Believing is seeing

[Adrian II]

Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine which I read occasionally for comic relief, has a book out about the origin of the human belief in gods, conspiracies and aliens and such. He is not the first to pursue this train of thought and there is already a sound evolutionary and cognitive basis for his approach. To my mind it provides the most convincing explanation for our dogged attachment to real or perceived patterns of cause and effect, even if one of these terms is 'unseen'.

An amazing aspect of this is that both science and belief are rooted in the same evolutionary reflex, although of course science proceeds to methodically test any intuitive patterns whereas beliefs make the facts fit the intuition.

A more sobering aspect is that man will always invent new gods and conspiracies. Inevitably these will also be subject to the evolutionary law of selection. Some day someone should write an evolutionary history of religion. In the meantime I would love to hear Pape's insights in particular.

Beliefs come first; reasons second. That's the insightful message of The Believing Brain, by Michael Shermer, the founder of Skeptic magazine. In the book, he brilliantly lays out what modern cognitive research has to tell us about his subject—namely, that our brains are "belief engines" that naturally "look for and find patterns" and then infuse them with meaning. These meaningful patterns form beliefs that shape our understanding of reality. Our brains tend to seek out information that confirms our beliefs, ignoring information that contradicts them. Mr. Shermer calls this "belief-dependent reality." The well-worn phrase "seeing is believing" has it backward: Our believing dictates what we're seeing.

Mr. Shermer marshals an impressive array of evidence from game theory, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. A human ancestor hears a rustle in the grass. Is it the wind or a lion? If he assumes it's the wind and the rustling turns out to be a lion, then he's not an ancestor anymore. Since early man had only a split second to make such decisions, Mr. Shermer says, we are descendants of ancestors whose "default position is to assume that all patterns are real; that is, assume that all rustles in the grass are dangerous predators and not the wind."

"As a back-of-the-envelope calculation within an order-of-magnitude accuracy, we can safely say that over the past ten thousand years of history humans have created about ten thousand different religions and about one thousand gods," Mr. Shermer writes. He lists more than a dozen gods, from Amon Ra to Zeus, and wonders how one of them can be true and the rest false. "As skeptics like to say, everyone is an atheist about these gods; some of us just go one god further."

Link

[Fragony]

'A human ancestor hears a rustle in the grass. Is it the wind or a lion? If he assumes it's the wind and the rustling turns out to be a lion, then he's not an ancestor anymore.'

You wouldn't exist as your to-be ancestor got eaten, smart guy

[ICantSpellDawg]

Sounds interesting. I believe in God the "watchmaker". I am always interested in seeing the mechanism of life. A dry understanding of the history of evolutionary faith would be interestingfrom both a secular and religious perspective.

[Papewaio]

Mr. Shermer says, we are descendants of ancestors whose "default position is to assume that all patterns are real; that is, assume that all rustles in the grass are dangerous predators and not the wind."

That ancestor would be dead of adrenaline overdose the moment a mild wind went across the Savannah.

More seriously, ideas do quite often come first. A lot of scientist's have the intuition that something should be. The funny thing is that empirical evidence is considered an inferior way to find a predictive model.

The flipside is that the first meme is very hard to shake, to be a good scientist you have to take the thing that you most firmly believe in and in the face of evidence let it go, and some of the best will embrace an idea that's just destroyed something they believed in for decades. It's also why some of the best scientists have turned out to be very religious (ie Jesuits)... the memes you start with a very hard to break out of.

Pattern recognition is crucial in science, but one has to avoid overly vague patterns like horoscopes which can be made to fit the bill on anything.

[Skullheadhq]

I still don't get atheist obsession with religion, they should get an hobby or something. Creating magazines about something you think is nonsense is just plain silly.

[Papewaio]

I still don't get atheist obsession with religion, they should get an hobby or something. Creating magazines about something you think is nonsense is just plain silly.

Skeptics are like mechanics. I've seen my mechanically minded cousin's happily tear down a favourite engine and then rebuild it. Skeptics and scientists in general will test all theories, theirs, other scientists. So it's being part of the group when they test other's.

I can live with religion as long as the monks keep rolling out the beer .

When religion is used to illuminate it's a good thing, when it's used to narrow views down to a single document out of context... well you end up with a whole host of unsavoury things.

So until people stop flying planes into buildings, wearing bomb vests, or blowing up rallies because one group has a different colour in the spectrum then the other... well I think it's in anyone's best interest to understand how we created such an meme suite even if we think its nonsense or not.

[Adrian II]

It's also why some of the best scientists have turned out to be very religious (ie Jesuits)... the memes you start with a very hard to break out of.

Aye

And is the 'pattern-thinking' pattern impossible to break out of? I mean, if religious and conspiratorial thinking is ineradicable, you and I had better adapt to the fact.

Aii

[CBR]

And is the 'pattern-thinking' pattern impossible to break out of?

It could be. What is important IMO is that we are all aware of how a strength of our brain quickly can become a weakness, as we might all be hit by such pattern-thinking in various degree.

[Adrian II]

It could be. What is important IMO is that we are all aware of how a strength of our brain quickly can become a weakness, as we might all be hit by such pattern-thinking in various degree.

Mebbe. Social science abounds with such paradoxes. We can for instance try to render the scapegoat mechanism inoperative by raising kids to be aware of it. There is even an evolutionary basis for such tactics as well, in the sense that we have a genetic make-up that enables us to study our self-same genetic make-up and influence it.

What makes it so hard to 'switch off' such mechanisms is that they have served us so well. Like Papewaio said, even science thrives on it.

AII

[Rhyfelwyr]

Some day someone should write an evolutionary history of religion.

idk, I always thought that the history of all of our religious systems could be better explained by socioeconomic developments.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Some day someone should write an evolutionary history of religion.

Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer.

I thought it was a very interesting book. He goes into what kinds of things we find plausible and what we don't. He's an anthropologist, and talks about that with a lot of cognitive psychology as well.

He says we have a certain (small) number of very powerful inference mechanisms. One for "is it an animal" one for "is it human" one for "is it a tool" and only a couple more. If you've ever come across a big bug in your house and killed it, and realized afterwards that you were able to scan the whole room and judge a dozen objects based on how suitable they are for killing it then you understand the idea of the tool inference mechanism. Religious beliefs tend to be minimally counterintuitive (I think that's his phrase). So there's one tribe in africa that believes a certain kind of tree eavesdrops on the conversations of whoever is listening. When you hear about it, you don't believe it, but the thing that you aren't believing in is the same as the thing they actually believe in, despite the fact that I told you very little about it. You make the assumption (because it's much more plausible to you) that the trees have many of the features of a human like mind. You assume that their hearing has a limited range, that they don't forget everything they've heard after 10 seconds, etc.

It focuses very little on modern monotheistic religions, his point is that those are very unusual compared to the rest of religious thinking. One thing I remember about it was a study he described where they told christian believers a story in which god was described as omnipresent (what they said they believed). In the story he saved a man from a car crash and cheered up some woman who was having a bad day and prayed for help with it at the same time. When they were brought back in a few months later and told to repeat the story, they usually had remembered it with god saving the man first, and then going and helping the woman later.

[Fragony]

let's hope we can recycle 0 and 1's ome day that was LONG

[Adrian II]

When you hear about it, you don't believe it, but the thing that you aren't believing in is the same as the thing they actually believe in, despite the fact that I told you very little about it. You make the assumption (because it's much more plausible to you) that the trees have many of the features of a human like mind. You assume that their hearing has a limited range, that they don't forget everything they've heard after 10 seconds, etc.

This made me laugh out loud because it's so true.

I found some articles and parts of books by Boyer in Google books and they look very promising. What appeals to me (and to Shermer, who wrote a very favorable review of Boyer) is that Boyer doesn't invoke any extraordinary capacities or circumstances to explain religion. As it says in a quote in the Wiki:

As I have pointed out repeatedly the building of religious concepts requires mental systems and capacities that are there anyway, religious concepts or not. Religious morality uses moral intuitions, religious notions of supernatural agents recruit our intuitions about agency in general, and so on. This is why I said that religious concepts are parasitic upon other mental capacities. Our capacities to play music, paint pictures or even make sense of printed ink-patterns on a page are also parasitic in this sense. This means that we can explain how people play music, paint pictures and learn to read by examining how mental capacities are recruited by these activities. The same goes for religion. Because the concepts require all sorts of specific human capacities (an intuitive psychology, a tendency to attend to some counterintuitive concepts, as well as various social mind adaptations), we can explain religion by describing how these various capacities get recruited, how they contribute to the features of religion that we find in so many different cultures. We do not need to assume that there is a special way of functioning that occurs only when processing religious thoughts.

Which saves a lot of fruitless speculation about a 'religion gene'.

Religious beliefs tend to be minimally counterintuitive (I think that's his phrase).

From various reviews I get the impression that Boyer holds the opposite view, i.e. that religious ideas are expressly counterintuitive. As karen Armstrong wrote in het review:

We have an inbuilt set of ontological expectations and a tendency to dwell on intuitions which violate these, such as mountains that float or companions whom we do not see. From the dawn of modern consciousness, men and women have focused on certain imaginary personalities that transcend the norm, convinced that they can help them in strategic ways. These supernatural agents link with other mental systems, such as our moral intuitions and social categories, for which we can find no conceptual justification.

Ur giving me food for thought Sasaki, thanks.

Now, would it be possible to write a similar 'natural history' of conspiratorial thought?

AII

[Fisherking]

Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine which I read occasionally for comic relief, has a book...

You must be hard up for entertainment.

Michael Shermer is no skeptic. Skepticism requires an open mind. From what I have heard and read the only thing he believes is that he is right and everyone else is stupid.

With that in mind I tend not to buy his work, or to pay for it.

But, what ever floats your boat