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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 02/10/2012 23:00, Tom Nowell wrote:<br>
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On 01/10/2012 21:05, Charlie Stross wrote:<br>
> 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".<br>
><br>
> In other words, *not* "there is no God" but "the
concept of God is a cognitive malfunction".<br>
<br>
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.<br>
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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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University </pre>
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