I'm wanting to show that an impersonal, purely physical and deterministic/mechanistic process for evolving mental states (beliefs) cannot, with sufficient time, lead to stable and fixated false beliefs.
You mean that natural selection cant lead to two thousand years of Europe believing someone will burn eternally in non-consuming flames for adultery, e.g.? Why not?
Most people simply don't care enough, or (and without actually being condescending) they just don't really have the intellect/acumen/logical faculties for the conversation to be worthwhile.
Oh condescend all you want. Most people aren’t here, so we can talk about them all we want!
I'm interested moreso with how supernatural beliefs are meant to evolve in the first place. I understand that they throw ToM at it, but I'm just not satisfied. Once the belief exists, I think it is clear that natural selection could favor said belief if it's sum total effects are either neutral or positive. But how did we get there? I think I have a greater dispute with (a) how any belief could be supernatural, and (b) how natural selection could favor - not supernatural belief itself, but - the cognitive processes that would lead to supernatural beliefs.
Whats ToM?
> how natural selection could favor - not supernatural belief itself, but - the cognitive processes that would lead to supernatural beliefs.
Like I said, It would seem that some accurate mental facsimile of the world is too resource intensive. A ruder, more symbolic interpretation of the world with a lot of binary operations to process decisions is probably closer to our real mental circuitry. Do (good) or Don’t Do (evil).
Is it a penalty to explain incorrectly that the sun or stars are controlled by a relatively benevolent sky father? No.( Unless youre a rocket scientist. But weve already agreed they are spandrels. Lol.)
How did the theory of a sky father arise? Accidentally probably through the same neurological structures that help us understand an idea like “Father”. So accidentally, but not entirely randomly.
ToM is theory of mind.
It basically represents our folk psychological theories, how we model other minds in terms of explaining the behaviors of others. We handle the problem of other minds by attempting to internally model them (empathizing or putting 'ourselves in their shoes'). A ToM would be how we judged someone's expressions about their hand (which we can't see directly) when we play poker. I see this facial expression...why might I make that face if I were him? In other words, it is an adaptation for decision making with sub-optimal information or, in principle, inaccessible information.
That theory is supposed to transfer in terms of its tendency to agent-seek to phenomena we cannot explain according to our current theories. Ancient man encounters thunderstorm, cannot explain this complex event in any reductive way to meteorology or chemistry or physics, so it must be the intentional act of a storm god.
Many would say our tendency to believe in the supernatural is an over-extension of faculties that were very useful in dealing with other people, perhaps even trying to figure out our own mother's behaviors as young people, for example. (How do I get that boob...I'm starving!)
Of course, all of this is based on a LOT of assumption. Just because something sounds intuitively reasonable, does not make it true of reality.
There is something about this that still bothers me very much...that anything we cannot explain is treated as a living and intentional being.
Perhaps there is survival advantage in this, but something about it all is an insult to mind itself. There is kind of a 'church of progress' pomp in it, which looks back on all ancient people and finds blithering idiots, who can build fire and shape tools but at the first sign of a weather event, fall to their knees at muh sky person.
I don't know why it isn't right, but I am confident it's not.
Like I said, It would seem that some accurate mental facsimile of the world is too resource intensive.
I agree with this completely, however, as that mental model abstracts from the complexity of the world and begins to assemble stereotypes and heuristic behaviors, it runs a great risk. If the model is too simple, you're dead.
To be robust enough, we would expect there to be an underlying logic, which did not simply go from the real world into Candyland because of a need to simplify. We need to be careful not to let imagination be a cart we place before the horse.
This brain had to evolve in a live-or-die situation long before we developed imaginative faculties. There must be underlying logical structures involved in our modeling which would be unfavorable toward belief (only for the sake of simplifying the world) in fairy dust as a useful theory of the unknown threats in the world.
(post is archived)