But maybe that’s giving us too much credit. Even today, logical/intellectual processes can be pretty dumb. Millions of people throughout history have failed to reproduce because they became monks for false religions; if they had just listened to their reinforcement/instinctual processes instead of their intellectual/logical ones, they could have avoided that problem.
Becoming a monk isn’t as much of a reproductive dead end as you paint it here: yes, the individual won’t reproduce, but the individual wasn’t spontaneously created from a vacuum. The monk has siblings and cousins who will go on to reproduce, and in the context of a society that places high value on religion, the respect the monk’s family earns via the monk demonstrating such a costly sacrifice, will help the monk’s genes more than the would-be monk himself could do by trying to reproduce.
It’s important to view religion not as a result of our cognitive processes being insufficient to reject religion (which is nearly trivial for an intelligent being to do, by design), but as a result of evolution intentionally sabotaging our cognitive processes to better navigate social dynamics, and for this reason I take issue with this being used as an example to support the point you make with it.
I agree with the point of “belief in religion likely evolved for a purpose so it’s not that we’re intrinsically too dumb to reject them”, but I’m not sure of the reasoning in the previous paragraph. E.g. if religion in the hunter-gatherer period wasn’t already associated with celibacy, then it’s unlikely for this particular causality to have created an evolved “sacrifice your personal sexual success in exchange for furthering the success of your relatives” strategy in the brief period of time that celibacy happened to bring status. And the plentiful sex scandals associated with various organized religions don’t give any indication of religion and celibacy being intrinsically connected; in general, being high status seems to make men more rather than less interested in sex.
A stronger argument would be that regardless of how smart intellectual processes are, they generally don’t have “maximize genetic fitness” as their goal, so the monk’s behavior isn’t caused by the intellectual processes being particularly dumb… but then again, if those processes don’t directly care about fitness, then that just gives evolution another reason to have instincts sometimes override intellectual reasoning. So this example still seems to support Scott’s point of “if they had just listened to their reinforcement/instinctual processes instead of their intellectual/logical ones, they could have avoided that problem”.
So this example still seems to support Scott’s point of “if they had just listened to their reinforcement/instinctual processes instead of their intellectual/logical ones, they could have avoided that problem”.
But my point is that the process that led to them becoming monks was an instinctual process, not an intellectual one, and the “problem” isn’t actually one from the point of view of the genes.
Actually upon further thought, I disagree with Scott’s premise that this case allows for a meaningful distinction between “instinctual” and “intellectual” processes, so I guess I agree with you.
Becoming a monk isn’t as much of a reproductive dead end as you paint it here: yes, the individual won’t reproduce, but the individual wasn’t spontaneously created from a vacuum. The monk has siblings and cousins who will go on to reproduce, and in the context of a society that places high value on religion, the respect the monk’s family earns via the monk demonstrating such a costly sacrifice, will help the monk’s genes more than the would-be monk himself could do by trying to reproduce.
It’s important to view religion not as a result of our cognitive processes being insufficient to reject religion (which is nearly trivial for an intelligent being to do, by design), but as a result of evolution intentionally sabotaging our cognitive processes to better navigate social dynamics, and for this reason I take issue with this being used as an example to support the point you make with it.
I agree with the point of “belief in religion likely evolved for a purpose so it’s not that we’re intrinsically too dumb to reject them”, but I’m not sure of the reasoning in the previous paragraph. E.g. if religion in the hunter-gatherer period wasn’t already associated with celibacy, then it’s unlikely for this particular causality to have created an evolved “sacrifice your personal sexual success in exchange for furthering the success of your relatives” strategy in the brief period of time that celibacy happened to bring status. And the plentiful sex scandals associated with various organized religions don’t give any indication of religion and celibacy being intrinsically connected; in general, being high status seems to make men more rather than less interested in sex.
A stronger argument would be that regardless of how smart intellectual processes are, they generally don’t have “maximize genetic fitness” as their goal, so the monk’s behavior isn’t caused by the intellectual processes being particularly dumb… but then again, if those processes don’t directly care about fitness, then that just gives evolution another reason to have instincts sometimes override intellectual reasoning. So this example still seems to support Scott’s point of “if they had just listened to their reinforcement/instinctual processes instead of their intellectual/logical ones, they could have avoided that problem”.
But my point is that the process that led to them becoming monks was an instinctual process, not an intellectual one, and the “problem” isn’t actually one from the point of view of the genes.
Actually upon further thought, I disagree with Scott’s premise that this case allows for a meaningful distinction between “instinctual” and “intellectual” processes, so I guess I agree with you.