought.
The alert I want to offer you is just this: try to avoid committing your precious formative years to a research agenda with a short shelf life. Philosophical fads quickly go extinct and there may be some truth to the rule of thumb: the hotter the topic, the sooner it will burn out.
One good test to make sure you’re not just exploring the higher order truths of chmess is to see if people aside from philosophers actually play the game. Can anybody outside of academic philosophy be made to care whether you’re right about whether Jones’s counterexample works against Smith’s principle? Another such test is to try to teach the stuff to uninitiated undergraduates. If they don’t “get it,” you really should consider the hypothesis that you’re following a self-supporting community of experts into an artifactual trap.
One of the reasons that this discussion is hitting the mainstream media (the NY Times, etc) is because understanding god-beliefs in terms of evolutionary development seems to hold the promise of answering a helluva lot of questions. And it threatens to undermine, some fear, the whole religious structure. Or, perhaps it can justify it. I don’t happen to think that is the case, on either side. I think we’ll wind up with more questions than we began, and without “solving” the problem of religious belief’s origin, usefulness or justification–at least not the point where we stop arguing about it. But does that mean the topic will burn out?
Well, no. First, we have a long way to go in fleshing out the neuroscience involved in this discussion. And we’re still hashing out what the relationship is between the empirical sciences and the generally a priori discipline of philosophy. Washington University has a “PNP” (Philosophy, Neuroscience, Psychology) program investigating the link between these disciplines.
Second, philosophers are still debating questions like whether materialism is true, whether we think in natural language, whether our brain states determine our actions or we have free will (or some third position). Cognitive science won’t instantly solve these debates–which are often background to discussions of religious belief.
Third, we are still articulating the questions. Just what is “it” that we are looking to explain? Is it belief in a god/gods? Is it the functional role of religion? Is it the phenomenal experience of belief, unity with god, unity with the One? Despite PET scans and models of brain states, we haven’t entirely deided what it is we’re attempting to explain.
However, Dennett’s warning is appropriate for the topic. Because we’re still laying out models, tweaking questions, it doesn’t make sense to get too enamored of any particular approach too quickly.
Image by lukasd2009, uploaded to Flickr.