[ExI] ai is the easy road

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 17/10/2026 19:08, spike wrote:
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> Keith you pointed out that humans are able to create larger stable groups than our cousins the chimps and bonobos.  Think of religion not so much as a mind parasite but as a technique or basis for stabilizing large groups of humans, enabling them to work in parallel.  
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> This view has its consequences: we argue that diversity is our strength.  If religion creates a common basis for society, then diversity is our weakness.  That view predicts the existence of multiple religions results a reduction in cohesiveness of a society.
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Ok, but I don't see how.
Why should irrational beliefs in impossible things act as a basis for stabilising large groups, rather than something more concrete and demonstrable?

Religions, at least organised ones, seem to have arisen after humans started organising into large groups, and served to form a kind of opposing power structure within the earlier structure of tribal leaders - chieftains - kings, etc. I think you could argue that religions were a consequence, rather than a cause, of large groups of  humans.

There's also some evidence that reproduction, not religion, was the driving force behind a lot of the large ancient monuments that we usually assume were religious in nature. Some people think that they were gathering places for people to party and find mates from different tribes. So sites like stonehenge, etc., might not be evidence of pre-civilisational religion at all.
-- 
Ben
"The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything." - Pablo Casals, via Albert Einstein