[ExI] Religions are not the ultimate cause of war

[Anders Sandberg]

On 02/10/2012 23:00, Tom Nowell wrote:
>
> 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.
>

Spiritual feelings are very common. But there is a difference between 
experiencing deep meaning (and related things, all the way up to 
mystical experiences) and the elaborate constructions of religions. 
Plenty of spirituality is free from the assumption that there has to be 
a particular agent behind it, although in many cases people frame their 
spiritual experiences in the form of their culture's expectations.

I do think a lot of the spiritual stuff is "misfiring" too, but the 
border between misfiring and having a individually meaningful experience 
is very blurred. See for example Austin's "Zen and the brain" for a 
hardcore dissection of the Zen mystical experience and an attempt at 
mapping it onto brain states: if his theory is right, meditation is all 
about deliberately whacking out the attention systems of the brain in 
order to cause long term changes that are actually quite adaptive. And 
then there are those core values and intuitions we do have: maybe not 
sacrosanct and above challenging from time to time, but they are what 
actually guides us and gives meaning to our lives.

The point where I think people become chuckleheads is when they stop 
being truth tracking: when you decide that something is true because you 
believe it and then refuse to change your views no matter what the 
evidence is. Happens a lot outside religion too, of course. And it is 
just as stupid there.

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

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