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Impact of early life adversity on reward processing in young adults (2014)

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Re: Impact of early life adversity on reward processing in young adults (2014)

#121

Post by taeric »

em-bee wrote: post #115
taeric wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For this to work, though, you would have seen a convergence of all humanity onto the same explanations? While I think you can almost make the case that there are some commonalities between origin stories, I think you would be stretching credibility a fair bit there. This also hits a pretty tough point with regards to other animals. Do they have religions?

For this to work, though, you would have seen a convergence of all humanity onto the same explanations given the dominance of monotheistic religions this is actually happening. there is no need for origin stories to have commonalities because the convergence can also happen through replacement. if every group comes up with their own explanation for the different experiences they have, their stories are naturally goin…

This is still to my point. If you require indoctrination to get "convergence" through replacement, then you would, by definition, not have the same stories without priests.

Yes, you can stretch some stories to say there are commonalities. But you are doing some heavy stretching. And you still don't address other social animals. Do they have religions? Why not?

Re: Impact of early life adversity on reward processing in young adults (2014)

#122

Post by em-bee »

taeric wrote: post #121
em-bee wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For this to work, though, you would have seen a convergence of all humanity onto the same explanations given the dominance of monotheistic religions this is actually happening. there is no need for origin stories to have commonalities because the convergence can also happen through replacement. if every group comes up with their own explanation for the different experiences they have, their stories are naturally goin…

This is still to my point. If you require indoctrination to get "convergence" through replacement, then you would, by definition, not have the same stories without priests. Yes, you can stretch some stories to say there are commonalities. But you are doing some heavy stretching. And you still don't address other social animals. Do they have religions? Why not?

indoctrination is not required. nor are priests. the story just needs to make sense, and if it does people will accept it.

how are the commonalities a stretch? they are self evident: somehow some entity created the universe. somehow this creator is communicating with us, not just once, but multiple times, and they will communicate again in the future. everything else is the content of that communication, and for that there is no need of any further commonality even though there still are many.

i am not addressing animals because that is completely out of scope. our understanding of the consciousness of animals is still very limited, and even if it is shown that animal are potentially capable of such higher order thinking, as long as we can't actually able to communicate with them, we won't know what they are thinking. the question if animals have a religion is therefore unanswerable for the time being.

Re: Impact of early life adversity on reward processing in young adults (2014)

#123

Post by taeric »

em-bee wrote: post #122
taeric wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is still to my point. If you require indoctrination to get "convergence" through replacement, then you would, by definition, not have the same stories without priests. Yes, you can stretch some stories to say there are commonalities. But you are doing some heavy stretching. And you still don't address other social animals. Do they have religions? Why not?

indoctrination is not required. nor are priests. the story just needs to make sense, and if it does people will accept it. how are the commonalities a stretch? they are self evident: somehow some entity created the universe. somehow this creator is communicating with us, not just once, but multiple times, and they will communicate again in the future. everything else is the content of that communication, and for that…

The commonalities are a stretch because they largely amount to "a creator exists."

Animals have absolutely been shown to be able to communicate. They are unable to persist this teaching in the wild. Which, again, is to my point.

Re: Impact of early life adversity on reward processing in young adults (2014)

#124

Post by em-bee »

taeric wrote: post #123
em-bee wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

indoctrination is not required. nor are priests. the story just needs to make sense, and if it does people will accept it. how are the commonalities a stretch? they are self evident: somehow some entity created the universe. somehow this creator is communicating with us, not just once, but multiple times, and they will communicate again in the future. everything else is the content of that communication, and for that…

The commonalities are a stretch because they largely amount to "a creator exists." Animals have absolutely been shown to be able to communicate. They are unable to persist this teaching in the wild. Which, again, is to my point.

well, i think there are more commonalities than that but since my argument was that commonalities aren't really needed, to me this point is not really important.

speaking of commonalities, this subthread has diverged from the original topic quite a lot and in an odd way is actually converging with the discussion on "Life is not a story" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41876979

regarding animals, i don't get which point you are making there.

Re: Impact of early life adversity on reward processing in young adults (2014)

#125

Post by InDubioProRubio »

LouisSayers wrote: post #91
SoftTalker wrote: post #51

I don't really see how there can be any question that chaos, poverty, moving every year, constantly changing schools, multiple and changing "parent" figures, adults making poor choices over and over, no examples of deliberate planning and saving for the future, screws up kids. They learn that life is completely unpredictable, that opportunities for reward should be taken immediately because they will not be there lat…

> They learn that life is completely unpredictable As someone with pretty much the upbringing you described, I don't think this was the takeaway. For me personally, I learnt adaptability, how to adjust to new situations and people quickly. I saw what my parents did and said "I don't want to be like that". The downside is, it's hard to answer "where are you from?", or to know where home is, and it's especially frustra…

Did you have a counter-example in the nearer family?

Re: Impact of early life adversity on reward processing in young adults (2014)

#126

Post by taeric »

em-bee wrote: post #124
taeric wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The commonalities are a stretch because they largely amount to "a creator exists." Animals have absolutely been shown to be able to communicate. They are unable to persist this teaching in the wild. Which, again, is to my point.

well, i think there are more commonalities than that but since my argument was that commonalities aren't really needed, to me this point is not really important. speaking of commonalities, this subthread has diverged from the original topic quite a lot and in an odd way is actually converging with the discussion on "Life is not a story" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41876979 regarding animals, i don't get whic…

Thanks for the link to the other thread, I skipped that article the other day. (Barely keep up with my threads on weekends.)

Point on animals is that it isn't just the story telling that propagates religion and similar, but persistent story telling. Writing things down and learning the symbols of previous generations is a fairly uniquely human activity.

Re: Impact of early life adversity on reward processing in young adults (2014)

#127

Post by em-bee »

taeric wrote: post #126
em-bee wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, i think there are more commonalities than that but since my argument was that commonalities aren't really needed, to me this point is not really important. speaking of commonalities, this subthread has diverged from the original topic quite a lot and in an odd way is actually converging with the discussion on "Life is not a story" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41876979 regarding animals, i don't get whic…

Thanks for the link to the other thread, I skipped that article the other day. (Barely keep up with my threads on weekends.) Point on animals is that it isn't just the story telling that propagates religion and similar, but persistent story telling. Writing things down and learning the symbols of previous generations is a fairly uniquely human activity.

thanks, now i get your point. essentially what we are discussing is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religio... a topic that i am not deeply familiar with, and to be fair, i also don't hold a strong opinion on. in my naive view i believe the following to make sense: storytelling precedes religion. religion evolved from storytelling and became more elaborate, motivating the development of the role of priests because the skills and knowledge needed took more time than a normal person had available and the role was deemed important enough to warrant significant time investment into learning it by selected individuals as part of the specialization of roles in a community. today priests are no longer needed because the skills needed to create, share and interpret stories can be learned by anyone.

to summarize the argument and bring it back to the main topic, i'd like to argue that adversity influenced storytelling which created religion and religion necessitated priests. so yes, without priests religions may not have persisted, but that's like saying without farmers farming would not have taken hold and we would still all be hunter/gatherers.

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