I thought that overzealous pattern recognition and selective memory (aka “van on the corner” syndrome) were by themselves enough to explain why people today decide that wearing that same pair of unwashed socks during each game will improve their performance. I don’t think that it’s overzealous speculation to suppose that some people might have noticed that just after Thag beat up Og, he got gored during the next hunt --and from there it’s just two or three more notable coincidences and you have an emerging theory of Divine Justice.
Oh, the Romans were super engineers. They had flush toilets also. The Greeks were great mathematicians also. But neither of these things were science. Of course there was no council, (at least I’ve never heard of one) but pre-scientists accepted Aristotle as nearly holy writ. They knew that astrology worked, they knew that transmutation was possible. They got a very good working knowledge of what happened when you mixed this chemical with that one, or where Mars was going to be next year.
I wasn’t insulting the old gentleman naturalist I mentioned. People like that are incredibly valuable in collecting information. But that is different from the process of science, which I still contend the alchemists didn’t follow. If they had, they wouldn’t be alchemists for so long.
These are interesting questions, but note that they are not confined to human behaviour. For example, there is a kind of wasp which lays its eggs in the bodies of aphids: if the poor aphid has no wasp eggs in already, the wasp will lay a female egg; but if it detects another egg, the wasp lays a male egg. In another example, Vervet monkeys have a specific warning cry for eagles which eat Vervet monkeys but which look very similar to other, non-threatening eagles. Thus, Vervet monkeys can be said to detect threatening eagles very effectively.
These detection mechanisms are examples of is what is known as the extended phenotype (an important phrase coined by, yes, guess who): A change in genotype causes a change in the individual “built” by the genes, but that change might manifest in different behaviour of some kind. And how does this happen? The mechanism is anything but hypothetical: it is the basis of the science of neural networks. We can build simple artificial neural circuits in robots and set them to some kind of task, such as navigating a maze, then select the “best actors” and use them as the templates for new random mutations. Eventually, this evolutionary process produces circuits which are pretty good at the task required. Now, do we know why those specific circuits fared better than the others? No. Rather like a cryptographic process, the “reduction” becomes computationally infeasible very quickly, but I’m sure you’d agree that no supernatural element need be introduced.
Of course, in biological organisms these neural circuits become even more intractable. But we can still measure which areas of the neural network “light up” with activity during certain tasks, and observe the effects of damage to these areas in patients who have suffered a tumour, stroke or accident, and in the case of those born with damage or stunted growth in this area, try and pick out the genes responsible. These are the types of studies which were carried out in the paper I cited (I could dig out a few more if you like – are you a member of an institution which has access to journals or would you be satisfied with just abstracts?).
But note that the “societies” we’re talking about are the small isolated groups which characterised all the hominids from Toumai onwards. There was little diversity in the size of the “societies” we’re discussing, agreed? Anthropology suggests that in small tribal groups, the man who is “barely aware of the possibility of infidelity” is a rare creature indeed, if he exists at all. And like I said, if genes affecting behaviour seems strange, then our debate shifts back half a billion years to the emergence of animals in the Precambrian seas.
Ah, but I didn’t say all cases, since clearly even Thag would be able to recognise some natural causes – again, watch out for ascribing universals where none were even suggested (you promised!). You appear to accept that agent detection could have evolved as naturally as other “detections” in simpler animals, but not that hyperactive agent detection (which still doesn’t ascribe agency to everything) would be advantageous. I happen to disagree, but it’s not really key to our discussion – after all, to perfectly identify natural versus intelligent causes in every case would be vanishingly unlikely, so we’re really just offering opinions on which side of the line more errors would fall on. In other words, whether hyperactive agent detection is advantageous is not so relevant compared to whether it is the case (since evolutionary features can still avolve arbitrarily, as per Dawkins’ quote on p.219).
I offer that agent detection is and was hyperactive in many regards: a natural explanation has to be genuinely rigorous and convincing before we let go of our “default” of ascribing agency (just look at the debate we’re having!), which is why natural explanations have only taken hold in modern times. In tribal religions today, and in history and prehistory, people consider things like lightning, different yields at harvest and all manner of natural phenomena as being caused by some kind of agent.
And once more (unposited universal alert!), I did not suggest that hominids believed everything they hear, only that sometimes they would believe an impressive story about ancestors and agents, convincingly told by a good story-teller who could remember his dreams, handle his psychotropics and perhaps experience an epiphanic, epileptic episode. This is reasonable too, yes? (And remember,if you say no, this is not reasonable, then we must explore the numerous cases where convincing speakers have started their own religious cults, the existence of which demonstrates that some groups are anything but skeptical in this regard.)
Well, now I’d have to ask you to expand on what you mean by this, since it seems that you are attempting to remove tribal religions (of today and prehistory) from the set of “religions” since they might not “focus minds and reconnect their followers to the way of the universe”, whatever that means. The tribal religions we’re talking about are still religions, yes? Or are you shifting the necessary divine inspiration to some point after Thag’s tribal shamen? If so, lay out the step you consider ludicrous and we’ll explore what science has to say once more.
To me the issue of cults demonstrates the opposite. Cults attract only a tiny fraction of the population and they do so by finding individuals in vulnerable circumstances. They also exploit whatever conditions (political, religious, or economic) they find useful. But in primitive societies there never were such circumstances, nor any reason for any individual to be vulernable. A primitive society had to be a tight-knit society, so I’d guess that single ideas would win or lose at the group level rather than the individual level. Also, an early tribe would have to be more rigidly practical. They wouldn’t engage in all the abstract thinking that makes individuals today vulnerable to groundless ideas.
Let me address this sentence in reverse order. As to “whatever that means”, it means religion. Religion is the process by which the individual reconnects his or her consciousness to levels of being higher or truer than the physical one. (Re=again and ligare=to connect, in Latin.) If you don’t mind a little reading, we recently discussed E. F. Schumacher’s book A Guide for the Perplexed, which introduces religion to beginners. The idea is that a person at the lowest level spends all their time distracted base conerns and emotions. By one or more processes–prayer, meditation, ritual, yoga, fasting, singing and chanting, dancing, charity work, and many others–the individual learns how to avoid those distractions. Once the merely physical desires no longer control the consciousness, the individual can then focus on the spiritual realm and connect with things that were previously off limits. While the details vary, the basic idea is the same, and the final experience is quite similar in cultures from around the world and across history. You can find descriptions of it from followers of all major religions, and Schumacher does.
(As tactfully and politely as I can, I feel the need to point out that you reacted to the idea by saying “whatever that means”. The fact that you didn’t recognize the basis of religion suggests that you could stand to learn more about it.)
As for tribal religions, I’ve not looked at every one in depth–but then again who has? I have studied the cultures of some Native American tribes from the Plains, the Southwest, and the Northwest, and all of them did pursue the process as discussed above. Of course the details are vastly different from one religion to the next, but the central idea is very clearly there. An individual should learn to control his or her own mind, to avoid distractions, to banish unworthy thoughts, and to detatch from the physical world in order to better know himself or herself. I think it’s an inherently western prejudice to suppose that tribal religions didn’t involve this process. I find it quite plausible that some of them were better at it than the major religions. At the very least, people in primitive tribes had fewer distractions to deal with.
Now if there are tribal religion that didn’t have the same basis, I’d be interested to hear about them.
I don’t see any connection between neural networks and genes. A neural network functions mainly by pruning. In other words, early on there’s an almost useless jumble of neural connections in the brain, around fifty times as many as in the adult brain. Those connections get pruned according to how much they are used. Connections which are used heavily remain and are re-enforced, while those used rarely or never disintegrate until what’s left allows a useful flow of neural communication. The pruning occurs due to the circumstances the individual encounters; for instance, if he gets lots of visual stimulus then the brain retains a lot of connections related to vision and visual thinking. The process continues throughout life. To me this points in the opposite direction of genetic control over thinking. Since the pathways of the brain are determined by experience and choice, what role is left for genes to play?
Of course I’m willing to consider that genes play some role, but I’d like to see some evidence.
At the moment we’re talking about genes affecting thinking. Animals don’t think, so I don’t see how they’re relevant to this question. The case of monkeys seeing an eagle and reacting instinctively is not the same as the type of abstract thinking we’re dealing with here.
I don’t see any justification for the claim that humans are more likely to see human activity when there is none rather than vice versa. In fact, I see the exact opposite. Almost all baloney arises when people fail to see that humans are the driving factor. Hence Marx, for instance, viewed all human history in terms of clashing economic classes. He neglected to account for individual behavior, and consequently a few of his predictions were a bit off-target.
Or the eugenicists, for example, saw only races rather than individuals, and there’s no need to explain what that led to.
Likewise economists say that “market forces” will cause a certain outcome, as if the market force should be listed next to gravity, the elctromagnetic force, and the nuclear forces. Market forces will eventually lead to cleaner energy, or higher wages, or manufacturing returning to the USA. But a market is just a collection of people making individual decisions, which is why such predictions are often wrong.
Or we could look at the hippies, who though that music would set us free, or that free love would make us free, or so on. But the hippie communes failed because most individuals who tried them rejected them.
Or so on. The point is that human beings are quite prone to forgeting that humans are involved in certain activities, rather than the other way around.
I’ve never believed that or met anybody who does.
It seems to me it would work the other way. If Thag beats up Og and nothing bad happens to Thag, folks would see that as evidence that divine intervention was lacking. Since people generally remember injustice (real or percieved) more than justice, selective memory would work against belief in God.
You should read your Bible more. This situation happened all the time to Judah. The answer was either that Og secretly committed a sin, or Og’s dad did, or his granddad, etc. There are plenty of examples of virtuous kings dying quickly and evil kings dying of old age in their beds.
So your position is that in no case would a tribal group believe the story of a prehsitoric shaman? Remember, I am positing that in some cases this is a reasonable premise. And are you suggesting that isolated tribes today are more immune to suggestions of external agency than western skeptics? If so, we could explore what anthropology has to say on the matter.
As I explained to mswas, I used to be religious myself, so I would hope you consider me well-enough schooled in religious teachings already. I can assure you that I pursued all the criteria you list. (Indeed, I still pursue most of them as an atheist.)
Anthropologists have studied a great, great many of them. If you were trying to draw a crucial distinction between the beliefs and practises of these prehistoric groups and “religion” we could talk about anthropology further, but it seems that you do accept that they constitute religions, so this is not necessary for our debate.
But into what arrangement does the neural network grow in order to be pruned in the first place? You surely cannot deny that it grows under the direction of the gene? This is why baby humans don’t emerge with a baby monkey brain, or wasp ganglia for that matter, in their cranium. Again, watch your universals: cognition is a function of both genes and environment in development. Monkeys and wasps wouldn’t be good at agent detection even if they developed in a human environment, and some brain-impaired humans aren’t either despite such an environment.
But humans can instinctively jump to agency conclusions as well, which is what psychological tests are designed to measure. In any case, you appear to be drawing an arbitrary distinction between animal and human behaviour when it comes to cognition. (In fact, it sounds like you’re questioning the entire field of evolutionary psychology.)
Note that all of your examples come from the 20th Century, hundreds of millennia later than the tribal groups we’re discussing, and all seem to involve the balance between individuals and collectives rather than anyone suggesting that economics, politics or eugenics had nothing to do with agents. Surely the question remains, why were lightning, harvest yields and all kinds of natural phenomena routinely ascribed to external agents?
Look, I can see how this is going. You ask me questions, I put together a hopefully informative answer with some useful references, and you pick at those answers where you disagree. But do you really consider that the points you’ve just picked at demonstrate the ludicrousness of considering religion to have emerged naturally? The only disagreement on your part which pertained to our central debate was the first, in which you appear to suggest (so correct me if I’m wrong) that it is ludicrous to suggest that a tribal group might believe stories featuring external agents. From there, it seems that you’re suggesting that even were they to believe such stories, this still wouldn’t constitute “focussing minds and reconnecting to the way of the universe” as required by your definition of religion. Perhaps we could therefore explore what a tribe might do if they did come to believe that events were controlled by external intelligent agents who could be influenced by the tribe’s actions?
This is just not true. Animals do think - abstract thoughts. Ask any chimp ethologist.
Plus, you know, we’re animals, and we think.
Hi! Pleased to meet you. 
And, as long as you’re summarily rejecting the idea, where do you think that smelly sock sports superstitions come from? Keep in mind that it sure ain’t established religion or any other specific tradition, since any random thing can be selected to be superstitious about.
People remember the shocking and abnormal, not justice or injustice specifically. Ergo, percieved Godly actions like lightning strikes attract notice; one guy thumping another doesn’t - unless they make an incorrect pattern match between the thumping and the lightning.
People are by nature pattern-matchers. Sometimes they get it wrong. False beliefs about otherwordly causation ensue. Hmm, seems simple enough to me.
That’s almost exactly what I was trying to say. Our genes give us a messy network. Our experiences and choices determine prune the network. Genes determine that we are able to think. Experiences and choices determine what we actually will think, including when we do and don’t assume human involvement. The research I’ve linked shows that environment and choice determine many facets of human thought, but it doesn’t mention agent detection. So like I said, I’ll consider that genes are caused by agent detection, if I see some evidence. You claim that “humans can instinctively jump to agency conclusions”. Show me the proof.
I sure am.
In many cases they were suggesting just that. The entire point of Marxist thinking was that the course of history was set and determined and no person or group of persons could change that course with their choices. In your terminology, Marx believed that there were no agents. The various economic classes were bound to do certain things and certain times. No choices of actions were involved, or even possible.
If various tribes actually did and still do think this way, I’d be interested in reading about it. I am somewhat skeptical about such accounts. If a western researcher claims to have found such beliefs, it may be that they were misunderstanding something, or oversimplifying a more complex beliefs. After all, scientific materialists hold a lot of erroneous beliefs about the major western religions, which they spend their life around. It stands to reason that they’d make even more mistakes while studying the religion of a primitive, remote tribe. But as always, I’ll approach the issue with an open mind if you tell me what to read.
My point was that your hypothetical caveman religion did not appear to have any relationship to any real religion. Now that you’ve acknowledged a gap between the two, I’m willing to lay aside my other objections for the moment. So we have a bunch of cavemen that some intelligent being causes some natural phenomena. What next?
[QUOTE=SentientMeat]
So, the two points therein which I thought I’d raise here.
[list][li]Religion, both in its claims and in its phenomenology, is a legitimate subject for scientific study. [/li][li]Believing something because it makes you happy makes it no more likely whatsoever that what you believe is actually true: That is the very definition of wishful thinking.[/li][/QUOTE]
Thought I’d bring back the OP. Been enjoying the discussion so far though.
I deffinately think that religion is open to be the legitimate subject for scientific study. Otherwise Cultural Anthropology isn’t a science.
It should be made clear that my idea of religion is a set of ideas that are said to show truth or morality. This means that cults and science and economics are to some extent religions, sorry. For me the logical gray area from God to Market Forces doesn’t really allow for seperation. They are both Actors being put forward in an explanetory fashion, and subject to checks on predictive ability. Come to think of it, I’ll throw Karma into that category as well.
That being said, my own study has lead me to have a high degree of confidence in there being some sort of Creator and an infintessimaly small confidence that the Creator has even the remotest desire to interfere/notice my existance. Frankly I think human beings are no better than self-aware viri, not that I’m sure viri aren’t also self-aware.
-Eben
Out of curiousity, what “logical grey area” do you see between God and Market Forces? Market forces are observable aggregate effects of the real actions and decisions of real people. God is…not.
And, science has no members, no central authority, requires no leaps of faith - nothing that makes it resemble any religion except that there’s a tiny amount of overlap between the set of topics it offers explanations for, and the set of topics that religions have myths about. Based on that standard, Burger King is a religion, as is the IRS. Arguably they qualify much better.
Why do you think there’s a creator? Do you feel that there’s something about observable reality which cannot possibly have developed through natural methods?
Yep, Buger King and the IRS are indeed religions by my deffinition. And therefore any predictive claims they make are possible subjects of scientific study. The problem with “God is…not.” is that the difference is only apparent if you start with the premise that God cannot/doesn’t exist. If you’re a lay person you are presented with very similar sounding arguments that the aggregate effects of the real actions and decisions of God are the reason the universe works like it does. I’m not saying I subscribe to that, just saying that the arguments themselves are similar. They are then testable to scientific standards. Which pretty much says that going with Market Forces to predict market changes is better than praying for insight on a statistical basis.
The idea that “science has no members, no central authority, requires no leaps of faith” is oversimplification. It like saying that Religions has no members, no central authority, and requires no leaps of faith because there’s not one single religion. (using religion in the more traditional sense here, btw.) There are most certainly members of scientific groups, they usualy have an authority (peer review at the least), and to someone not versed in the field great leaps of faith are called upon.
I gather from your response that some offense was generated by lumping things together the way I have, but I meant no offense. If you accept my deffinition of religion, you find it does much to demystify classicaly defined religions rather than suddenly mystify science or market forces.
Not that I want to go into it all here, but after what was a long-term review I went from being an athiest in the pure sense to giving a high probability in the chance that the Divine Watchmaker hypotheses is essentialy correct. It might be interesting to note that this doesn’t really change anything about the way I live, except that I’ve stopped focusing research on the subject.
-Eben
Then I reject your definition. (I already did, but boy, this cements it.)
In what way are the arguments similar? Beyond “something causes this big effect. If we close our eyes and don’t look for evidence of causes, it’s all equally mysterious.” Again it seems like you’re overgeneralizing concepts to the point that any two things are equal. I push a button on my phone - it beeps as a result. ‘If you’re a lay person you are presented with very similar sounding arguments that the phone machinery and decisions of God are the reason the universe works like it does.’
Any argument or defintion that works equally well on any example is probably not all that useful.
Using religion in its standard definition (as I understand it), science would only qualify if its members (those peer reviewers) had to take the pronouncments of the science on faith. That is both clearly not true and also antithetical to science in general. So, while I might be oversimplifying, you’re definitely overgeneralizing again.
I don’t accept your definition of religion though, as it seems to amount to “any group”. And, even if I did, I don’t see how it demystifys anything. It provides no answers or explanations, after all.
(It wasn’t so much offense as a desire to challenge misconception, by the way.)
Well, not to get all detailed about it, but the Divine Watchmaker hypothesis is fundamentally flawed, in that it states that for anything that is complicated and ordered to exist, it requires a creator that is at least as complicated and ordered, if not more. If it didn’t require that, of course, the universe could have developed on its own, incrementally, from prior ‘simpler’ incarnations of itself. But, if that’s not possible, then the watchmaker similarly requires his own more complicated watchmaker-maker to exist, which requires his own even more complicated watchmaker-maker-maker, which requires yet another, and another, and another, and another…
Clearly, if complexity requires prior complexity to exist, then you are forced to the nonsensical conclusion that there must always have been yet more bigger, better creators - nonsense, and therefore untrue. Ergo we know that either incremental creation is possible, or that complicated, ordered things may spontaneously pop into existence from nothing. Either way we don’t need a separate creator to explain the existence of the universe.
I’ve created two new posts to deal with those issues currently raised here so as not to hijack this thread any longer. I would very much like to continue the debates relevant to them in their threads.
Thanks,
-Eben
And if those genes change over millions of years, so the various thinking abilities of the organism built by those genes change.
For the third time, what’s wrong with the world-respected, peer-reviewed [I cited? If you’d like some more (and can access more than just abstracts) I’d be happy to oblige, but I still don’t understand what you’ve got against this one first.
Well, again, like I invited mswas, I invite you to choose a paper at random from this world-respected, peer-reviewed scientific journal and we can explore its scientific rigour or otherwise. Would you say you understand evolutionary psychology well enough to summarily dismiss the career’s work of tens of thousands of scientists at the most august academic institutions in the world?
You honestly doubt that tribal cultures routinely ascribe agency to natural phenomena? Well, OK.
Pascal Boyer is a respected expert anthropologist who has studied thousands of tribes across several continents and catalogued them in his book Religion Explained (I’m afraid you can’t read this online, only articles based on similar work). He studied the Fang people of Cameroon, who believe that crop failures result from poison from a witch’s internal “animal spirit”, the Yanomamo of the Amazon who ascribe lightning to the action of another spirit, and the Fore of Papua New Guinea for whom “bush spirits” form the cause of many natural phenomena. The point is that these are typical examples – indeed, if you can present evidence of a tribe isolated from western philosophies which routinely ascribes natural causes to lightning, harvests and whatnot, you will have found a very interesting subject which many anthropologists will wish to study.
Whoa, whoa, where have I acknowledged any such thing? I was asking you if you posited such a gap. My position is that these are not gaps but unsurprising (if not inevitable) gradual steps. And I don’t see why you keep calling tribal religions hypothetical – they exist currently and anthropologists study them in detail.
Well, like I said, let’s explore what a tribe would do if it believed that it could influence those agents. Would they try to talk to them? Bring offerings of some kind in the hope of favour? Would they, as you put it focus their minds on how they might influence their universe via the agents they believe in? I posit that these would, again, be reasonable steps.
In fact, since you’ve asked for some reading, you might as well try the very recommendation I made in my OP: Breaking the Spell. Try chapters 4 & 5 (beginning on p.108) and tell me if you consider them ludicrous. Note that there are plenty of references to scientific papers if you want to question a particular point. Dennett is largely presenting the same substance as Dawkins in his chapter of the same name (the one you consider ludicrous here), but his style might be more to your liking.
ITR, it seems to me that we are nearing some kind of tipping point in which you might agree that, actually, religions emerging naturally isn’t so ludicrous as you first thought. You might still disagree that some religions did emerge without divine inspiration, which is fine, but no longer that they could. If you could let me know explicitly where you are with this - whether I’m making any headway here or whether my arguments simply aren’t what you’re looking for at all - that would be very helpful, thanks. And if you have actually changed your mind as a result of my posts, I would salute you and thank you deeply.
Erratum: paper I cited.
My the main problems with that one are that I don’t feel like coughing up $31.50 for the privilege of reading it, that the abstract makes no mention of genetics, and that the last sentence of the abstract informs us that the paper is inconclusive.
You’re willing to dismiss the life’s work of billions of people based on a topic that you don’t understand, namely religion. Hence it seems a bit hypocritical for you to complain about me dismissing far fewer people. For the record, though, I don’t expect you to respect my opinions on the subject. Indeed, my respect for your opinions would drop if you did. I would say that I don’t have any particular respect for august academic institutions or peer-reviewed scientific journals. I attended two august* academic institutions, Harvey Mudd College for undergrad and Vanderbilt University for graduate school, and I encountered more deranged and hysterical people there than I’ve ever met elsewhere. By contrast, my current church in rural Virginia has only calm and sensible people, though many of them never graduated from high school. I’ve also found more nonsense in peer-reviewed articles than anything else I’ve ever read (except The God Delusion), with the ones I wrote being the worst offenders.
But that’s neither here nor there. The evolutionary psycholgists could be at september institutions for all I care. What matters is whether the things they say make sense. My view on human behavior is that humans make decisions based on what they think is best. I don’t think I’m overreaching when I suggest that this is the most common view. Hence, if someone wants me to believe that current human decisions are totally or partially determined by genes inherited from cavemen, the onus is on them to provide the evidence.
I’ll repeat what I’d classify as evidence. The chromosome(s) and location(s) of the gene(s) that cause a certain behavior, the proteins manufactured by that gene, the structure in the brain result from that gene, and an explanation of how that causes the behavior in question.
*August within the world of academics, that is. I don’t think any academic institution is really august any more.