[extropy-chat] Edge: Thank Goodness! By Daniel C. Dennett

[Keith Henson]

At 03:42 PM 11/5/2006 -0800, Fred wrote:
>On Sat, 2006-11-04 at 23:35 -0500, Keith Henson wrote:

snip

> >
> > You might note that better sanitation memes are an outgrowth of
> > *understanding* infectious disease, particularly what *causes* it.
>
>I agree that understanding the mechanisms in which harmful memes take
>hold is important.

I agree with you on the importance of understanding.  But "harmful" needs 
to be carefully examined as to what is harmed and what is helped.  Take the 
9/11 hijackers as an example.  No doubt about them harming others and dying 
in the process or about them being motivated by some religious class meme.

But how about their *genes*?  Don't forget that most or all of them had 
lots of relatives who shared their genes.

I can't state with confidence that the relatives of the 19 hijackers are 
doing better in terms of status and other perks that make it more likely 
for there to be a more copies of those hijacker's genes in the next 
generation, but these psychological traits were selected in the Stone 
Age.  The relatives of warriors (i.e., copies of their genes) who fought 
neighbors for resources on average did better than those who did not.

We know that the brain even has dedicated "religious feeling" circuits in 
the temporal lobe.  That indicates genes build a PROM like religious meme 
receptor area.

My (paranoid) claim is that wars were the origin of the psychological 
traits that manifest as religious memes.

>My opinion is that this is a very complex subject
>and that Dennett, Dawkins and Harris (along with many others) are just
>beginning to make progress in this area.

I wish it were true, but I don't even see them moving in the right 
direction.  Evolutionary psychology states that every psychological trait 
resulted from direct selection or it is a side effect of something that was 
selected.  I strongly suspect that the psychological trait that causes 
humans to have religions at all was selected as a result of incessant 
warfare.  It wouldn't be hard to show with some hopped up war buffs and 
functional MRI.  Viewed this way, religions are seed xenophobic memes that 
are brought to a fever pitch by the conditions leading to wars.

> > Ranting against religions might be really effective if religions were
> > understood to the level we understand infectious disease.  As it is, what
> > this crew is doing is like ranting against fevers without the least
> > understanding of what causes fevers.
>
>I think I found more value in what Dennett, Dawkins and Harris are doing
>than you do.  For one thing they are providing momentum to a long
>overdue response to some of the nonsensical attacks on atheism which
>many religious persons have been doing for years.

I suspect that wide understanding the function of religions as a part of 
the war complex might be more effective.

On the other hand, if my paranoid thoughts on the function of religions are 
right, we might *need* them.  If some vast religious population insists on 
going to war with the western world, some bunch of our warriors, hopped up 
on memes of the religious class, will have to kill huge numbers of them.  :-(

The alternative I see to megadeath is high tech rapidly improving the 
"income per capita" and shutting off the psychological mechanisms that lead 
to war or related social disruption.  It's too late for a reduced birth 
rate (as happened in Ireland) to shut off the drive to war.

Have fun at Hacker's

Keith