Neither do I, though I’m often tempted to find a reason for why my iPod’s shuffle function “chose” a particular song at a particular time. [“Mad World” right now.]
It seems that our mental ‘hardware’ is very susceptible to agency and causal misfires, leaving an opening for something like religious belief. Robin explained religious activities and beliefs as important in group bonding [http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/why-fiction-lies.html], but the fact that religion arose may just be a historical accident. It’s likely that something would have arisen in the same place as a group bonding mechanism—perhaps religion just found the gap first. From an individual perspective, this hardly means that the sanity waterline is low. In fact, evolutionarily speaking, playing along may be the sanest thing to do.
The relevant sentence from Robin’s post: “Social life is all about signaling our abilities and cooperativeness, and discerning such signals from others.” As Norman points out [link below], self-deception makes our signals more credible, since we don’t have to act as believers if we are believers. As a result, in the ancestral environment at least, it’s “sane” to believe what others believe and not subject it to a conscious and costly rationality analysis. You’d basically expend resources to find out a truth that would make it more difficult for me to deceive others, which is costly in itself.
Of course today, the payoff from signaling group membership is far lower than ever before, which is why religious belief, and especially costly religious activities, violate sanity. Which, perhaps, is why secularism is on the rise:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/secularism
I think this is a good answer to Eliezer’s thought experiment. Teach those budding rationalists about the human desire to conform even in the face of the prima facie ridiculousness of the prevailing beliefs.
Teach them about greens and blues; teach them about Easter Islanders building statues with their last failing stock of resources (or is that too close to teaching about religion?). Teach them how common the pattern is: when something is all around you, you are less likely to doubt its wisdom.
Human rationality (at least for now) is still built on the blocks and modules provided to us by evolution. They can lead us astray, like the “posit agency” module firing when no agent is there. But they can also be powerful correctives. A pattern-recognizing module is a dangerous thing when we create imaginary patterns… but, oh boy, when there actually is a pattern there, let that module rip!
Neither do I, though I’m often tempted to find a reason for why my iPod’s shuffle function “chose” a particular song at a particular time. [“Mad World” right now.]
It seems that our mental ‘hardware’ is very susceptible to agency and causal misfires, leaving an opening for something like religious belief. Robin explained religious activities and beliefs as important in group bonding [http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/why-fiction-lies.html], but the fact that religion arose may just be a historical accident. It’s likely that something would have arisen in the same place as a group bonding mechanism—perhaps religion just found the gap first. From an individual perspective, this hardly means that the sanity waterline is low. In fact, evolutionarily speaking, playing along may be the sanest thing to do.
The relevant sentence from Robin’s post: “Social life is all about signaling our abilities and cooperativeness, and discerning such signals from others.” As Norman points out [link below], self-deception makes our signals more credible, since we don’t have to act as believers if we are believers. As a result, in the ancestral environment at least, it’s “sane” to believe what others believe and not subject it to a conscious and costly rationality analysis. You’d basically expend resources to find out a truth that would make it more difficult for me to deceive others, which is costly in itself.
Of course today, the payoff from signaling group membership is far lower than ever before, which is why religious belief, and especially costly religious activities, violate sanity. Which, perhaps, is why secularism is on the rise: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/secularism
I think this is a good answer to Eliezer’s thought experiment. Teach those budding rationalists about the human desire to conform even in the face of the prima facie ridiculousness of the prevailing beliefs.
Teach them about greens and blues; teach them about Easter Islanders building statues with their last failing stock of resources (or is that too close to teaching about religion?). Teach them how common the pattern is: when something is all around you, you are less likely to doubt its wisdom.
Human rationality (at least for now) is still built on the blocks and modules provided to us by evolution. They can lead us astray, like the “posit agency” module firing when no agent is there. But they can also be powerful correctives. A pattern-recognizing module is a dangerous thing when we create imaginary patterns… but, oh boy, when there actually is a pattern there, let that module rip!