'God' is the average opinion of your tribe
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'God' is the average opinion of your tribe
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Re: 'God' is the average opinion of your tribe
#2[dead]
Re: 'God' is the average opinion of your tribe
#3What this is talking about is basically what's called the "superego" in Freudian writing.
Anyway, basically agree with the OP that societies try to find a stable configuration for it, but I like to think of it in physics terms: it's a stable attractor in the space of moral configurations, not exactly uniform everywhere but something that has a "pressure" keeping it close to a set of norms so that everything feels more-or-less safe and predictable. Perturbations are tolerated as long as their magnitudes are small and they die out over time.
Fads and changes of moral fashion, then, act like waves propagating in this substrate, as everyone's moral compasses realign slightly to account for the new concepts. Complete social revolutions, and likely physical revolutions, are "phase changes" in which the local inconsistencies become so great that they blow up to global transformations that reconfigure the whole thing at once.
Basically um society is a gas of moral compasses.
Re: 'God' is the average opinion of your tribe
#4The title explains literally the whole concept:
Representing the "opinions" (or more appropriately dispositions) of each person as a vector, the belief system of a "tribe" (connected set of individuals) is probably the mean of these vectors.
And relgions seek to optimize the "morality" they preach (vector they propose as "god") to maximize membership / agreement / centralness of their god. Which of course (author does not point this out) is the mean of the population.
They could have expanded a little:
* By what metric do we define "closeness"? A higher norm would penalize dissent / divergence from "god" more. * In the limit, how does dissent penalties affect the "coverage" of available religions? This is basically k-means with different defintions of "mean" * You could model the problem as unsupervised clustering where k is unknown to predict how many religion clusters form, for a given population - if opinions could be measured.
on and on. Title was the most interesting part, the rest was just coffee kicking in.
Re: 'God' is the average opinion of your tribe
#5I am a Catholic Christian and a moral objectivist, so my thoughts are, of course, colored by my own religious and philosophic views. With that disclaimer out of the way ...
I don't think this rings true. It suggests that the morality espoused by a particular religion basically just boils down to public opinion. But there are a multitude of cases from my own and other religions where the message put forth by the religion was never popularly accepted by the prevailing community. You can move the goal posts, of course, and say that it's not the prevailing community's views that matter but the tribe's, and you can define "tribe" in such a way that it only applies to the people who accept a particular opinion -- but then that becomes a tautology.
It also suggests that the primary goal of religion is to attract new members, and so the religion is going to offer views that appeal to the majority of people. I don't think religion resembles politics in that way, at least not for the major world religions.
Re: 'God' is the average opinion of your tribe
#6This has nothing really to do with the concept of "god" or "God," really, and more an inspection of social rules.
Re: 'God' is the average opinion of your tribe
#7> Let’s assume that there are n possible opinions
Is n finite? Is n less than the population size? Far greater than the population size?
> define “God” to be the mean opinion vector
What does it mean to take the mean between Trinitarianism, Unitarianism, Binitarianism and Modalism?
Re: 'God' is the average opinion of your tribe
#8This has nothing really to do with the concept of "god" or "God," really, and more an inspection of social rules.
It seems like it has to do with (the concept of (the concept of god))
Re: 'God' is the average opinion of your tribe
#9[deleted]
Re: 'God' is the average opinion of your tribe
#10I am a Catholic Christian and a moral objectivist, so my thoughts are, of course, colored by my own religious and philosophic views. With that disclaimer out of the way ... I don't think this rings true. It suggests that the morality espoused by a particular religion basically just boils down to public opinion. But there are a multitude of cases from my own and other religions where the message put forth by the relig…
Exactly. A huge component of Christianity is separation from the world and standing out against a crowd.
There is certainly a popular folk religion, but this is not the essence of religion.