[ExI] Religions are not the ultimate cause of war

[Tom Nowell]

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".

And in response Anders speculated on how common this cognitive malfunction is. Well, it's time for confessions of a paid-up chucklehead here. As a genuine religious believer, I'm definitely experiencing something subjectively, whether it's the agency attributing parts of my brain misfiring or my consciousness responding to the Divine. Discussing spirituality with co-workers in the past, I've discovered a lot of people who are "not religious, but very spiritual" - while one British comedian liked to dismiss this as "this means I don't like going to church but I'm still scared of dieing", I prefer to think of this as "I'm getting similar experiences and emotions, I just can't a find a label to fit". I sometimes wonder how common experience or non-experience of (for lack of a better phrase) "spiritual feelings" are.

Anyway, I'm quite happy with the way the agency attribution in my brain works - it enriches my life, hasn't stopped me solving any equations yet, and given the philosophical difficulty of disproving the simulation argument, maybe my brain is responding correctly to the Creator's direction and other people are suffering from a neural variation that's blinding them to this side of the universe.

Tom

PS If Dr Broderick was still here, I'd want to kick off a discussion of how the Charismatic "gifts of the spirit" and psi sometimes seems to have an amazing overlap, but I don't know if there's a ready audience to discuss psi on this list anymore.
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