Monotheism vs. Polytheism

[Kalbear]

On 1/12/2024 at 7:01 PM, fionwe1987 said:

I have no idea why this must be so. Theoretically, at least, there's plenty of ways for religion to evolve. You seem to think it must be caused only by how our brains work, but I see no reason to assume that. 

That's fair, but religion as we know it is almost certainly presupposed to how humans brains work and how humans experience their environment. At the very least anything that we think of as religious viewpoints is not going to be easily represented in an alien species; it's also quite reasonable to believe that religion - the notion that there are things that you can never, ever prove and have to take on faith - is something that other species would manifest. 

On 1/12/2024 at 7:01 PM, fionwe1987 said:

Ummm... We're hardwired to experience all the emotions we experience, and there's no reason for sociality to be the driver of awe, because awe can come from any interaction of the small and individual set against the vast and connected world. 

And awe is hardly a consistent emotion social animals feel around authority, so I'm sorry, that kind of evolutionary psych hypothesis just doesn't fly. 

You're conflating a couple things I said, so I'll back up a bit.

Awe is one of the major cornerstones of religious experiences across the neurotypical human spectrum. Religion - or at least spirituality and faith - is something that we encounter in every human tribe, so it is something that is part of being human. The experience of awe appears to be part of that. So does the neurotypical human moral of respecting authority. Both of those things are present and represented in most human religions (especially the polytheistic/monotheistic viewpoints), but you're right - they don't have to be together specifically. Awe isn't a product of authority moral values, just one that works well together; you see something incredibly amazing and you think of what great power must have created it. 

Note that none of this requires an evolutionary psych hypothesis. I'm incredibly skeptical of most evopsych bullshit. I'm not saying why these things evolved in humans. I'm saying that they exist, which is scientifically provable. We have a whole lot of studies (including the metastudy I linked) that talks about the experience of awe in humans. Why awe exists is a question I'm not interested in exploring, only that it does. Similarly, we have a whole lot of studies indicating neurotypical humans have a moral around authority (as do most social mammals). I can guess why that's the case, but it's not a requirement that I'm right for that moral to exist. 

But let's go with what your skepticism is saying - that somehow religion is universal to intelligent species. Why? What does religion provide, and what does that say about what that species needs? And are those needs universal?

On 1/12/2024 at 7:01 PM, fionwe1987 said:

Well this isn't a reasonable assumption. No creature is going to evolve without a biosphere of many other species, and even solitary or non-social species in our world interact with other creatures. 

Again you're not being imaginative enough. Imagine a biosphere where everything in that biosphere is connected to everything else, run in harmony together. In that world there is no interacting with 'other' creatures because everything is you. An example of this: imagine something like The Thing's world, where every cellular organism is a Thing and can communicate with itself on a cellular level. That kind of species does not have interactions with other creatures - certainly not in the same way we do. 

On 1/12/2024 at 7:01 PM, fionwe1987 said:

And even if you imagine such a thing, this species will be interacting with the world, with nature, with the vast universe. Whatever they feel in response to these things won't be identical to human awe, but they'll feel something, and it'll be awe-adjacent. 

And I disagree. There is no guarantee that they will experience 'awe'. Those things that are vast to us may be boring to something else. Again, imagine that hyperorganism the size of a planet; why would a sunrise provoke 'awe' in it? 

If you were the size of a planet and had nothing else to talk with, nothing to threaten you and could control basically every part of your environment, with no death of your 'self' - why would you think there was something 'greater' out there? Why would you need an afterlife? 

If you could communicate with other creatures without any ability for another creature to lie or be duplicitous, what do you need authority for?

On 1/12/2024 at 7:01 PM, fionwe1987 said:

Arrival is a great concept and story, but it's a far greater reach to imagine a species unbound by time that way that evolves naturally than assuming any naturally evolved species that comes up with linguistic communication will have some form of religion. 

I don't see at all how linguistics precludes religion. Care to explain that? 

[Rippounet]

11 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

Yeah I don't see much value to your assumption, if you won't explain it.

It's not something that can be explained. The fact that human thought is the product of our brains and is thus profoundly self-referencing (in ways we're still discovering tbh) is something you either admit or you don't, and trying to convince someone of this through the internet is as difficult as explaining the color red to someone who was born blind.

It's a recurring problem of discussions on the internet, that one may find themselves in a position of having to convince others of something that requires some reading to establish ; many things can be difficult to believe if you haven't read about them, but progressively become obvious the more you read. I personally gathered the information from researchers/writers like Daniel Kahneman, Richard Hofstadter, Donald Hoffman or Lisa Barrett (to name a few). But frankly speaking, I don't have the expertise or knowledge to convince you myself, so it's not a discussion I can have, lest I end up spending dozens of hours to provide what would almost amount to a "scientific" article...
Also, experience has taught me that even when one does take the time to try to explain things, people are seldom convinced, because exchanges on the internet tend to turn to rhetorical exchanges rather than cooperative/constructive ones. I've been on internet forums for over two decades now, and I'm not sure I've seen something like "Gee, you're right, I didn't see it that way, I see what you mean now" more than a handful of times, and certainly not when discussing religion or politics.
So the question becomes -and again, no offense- how much time and energy I'm willing to dedicate to something that has a high probability of turning into a rhetorical exercise, when the reason I'm on my computer in the first place is to write actual scientific stuff...

4 hours ago, Kalbear said:

it's also quite reasonable to believe that religion - the notion that there are things that you can never, ever prove and have to take on faith - is something that other species would manifest.

I'll beg to differ here, because there's a world of difference between "taking things on faith" (which is something it is reasonable to assume another sentient species would have to do - assuming it's likely they are embodied rather than omniscient) and developing religion. In fact, while we all use faith on a daily basis, the degree to which the beliefs in the supernatural or religion get involved is extremely relative to each individual. Some humans will see the hands of Gods everywhere ; others almost nowhere. But religion isn't a logical conclusion of the scientific process, it's a hindrance to it.
For instance, you can only start analysing and understanding evolution if you admit that it exists, which means that you admit that no God created humans, at best they only created the process which saw humans emerge. In this case, the scientific approach requires that one limit the powers of God and replace it with a different approach to the Truth, i.e. to believe that there is a Truth to be found through reason but that such a quest will take time and may be open-ended, instead of ascribing natural phenomena to a form of divine will that may or not be well described and understood.
I don't buy the idea that a scientist can be deeply religious. I think it's reasonable to say a scientist can have spirituality, or some form of agnostic faith. But religion? It seems to me that, by definition, religion can get in the way of having a dispassionate or objective approach to the analysis of what can be observed, which is the common definition of science.
And this is where the structure of human thought comes in. Why do we ascribe will and motive to natural phenomena? Because humans "naturally" tend to think this way - becaus ehuman thought is naturally self-referencing. Except, ironically, I don't believe I can truly convince anyone of this. I can say this has been well-established, but that requires, ironically, faith... or at least willingness to consider the perspective in good faith.
Or, to put it differently, I end up saying something like "trust me Bro, it is known," which, given the fact that I am not a psychologist or neuro-scientist, feels out of place if we want to have a "serious" discussion about this.

4 hours ago, Kalbear said:

I'm not saying why these things evolved in humans. I'm saying that they exist, which is scientifically provable.

Yeah, same here. Thanks for articulating this in a simple way, I was a bit at a loss to explain it myself. Perhaps I'm just bad at communicating...

Yeah, I think there's a lot of things we already know about human thought or human psychology (we're all humans after all, right? RIGHT?), but I personally tend to limit speculations on the relationship with evolution to cases that are beyond debate, like altriciality (the dependance of the human child on its mother, parents, family and/or community, and its wider implications).
'tis why I couldn't define evolutionay psychology for you @fionwe1987 because my process is to select the stuff that I find certain, rather then to be interested/involved in the entire field, whose conventional boundaries I am not familiar with - and for which I care little tbh.

[fionwe1987]

7 hours ago, Kalbear said:

That's fair, but religion as we know it is almost certainly presupposed to how humans brains work and how humans experience their environment. At the very least anything that we think of as religious viewpoints is not going to be easily represented in an alien species; it's also quite reasonable to believe that religion - the notion that there are things that you can never, ever prove and have to take on faith - is something that other species would manifest. 

Oh absolutely. I don't expect "religion" to be anything similar for any alien society. Indeed, if an alien religion, in content, is anything like any of ours, I'd honestly go back to the drawing board on my beliefs on the validity of that religion.

All I'm saying is alien species are likely to have aspects of their experience they do not understand, and will come up with faith based explanations. Whether that will even become organized religion is something we can't be certain of, because that would depend on the social dynamics of of said alien species, which can indeed be very different than ours.

7 hours ago, Kalbear said:

You're conflating a couple things I said, so I'll back up a bit.

Awe is one of the major cornerstones of religious experiences across the neurotypical human spectrum. Religion - or at least spirituality and faith - is something that we encounter in every human tribe, so it is something that is part of being human. The experience of awe appears to be part of that. So does the neurotypical human moral of respecting authority. Both of those things are present and represented in most human religions (especially the polytheistic/monotheistic viewpoints), but you're right - they don't have to be together specifically. Awe isn't a product of authority moral values, just one that works well together; you see something incredibly amazing and you think of what great power must have created it. 

I'm with you on the first part, but I'm not sure with what confidence we can say it is a neurotypical human moral to respect authority. At the very least, the nature of authority, and what respect for said authority means, varies very widely. In fact, several polytheistic religions, like Hinduism, have regular humans cursing Gods for their moral failures (and by this I mean actual curses that end up constraining or harming said gods), defying them, for moral reasons, or calling out their immorality.

These are the stories I grew up with, and I'd hesitate to say their moral was "awe inspiring figures have authority you must respect". I learned quite the opposite from them, and that's why I hesitate to take it as a given that its typical to tie awe to respect. 

7 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Note that none of this requires an evolutionary psych hypothesis. I'm incredibly skeptical of most evopsych bullshit. I'm not saying why these things evolved in humans. I'm saying that they exist, which is scientifically provable. We have a whole lot of studies (including the metastudy I linked) that talks about the experience of awe in humans. Why awe exists is a question I'm not interested in exploring, only that it does. Similarly, we have a whole lot of studies indicating neurotypical humans have a moral around authority (as do most social mammals). I can guess why that's the case, but it's not a requirement that I'm right for that moral to exist. 

Awe exists. But respect for authority is a lot more fluid. Social mammals do question authority, and that's what causes social hierarchies to be dynamic. Individuals may have a greater or lesser propensity to respect authority, but we hardly seem to have a universal rule that authority must be respected. 

7 hours ago, Kalbear said:

But let's go with what your skepticism is saying - that somehow religion is universal to intelligent species. Why? What does religion provide, and what does that say about what that species needs? And are those needs universal?

I think religion is a byproduct of trying to explain forces larger than the individual. It doesn't provide much at all, except false comfort, most often, but the need to explain larger things seems pretty obvious for any species, and since not everyone will hit on the right explanation, or go through the painstaking process of hypothesis to theory to determine reasonable explanations, you will inevitably have anecdotal explanations that rely on imprecise symbolic and narrative constructs. Those imprecise constructs then become the substrate for religion.  

Put another way, religion is an inevitable byproduct of the pathway to more testable and robust systems of knowledge like science and mathematics. 

Is it plausible some species hits on more robust systems right away? Maybe. But I think it is way more plausible that the evolution of science and mathematics inevitably spits out junk on the way, and it takes effort to clear them away.

7 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Again you're not being imaginative enough. Imagine a biosphere where everything in that biosphere is connected to everything else, run in harmony together.

That's not a very evolutionarily plausible biosphere, I think. Something like this can be engineered, maybe. But can you lay out a plausible chain of evolutionary events for this to arise naturally? And what, even, does harmony mean? Our individual bodies don't run in perfect harmony, so I'm kinda confused by the notion of this arising naturally ecosystem wide.

Is this biosphere filled with autotrophs only, or are there species who eat the autotrophs? How do you define this "connection"? Is it neuronal? Then harmony is impossible, because data transfer is pretty slow. Do they somehow evolve natural radio communication between different parts of the biosphere? What kind of selective pressure would give rise to that?

Honestly, single species ecosystems and all species in an ecosystem being "connected" are nice Sci Fi ideas, but they don't make sense as a naturally evolved thing. Engineered, sure, but I don't have an issue with there being no religion in such cases. I can see religion being overcome, eventually, as a possibility for any species, and sincere hope for ours.

7 hours ago, Kalbear said:

In that world there is no interacting with 'other' creatures because everything is you.

That's a non-evolving species, then? What about nature? Such a species would be susceptible to storms, earthquakes, etc, right?

7 hours ago, Kalbear said:

An example of this: imagine something like The Thing's world, where every cellular organism is a Thing and can communicate with itself on a cellular level. That kind of species does not have interactions with other creatures - certainly not in the same way we do. 

The way of interaction can be very very different. But no interactions at all seems implausible. 

7 hours ago, Kalbear said:

And I disagree. There is no guarantee that they will experience 'awe'. Those things that are vast to us may be boring to something else. Again, imagine that hyperorganism the size of a planet; why would a sunrise provoke 'awe' in it? 

Whyever not? Firstly, I have no idea how a "hyperorganism the size of a planet" is to evolve. The square cube law will have something to say about that. But even if we skip past that hurdle, why isn't a sunset awe-inspiring to such a species. The sun is orders of magnitude larger, and will almost certainly be the sole source of energy to such a being, no? Awe and veneration seem entirely plausible.

7 hours ago, Kalbear said:

If you were the size of a planet and had nothing else to talk with, nothing to threaten you and could control basically every part of your environment, with no death of your 'self' - why would you think there was something 'greater' out there? Why would you need an afterlife? 

That's not a realistic animal, though! I'll wager a single planetwide species is way way less plausible than a totally religion-free, linguistic, technologically advanced species, biologically.

7 hours ago, Kalbear said:

If you could communicate with other creatures without any ability for another creature to lie or be duplicitous, what do you need authority for?

How? How do you ensure communication with another species without a chance for duplicity? And why would such a thing evolve? Duplicity is very useful, in communication, and very useful evolutionarily. And very expensive to minimize, and close to impossible to eliminate. 

But even if you overcome all that, you're assuming that this means no religion. What if they believe in a God of Truth?

7 hours ago, Kalbear said:

I don't see at all how linguistics precludes religion. Care to explain that? 

Sorry, I didn't word that right. "it's a far greater reach to imagine a species unbound by time that way that evolves naturally than assuming any naturally evolved species that comes up with linguistic communication will not have some form of religion." is what I meant to say.

If you're going to have language to communicate, you're going to have religion-adjacent narratives and concepts to explain things, unless this species hits on truly accurate mathematical modeling of the world right from the get go, somehow. Which, again, doesn't seem very plausible, does it?

[fionwe1987]

8 hours ago, Rippounet said:

It's not something that can be explained. The fact that human thought is the product of our brains and is thus profoundly self-referencing (in ways we're still discovering tbh) is something you either admit or you don't, and trying to convince someone of this through the internet is as difficult as explaining the color red to someone who was born blind.

I think this is why I asked for an explanation. Because what you're saying here isn't what we're discussing. I'm very much a strict materialist, so of course I believe our thoughts are the products of our brains. But that doesn't mean only our brains can produce our kinds of thoughts! Convergent is very much a thing.

8 hours ago, Rippounet said:

It's a recurring problem of discussions on the internet, that one may find themselves in a position of having to convince others of something that requires some reading to establish ; many things can be difficult to believe if you haven't read about them, but progressively become obvious the more you read. I personally gathered the information from researchers/writers like Daniel Kahneman, Richard Hofstadter, Donald Hoffman or Lisa Barrett (to name a few). But frankly speaking, I don't have the expertise or knowledge to convince you myself, so it's not a discussion I can have, lest I end up spending dozens of hours to provide what would almost amount to a "scientific" article...
Also, experience has taught me that even when one does take the time to try to explain things, people are seldom convinced, because exchanges on the internet tend to turn to rhetorical exchanges rather than cooperative/constructive ones. I've been on internet forums for over two decades now, and I'm not sure I've seen something like "Gee, you're right, I didn't see it that way, I see what you mean now" more than a handful of times, and certainly not when discussing religion or politics.
So the question becomes -and again, no offense- how much time and energy I'm willing to dedicate to something that has a high probability of turning into a rhetorical exercise, when the reason I'm on my computer in the first place is to write actual scientific stuff...

All I'll say is, maybe lay off on the firm sceintific stances if you don't want to explain them? It seems clear that you read me questioning evolutionary psychology and understood something worlds different. Evo psy being bullshit, often, doesn't rest on thought not being a product of biology.

8 hours ago, Rippounet said:

'tis why I couldn't define evolutionay psychology for you @fionwe1987 because my process is to select the stuff that I find certain, rather then to be interested/involved in the entire field, whose conventional boundaries I am not familiar with - and for which I care little tbh.

Ok... not sure what point you were making, then. We seem to have spent a lot of words for... not sure what.

[Phylum of Alexandria]

On 1/14/2024 at 10:33 PM, Conflicting Thought said:

i guess my criticism with EP is that i see it used as a way to justify some very sus shit like sexism and misogyny,

Like any field, EvoPsych has some junk studies being done in its name as well as solid ones. Neuroscience generally has a better reputation in the public eye, but there's no shortage of silly studies with people using fMRI just because they can.

Also for both, you've got pop science journalists reporting something because it sounds interesting, and maybe distort the original studies in the process. And from there you've got think pieces and pundits giving their own two cents, and the whole notion of strength of evidence is almost beside the point.

All of this is to say: the best of EvoPsych shouldn't be lumped in with the worst. Chomsky's dismissal of an entire field that's well beyond his own expertise in cog psychology/psycholinguistics should be taken with a full shaker of salt.

Edited January 16 by Phylum of Alexandria

[Kalbear]

Just to be clear to both @Rippounet and @fionwe1987 - I mistyped and left out a 'not' in a sentence. I meant to say that it is entirely reasonable for an alien species to NOT develop faith. The idea that you must believe without any evidence in something you cannot explain instead of accepting "I don't know why" is not something I think has to evolve, and I'd actually argue that requiring explanations for things that you cannot observe and doing that kind of odd extrapolation to the point of making it up is a very specifically odd thing that requires a lot of bits that are not required for intelligence.

I'll answer other stuff later, though I'll also point out that the big objection to my statements previously - that they were based on evopsych - was also not accurate. They're based on psychology and anthropology. Evopsych tries to determine why certain things evolved in humans and I don't care or need that. I only point out that they do exist, and like ripp said are clearly biological in origin as they show up in all neurotypical humans across the world. I'm happy to fight about evopsych being bullshit, but not so much about anthropology and psychology being bullshit.

[fionwe1987]

42 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Just to be clear to both @Rippounet and @fionwe1987 - I mistyped and left out a 'not' in a sentence. I meant to say that it is entirely reasonable for an alien species to NOT develop faith. The idea that you must believe without any evidence in something you cannot explain instead of accepting "I don't know why" is not something I think has to evolve, and I'd actually argue that requiring explanations for things that you cannot observe and doing that kind of odd extrapolation to the point of making it up is a very specifically odd thing that requires a lot of bits that are not required for intelligence.

That doesn't make much sense to me. You obviously need belief in things you don't have immediate proof for to do anything complex. I'd argue that's one of the central reasons we have any kind of civilization/technology. I rely with 0 evidence on a lot of things, as do you, because I'm pretty sure you didn't sit and invent your own proofs to every bit of math you use, nor did you collect data for every bit of science you believe in. We outsource this stuff to the group, and communicate it using language, and language allows us to interrogate the claims made by other members of the group.

No one human can find evidence and prove to themselves all the things they need to belive in and rely on, and that's gonna be true of any other species. And mistaken beliefs, or even theories resting on erroneous data, will happen. Just like errors in copying DNA will happen. So how do you avoid anyone even accidentally taking something on faith that is actually wrong?

Now, there's a good way to test whether the belief you're being offered is correct, and ways to separate the horeshit from the gold, but that's an iterative process, so I don't know how a species will come readymade with that ability from the start, and use it in such a way that they never land on explanations that are not supported by evidence.

Seems too ideal to be real. 

As for the rest, I don't think anyone in this discussion has said psychology or anthropology are BS. For myself, I don't even think all evolutionary psych is BS. I just specifically disagreed with this bit of evolutionary psych, which you've said you don't hold to strongly anyway:

Quote

For instance, humans and monkeys are hardwired to experience awe, which in turn probably comes from social animal's need to have emotion around authority.

That causative link is all I disagree with, with respect to Evo psy, in this conversation. Since no one seems to hold this link to be true anyway, maybe we can table the discussion on evolutionary psychology for now? 

Edited January 16 by fionwe1987

[Rippounet]

3 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

I'm very much a strict materialist, so of course I believe our thoughts are the products of our brains. But that doesn't mean only our brains can produce our kinds of thoughts! Convergent is very much a thing.

Yes, that is in fact my point: you'll find convergence in behaviors among social mammals or social animals. Behavior that can be interpreted as religious (deference or rites) are found in social animals, and humans merely add the concepts (because symbolic thought, baby!) to behavioral tendencies that have biological functions.

At least that's what I gathered.

3 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

All I'll say is, maybe lay off on the firm sceintific stances if you don't want to explain them?

I did explain them though, by providing the gist of a rather "complete" "theory of religion" (which isn't mine, of course).

3 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

It seems clear that you read me questioning evolutionary psychology and understood something worlds different.

True. It now seems evident that I've seen evolutionary psychology through its most solid works (that I selected directly or indirectly) whereas you were seeing it from what Phylum called "junk studies" (which Ormond, an actual psychologist, said "appals" actual professionals). So of course, we were not going to agree.
All in all, for an internet conversation, I think we did ok.

[Rippounet]

2 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Just to be clear to both @Rippounet and @fionwe1987 - I mistyped and left out a 'not' in a sentence. I meant to say that it is entirely reasonable for an alien species to NOT develop faith.

This is really a conversation that would be nicer to have around a table with a few cold beers, wouldn't it, eh?

[Kalbear]

5 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

Oh absolutely. I don't expect "religion" to be anything similar for any alien society. Indeed, if an alien religion, in content, is anything like any of ours, I'd honestly go back to the drawing board on my beliefs on the validity of that religion.

All I'm saying is alien species are likely to have aspects of their experience they do not understand, and will come up with faith based explanations. Whether that will even become organized religion is something we can't be certain of, because that would depend on the social dynamics of of said alien species, which can indeed be very different than ours.

And I don't agree with that. Or rather, I don't agree that aliens will have part of their experience they don't understand and then choose to make up a non-experiential story to explain it that can never be falsified. 

5 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

I'm with you on the first part, but I'm not sure with what confidence we can say it is a neurotypical human moral to respect authority. At the very least, the nature of authority, and what respect for said authority means, varies very widely. In fact, several polytheistic religions, like Hinduism, have regular humans cursing Gods for their moral failures (and by this I mean actual curses that end up constraining or harming said gods), defying them, for moral reasons, or calling out their immorality.

These are the stories I grew up with, and I'd hesitate to say their moral was "awe inspiring figures have authority you must respect". I learned quite the opposite from them, and that's why I hesitate to take it as a given that its typical to tie awe to respect. 

I think this is a bit uncharitable but I'll retort. It is absolutely a neurotypical human moral value to respect authority. That doesn't mean unwavering obedience. It means that humans are hierarchical social animals, humans look to sources of leadership (or create them if they don't exist), humans have ways of establishing authority that other humans respect and recognize, and humans think it is morally 'good' to be in alignment with their leadership. Those polytheistic stories have a lot of humans cursing out the gods - which is another part of the moral values (notably fairness and help/harm) - and those stories also often have the gods striking down those humans for their insolence. 

Again, authority as a moral doesn't mean always obeying - it means that you have a value of hierarchy and in general you appreciate that value. Those same polytheistic religions had a chief god in them, along with sub gods and ones that were more and less powerful, and constant jockeying for power - along with that jockeying being often portrayed as evil. 

5 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

Awe exists. But respect for authority is a lot more fluid. Social mammals do question authority, and that's what causes social hierarchies to be dynamic. Individuals may have a greater or lesser propensity to respect authority, but we hardly seem to have a universal rule that authority must be respected. 

See above. 

5 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

I think religion is a byproduct of trying to explain forces larger than the individual. It doesn't provide much at all, except false comfort, most often, but the need to explain larger things seems pretty obvious for any species, and since not everyone will hit on the right explanation, or go through the painstaking process of hypothesis to theory to determine reasonable explanations, you will inevitably have anecdotal explanations that rely on imprecise symbolic and narrative constructs. Those imprecise constructs then become the substrate for religion.  

Put another way, religion is an inevitable byproduct of the pathway to more testable and robust systems of knowledge like science and mathematics. 

Yeah, I really disagree with that. And that doesn't appear to be what we see in anthropology as well. One thing you're not putting any weight in at all is the value of religion as comfort for people - giving them an answer to what the afterlife will be, or what happens when you die, or if justice will be given out. You're also not valuing religion as an ultimate authority - something that many people do view it as (which again gets into the authority as morality viewpoint). 

5 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

Is it plausible some species hits on more robust systems right away? Maybe. But I think it is way more plausible that the evolution of science and mathematics inevitably spits out junk on the way, and it takes effort to clear them away.

Given that we have a sample size of 1 I don't think that's a fair assumption, especially since so much of our religion is based on our hardwired universal morality views. 

5 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

That's not a very evolutionarily plausible biosphere, I think. Something like this can be engineered, maybe. But can you lay out a plausible chain of evolutionary events for this to arise naturally? And what, even, does harmony mean? Our individual bodies don't run in perfect harmony, so I'm kinda confused by the notion of this arising naturally ecosystem wide.

I don't really have to come up with a specific plausible biosphere for this, do I? Compared to what? Again,  we have a sample size of 1. Imagine a world where instead of competition being the most important trait for survival cooperation was. Heck, imagine a system where quantum communication was found before photon reception. 

Again, you aren't imagining big enough. 

5 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

Is this biosphere filled with autotrophs only, or are there species who eat the autotrophs? How do you define this "connection"? Is it neuronal? Then harmony is impossible, because data transfer is pretty slow. Do they somehow evolve natural radio communication between different parts of the biosphere? What kind of selective pressure would give rise to that?

Honestly, single species ecosystems and all species in an ecosystem being "connected" are nice Sci Fi ideas, but they don't make sense as a naturally evolved thing. Engineered, sure, but I don't have an issue with there being no religion in such cases. I can see religion being overcome, eventually, as a possibility for any species, and sincere hope for ours.

Gas giants and survival in them would, as would high-density environments. We have animals that use photonic communication already (cuttlefish); it isn't particularly weird to think that would be more commonly done. 

Communication in the Thing verse is done by some RNA analogue transfer of memories, and works at the speed of blood/fluid transfer. It could be a lot faster. Or...maybe you have a really slow species that doesn't need to go fast because nothing is a threat to it. 

Mostly I don't understand why single species ecosystems don't make sense. Especially not as an end state. Here's another idea - imagine a species that was hypercompetitive and wiped out anything and everything that wasn't it. Say it's a lithovore, and doesn't need to eat other creatures or anything other than minerals, or it gets all its energy needs from photons. 

5 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

That's a non-evolving species, then? What about nature? Such a species would be susceptible to storms, earthquakes, etc, right?

It would likely have only evolutionary pressures from the outside, but it doesn't need to diverge or have any major punctuated equilibrium events that cause selection issues. 

5 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

The way of interaction can be very very different. But no interactions at all seems implausible. 

Implausible doesn't mean impossible. 

5 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

Whyever not? Firstly, I have no idea how a "hyperorganism the size of a planet" is to evolve. The square cube law will have something to say about that. But even if we skip past that hurdle, why isn't a sunset awe-inspiring to such a species. The sun is orders of magnitude larger, and will almost certainly be the sole source of energy to such a being, no? Awe and veneration seem entirely plausible.

What causes you to venerate something? Or have gratitude? Why do you appreciate something, or think it is significantly more important to you? 

These are human values. They aren't universal, and we know this because we see non-neurotypical humans not have them. A being that sees the sun doesn't necessarily think that it is a deity, much less a deity that is like itself. Depending on how well they can perceive the universe they may see it literally as a ball of superheated plasma. 

As to the hyperorganism the size of a planet, I didn't say that it's mobile. We already have organisms that spread several miles on the planet in fungi. It doesn't have to move around to be intelligent. 

5 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

That's not a realistic animal, though! I'll wager a single planetwide species is way way less plausible than a totally religion-free, linguistic, technologically advanced species, biologically.

Ultimately we don't know, but having one type of life spread out everywhere is a lot more plausible than having a whole lot of different life spread out everywhere. 

5 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

How? How do you ensure communication with another species without a chance for duplicity? And why would such a thing evolve? Duplicity is very useful, in communication, and very useful evolutionarily. And very expensive to minimize, and close to impossible to eliminate. 

It's only useful evolutionarily if you have survival of the fittest as your primary driver for change. That's not a guarantee for how things may evolve. It also is only useful when survival of individuals is important over the species.

Do ants lie? 

China Mieville had a great take on this in Embassytown if you're at all interested, but the notion that things can actually come up with fake ideas is not at all a universal thing, not even in monkeys. 

5 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

But even if you overcome all that, you're assuming that this means no religion. What if they believe in a God of Truth?

What would that mean? And why is that a religion instead of, say, just a philosophical principle? How is that different from agnosticism? 

5 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

Sorry, I didn't word that right. "it's a far greater reach to imagine a species unbound by time that way that evolves naturally than assuming any naturally evolved species that comes up with linguistic communication will not have some form of religion." is what I meant to say.

If you're going to have language to communicate, you're going to have religion-adjacent narratives and concepts to explain things, unless this species hits on truly accurate mathematical modeling of the world right from the get go, somehow. Which, again, doesn't seem very plausible, does it?

I disagree with all of that. You don't have to have language to communicate - that's not remotely a given, and I've mentioned several ways in which you could not have that. If you DO have language to communicate you don't require having lying or storytelling or even imagination.

And yes, it is entirely plausible to me to think that a species does mathematical modeling of the world right from the getgo; there's a reason that xenologists on Earth assume math is the only universal language and do not assume anything else - because mathematical concepts are significantly more universal. 

3 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

That doesn't make much sense to me. You obviously need belief in things you don't have immediate proof for to do anything complex. I'd argue that's one of the central reasons we have any kind of civilization/technology. I rely with 0 evidence on a lot of things, as do you, because I'm pretty sure you didn't sit and invent your own proofs to every bit of math you use, nor did you collect data for every bit of science you believe in. We outsource this stuff to the group, and communicate it using language, and language allows us to interrogate the claims made by other members of the group. 

No one human can find evidence and prove to themselves all the things they need to belive in and rely on, and that's gonna be true of any other species. And mistaken beliefs, or even theories resting on erroneous data, will happen. Just like errors in copying DNA will happen. So how do you avoid anyone even accidentally taking something on faith that is actually wrong?

And none of that is religion or faith. Faith does not mean 'believe others word but know it's backed up by something'. It means that you believe in something without any evidence. You believe it solely because someone has told you a story, and you take it from their authority that it is true. 

That isn't at all a given. 

And no, you don't also need belief in things you don't have immediate proof in to do anything complex. That's what experimentation and repetition is for. I don't need to believe that my keyboard will work for it for me to use it. 

3 hours ago, fionwe1987 said:

Now, there's a good way to test whether the belief you're being offered is correct, and ways to separate the horeshit from the gold, but that's an iterative process, so I don't know how a species will come readymade with that ability from the start, and use it in such a way that they never land on explanations that are not supported by evidence.

This is literally how humans and virtually every mammal interact with the world to start with - an iterative process of seeing what happens when they do things and learning from it. What's weird is taking other people's word for it. 

Sorry this is so long, but my point is that there are a whole lot of unchallenged assumptions in your idea that religion will be something likely in other aliens. The concepts of self, of causality, of language, of duplicity, of authority as a moral value, veneration, hierarchy, a need to have an explanation for events beyond 'it happens sometimes' - all of these are not given traits in other species. Notably this is true because they are not traits in terran species. They may not even be traits in species we consider highly intelligent such as whales or dolphins or apes. 

 

[IFR]

I'm really enjoying this discussion!

The neuroscience that primes humans towards religion is both fascinating and relevant. The conjoined interest in the understanding of organic-produced intelligence and advancing artificial intelligence will certainly touch on points such as this.

The strongest argument I'm aware of against the modernly popular notion of an omniscient/omnipotent god(s) is of course the classic Epicurus argument; that is (pilfering from wikipedia):

-While omniscient and omnipotent, he has knowledge of all evil and the power to put an end to it. But he does not. So it is not omnibenevolent.

-As omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then it has the power to extinguish evil and wants to do so, because it is good. But he does not do it, because he does not know how much evil there is and where the evil is. So he is not omniscient.

-While omniscient and omnibenevolent, then he knows of all the evil that exists and wants to change it. But he does not, because he is not capable. So he is not omnipotent.

This is a very persuasive logical argument. However, the problem inherent to it is the implicit axiom that omnipotence is subordinate to logic, which is an easy conclusion to fall to since it's hard for us to conceive that reality may fall outside of logic, and what a reality like that means.

But I do think upon even a cursory examination of our own fallibilities, that this may indeed be the case. We are absolutely limited by the fundemental architecture of our senses and biases. We try to circumvent this via science: that is, minimizing the weighted value of our biases from the evaluation of an observed phenomenon with emperical examination. But the cold, hard reality of the matter is even the instruments we use to probe the universe are themselves biased at a fundemental level, and it may be possible that there is not a way to minimize biases to the point one can arrive at any correct or approximately correct inference of our reality. Mathematics may be biased, and logic may be biased. A further problem is that there may be biases that are impossible for us to detect or discern.

We readily experience known interferences to our apprehension of our reality. For example, will we ever have any understanding of phenomena pre-Big Bang? Maybe. Maybe not.

I do have confidence that our understanding of neuroscience will improve to the point that we can precisely identify the pattern of synaptic impulses that correlate to every impulse, and every "drive" of the general template of human behavior - including the proclivity towards theism.

Will this ultimately have any real bearing on the overall discussion of the reality of theism? I doubt it. I'm skeptical that this an issue that can be resolved. It will always be a brain in the vat/butterfly dream kind of paradox.

Still, interesting discussion!

[Phylum of Alexandria]

On 1/17/2024 at 1:30 PM, IFR said:

This is a very persuasive logical argument. However, the problem inherent to it is the implicit axiom that omnipotence is subordinate to logic, which is an easy conclusion to fall to since it's hard for us to conceive that reality may fall outside of logic, and what a reality like that means.

But I do think upon even a cursory examination of our own fallibilities, that this may indeed be the case. We are absolutely limited by the fundemental architecture of our senses and biases. We try to circumvent this via science: that is, minimizing the weighted value of our biases from the evaluation of an observed phenomenon with emperical examination. But the cold, hard reality of the matter is even the instruments we use to probe the universe are themselves biased at a fundemental level, and it may be possible that there is not a way to minimize biases to the point one can arrive at any correct or approximately correct inference of our reality. Mathematics may be biased, and logic may be biased. A further problem is that there may be biases that are impossible for us to detect or discern

This all makes sense. And I'd take it even further. It's also the case that human understanding of the supernatural and religious ideas are often necessarily beyond reason and evidence. And sometimes beyond description.

A simple way of thinking about it is that our religious impulses are more about certain emotional states, and the practices that evoke them (and at the social level about how they contribute to a collective identity) than they are necessarily about descriptions of the world for logical or utilitarian purposes. As Karen Armstrong has put it, God is a verb.

There is some utility in disproving the simplest and silliest religious ideas, but I don't think we'll ever prove or disprove all spiritual or religious hypotheses, as many of them exist beyond the bound of testing, and also exist as part of our mental architecture that's only superficially tied to language and explanation. 

On 1/17/2024 at 1:30 PM, IFR said:

I do have confidence that our understanding of neuroscience will improve to the point that we can precisely identify the pattern of synaptic impulses that correlate to every impulse, and every "drive" of the general template of human behavior - including the proclivity towards theism.

I'm not so optimistic. We have learned a lot, and we continue to learn more. But I'm afraid the overly quantitative, disconfirmatory nature of most neuroscientific work remains a real barrier to understanding the richness of subjective experiences. For all our advances, Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" from the 70s remains a challenge for all biobehavioral approaches to understanding the mind. I'd be fine with being proven wrong, but I just see the task as insurmountable without some radical new approach to account for those deficiencies.

[The Grey Wolf Strikes Back]

I have to say I fundamentally disagree with the (predominately western) notion that faith and science cannot coexist. I mean, I get how that idea developed out of conflicts and events such as for example the Catholic Church's persecution of Galileo, but that still doesn't make it a hard and fast rule.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Spirituality and science can coexist. Religion and science really can't. 

Edited January 20 by Mr. Chatywin et al.

[Heartofice]

7 hours ago, The Grey Wolf Strikes Back said:

I have to say I fundamentally disagree with the (predominately western) notion that faith and science cannot coexist. I mean, I get how that idea developed out of conflicts and events such as for example the Catholic Church's persecution of Galileo, but that still doesn't make it a hard and fast rule.

Faith in what though? Faith in something with no evidence?  I get there is value in believing in something that may well be untrue if it’s beneficial, we all do that all the time. 
 

Faith itself is an act of believing, often with no evidence or despite evidende to the contrary, which really is the antithesis of science. 

[polishgenius]

6 hours ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

Spirituality and science can coexist. Religion and science really can't. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

20 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

That's helpful...

[polishgenius]

32 minutes ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

That's helpful...

 

You can argue that religious scientists past and present were in some way being hypocrites, if you want. You can argue that religious scientists who discover something that counters what they've believed till now and adapt their faith to fit it are playing mental games.

But you can't deny that religion and science co-exist. It's pretty undeniable that they do. I don't even mean in the literal sense that in the world we have both science and religion- I mean that a lot of the most important Western scientists in history were not just religious but deeply so, and committed to science because they wanted to understand God's universe (I specify Western because while I assume that's true of scientific thinkers elsewhere, I .don't know enough about them to name, say, monk-scientists of China or religious scientists of the Islamic world). 

Through the middle ages, it was monasteries and the like that preserved and advanced a lot of scientific learning. Arguing that the two can't co-exist is, honestly, an absurdity. 

 

The Bible said so and .we must suppress anything that contradicts it!! , the kind of religiosity that makes people think that religion and science can't co-exist, is only one form of being religious. 

Edited January 20 by polishgenius

[Larry of the Lawn]

7 hours ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

Spirituality and science can coexist. Religion and science really can't. 

But they do and have.

I think some very religious people who have made undeniable contributions to science would strongly disagree.

Here's Einstein:

"Science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration towards truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion"

Between that and Newton I don't know how you can make that claim.

Edited January 20 by Larry of the Lawn

[Mentat]

7 hours ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

Spirituality and science can coexist. Religion and science really can't. 

I think it's more a question of rationality than of science. Science is a process. A devoutly religious person who performs experiments rigorously and reports their results accurately may excel in any field of science (and indeed many notable scientists, such as Mendel, have been devoutly religious).

The specific tenets of any major religion, though, are not based on rationality. The belief that Allah is God and Muhammad is his prophet of a Muslim and the belief that God is the Holy Trinity of the Father, his son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit of a Christian have the exact same rational basis (which is to say none), but I'd expect a devout Muslim to belief the first is true and the second is not. The belief that an all powerful creator of the universe much cares about our head-gear, what food we eat or what day of the week we work is, to me, to put it kindly, fanciful, yet this is something all major religions share to an extent.

 

On 1/17/2024 at 7:30 PM, IFR said:

The strongest argument I'm aware of against the modernly popular notion of an omniscient/omnipotent god(s) is of course the classic Epicurus argument; that is (pilfering from wikipedia):

-While omniscient and omnipotent, he has knowledge of all evil and the power to put an end to it. But he does not. So it is not omnibenevolent.

-As omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then it has the power to extinguish evil and wants to do so, because it is good. But he does not do it, because he does not know how much evil there is and where the evil is. So he is not omniscient.

-While omniscient and omnibenevolent, then he knows of all the evil that exists and wants to change it. But he does not, because he is not capable. So he is not omnipotent.

I've always found this argument weak. On one hand, though most all religions will claim their God is "good", their actions as portrayed in different holy texts often seem anything but (lawful neutral at best), so we're forced to understand this goodness backwards (what God does or allows to happen is good because God does it or allows it to happen, and any moral judgement you might make opposite to this is wrong because you don't know better than God).

On the other hand, we tend to brand as "evil" things that happen to us (death, injury, sickness, old age...), things that happen in general (natural disasters, famine...) and things that we purposefully do to each other (war, crime...). Yet a world devoid of all this would be extremely strange and boring, and we probably wouldn't even exist in it (would an omni-benevolent God have allowed a meteorite to wipe out the dinosaurs?). Without adversity or competition (which lead to "evil" things such as death, winners and losers, inequality...) the world might be an endless calm sea full of lazy immortal amoeba with no incentive to evolve.