JB01

This is probably the longest essay I've written on the subject, certainly the longest I've contributed to this board, and I'm not sure where it belongs so I'll try it out here. It starts as a quasi-scientific discussion and culminates in a sort of sardonic diatribe. Anyway, here's my take on the roots of religion:

Within the modern cognitive neurosciences, a popular model for the organization of the human brain, and indeed all animal brains, is in terms of a collection of specialized modules, each consisting of a subset of the available neurons that is dedicated to solving one particular cognitive problem. The mind is then seen as the result of the joint activity of all these modules. [See Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" for a linguist's view of this idea].

A very frequently necessary task for a working brain (and perhaps the most generic) is that of pattern recognition. The task of a particular pattern recognition mental module is to reliably determine the presence or absence of a particular signal, of survival-related importance to the organism, within a noisy, erratic and irregular stream of data. For example, an ancient human needed to be able to detect the presence or absence of a leopard in his visual field not just when staring it in the face head-on from two feet away at noon, but at a distance, in profile, in tall grass, at night, etc.

Fortunately, thanks to work over the last few decades in computer science and applied mathematics, pattern recognition is also one of the easiest functions to understand in terms of the activity of a large number of neurons connected together. Computer instantiations of neural networks consist of connected sets of extremely idealized neurons each of which simply performs a weighted sum of signals it receives from other neurons wired to it, and fires if that sum exceeds a set threshold, sending a signal in turn to other neurons in the network. Feeding into one end of the network is a set of input nodes supplying the material of raw perception; at the other end is a (generally smaller) set of output nodes whose firing might be interpreted as meaning, say "YES" or "NO" or indicatingwhich letter of the alphabet the network thinks it is looking at. Such models show an impressive ability to mimic the qualities we would expect from a natural pattern-recognition system: they can be "trained" to recognize new types of patterns; unlike typical computers, they employ a large number of redundant units working in parallel, which makes them efficient even which each unit works relatively slowly and makes their behavior relatively insensitive to the failure or loss of any one unit; and, most relevant to this discussion, they can extract a signal from data even when the signal is presented in a variety of different ways and the data is adulterated with random noise. There is good reason to suppose that pattern recognition in the human brain is accomplished by similar systems.

If this is the case, then we should be able to learn something about our own minds from the ways these models work. In particular, no such system is perfect. There will always be examples of input data containing a signal that the network fails to detect (a false negative) and data lacking the signal that the network claims is there (a false positive). Networks can be tuned along a continuum so as to tend to err more on the side of false positives or false negatives. In the case of biological neural networks, we expect evolution to tune their performance so as to maximize survival and thus ultimately reproductive success. In the leopard example, it would be much more dangerous to fail to notice a leopard that is there than to believe one sees one that isn't, so we should expect that module, if there is one that specific, to be more likely to register false positives. I suspect most of us have more often had the experience of thinking we saw some malign shape in what turned out to be some innocent random arrangements of objects in shadow than of failing to notice a truly threatening object in our visual fields until our attention was drawn to it by someone else.

Because humans are social animals, a substantial number of our mental modules might be expected to specialize in picking up patterns related to other humans. There is, for example, strong evidence that we have dedicated face-recognition systems; we have such a strong propensity to perceive human faces everywhere that just about any closed curve containing a small circle with a dot in the middle will be perceptible as one - try it! We also have modules for distinguishing various types of human bodies, important in sexual behavior; and, I propose, we have a module for detecting the presence of a human mind.

If you place an obstacle in the path of a moving insect, it will typically stop, assess the situation, and then turn back or navigate around or over it. If you then add another obstacle, it will behave similarly. You can repeat this until you get bored, and the insect will continue to treat the obstacle as a natural occurrence. If, on the other hand, you try repeatedly obstructing the activity of a human being, even covertly, he will (unless he is autistic) quickly draw the correct conclusion: "Someone is f***ing with me." Humans possess an almost infinite capacity to screw each other over, so it should come as no surprise that we have evolved a highly sensitive dedicated mental system to distinguish between obstacles to our aims that occur naturally (and thus must be solved by our inanimate-object-manipulation toolkit) and obstacles that have been placed there by a person (and thus might be best removed by negotiation, threats, pleading, or by hitting the person with a rock ). Indeed, there is a school of thought that speculates that it was the evolutionary arms race between people good at taking advantage of others, and people good at telling when they were being taken advantage of that led to our developing such grossly oversized brains in the first place.

It should also come as no surprise that this other-mind recognition system would be tuned to register false positives. Failing to realize that someone is trying to kill you is far more dangerous than suspecting they are when they aren't. A vertically falling object that just misses your head probably signifies considerably less danger than a similar object traveling horizontally, but in either case you might be better off running. As evidence that our mind-recognition units are tuned in this direction, I offer the following anecdote: in the second grade, whenever a fellow student of mine was unable to locate a needed school supply, such as a pack of crayons, I was amused to note that he would never complain, "I can't find my crayons." Instead, he would always whine, "Somebody stole my crayons," which would generally turn out on inspection to be false. It was simply inconceivable to this child that something so undesirable could happen to his personal property through accident or his own negligence; it had to be a hostile conscious agent.

How would a prehistoric adult whose mind-finder frequently gave false positives behave? If you're a hunter who can't catch anything, maybe it's not that you're too slow or have lousy aim; maybe someone invisible is deliberately interfering. If so, maybe you can talk him out of it. Maybe you can bribe him into making you the best hunter in your tribe. If you're a farmer whose crops won't grow because there's no rain, maybe it's not just bad luck, maybe someone responsible for producing rain is withholding it for some reason. Maybe he can be talked out of it. If he can, you're back in business; if not, you're no worse off than if you didn't try. If you're a parent whose child is sick and dying, and the germ theory of disease won't be proposed for several millennia, you might conclude that someone you can't see is hurting the child. If you're wrong, there's nothing you can do but watch it die. If you're right, though, maybe the spirit can be propitiated. Your neighbor stopped attacking you when you started sharing some of your kills with him. Maybe if you give up something valuable the invisible attack on your child will stop too. Maybe you gave something up the last time a child was sick and it got better. That's pretty convincing evidence for your malignant-spirit theory. In any case, better safe than sorry.

What would happen in a modern human, who knows something about how weather and disease and a great many other things work, but whose hominid brain is still diligently sifting through mountains of data, processing thousands of distinct events, both directly experienced and indirectly heard of, always primed to look for the telltale signature of conscious intent? A hypersensitive pattern recognition module will return false positives. It will claim to see a signal in completely random data. Are bad things consistently happening to you? Someone must be punishing you for doing something wrong. Were you the beneficiary of an unexpected but happy coincidence? Someone must have planned it that way. How wonderful to think that an unseen being has a positive plan for your life! How foolish you were to have doubted it! Maybe by sifting even more carefully through the randomness, you can uncover more hidden faint impressions of intent that will tell you something about this wonderful being's plans. How much it must have to teach us, if only we can pull a pattern out of the noise! Is the universe -- an inconceivably vast, mostly empty space seeded here and there with clouds of hydrogen and dust -- the one possible, beautiful, perfect incubator for our species? Someone must have designed it that way.

That's what religion is. A bad but highly contagious idea taking opportunistic advantage of an unavoidable design flaw in the pattern-seeking mechanism of the human brain. We perceive human intention everywhere, even where it could not possibly be, even where no human has ever been, simply because we are wired that way. We are one frail species of hairless ape that sees its reflection in everything terrestrial and extraterrestial, inferring ape-like intentionality in the very cosmos itself. Hey, if we're right, maybe we can talk the universe out of hurting us. If we're wrong, what have we lost? Better safe than sorry.

Splat

Wow JB01. That's quite an impressive essay (you're in grad school, right?). It'll take a while to digest all that, but it's late friday night and I'm feeling good and loose...

I think you're onto something here, though I wouldn't necessarily write it off as "bad," at least evolutionarily.

Among other things, religion, together with its cousins, myth and folklore, provides us with a "complete" (i.e., containing an ultimate beginning, often a predicted end) model of the world, which we absolutely need if we're to continue functioning cognitively.

In addition to giving us the necessary illusion of a complete model, it also encoded a lot of the practical knowledge, customs, mores, etc. that actually put food on the table and maintained social structures. So as the only option available to us until recently, religion helped us survive and reproduce for a few tens of thousands of years--long enough to "train" our pattern recognition machinery to be more effective and to develop non-theistic alternatives that serve the same purposes, but are far more potent.

Just some thoughts. Nice essay.

JB01

Thanks for the feedback, Splat.

Oh, and I got out of grad school a year ago. I'm a post-doc now.

What tipped you off?

Splat

Congratulations, Dr. JB01. (Feels great, doesn't it?--except for the angst of being back at the bottom of another ladder...sigh)

What's the postdoc?

Quality and depth, mostly. Don't worry, with time and effort, it will fade.

JB01

You don't seem to be set up to receive private messages, so I'll answer you here. My subject is plasma physics; the cog sci stuff is just a side interest of mine. The postdoc is computer modeling peripherally related to fusion energy research.

What's your field?

Buffman

JB01

We are one frail species of hairless ape that sees its reflection in everything terrestrial and extraterrestial, inferring ape-like intentionality in the very cosmos itself. Hey, if we're right, maybe we can talk the universe out of hurting us. If we're wrong, what have we lost? Better safe than sorry.

Superb analysis. Thank you for posting it.

Feeding into one end of the network is a set of input nodes supplying the material of raw perception;...

Would you agree that our genetically produced senses are the first mechanism of input by which the brain's memory storage, filing cabinets, are utilized? (i.e.: The first to supply the input nodes with raw data?) --- I ask this question in an attempt to find a more simplistic, but no less accurate, method of explaining how humans actually arrive at the condition/state you eloquently describe in your conclusion.

Recently I have been using an analogy (hopefully an accurate one) in an attempt to describe the brain-mind interface in less technical language.

The newborn human is a fully functional, but empty, library. As enough nodual inputs are made (books placed in the stacks/raw data "sensed" and recorded in the memory files), the brain hires a librarian...the mind...to keep some sort of order in the stacks and interpret what can be found there.

Note: I treat puberty as analogous to the genes (utility company) turning the electric and plumbing systems ON inside the library.

at the other end is a (generally smaller) set of output nodes whose firing might be interpreted as meaning, say "YES" or "NO" or indicatingwhich letter of the alphabet the network thinks it is looking at.

Perhaps I should be calling these output nodes the librarian/mind.

Such models show an impressive ability to mimic the qualities we would expect from a natural pattern-recognition system: they can be "trained" to recognize new types of patterns;

Hmmmmm? "Trained" (educated) and/or "conditioned"(propagandized) to recognize new, or pre-planned, patterns?

You have done an excellent job in explaining one of the prime possibilities why humans are prone to seek supernatural intercession on behalf of their individual/group concerns. I have been interested in examining, and better understanding, the techniques being employed to facilitate and enhance this belief system. IMHO, I believe those techniques are highly developed, professionally employed, and extremely (frightenly) successful in today's world.

Thus, what techniques can be highly developed and professionally employed that will offer humanity the best opportunity to "know" that safety comes from understanding the accurate facts rather simplistic prayers for supernatural intercessions?

JB01

Thanks! Re-reading it, it seems too wordy to me. I need to learn to simplify my sentence structure.
But I'm glad you appreciated it.

Would you agree that our genetically produced senses are the first mechanism of input by which the brain's memory storage, filing cabinets, are utilized? (i.e.: The first to supply the input nodes with raw data?)

Yes, I suppose so, but I would be hesitant to apply the neural network analogy to the human brain as a whole. While it may be a useful way to understand the functioning of an individual pattern-recognition module, I don't think it's quite up to the challenge of accounting for the whole thing in all its complexity. At least not yet.

The newborn human is a fully functional, but empty, library. As enough nodual inputs are made (books placed in the stacks/raw data "sensed" and recorded in the memory files), the brain hires a librarian...the mind...to keep some sort of order in the stacks and interpret what can be found there.

Not bad, but I don't know if you want to imply that the infant brain is merely a "blank slate".
We shouldn't overlook the importance of innate, genetically programmed preconceptions in organizing sensory data. In your analogy, I guess you could say that the librarian (and his filing system) is present from birth.

Hmmmmm? "Trained" (educated)and/or "conditioned"(propagandized) to recognize new, or pre-planned, patterns?

Sorry, I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here.

I have been interested in examining, and better understanding, the techniques being employed to facilitate and enhance this belief system. IMHO, I believe those techniques are highly developed, professionally employed, and extremely (frightenly) successful in today's world.

Well, I don't suspect a grand over-arching conspiracy, if that's what you're suggesting, but I agree that there are groups, notably organized religions, that have gotten very good at exploiting human weaknesses for their own gain.

Thus, what techniques can be highly developed and professionally employed that will offer humanity the best opportunity to "know" that safety comes from understanding the accurate facts rather simplistic prayers for supernatural intercessions?

Good question. I hope you've found some answers. All I can think of are the usual suggestions: teach critical thinking skills early; help people understand the most common reasoning errors so they can be on guard against them; and continue to demonstrate the unprecedented success of the rationalist approach to the world.

Ryanfire

You could consider each node in the brain an experience of the senses. The eyes detect different colors, and sets up a node for "colors".
The same could be done for taste, sound, touch...etc.

Within the network of nodes acting together in unison is your intellect. From all your experiences or senses (knowledge) defines your intellect.

The brain is quite capable of filling in empty nodes with what seems the most logical upon the make up of the other nodes.

This is what religion is good at doing.. Defining an empty node based on what the other nodes are.

This is the problem with all discussions upon religion, god, and atheism.

We all have an empty node that we are debating over and how it should be filled in.

There are many humans with little networks, and others with expansive networks. But perhaps the ability of the way their network works comes into question. This could all be in the way our networks are "wired" to work. Some people recognize patterns more effectively visually, and others may be working blind. Perhaps their ears work more effectively then their eyes.

We all have different networks.

Religion has prayed on the weak, but it's changing now. Religion is losing its hold on the human mind. The networks continue to become smarter, through technology and science, our networks have more effective ways of training our minds, and the way our network works

Edit:
I'm wondering if some nodes take priority over other nodes? Is the network built on priority?
And if so, what causes the nodes to act the way they do?

[ July 18, 2002: Message edited by: Ryanfire ]</p>

fando

This is an interesting conjecture. I can believe that there is a tendency to attribute spectacular events or sights to other humans. However, I'm more conductive to the idea that worship and religion arose from animism. I believe that animism arose the moment pattern recognition in humans became sophisticated enough that they could recognize the emotions of animals. From that, it is a simple jump to applying empathetic guestures reserved for humans to the animals hunted by man. Primitive man would respect the spirits of their prey so that the guilt does not prevent him from making the next kill. As human brains evolved in capability through a variety of means, the guestures grew to be more elaborate.

The prehistoric cave paintings in Australia and France suggest to me that we first worshiped animals and humans (particularily the human female). That evidence favors animism as the origins of religion over pure instinctual knee-jerk reactions, but I'm sure those played a part in the later stages of religious evolution.

Buffman

JB01

Well, I don't suspect a grand over-arching conspiracy, if that's what you're suggesting, but I agree that there are groups, notably organized religions, that have gotten very good at exploiting human weaknesses for their own gain.

I am not an "everything" is a conspiracy enthusiast. However, neither am I blind to the efforts being put forth to gain "mind-control" over the masses. Whether this could be labeled as a cabal of American, fundamentalist, Christian theists bent on an evil end, remains open to discussion. Thus, I will not close my mind to the possibility of a religious conspiracy. (i.e.: The Christian Coalition/Moonie/Mormon Church alliance and all their spin-off organizations working in conjunction with many religiously motivated philanthropical organizations and many so-called Conservative (right wing) political powerhouses.) When one starts tracking many of these seemingly separate spokespersons (organizations) back to their sources, it can become most illuminating...and certainly surfaces a preliminary appearance of a conspiracy of mutually shared myths, superstitions and ultimate goals. (I consider superstitions and myths as evil if they are not recognized for what they are.)

<a href="http://www.datafilter.com/mc/" target="_blank">http://www.datafilter.com/mc/</a>

I will quickly grant that the above URL is hardly a scientifically definitive analysis of the subject. What it does indicate is that there has been, and continues to be, a great deal more going on in the area of human mind control than most citizens might suspect. (Personally, I have found "The MIT Press Neuroscience Catalog" to contain some of the best scientific publications related to gene-brain-mind interfaces available for purchase.) My point here is that for "mind-control" to be successful, one must not be aware that their mind is under someone else's control.

We shouldn't overlook the importance of innate, genetically programmed preconceptions in organizing sensory data.

If by this you mean the genetic design of the brain which permits it to do what it does, I will agree. However, the "Savant Syndrome" does offer some intriguing questions about innate genetic preconceptions...whatever you view those as being.

<a href="http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~changc/page1.html" target="_blank">http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~changc/page1.html</a>

I hope you've found some answers.

Well, 2,000 years and still looking. Perhaps I spent too much time studying and being exposed to Communist Psychological Warfare and Mind Control Techniques. I see the radical religious right following in their footsteps...only with more modern, better financed and efficient/effective employment. That might help to explain why I seek a simple and understandable method of educating folks on how they are being manipulated by these more modern Masters of Deceit. Critical thinking skills are the answer, but how do they get taught early enough, and across the broadest possible spectrum of our citizenry, to be able to expose the beliefs in the supernatural for what they really are?---We see the Voucher plan being found constitutional which will result in removing ever more young people from secular to religious educations. We see the Religious Faith Initiative being pushed in order to gain access to some of our most vulnerable adults by the religious manipulators. We see the Church-State separation wall being breached and destroyed by an increasing hue and cry for supernatural Gods to protect and lead us...even from our so-called elected representatives. Exactly how do we help people understand the most common reasoning errors so they can be on guard against them; and continue to demonstrate the unprecedented success of the rationalist approach to the world? --- The only answer I have at the moment is that those who know the accurate facts must be convinced to take a vital interest in challenging the propaganda, mis-information, dis-information, and falsehoods of the religious right and their "fellow travelers" at every possible opportunity...especially every public opportunity.