As a young physics math guy, religions to me were just another silly cultural thing we humans do. Makes one prone to ignorance of science, evolution. Like Dawkins, I was dismissive and haughty about it.
I viewed it as two opposing hypotheses about the world. Rational Bayesian reasoning left no doubt: religious claims are false. Really really false! End of issue. But through my own research in cognitive science and the origins of language and music, I slowly transformed to possess a new respect for religion. Why? First, by “respect” I mean it here in the way you have respect for a lion when you encounter her in the wild. Whether you like her is irrelevant. Whether she’s good is irrelevant. You respect her in the sense that you appreciate that she is a highly engineered thing, worthy of much study to understand her. And she is also powerful. My change toward respect of religion started in the early 2000s when I became interested in whether writing, language and the arts have culturally shaped themselves to be a good fit for our brains. The answer was, Yes. For writing, it occurred to me that we read too well — almost as if we have a reading instinct. See this piece: Pinker’s Instincts on Language. I wondered if writing over history has culturally evolved to look “like nature”. I provided evidence for this in two papers — first and second — and also in my earlier book, VISION rEVOLUTION. Writing culturally evolved to harness our ancient instincts for object recognition. No reading instinct was needed. A few years later I examined whether the sounds of speech might also harness us, by sounding like natural events. Here too I found strong evidence for what I call “nature harnessing.” On the controversial issue of whether we have a language instinct, the answer is No. Spoken language harnesses already existing natural-event-recognition mechanisms. Although, there is, in another sense, a language instinct: We are really born with an innate proclivity for our languages. But not because we evolved for language, but, rather, because our languages evolved to fit us. The nature-harnessing origins of speech was the topic of my most recent book, HARNESSED. (And that book also makes the case that music may have culturally evolved to sound like something we already had ancient auditory mechanisms for: the sounds of human movement.) What did these research directions have to do with religion? Well, language — writing and speech — are central to who we take ourselves to be. But, on the view I am suggesting, they aren’t human per se. They are cultural inventions. Really really sophisticated ones. In this light, rather than being a reservoir of silly things we humans happen to do, culture is a brilliant (blind) engineer giving us highly honed artifacts that change us into a kind of Human 2.0 I had acquired at this point a whole new respect for culture. But, if cultural artifacts we take for granted can have, hidden inside them, tremendous design, why not religion? As a theorist, I like letters and phonemes and relatively simple stimuli, because I just might be able to wrap my head around them. Religion is not the kind of cultural animal I prefer studying. Too complicated for the sorts of elegant hypotheses, and tests, I hope to have. So, I have not studied religions in this “harnessing” paradigm. And I don’t plan on doing so. There are minds much better equipped for that, like Pascal Boyer. But, once one sees the secret wisdom of seemingly simple cultural artifacts like writing, one would have to close one’s mind to not see that much-more-complex religions might be teeming with design, and tap into lots of our innate mechanisms, transforming us. ...in some way. That religion’s truth claims are false is so missing the point. Again, whether religion is good for us, or for society, is another issue. Respect here just means realizing that religions might well be well-oiled machines plugging into human brains, and that one should be prepared to get one’s feet wet in trying to pick them apart and reverse engineer them. We need less haughtiness and hostility from us atheist scientists. More humility on religion. Originally published as a Twitter thread, 2018, at @markchangizi I find myself wondering more about the extent to which we’re innately biased against seeing great intelligence in non-human species.
Plenty of reasons to worry, including our proclivity for doing so even for minor ethnic differences, and even purely for outgroups. I like to imagine I am fairly self aware of these biases, having written about them, including this... http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/tag/animal-rights/#.WvXhQ_8pCaM But I suspect that this is just the tip of the Bias Berg. Two avenues of research have pushed my view considerably in this regard. (1) The first shows that crows and parrots have qualitative levels of intelligence of apes, and (2) The second is my own “nature-harnessed” research arguing that language (and arts like music) are not part of our biology, but, rather, cultural artifacts harnessing ancient instincts. Together, these suggest that we’re much closer in biological intelligence to apes — and even corvids&parrots — than our unaided intuition would suggest. I have found myself wondering about the following thought experiment: Supposing one particular species of, say, bird were biologically the same qualitative level of intelligence as humans, how difficult would it be for us to truly realize it? For starters, let’s add some sci-fi and make it starker: Imagine human brains in utero are transplanted into the body of some crows. (And somehow they function as crows, etc. Don’t think too deep about this counterfactual or it won’t make sense.) Would it be obvious to people that these crows are... ~ different? ~ smarter than other crows? ~ as smart as people? ~ basically people, in crow bodies? My bet is that it would be totally not obvious. ...that it would be practically impossible to tell. ...and that there are hosts of distinct reasons — biases from humans observing them, and necessary behavioral consequences to these “crow-people” by virtue of being raised in crow bodies — that would mask the truth. But if THAT is the case, then we should be deeply worried that we might be radically underestimating the intelligence of many animal species, especially so the more phylogenetically distant they are from us. Not that intelligence is the only factor in moral-worth / personhood / rights of animals. But it’s one big one. I personally killed half a dozen hornet-sized bumblebees this weekend. They were making a home, and scaring the crap out of guests. (Even though docile.) Surely nowhere near the level of mammals and birds. (Right?) But, probably also surely much — an order of magnitude? — more intelligent / aware than I may historically have been presuming. This changes how one looks upon every non-human animal. As a theoretical biologist I have always appreciated the mind boggling complexity and design. But even though I’m also a cognitive scientist, my human biases have, I think, prevented me from seeing the truth about all the other minds out there. The veil is slowly lifting. This first appeared as a Twitter thread in 2018 at @markchangizi |