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MinibearRex comments on [SEQ RERUN] A Failed Just-So Story - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: MinibearRex 14 December 2011 06:22PM

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Comment author: MinibearRex 14 December 2011 06:28:55PM 4 points [-]

Heretics were routinely burned alive just a few centuries ago. Or stoned to death, or executed by whatever method local fashion demands. Questioning the local gods is the notional crime for which Socrates was made to drink hemlock.

Why would you need to go anywhere near the accursèd territory of group selectionism in order to provide an evolutionary explanation for religious faith? Aren't the individual selection pressures obvious?

This selection pressure only exists if religion is already a universal in the society. If Ugg, from three huts over, says that everyone in the tribe must believe in his imaginary friend, or else he will kill them, the selection that actually happens will work against Ugg. If religion arose essentially as an accident (like as a result of anthropomorphizing nature), then EY's proposed selection mechanism could cement it. But if the first impetus towards religion was an evolutionary adaptation, then we need some other rationale to explain it.

Does anyone know of any alternative hypotheses for the rise of religion?

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 14 December 2011 07:23:09PM 1 point [-]

This selection pressure only exists if religion is already a universal in the society. If Ugg, from three huts over, says that everyone in the tribe must believe in his imaginary friend, or else he will kill them, the selection that actually happens will work against Ugg.

I'm not sure if this is actually true. The idea of religion is appealing enough that Ugg may be able to sell it to them. After all, Christian missionaries often succeed in displacing an old religion.

Besides, is the naïve argument really incorrect? The reason group selection fails is that individual selection is stronger. But if, by chance, religion grows to dominance in a tribe, then becoming irreligious is no longer an individual fitness gain. The two selection pressures point in the same direction.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 December 2011 12:13:40AM 4 points [-]

I'm not sure if this is actually true. The idea of religion is appealing enough that Ugg may be able to sell it to them. After all, Christian missionaries often succeed in displacing an old religion.

The question is why are human brains wired such that this is the case?

Comment author: Raemon 15 December 2011 02:39:00AM *  2 points [-]

The Just-So-Story I tell (while stating up front that it is a Just-So story) is this:

Our tendency is to anthropomorphize. Today, we angrily yell at our cars and computers when they fail us. Rationally we know they are unthinking hulks of metal, but we still ascribe malevolence when the real culprit is a broken, unsentient machine.

There are plausible reasons for humans to have evolved this trait. One of the most complicated tasks a human has to do is predict the actions of other humans. We need to be able to make allies, to identify deceptive enemies, to please lovers. I’m not an evolutionary psychologist and I should be careful when telling this sort of Just-So story, but I can easily imagine selection pressures that resulted in a powerful ability to draw conclusions about sentient creatures similar to ourselves.

And then, there was NOT a whole lot of pressure to NOT use this tool to predict, say, the weather.

We weren’t very good at predicting storms and snowfalls, one way or another. Weather is complicated. Even modern meteorologists get it wrong half the time. So would it matter much if an early human leveraged their empathy and narrative skills to predict natural phenomena? The rain would come, or it wouldn’t, regardless of whether we ascribed it to gods or “emergent complexity.”

So we told stories about gods, with human motivations, and we honestly believed them because there was nothing better.

Assuming this is true, (I don't know how to test for it) then once the basic ideas are in place, I think they'd be subject to memetic selection pressures that include "the person telling the stories becomes higher status for being a good story teller" which means people trust them more and other related things.

Comment author: MinibearRex 16 December 2011 02:58:27AM 2 points [-]

There are plausible reasons for humans to have evolved this trait. One of the most complicated tasks a human has to do is predict the actions of other humans.

The Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis suggests that this is entirely the reason for our species' level of intelligence. Hence chemistry professors using expressions like "electrons want to get to a lower energy state", as if electrons have desires of their own. That sentence makes a lot more intuitive sense to a human brain than "electrons just sort of always do this. Because of math."

Comment author: [deleted] 15 December 2011 01:00:57AM *  1 point [-]

Most people (especially in very simple social environments, which is where this whole thing started) hold opinions for approximately good reasons. This is less true of very complex or infrequently occurring issues.

Nevertheless, individual opinions do constitute a certain degree of evidence. It strikes me as very likely that a mechanism for accepting second-hand, unverifiable information would provide a fairly substantial evolutionary benefit to a hunter-gatherer. For that matter, it provides some benefit to us today.

Religion is also a good source of individual motivation, if you don't happen to have an elaborated system of reasoning and ethics and metaethics handy. People tell stories about events (not all of them religious in nature) to contextualize them and predict them. Though that doesn't necessarily explain their tendency to spread in and of itself.

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