X-Message-Number: 22115
Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2003 01:26:49 -0400
From: Keith Henson <>
Subject: An interesting book

I just finished Pascal Boyer's book, _Religion Explained_.  The book *does* 
explain where religions come from and what quirks of the human mind support 
these memes.  But it also explains most of the rest of the features of 
culture along the way, including the really "unnatural" development of science.

There are a few places where Dr. Boyer says things that are practically 
paraphrases of the way I have put my thoughts on related subjects over the 
past ten years.  Likely just common background, but I can't help wondering 
if he has read some of my articles.  Of course he brings in supporting 
information from anthropology and cognitive science into the discussion 
that I know only slightly.

This is a book much like _Selfish Gene_ in having a lot of meat to it.  It 
will take reading parts of it over a few times before I can do a decent job 
of paraphrasing his arguments, but I can quote a bit of it.

After about two pages of discussion about the relative failure over the 
past centuries of religions to produce a more accurate world view than that 
produced by science:

"In contrast, as biologist Lewis Wolpert suggests, scientific activity is 
quite "unnatural" given our cognitive dispositions. Indeed, many of the 
intuitive inference systems I described here are based on assumptions that 
scientific research has shown to be less than compelling. This is why 
acquiring some part of the scientific database is usually more difficult 
than acquiring religious representations."

"What makes scientific knowledge-gathering special is not just its 
departure from our spontaneous intuitions but also the special kind of 
communication it requires, not just the way one mind works but also how 
other minds react to the information communicated. Scientific progress is 
brought about by a very odd form of social interaction, in which some of 
our motivational systems (a desire to reduce uncertainty, to impress other 
people, to gain status, as well as the aesthetic appeal of ingenuity) are 
recruited for purposes quite different from their evolutionary background. 
In other words, scientific activity is both cognitively and socially very 
unlikely, which is why it has only been developed by a very small number of 
people, in a small number of places, for what is only a minuscule part of 
our evolutionary history. As philosopher Robert McCauley concludes, on the 
basis of similar arguments, science is every bit as "unnatural" to the 
human mind as religion is "natural.""  (page 319-320)

"To impress other people, to gain status" has been a theme of my 
speculations about a universal explanation for motivation (not just in 
science) since perhaps 1995.  Because it applies to social primates and I 
am one, honesty requires that I recognize the fact.  Unfortunately, even 
though it is a major if not *the* major motivation for people, saying so 
and applying it to yourself is considered really objectionable, especially 
to a certain judge who has taken me to task in his legal rulings for saying so.

Of course, I am no more aware of this motivation on a day to day basis than 
the judge.  *He* gave up being a lawyer where he made several times as much 
money for the higher status job of being a judge.  Our deep motivations 
come from a mess of non-verbal "downstairs" mental agents we are not even 
aware of.

The book strongly relates to how you would go about constructing AIs and 
Artificial Personalities.  Reasonable priced copies (hard and paperback) 
are available on half.com and amazon.com.  Highly recommended.

Keith Henson

PS.   Since people see religion and cryonics as sort of in competition 
people will ask if the book spells out how to recruit more people into 
cryonics.  More thinking about the issues might help, but the main thing I 
see so far is support for just how hard it is to sell cryonics.

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