Religion Explained
Formerly at Princeton, King's College, Cambridge and the University of Lyon, Pascal Boyer is Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St Louis, MissouriWhile human religious practice and belief are extraordinarily varied, they are nevertheless not infinitely so. The varieties of belief have provided generations of anthropologists and religious scholars with material for research; there have been fewer attempts to explore what religious beliefs have in common - and fewer still that have been convincing. Following in the footsteps of Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker's explorations of what languages have in common beneath their vast superficial variety, Pascal Boyer explores the commonalities of religious belief, bringing the new tools of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology to bear on the ways in which beliefs reflect human needs and the ways in which our minds work. This is no sense an attempt to explain religion away, or to reduce it to simplistic nostrums; Boyer is himself an anthropologist, and rejects almost all the usual obvious, but unsatisfying, explanations for religion, in a book that is certainly ambitious and provocative, but also a rich exploration of this profound and important area of human experience - an area that is almost as universal and central to our shared humanity as our common use of language.
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What Hacker News says
- > I posit the conspiracy theories play a role in some other societal processes
We do know what happens with conspiracies, and it is our neurological processes and societal processes getting stuck in just the right way.
Take 2 forces -
1) Human brains are pattern recognition machines
2) A particular person always goes against the grain
With these two forces alone, this person will always orient their pattern interpretations against what is held by the "majority".
None of these things are bad, they are quite useful to the majority when someone tells them that tulip mania (for example) is irrational.
A book that I keep thinking about years after I read it, is Religion Explained, by Pascal Boyer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_Explained).
While the topic is religion, its more an examination of beliefs, superstition and cultural norms through the lens of anthropology, evolutionary pscy, and other cognitivie theories.
Relevant to our discussion is it highlights how often brains encode information in odd ways, to increase recall, or just as a quirk of our mental wet ware.
A common example in cultures around the world are objects of a category, say Mountains/ancestors, that have an aberration or trait of another category (Eat people/are incorporeal)
Our brains fill in the necessary blanks - no one worries about the structure of the mountains digestive tract, or why ancestor spirits seem to be so human or don't dissipate in the wind/randomly follow movement rules for corporeal people.
The same applies for conspiracies. Somehow when people discuss conspiracies, the agencies involved have super human coordination, error checking, wealth and power.
- Last week I just finished 'Religion Explained' by Pascal Boyer - and it is indeed quite good explanation - I recommend that book. In short the theory presented there is about religion as a kind of side effect of having brains trained for what was needed to live. It is quite convincing, maybe a bit falling into the false dichotomy path by trying to present itself as the sole and only theory - while the reasoning there does not in fact eliminate other mechanism adding to the trend of evolving a religious attitude.
- Sure but that doesn't mean we can't understand why some works of art resonate with us. The computational folkloristics field has found some very interesting patterns (see for instance http://www.mftd.org/index.php?action=atu). In "Religion Explained" Pascal Boyer describes why certain myths resonate with us and others do not.
- I am not agreeing with your argument, but let me play devil's advocate.
If somebody wanted to produce a real AI, every bit as intelligent as a human, he probably wouldn't go wrong by trying to reproduce in software what Pascal Boyer describes in his book "Religion Explained". http://www.Amazon.com/Religion-Explained-Evolutionary-Origin...
Boyer fails, in my mind, in many ways, but at the very least by not providing a solution to the Frame Problem. The Frame Problem looms very large in all of Boyer's descriptions of folk psychology, and how the human mind works. Yet it is completely unaddressed.
For a good explanation of the Frame Problem, see Daniel Dennett's argument "Cognitive Wheels: The Frame Problem of AI" in chapter 7 of "The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence". http://www.Amazon.com/Philosophy-Artificial-Intelligence-Oxf... In this article, Dennett is his own worst enemy, in that he proves that AI isn't possible. (Nobody has solved the Frame Problem yet.)
