21–30 of 88 posts
Then it's pretty awkward that the West is engaged in a long program to critique and dismantle its collective identity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So basically while the conscious mind was evolving, people originally took that mind to be an external voice? Is it not totally automatic that people can control their conscious mind?
Well, consider maybe that it has to do with a couple of factors, not just learning, but opportunities to learn, as artificial environments (homes) become more refined, and there's more opportunity to contemplate upon abstractions. Not only that, but capacity to contemplate, that is to say, relative intellect has likely been augmented by our capacity to self domesticate within such environs. On the on hand, you have t…
There's a very common trap when considering the past to look for "logical causation". It's almost always incorrect to do so and leads to this sort of wild speculation.
There's plenty of evidence of this happening in animals with greater levels of intelligence. For instance chimps tend to join up into groups and then go engage in war with other groups. But they, in turn, lack that intelligence to go even one step further. The same logic of '2 individuals can go kill 1 individual and take their land' leads to 'two groups can join up to go kill one group and take their land.' Presumably some outlier will eventually manage to start realizing this at which point you're well on your way to to the evolution of another highly intelligent species spreading themselves all over the place.
I also think there's even evidence of this in society today. When social order collapses, for instance due to a natural disaster, we turn to some pretty nasty behavior quite quickly even when it's in no way necessary. This seems to suggest cooperation, in and of itself, is not innate - but rather something else drives that cooperation. We can even see it in higher order systems. Corruption is a regular part of all societies at all levels. And that is people simply determining that they can get more by working outside the interests of society than working within it. It's quite easy to see how the same intelligence can drive both corruption and cooperation. Once again, self interest driven by intelligence enabling an accurate assessment of probable outcomes. Do I work just for myself, or do I work with this guy?
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One argument against this are simple creatures that possess no semblance of higher order thinking, yet cooperate. Examples would include most types of ants. But I think there are too many differences to start considering these sorts of species. They tend to be extremely short lived and have extremely minimal needs relative to the quantity of resources out there -- that's unlike anything we can imagine. Imagine if a single banana could feed thousands of chimps for days. That rather reduces any motivation or incentive for competition. Well, except for when your thousands of other familiars run into a group of thousands of unfamiliars - which does happen and can lead to 'ant wars'.
I haven't read the paper yet, but the headline/summary keeps getting bandied about reddit, imgur, facebook, and twitter. The implication seems to be that because complex society formed without complex religion(s), said religions are superfluous and maybe even unnecessary or deleterious to said society. I may be reading the implication incorrectly. If I am not, then I'm quite puzzled by this line of inference. If comp…
Even today, many religious people will say that atheists are incapable of having morals. This is evidence showing that claim is ridiculous, not an attack on religion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)#Issu...
Huh, published in 1976. Somehow I'd assumed that this sort of hypothesis would have been proposed back in the 1930s when it's assumptions would have been a lot more credible.
I haven't read the paper yet, but the headline/summary keeps getting bandied about reddit, imgur, facebook, and twitter. The implication seems to be that because complex society formed without complex religion(s), said religions are superfluous and maybe even unnecessary or deleterious to said society. I may be reading the implication incorrectly. If I am not, then I'm quite puzzled by this line of inference. If comp…
There are plenty of (complex! organized!) religions where all the gods just... do what they do, rather than being optimizing forces that seek to punish humans when they "step out of line" of the god's desires. The religion of the Ancient Greeks is kind of like this (in that only some of the pantheon have any moralizing character; others just "party" or "move the sun", etc.) The beliefs of some aboriginal American tribes are also this way. And Sumerian religion was definitely this, from what we know of it.
In such religions, "Gods" have two faces: one as heroic figures in a creation narrative (which has little relevance to day-to-day life), and the other as explanations for natural phenomena. Such religions don't usually distinguish between modern religious concepts of "god", "demigod/angel/demiurge/deva/djinn", and "heroic human": anyone from history could somehow be responsible for any random thing the world does now, no matter if they were just a regular human in their part of the creation narrative. (The reductio ad absurdam version of this belief system is the "caricature of native American religion" espoused in movies like Avatar, where everyone who dies becomes part of an amorphous entity of "the ancestors" who are collectively responsible for everything that happens. But they don't moralize at people; they just... make the tides and stuff.)
If something bad happens to you in a non-moralizing religion, it's not because a God decided you were disobeying their creed, but rather because a God was doing stuff and you just happened to get trampled underfoot without their notice.
A plausible theory of such non-moralizing religions (and their characters) is that they're the memetic byproduct of "mythology in the mode of Calvin's Dad"—i.e. parents giving off-the-cuff answers to children who keep asking why, when there is no real why as far as they know. (For example: "why does that star bob up and down around the horizon?" → "That star is a lady named Ishtar, changing her mood between loving the world and warring with it.")
The best of those explanations stick, and are remembered and passed along; and then, after the characters are created in the form of explanations for phenomena, then they get woven into the creation narrative, by the same sort of collective storytelling process that produced the Aurthurian mythos. Bam: a religion. We have enough examples of this happening even during recorded history (and even continuing to happen in the modern day) that it seems like a pretty solid explanation.
Moralizing gods have a different creation process that we don't understand nearly as well, though the cited study is a step in the right direction.
(My own personal hypothesis is that such religions are formed by elders who want to create evocative, memorable characters to use in parables to enculturate the youth (i.e. to get them to stop being such little assholes.) They start off as basically the equivalent of the "Donny Don't" storybook from The Simpsons—simplistic paragons of virtue or vice—and then elements are added to the narrative through repetitions of telling [i.e. practice], and mutation during retelling [i.e. children growing up, having their own kids, and realizing the usefulness of the parable-as-social-more-capsule], until the story is compelling enough to take off on its own without the need for goal-directed retelling. And one of the key elements to making such a narrative compelling is the addition of punishment of the paragon-of-vice by a character who isn't virtuous themselves, but rather is neutral and high-status, being able to serve as a "judge"; a character that can "stand above" the whole civilization, such that nobody can tell that character what to do, but where that character can tell everyone else what to do, whether by fear or respect. A paragon of authority. A God.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understood it to be less like schizophrenia and more like early peoples who were not aware of their internal monologue. Their own thoughts were perceived as the command or voice of Gods because how else would they be able to, "hear" words that were not said by another around them?
It's beyond me how you could ever show evidence for that, beyond reading between the lines of ancient text (which we know is one of the least reliable forms of historical evidence ever invented).
I haven't read the paper yet, but the headline/summary keeps getting bandied about reddit, imgur, facebook, and twitter. The implication seems to be that because complex society formed without complex religion(s), said religions are superfluous and maybe even unnecessary or deleterious to said society. I may be reading the implication incorrectly. If I am not, then I'm quite puzzled by this line of inference. If comp…
You're moving the argument too far. As complex societies developed without a moralizing god, religion is not necessary for morality. You can't use this to then say religion is unnecessary, as nobody has said morality is the only reason for religion. Even today, many religious people will say that atheists are incapable of having morals. This is evidence showing that claim is ridiculous, not an attack on religion.
> “Our results suggest that collective identities are more important to facilitate cooperation in societies than religious beliefs,” says Harvey Whitehouse. Then it's pretty awkward that the West is engaged in a long program to critique and dismantle its collective identity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh, published in 1976. Somehow I'd assumed that this sort of hypothesis would have been proposed back in the 1930s when it's assumptions would have been a lot more credible.
As Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion , "It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets."
And I suppose, as someone who does a lot of thinking without an internal narrative I feel a bit attacked by the whole idea.