This and That (9)

Have you been possessed by a demon? Here's how to find out.

Midjourney: Doctors in the 1500s testing a woman to see if she’s possessed by a demon

1.

Here are two new podcasts with Robert Wright. In the first, we continue our previous discussion of free speech and campus protests, but we also talk about other topics, including atheism, old and new. (Bob attacks atheism; I defend.)

In the second, it’s all about AI—the pros and cons of the new chatbots that actually chat with you.

As always, paid subscribers have access to the paywalled sections at the end. After the first podcast, I pretend to be a therapist and talk to Bob about his insecurities; after the second, we discuss porn and sexbots.

2.

Many years ago, the psychologist Susan Gelman and I wrote a short letter to the journal Trends in Cognitive Science.

Susan and I have both long been interested in psychological essentialism, and, more specifically, in the idea that people think some objects come to possess invisible essences that give them special properties. (See my How Pleasure Works and Susan’s The Essential Child.) Often, this happens when the object makes contact with someone who is either revered or hated. This explains the lure of collectible items such as autographs and original artwork. It also explains the disgust that some feel towards Nazi memorabilia or the clothes worn by a serial killer.

In our letter, we suggested that this intuitive belief system is nicely illustrated by the procedure through which the 14th Dalai Lama was selected. We quoted a text that described the testing of a 2-year-old boy in his remote village.

A group of bureaucrats brought with them the belongings of the late 13th Dalai Lama, along with a set of inauthentic items that were similar or identical to these belongings. When presented with an authentic black rosary and a copy of one, the boy grabbed the real one and put it around his neck. When presented with two yellow rosaries, he again grasped the authentic one. When offered two canes, he at first picked up the wrong one, then after closer inspection he put it back and selected the one that had belonged to the Dalai Lama …

We concluded that the Tibetan bureaucrats were testing for the capacity to detect invisible essences, those that infused the objects after contact with the 13th Dalai Lama. And the 2-year-old passed the test. A report at the time wrote: “The boy demonstrated his occult powers, which were capable of revealing the most secret phenomena.” Another observer described this recognition ability as a sign of “super-human intelligence.” The boy is now the 14th Dalai Lama.

Soon after our letter was published, though, there was a short reply by Claire White and colleagues that offered a different interpretation:

though some of the objects may appear to be identical to ordinary folk, they are not assumed to be identical to the Dalai Lama, who is supposed to have intimate familiarity with those he owned and this is exactly the point of the task. .. We propose that reactions to objects are important because they indicate differential familiarity with them based on personal memory, in much the same way as a child would delight in being reunited with a cherished toy.

They suggest, then, that this was a test of whether the boy had memories of his past life as the 13th Dalai Lama and could remember objects that he possessed—sensitivity to invisible essences had nothing to do with it.

White and her colleagues were probably right. But last week, I came across something on the Twitter feed of @Neuro_Skeptic that provides a better example of the phenomenon that we were interested in, something that can’t be explained by personal memory. In the most recent edition of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Racha Kirakosian and her colleagues tell an extraordinary story:

In 1599, in a small town in the Loire Valley in France, a young girl with extreme behavioural and verbal outbursts was examined by a medical commission dispatched by Henri IV. It had been alleged that Marthe Brossier was possessed by demons, so she had been subjected to daily exorcisms intended to cast out the demons and restore the girl to health. The exorcisms were performed by priests, often in front of large audiences who came to see the victim’s shocking behavioural displays. The King’s medical commission took Marthe to a private location where her responses to the exorcisms could be closely examined, without distractions

The commission, led by the physician Michel Marescot, ran an experiment:

The rationale for an exorcism is that a demon cannot tolerate direct contact with divine objects. The exposure to religious paraphernalia would thus cause the demon great pain and force it to leave the possessed person. Marescot and his commission had brought items that would allow them to compare Marthe’s reactions to genuine religious objects and to comparable sham objects. For example, these might include using unconsecrated water in a bottle normally used for holy water, or unconsecrated bread (wafers, or hosts) drawn from a box that usually contained only consecrated bread. After a 40-day trial, the physicians concluded that Marthe could not have been genuinely possessed by a demon as she reacted similarly when exposed to both genuine and sham religious objects. The commission thus concluded that the allegation that she was possessed was false, and this finding was communicated to Henri IV.

Kirakosian and her colleagues are intrigued by this study because it was, as they put it, an early instance of “a placebo-controlled experiment.” But from my own perspective, the cool thing is how close the demon-detection test is to the test done on the 14th Dalai Lama. And here, it’s quite clear that Marescot and his colleagues believed that consecrated objects have an invisible property that demons, and only demons, react to. Now, that’s evidence for a form of psychological essentialism.

3.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post on Four Terrific Books on Writing. There were many recommendations for other books in the comment section, and one from John Howe caught my eye. This is Economical Writing by Deidre McCloskey. Since I like McCloskey’s writing, I bought it.

It’s an awful title but a terrific book, full of great advice. Here’s McCloskey complaining about something that a lot of otherwise good writers do.

This paragraph illustrates another piece of advice McCloskey has—a good way to end a paragraph, particularly one with more formal writing (such as a quote from Adam Smith), is with a snappy colloquial sentence. Like “So watch it.”

I’ll add that for someone who discourages yelling, she can be awful yelly herself:

But she’s funny and smart, and her sternness is good-natured. Thanks John Howe—now, I have five terrific books on writing to recommend.