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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

#61

Post by boomboomsubban »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #52
boomboomsubban wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Atheists can certainly act morally, and many do. But I would say that atheists don't have a basis for having morals. dictionary.com says that morals have to do with "right conduct". But in atheism, there is nothing with the authority to give you a definition of "right". There's nothing absolute in the way that, say, the Christian God is absolute, except the universe, and the universe doesn't tell you what right condu…

The presence of a god effectively changes nothing.

Suppose there is a god that has defined right and wrong, how has this knowledge been passed to mankind? If it is innate, then an atheist would have the same morals as everyone. If there is no knowledge given, then an atheist's innate sense of moral right is as likely to be correct than any others.

The third option is that they come from religious texts, in which case you are picking a standard as it matches your sense of what is right. Even if the morals are absolute, our inability to accurately find them makes them indistinguishable from an atheist standard.

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#62

Post by AnimalMuppet »

ABCLAW wrote: post #60
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atheists can certainly act morally, and many do. But I would say that atheists don't have a basis for having morals. dictionary.com says that morals have to do with "right conduct". But in atheism, there is nothing with the authority to give you a definition of "right". There's nothing absolute in the way that, say, the Christian God is absolute, except the universe, and the universe doesn't tell you what right condu…

>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 atheist does.

Yes and no. Yes, you have to deem the Christian God, say, to be absolute in order for Him to provide an absolute basis for your morals. (This is true whether or not that God exists.)

But the Christian is not in the same position as either Plato or the atheist. Within the Christian's position, God is absolute, and therefore can provide a rock-solid basis for a moral standard. In contrast, Plato's gods were inadequate as a moral basis, both in theory and in practice (that is, in practice they often behaved in ways that were not very moral).

The atheist has an absolute (at least, I think most atheists do) - the physical universe. Within (most flavors of) atheism, that's the only thing that can be really absolute, but it provides no moral standard whatsoever. (C. S. Lewis remarked that "what the universe is doing" is working toward the final and irreversible extinction of all life forms, and taking that as a moral standard would leave suicide and genocide as our only moral values. It seems better to just say "there's no moral standard there".) The atheist can pick a different basis for a moral standard and ascribe validity to it - say, the human race, or the atheist's society, or whatever. But the atheist has made a somewhat arbitrary choice - there's nothing within the atheist's position that compels that particular choice of moral basis. What's more, the atheist knows it. This is very different from the Christian's position, where there is one clear moral basis that can only be accepted or rejected.

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#63

Post by visarga »

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…

> What I find interesting about this hypothesis is that consciousness is just a stream of thoughts which we do not control.

I would define consciousness as that which keeps the body alive, reacting to changes in the environment and actions of other agents.

Consciousness is a perception-judgement-action-reward loop. It's a reinforcement learning kind of situation, where the agent, embodied in an environment, learns to act in such a way as to maximise its rewards. We have been programmed by evolution to favour certain kinds of rewards which are good for keeping us alive.

This definition is much more concrete and practical - it has been applied with some degree of success in designing AI agents. It gives a purpose and a mechanism to consciousness.

The consciousness loop is formed of sensing, judging, acting, learning from sensation and reward. Sensing is like deep learning - a neural net converts raw sensory signals in high level representations. Sensory learning is mostly acquired by reconstruction or self supervision. Judging is like RL - where an agent learns to predict the future rewards following its current situation and actions. It can be model based (reasoned) or model free (instinctual). Acting is like the feedback based motion planning algorithms in robotics. Reward learning happens in the background of all these processes. When you put all these systems together, and inside a body, inside an environment, you get consciousness.

In the end it's just the competition of genes for survival, self replication in a limited resource environment over billions of years.

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#64

Post by photojosh »

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.

> no way that bicameralism would be the dominant phenotype only a few thousand years ago

It would be cultural and taught, not genetic.

There are non-isolated populations: I come from a religious background where the idea that God "talks" to you is quite prevalent. If you want an analysis of how could possibly be the case in our modern society, I recommend Tanya Luhrmann's "When God Talks Back".

I say Jaynes puts the transition as far too sudden compared to what it actually could have been. Individuals could have had developed his version of "consciousness" often and repeatedly, but failed to pass it on into greater culture. I think of literacy as an analogous transition; until it's actually of benefit for the average person to read+write (ie society has moved beyond majority subsistence), it's not going to happen.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12958803-when-god-talks-...

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#65

Post by mgamache »

MR4D wrote: post #55
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.

> "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?

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#66

Post by photojosh »

nitrogen wrote: post #27
whatshisface wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

This isn't evidence, but I used to be religious and there was a certain religious mindset in which the internal monologue became more like an internal dialogue. Given this, and that IIRC there is a part of the brain that has been associated with religious experience, the bicameral mind seems at least plausible, though maybe not exactly as originally posited.

I posted a similar comment above on how religious approaches give bicameral theory some plausibility: people genuinely do think God talks to them, even today.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19567926

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#67

Post by photojosh »

Symmetry wrote: post #42
sebastos wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wonder how much of the mental thought process is genetic vs learned, because I can totally relate to your description.

You mention colour, which is interesting, because I was never attuned to colour until I worked as a photographer for a decade where it actually matters beyond just symbolism (ie blue sky = nice day, red light = stop). Now it is often prevalent in my thought process.

I would say my own thinking is a wild mix of language, maths ('just' another language really), graphs and other visual representations. Nigh impossible to form it into a coherent linear narrative.

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#68

Post by photojosh »

FakeComments wrote: post #29
MockObject wrote: post #21

> “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.

[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.

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#69

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history

#70

Post by dragonwriter »

FakeComments wrote: post #29
MockObject wrote: post #21

> “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.

[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.

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