Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history • Hacker News Board

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#71

Post by MR4D » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 12:03 AM UTC

mgamache wrote: post #65

MR4D wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "completely implausible " > "There is simply no way " You're rather confident of yourself there. What if it were viral? For comparison, we don't see any new cases of smallpox anywhere and that's only a few decades after eradication. [0] If we can eradicate traces of smallpox, then I don't see why traces of bicameralism couldn't also be erased. [0] - https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/history/history.html

Are you saying the Bicameral Mind could be a result of a viral infection? And that virus could have disappeared in the last two thousand years? Or are you saying the phenotype could have disappeared?

Either.

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#72

Post by trentlott » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 3:09 AM UTC

didgeoridoo wrote: post #4

Quickly scanned through the references and didn’t see one interesting perspective: Julian Jaynes’ theory of the “breakdown of the bicameral mind” in response to increasing societal complexity. His idea is that the voices of “gods” in premodern societies were literal command hallucinations experienced by members of these societies, in the place of having self-identified conscious thought. In a way, he argues, premoder…

If everyone had 'gods' instead of an internal monologue, why would anybody care if Moses said Jehovah spoke to him?

"Who cares?" God revealed to Levi, "It happens to all of us."

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#73

Post by rjf72 » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 5:17 AM UTC

TheRealPomax wrote: post #44

rjf72 wrote: post #23

Why is it not self evident that cooperation is driven by self interested paired with intelligence? Animal A sees animal B in its territory. This tends to result in an immediate battle where both animals expose themselves to risk of death. Higher intelligence would instead tell you 'hey if I cooperate with this guy, not only can we both keep all this land - but we can go take over the land owned by animal C'. There's…

Because "self-evident" doesn't hold up to analysis. Just because you see a pattern, and you decide that it's obvious and common sense and everyone would recognise it, doesn't mean you're right in any of those assertions. Without formulating hypotheses and then proving (i.e. testing) those hypotheses, your assertions are opinions; good for the pub, questionable-at-best for basing arguments on. Especially when dealing…

You surely appreciate that I absolutely could formulate various toy experiments to prove this hypothesis. And I'd of course also concede that you could similarly form toy experiments to disprove it.

This is ultimately the problem with social science. You can prove, or disprove, whatever you want with anything short of non-toy experiments. But non-toy experiments tend to be either impossible or unethical to execute. And even if we set ethics aside, there are so many confounding variables that even these unethical experiments don't necessarily resolve the question. E.g. - would isolated individuals completely separated from humanity since birth behave differently in a favorable climate, unfavorable climate, in areas with rich natural resources, or with minimal resources, etc. And then you even get into genetic questions on top of it. Ultimately, you're not really going to be able to prove anything in these fields. Consider that > 60% of psychology studies in well regarded journals cannot be successfully replicated. And psychology is more of a 'personal' science. Introduce a social scale to these studies and it's all just a grand demonstration of pseudo-scientific bias confirmation.

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#74

Post by rjf72 » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 6:40 AM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #40

rjf72 wrote: post #23

Why is it not self evident that cooperation is driven by self interested paired with intelligence? Animal A sees animal B in its territory. This tends to result in an immediate battle where both animals expose themselves to risk of death. Higher intelligence would instead tell you 'hey if I cooperate with this guy, not only can we both keep all this land - but we can go take over the land owned by animal C'. There's…

> 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. Only in misanthropist fiction and television shows. When social order collapses in real life previously equal people organize, cooperate, and protect the weak. That being said, if there's some extreme social stratification in the group already, and there was pr…

I'm not referring to any incident in particular. This is a regular pattern. One problem is that conclusive data collection is lacking and suffers from severe underreporting. For instance NPR was able to find more victims of sexual violence following Katrina than the entirety of the officially reported figures. [1] But there have been some efforts at collating what studies do exist. Citing a study that carried out an overview of available evidence (across various disasters - this is not unique to Katrina) [2] :

"The literature review also highlight that there are only a few studies, which focus on the relation between being exposed to a natural disaster and the rates of interpersonal violence.[16] The results of these studies reveal that being exposed to natural disasters such as tsunami, hurricane, earthquake, and flood increases the violence against women and girls, e.g., rape and sexual abuse,[39,40,41] intimate partner violence,[32,42,43,44] child PTSD,[45] child abuse,[46,47] and inflicted traumatic brain injury.[48]"

Significant increases in nasty behavior is not mutually exclusive with other people aiming to work together. And is in fact rather significant evidence of the stated hypothesis demonstrating the varying calculus between groups. Its people all simply doing what they feel is in their best interest. And cooperation, often for personal protection, emerges directly from this.

---

As one aside, I completely and absolutely respect that you cited your comments. Not enough people do this, others don't even concern themselves with evidence. But one point I would make is that Wiki tends to have issues with impartiality on issues that have political undertones, are relatively recent, or deal with social issues. And in this case you hit 3 quite hard. This makes Wiki a particularly unreliable source for topics such as this. As one very overt example, the Wiki page on effects of Katrina repeatedly implies official figures on rape incidents are accurate and representative of what actually happened. That is in spite of the fact that the same official behind said reporting acknowledging, "I admit that rapes are underreported. I know more sexual assaults took place."

[1] - https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=506379...

[2] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3908534/

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#75

Post by ionised » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 2:52 PM UTC

AlwaysRock wrote: post #13

raducu wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So everybody used to be schizophrenic? I know the bad connotations of schizophrenia are more present in modern societies, but still, I can't see how a primitive group of schizophrenics would be able to thrive. Is there any proof or actual need for this bicameral mind other than trying to explain the religious phenomenon?

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?

But they would have evolved with that inner monologue. It's not like it would be this strange thing to them.

I was born with the inner monologue. I wasn't told by others what it was, I figured it out for myself.

It's me. I'm not my body, I am the voice inside my head, looking out through the eyes of a body that is nothing but a vessel for a genetic code.

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#76

Post by tkxxx7 » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 4:10 PM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #62

ABCLAW wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But I would say that atheists don't have a basis for having morals. >So the atheist usually takes something non-absolute and makes it an absolute Okay, so that's a basis. The only issue here being that you don't consider a non-absolute basis to be valid. However, the deity of choice isn't absolute either - you have to deem it so in the same way that the atheist does. So either way there's no perfect ontological solu…

> The only issue here being that you don't consider a non-absolute basis to be valid. Well, it's not just me. A lot of people have, going back at least to Plato. Plato thought that you needed to have something absolute for there to be morals, but his problem was that his gods weren't big enough to proved that. > However, the deity of choice isn't absolute either - you have to deem it so in the same way that the athei…

It seems like you're making an implicit distinction between deciding to be a Christian and accepting God

> But the Christian is not in the same position as either Plato or the atheist. Within the Christian's position,

Yes, the position they just chose. It's like saying after you've made a choice, you can either take it or not

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#77

Post by AnimalMuppet » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

tkxxx7 wrote: post #76

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only issue here being that you don't consider a non-absolute basis to be valid. Well, it's not just me. A lot of people have, going back at least to Plato. Plato thought that you needed to have something absolute for there to be morals, but his problem was that his gods weren't big enough to proved that. > However, the deity of choice isn't absolute either - you have to deem it so in the same way that the athei…

It seems like you're making an implicit distinction between deciding to be a Christian and accepting God > But the Christian is not in the same position as either Plato or the atheist. Within the Christian's position, Yes, the position they just chose. It's like saying after you've made a choice, you can either take it or not

> It seems like you're making an implicit distinction between deciding to be a Christian and accepting God

I wasn't intending to, but perhaps I should have been. A Muslim has the same situation as a Christian - somewhat different morals, but the structure of the situation is the same. The distinction I was drawing was between polytheistic gods and a monotheistic, absolute God.

> Yes, the position they just chose. It's like saying after you've made a choice, you can either take it or not

I see the "choosing the Christian position" as parallel to "choosing the atheist position". But my point is that, when you choose the Christian position, that defines morals for you. When you chooses the atheist position, that does not define morals for you.

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#78

Post by FakeComments » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 6:01 PM UTC

photojosh wrote: post #68

FakeComments wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> ... by socialists ... No, it's done by Americans who don't fit the previous definition of "American identity". Picture the "ideal American" and see who that excludes; and you'll have an idea of who these people are.

Historically, those groups melted into a shared American identity — that’s one of the things the US is historically famous for. Irish, Italians, and the “not white enough” Europeans; Chinese, Japanese, and Asian groups; recent African migrants, etc.

Every one of these groups integrated and thrived over time, without stalling out the process, because they joined a shared American culture focused on merit and cultural fusion via open debate.

Starting with identitarian politics in the 60s that process has stalled, to the point it’s become non-functional in modern times, with antipodal ideas like “cultural appropriation”.

This coincides with the infiltration of academia by Soviets, and the rise of many social movements using Soviet psyop mantras.

“It was always this way!” is lazy rhetoric, and afactual: there’s been a change in American cultural values over the past 20, 50, and 100 years — and we should talk about that, because they’re changes that impact our well-being.

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#79

Post by FakeComments » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 6:04 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #70

FakeComments wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> The deconstruction of an American identity into fragmented identitarian politics by socialists American identity has been broken down into “fragmented identitarian politics” on sectarian, ethnic, regional, and other bases longer than there has been a philosophy called “socialism”. Pretty much as long as there's been an “America”, in fact.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19575256

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#80

Post by dllthomas » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 6:19 PM UTC

ionised wrote: post #75

AlwaysRock wrote: post #13

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?

But they would have evolved with that inner monologue. It's not like it would be this strange thing to them. I was born with the inner monologue. I wasn't told by others what it was, I figured it out for myself. It's me. I'm not my body, I am the voice inside my head, looking out through the eyes of a body that is nothing but a vessel for a genetic code.

> I was born with the inner monologue.

Are you sure? It seems very unlikely that it would predate language acquisition by much, at least in the form I experience.