[ExI] Religions are not the ultimate cause of war

[Anders Sandberg]

On 01/10/2012 21:05, Charlie Stross wrote:
> You seem to have missed "the human concept of  "god" is a cognitive processing error -- we observe random events and are prone to ascribe them to purposeful behaviour, and our theory of mine then back-projects a conscious intelligence behind it".
>
> In other words, *not* "there is no God" but "the concept of God is a cognitive malfunction".

I wonder how common this malfunction would be across intelligent 
species. Naturally evolved intelligent technological species are 
probably (?) mostly social species (since that way you can cheaply get 
more intelligence and cumulative cultural capital - it is hard to build 
a technological civilisation from loners). They would hence also likely 
have a lot of social cognition hardware, including agency detectors. So 
that would likely make a fair number of them share our delusional style. 
However, it is not entirely obvious that there might be social species 
with agency detectors that fail more in the other direction and they 
hence tend to assume only some purposeful behaviors are due to 
fellows... probably a somewhat sociopathic bunch, anyway.

In the case of non-evolved species anything goes. On one hand the first 
generation would likely be created by an evolved species that might have 
views on their cognition, likely biasing it to be similar to theirs. But 
they would likely have potential to quickly evolve whatever agency 
detection they found useful ("the sign of purposeful behavior is that 
the origin metadata is signed by the public key of something listed in 
the intelligent person database!") So there could be both naturally 
atheist and religious artificial species... and likely 
religion-equivalent cognitive quirks that are far more bizarre to our 
perspective. Besides the obvious awareness of who the creators were. ("I 
am communing with the Creator every Tuesday. I mostly send him spam!")


-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University