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Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

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Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#41

Post by conskdkdo »

msamwald wrote: post #32
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…

The hypothesis is completely implausible, and it is quite irritating that it keeps popping up in discussions in the 'hacker' sphere. There is simply no way that bicameralism would be the dominant phenotype only a few thousand years ago, and be completely absent in any present-day population, anywhere. We would still see it in isolated populations.

What I find interesting about this hypothesis is that consciousness is just a stream of thoughts which we do not control. Like whenever you think something it just arrives to your mind. Often we experience thought as spoken words in our mind but we don't know where they come from. They come from the subconscious but we are not aware of that part of ourselves. In dreams we have information expressed to us from the subconscious through symbolic representations. What if we could talk to our subconscious mind? When thinking about this I allways remember how John Nash described his paranoic ideas comming from the same voice his mathematical ideas came from.

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#42

Post by Symmetry »

sebastos wrote: post #39
knolax wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And I suppose, as someone who does a lot of thinking without an internal narrative I feel a bit attacked by the whole idea. When ideas like this and Sapir-Whorf pop up it really makes me wonder if maybe the social "sciences" are studied exclusively by some subset of the population that thinks entirely different from me. How else would they come to the conclusion that thoughts take the form of articulated monologues?…

I doubt they do, but have you never had a sort of "heart-to-heart with yourself"? I'll sometimes take a walk with the explicit intention of having a good think, and whenever I do that, my thoughts absolutely take the form of internal monologue. I think if you're really thinking something through, on a subject you haven't really explored, the 'voice' manifests. Just my .02.

People are different. There's a wide variety of extents to which people perceive their thoughts as comprising of words and also a wide variety of extents to which people are able to form mental imagery.

For me, most thinking isn't verbal unless I'm thinking of explaining my thoughts to some one else. Sometimes this is annoying when I've worked something out for myself and I go to explain it but then this nice chunked[1] concept for a step but when I hit that concept I realize it doesn't correspond to a word and I have to go on a long, unexpected digression. But sometimes there are words for which I haven't chunked the underlying concept well and I just use that word in isolation inside my head.

Also, some seem to be basically unable to form mental imagery and often assume that people are speaking in metaphor when they describe this. Some people are able to form mental imagery with fairly high fidelity to what their eyes see with very little effort. Personally I have an easy time with shapes but things don't tend to have colors unless I make a conscious effort.

I sort of suspect that people who refer to people by name inside their heads have an easier time remembering names but AFAIK it hasn't been studied. Likewise, I suspect there are correlations between mental subjective experience and what jobs people take. More research is needed, clearly.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#44

Post by TheRealPomax »

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 with "common sense": don't believe yourself. The moment you go "but it's obvious that", actually prove it to yourself. And if you can't (and very often, we can't) then by all means keep thinking it _might_ be true, but that you have no true basis to believe that and you can't use it to back up arguments.

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#45

Post by tlb »

knolax wrote: post #35
Symmetry wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really surprised that he and Dennet are so positive on the idea. In the humans running around today we can do experiments on we can clearly see that it's the same process that allows us to serialize experiences for to speak about them and serialize them to remember them. But I suppose before fMRI that work might not have been as convincing. And I suppose, as someone who does a lot of thinking without an internal…

>And I suppose, as someone who does a lot of thinking without an internal narrative I feel a bit attacked by the whole idea. When ideas like this and Sapir-Whorf pop up it really makes me wonder if maybe the social "sciences" are studied exclusively by some subset of the population that thinks entirely different from me. How else would they come to the conclusion that thoughts take the form of articulated monologues?…

When philosophers sit down and ask themselves, "How do I think?", they invariably end up concluding that consciousness is an internal monologue. A monologue is one of the many capabilities of the mind, but it's highly overrepresented in philosophical writings because the subject is himself trying to formulate the answer in words while doing it.

If instead you developed your theory of the mind while observing people performing tasks, you might see occasional evidence of inner monologue but it wouldn't be the dominant paradigm.

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#46

Post by sonnyblarney »

leftyted wrote: post #36
jkingsbery wrote: post #31

I haven't read the paper yet, but this idea shouldn't be terribly surprising. Augustine of Hippo did a pretty thorough analysis at least of the Greco-Roman gods in the early 400s and wrote about how pagan gods generally aren't moralizing, and how the punishments or favors they give often have little to do with how moral a particular person is and the behavior of the Greco-Roman gods is also not an example worth follo…

Greco-Roman gods absolutely punished immoral behavior. It's just that "what is moral" has changed a lot over time. For example, the classical Greek period was a time when pederasty and war were considered perfectly moral. It's often pointed out that pre-Christian morality seems to differ considerably from post-Christian morality. Also, Ancient Greece/Rome definitely count as "complex societites".

I think the OP's point is crudely valid. Greek gods basically wanted you to pray and appease them, more or less. Jesus and the Buddha wanted you to be a fundamentally better person, moreover, they were themselves enshrined in a metaphysical spirituality.

I always found it odd that Greek philosophers spoke of 'spirit' and 'soul' but that seemed for them to be a completely separate domain from Zeus et. al.

Here's chapter 1 of 'Plato's Republic' [1]

Talk of 'soul' and 'appeasing the just/unjust god's' seem to be a different kind of subject material, whereas in most modern religions they are inherently related.

I often wonder if there's a populist bent to that: a 'soul' is an abstract, intellectual concept, removed from our daily lives. It'd be hard to get the plebes even to pay attention to such haughty ideas. But give them some Gods and Goddesses warring at each other's throats, tales of jealousy, death, intrigue ... now there's something they can buy into.

[1] http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.2.i.html

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#47

Post by sajid »

conskdkdo wrote: post #41
msamwald wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hypothesis is completely implausible, and it is quite irritating that it keeps popping up in discussions in the 'hacker' sphere. There is simply no way that bicameralism would be the dominant phenotype only a few thousand years ago, and be completely absent in any present-day population, anywhere. We would still see it in isolated populations.

What I find interesting about this hypothesis is that consciousness is just a stream of thoughts which we do not control. Like whenever you think something it just arrives to your mind. Often we experience thought as spoken words in our mind but we don't know where they come from. They come from the subconscious but we are not aware of that part of ourselves. In dreams we have information expressed to us from the sub…

Nash said "the same way", not the "the same voice":

“the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.” - Sylvia Nasar, "A Beautiful Mind"

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#48

Post by leftyted »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #46
leftyted wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greco-Roman gods absolutely punished immoral behavior. It's just that "what is moral" has changed a lot over time. For example, the classical Greek period was a time when pederasty and war were considered perfectly moral. It's often pointed out that pre-Christian morality seems to differ considerably from post-Christian morality. Also, Ancient Greece/Rome definitely count as "complex societites".

I think the OP's point is crudely valid. Greek gods basically wanted you to pray and appease them, more or less. Jesus and the Buddha wanted you to be a fundamentally better person, moreover, they were themselves enshrined in a metaphysical spirituality. I always found it odd that Greek philosophers spoke of 'spirit' and 'soul' but that seemed for them to be a completely separate domain from Zeus et. al. Here's chapt…

> I think the OP's point is crudely valid. Greek gods basically wanted you to pray and appease them, more or less. Jesus and the Buddha wanted you to be a fundamentally better person, moreover, they were themselves enshrined in a metaphysical spirituality.

"Being a better person" means different things in different moral frameworks. Plato fought in wars. Jesus didn't. We don't live under a moral framework where "dying in battle is the ultimate virtue, regardless of which side you were on". The Greeks did, though.

It's unclear to me how anyone familiar with Greek mythology could make the claim that the Greek gods were unconcerned with morality. The story of Sisyphus is a moral lesson. Greek myths are full of that stuff: characters are punished for some sin or rewarded for some virtue.

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#49

Post by QuercusMax »

knolax wrote: post #35
Symmetry wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really surprised that he and Dennet are so positive on the idea. In the humans running around today we can do experiments on we can clearly see that it's the same process that allows us to serialize experiences for to speak about them and serialize them to remember them. But I suppose before fMRI that work might not have been as convincing. And I suppose, as someone who does a lot of thinking without an internal…

>And I suppose, as someone who does a lot of thinking without an internal narrative I feel a bit attacked by the whole idea. When ideas like this and Sapir-Whorf pop up it really makes me wonder if maybe the social "sciences" are studied exclusively by some subset of the population that thinks entirely different from me. How else would they come to the conclusion that thoughts take the form of articulated monologues?…

When I'm doing serious thinking about software design / architecture, or debugging/problem-solving, I often find the I have a kernel of an idea which seems fully-formed but inexpressible. I can "see", in my mind's eye, the different interactions between components (floating around in sort of a three-dimensional space), but it's often hard to put it to paper.

For me, the hardest work I often do is to describe my ideas in English text. Source code is somehow easier in some way; possibly because it's more concrete and less "squishy".

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#50

Post by andrewflnr »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #24
classicsnoot wrote: post #19

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.

It could be that moralizing religion is not essential to the emergence of morality, but is essential to its long-term survival. For example, maybe morality and religion imply each other, and it just happens that most societies discover morality first (on practical grounds) and follow through with the other consequences in order to keep it.
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