From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Sat Sep 27 2003 - 17:57:02 MDT
At 06:35 PM 26/09/03 -0600, you wrote:
>Complete disagreement on religion. I'll take it up with you formally
>sometime if you like. Write a 4 part formal argument and then debate it
>on-line afterwards? It may be "interesting." Suggested structure: You
>proposing "Religion has been beneficial to mankind" perhaps. Me opposing.
>Rhino as Chair, Kharin and I on the one side, you and whoever you nominate
>on the other? We could do it after we have the RevolutionUSA and Rat
>websites up and running.
That's not exactly what I mean. Clippings from:
http://www.operatingthetan.com/cryonics.txt
As human brains enlarged they improved in the ability to anticipate
changes, making plans to hunt, to move with the seasons, and, later, to
plant seeds for a future harvest. These and similar "smart" behaviors have
obvious survival advantages, but they may have disadvantages as well. Alas,
it seems that it is quite possible to be too smart for "the good of one's
genes."
snip
Being able to anticipate the future may not have been an
unmixed blessing for early humans. Besides worrying about what
to eat in the morning, and how to get through the night without
being eaten, our ancestors could worry about existential angst,
and ponder questions of the "Where Was I Before I Was Me?" and
"What Happens After I Die?" kind. It may sound silly, but such
questions, prompted by frequent deaths among those around you may
have been a barrier for hundreds of thousands of years to the
emergence of smarter people with enhanced ability to anticipate
and plan for the future. It is not good for your genes to be
dwelling on such questions while something large, furry, and not
in the least concerned about angst, sneaks up and nips off your
head!
snip
We know that eventually smarter people did emerge, and came
to dominate the world. This started about 200,000 years ago,
roughly the same time that DNA studies indicate that one woman
was the common ancestor of us all. Like chipped rock and larger
brains emerging together, it is possible that some meme mutated
out of more primitive ones, or arose from observations to form a
"religious belief" that provided "answers" to such questions and
had the effect of compensating for genes that otherwise would
made us too smart for our own (genetic) good. Beliefs that could
fit this description are known to go back to the very beginning
of written history, and archaeological digs produce physical
evidence (flower grave offerings) of such beliefs back at least
70,000 years. (The actual timing is not important to this
argument, but objects believe to be "religious" in nature became
common by about 35,000 years ago.)
"Religious" memes compensating for
too-smart-for-their-own-good brains is rank speculation, but
Marvin Minsky argues that more complex brains are inherently less
stable. It is true that our more remote relatives (such as cows)
seem to have fewer mental problems, perhaps just because they
have less "mental." His thought****
**** (footnote--- personal communication through Eric
Drexler)
is that certain "agents" built with patterns from outside
could enhance the stability of a complex mind. He discussed a
variety of mental "agents" in Society of Mind, reviewed in
Cryonics some time ago. One class, censors, would be especially
useful if kept someone's mind from spiraling down into a blue
funk over unanswerable questions. Ideas that when a family
member died he had gone to "the happy hunting grounds," and that
you would see him again might make a big difference in the
survival of grief- stricken relatives. Jane Goodall's report of
a case where a chimpanzee seems to have died of grief gives this
model some credibility. (The chimp was believed to have had an
abnormally strong attachment to his mother.)
This is very speculative, but "religious" memes could have
"functions" such as reducing the effects of grief or answering
philosophical questions about which it was (genetically)
unprofitable to ponder. These memes would be favored in a causal
loop if they improve the survival of people carrying genes which
tend to destabilize a person's mental state, but otherwise improve
their survival.
Such genes might (for example) contribute to intelligence,
sensitivity, and forming strong emotional attachments. After a
few millennia, religious memes and conditionally advantageous
genes would become quite dependent on each other. In an
environment saturated with religious memes, there would be little
pressure for minds to evolve that could get by without
stabilizing memes.
In turn, the religious memes that originated long ago have
had plenty of time to split into varieties, compete for hosts,
and themselves evolve in response to a changing environment. (An
occasional variation may kill its hosts, a la Jim Jones.) A lay
observer looking for similarities over such a period might not
recognize much common ritual. (Joseph Campbell devoted his life
to discovering common threads in ritual.) Both modern and
ancient religions seem to "fit" into similar places in the mind,
and have the similar functions of providing "answers" to the
unanswerable, and comfort to the grief stricken.
The environment in those minds (mostly the result of other
memes) has greatly changed as people accumulated more
observations about the world around them and got better at
manipulating it. There are known changes in the history of
religion, such as the tendency for monotheistic religions (in the
western cultural tradition) to replace polytheistic ones, and the
well known tendency for religions (and similar belief patterns)
to mutate into new and competing varieties. We can see some
(the written part) of the accumulated variation. For example,
the religion of the Old Testament is recognizably the ancestor of
the more recent New Testament.
Because humans learn from other adults as well as parents,
religious beliefs that are "better suited" to infect human minds
could spread, even (if it survived translation) across language
boundaries. (Islam simply imposed Arabic on its converts.) In
Europe during early historical times, we can see the displacement
of older religions with Christianity. Within Christianity we
can see in recent historical times competing varieties mutate
from earlier versions (a classic example would be the Mormons)
and within the US in the last decades we have seen the arrival of
both new "religions" such as Scientology, and the repeated
importation of eastern religions. (Almost all new and
transplanted religions fail--we only see the ones which grow
large enough to notice.)
Because human minds usually hold only one religion at a
time, religious memes are in "competition" for a limited number
of human minds. This sets up the conditions for a powerful
"evolutionary struggle" between religious memes. You should
expect the memes which survive this process to resist being
displaced, and to induce their hosts to propagate them."
************end clippings
My view of this subject has changed some due to reading Pascal Boyer's
_Religion Explained_ but I have not digested that book well enough to
articulate the changes in detail.
>[hr]
>Total agreement in the reality for the Islamic and Chinese populations.
>However you should bear in mind that they disagree (remember, "The tragedy
>of Africa"). And in that light, I also see how the "West" (recently mainly
>the US) is perceived (largely validly) as both having been deliberately
>and massively screwing both groups - and as the major, not just
>destabilizing force, but real and present threat to both groups.
Until the US was provoked into going into Afghanistan by 9/11, the
destabilizing force of western culture was casual and even now there is no
"department of western cultural imperialists." In fact, the aspects of
culture most likely to invade, music and computers, are not supported by
the western governments at all. In any case, the Chinese seem to have
embraced western culture. The same is true of a substantial fraction of
the Islamic populations.
>As you know, I advocate an even more Western system at the end of the day.
>Which is why I also advocate a very different way of dealing with the
>issues. Fix the environment and the people will fix themselves with
>minimal assistance.
Maybe. Sometimes fixing the environment is a very hard problem.
I have been thinking about Easter Island a lot as an example of a closed
system. Even importing the whole knowledge of today into their culture a
few generations before the collapse might not have been enough to avoid
disaster.
Keith Henson
>More later. I'm being dragged out the door.
>
>Kind Regards
>
>Hermit
>
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