Family Holloway

Plato and the Pythagorians advocated a mind/body distinction in terms of the supernatural and natural. At the time this ideology helped justify slavery because a slave’s caged body had a free mind that would later rest in an afterlife; after the slave owners were done with the slave’s body. The idea of a distinction between the mind and body has powerful implications for what we will tolerate within our lives.

We now know through modern research that disabling parts of the brain can affect the mind and its personality. Those with brain damage can have different personalities, and this effect can last for life. A person could live for one half of their life with one personality and then — through brain injury — live the other half with a very different personality. The concept of one essential personality is false. The idea of ghosts or souls that survive death of the body must be reconciled with the dozens of personalities that we can induce in the body’s brain.

When children are treated poorly they often react against the person, showing some simple forms of reciprocal altruism (be nice to others until they’re not nice to you). One evolutionary explanation for this behaviour is The Selfish Gene which is about how kindness is a product of selfishly taking care of others in your gene pool, as shown in this YouTube video:

This basic tit-for-tat altruism involves getting payback for kind deeds, however when the payback is in the form of supernatural rewards the question is whether there is any payback. Our innate reciprocal altruism can be co-opted by the promise of supernatural rewards that are inherently unknowable. It’s as if you lent money to a friend who promises they’ll pay it back in an afterlife.

The ideology that Plato and the Pythagorians advocated is still with us and, I think, it’s a foolish wager to make.