How we fashion meaning and purpose.

This is a brief post about some material I thought I might get to cohere, maybe something along the lines of purpose as an evolved means of generating order, part of the big story of order evolving from chaos in the universe. I was wrong about the coherence, but I think the links are worth mentioning. The “Big History Project” is an effort to generate a modern origin story that transcends previous stories because it is global. From David Christian:

...in modern science we've gotten used to the idea that science doesn't offer meaning in the way that institutional religions did in the past. I'm increasingly thinking that this idea that modernity puts us in a world without meaning….may be completely wrong. We may be living in an intellectual building site, where a new story is being constructed. It's vastly more powerful than the previous stories because it's the first one that is global. It's not anchored in a particular culture or a particular society. This is an origin story that works for humans in Beijing as well as in Buenos Aires...it sums over vastly more information than any early origin story….across so many domains, the amount of information, of good, rigorous ideas, is so rich that we can tease out that story.

The Christian's Big History project reminds me of the Natural Sciences 5 course originated by my mentor George Wald, which I taught in when I was a Harvard senior and then graduate student in 1963-67. These efforts have started with cosmology, the origin of the university, the solar systems and earth, the appearance and evolution of life, and finally the human story. I had a look at Chapter 5 of the online Big History Project (aimed at middle and high school level, 13-17 year olds) and found it reasonably engaging.


The second source I want to mention is a piece by Worthen titled "Wanted: A Theology of Atheism." The title is an oxymoron [Greek Theos (god) + logia (subject of study)], presumably intentional. It discusses efforts, of the sort described in some previous MindBlog posts, to form secular (godless) forums, churches, or assemblies that meet our human need for communal settings that reinforce kindness and moral behavior, that balance the needs of the community against self interest. Worthen quotes Sam Harris's:

...promoting science as a universal moral guide. This proposal is an old one. The 19th-century French philosopher Auguste Comte and the American intellectuals Walter Lippmann and John Dewey all wrote that moral progress depended on the scientific method.

Morality depends on “the totality of facts that relate to human well-being, and our knowledge of it grows the more we learn about ourselves, in fields ranging from molecular biology to economics,” Harris has stressed the special role of his own field, cognitive science. Every discovery about the brain’s experience of pleasure and suffering has implications for how we should treat other humans. Moral philosophy is really an “undeveloped branch of science” whose laws apply in Peoria just as they do in the Punjab.

Pragmatist philosophers like Philip Kitcher offer a different approach to the question of atheist morality, one based on “the sense that ethical life grows out of our origins, the circumstances under which our ancestors lived, and it’s a work in progress,” he said. In the pragmatist tradition, science is useful, but ethical claims are not objective scientific facts. They are only “true” if they seem to “work” in real life.

Invunerablism

Todd May does a brief essay (coining the world “invulnerabilism”) that is yet another interesting take on an issue central to all our lives: Do what degree is it useful to psychologically armor ourselves from the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ - to have a strong psychological immune system, or an emotionally invulnerable self construal? The meditative practices of several traditions offer us a route into our brain’s ‘basement’, a closer approach to and experience of the machinery that generates all the stuff upstairs, our emotionally reactive immersed selves and personas (Buddhism, for example, offering us an end to suffering if we abandon our desires.) May suggests:

..the way to think about these things has less to do with the invulnerability promoted by the official doctrines, and more to do with, one might say, using these doctrines to take the edge off of vulnerability, to allow one to experience life without becoming overwhelmed or depressed or resentful or bitter, except perhaps at the extremity of loss. There is some combination of embedding oneself in the world in a vulnerable way and not being completely undone by that vulnerability that is pointed at, if not directly endorsed, by the official doctrines.

It seems to me that Taoism, Buddhism, Stoicism, etc. work not by making one invulnerable but rather by allowing one to step back from the immediacy of the situation so that the experience of pain or suffering is seen for what it is, precisely as part of a contingent process, a process that could have yielded a very different present but just happened to yield this one.

Another point would be the evolution of our social brain has resulted in a built in bias towards feeling the sort of vulnerability and bonding that sustains and defends social group identity. A group of floating detached Taoists isn't all that useful in intergroup conflicts. Finally, disciplines that result in maintaining emotional distance from others can also let atrophy the evolved neuroendocrine chemistries that can vitalize our physiology and longevity.

The Cultural Evolution of Prosocial Religions

Having been an author in an issue of "Behavioral and Brain Biology" published by Cambridge University Press, I receive notice of forthcoming articles inviting reviewers comments. The articles are then published with the reviewer's comments and authors' responses to the comments.

As a followup to my recent MindBlog post on E.O. Wilson's new book, I am passing on this interesting abstract of such a forthcoming article by Norenzayan et al.  (Motivated readers can email me if they wish to obtain a PDF of this article.)

We develop a cultural evolutionary theory of the origins of prosocial religions, and apply it to resolve two puzzles in human psychology and cultural history: 1) the rise of large-scale cooperation among strangers in the last twelve millennia, and 2) the spread of prosocial religions during the same period. We argue that these two developments were importantly linked. We explain how a package of culturally evolved religious beliefs and practices characterized by increasingly potent, moralizing supernatural agents, credible displays of faith, and other psychologically active elements conducive to social solidarity promoted internal harmony, large-scale cooperation, and high fertility, often leading to success in intergroup competition. In turn, prosocial religious beliefs and practices spread and aggregated as these successful groups expanded, or were copied by less successful groups. This synthesis is grounded in the idea that although religious beliefs and practices originally arose as non-adaptive byproducts of innate cognitive functions, particular cultural variants were then selected for their prosocial effects in a long-term cultural evolutionary process. This framework (1) reconciles key aspects of the adaptationist and byproduct approaches to the origins of religion, (2) explains a variety of empirical observations that have not received adequate attention, and (3) generates novel predictions. Converging lines of evidence drawn from diverse disciplines provide empirical support while at the same time encouraging new research directions and opening up new questions for exploration and debate.

The ecology of religious beliefs

Botero et al. do a fascinating survey of 583 societies to show that religions with moralizing high gods that promote cooperation between humans are more prevalent among societies that inhabit poorer environments and are more prone to ecological duress:

Although ecological forces are known to shape the expression of sociality across a broad range of biological taxa, their role in shaping human behavior is currently disputed. Both comparative and experimental evidence indicate that beliefs in moralizing high gods promote cooperation among humans, a behavioral attribute known to correlate with environmental harshness in nonhuman animals. Here we combine fine-grained bioclimatic data with the latest statistical tools from ecology and the social sciences to evaluate the potential effects of environmental forces, language history, and culture on the global distribution of belief in moralizing high gods (n = 583 societies). After simultaneously accounting for potential nonindependence among societies because of shared ancestry and cultural diffusion, we find that these beliefs are more prevalent among societies that inhabit poorer environments and are more prone to ecological duress. In addition, we find that these beliefs are more likely in politically complex societies that recognize rights to movable property. Overall, our multimodel inference approach predicts the global distribution of beliefs in moralizing high gods with an accuracy of 91%, and estimates the relative importance of different potential mechanisms by which this spatial pattern may have arisen. The emerging picture is neither one of pure cultural transmission nor of simple ecological determinism, but rather a complex mixture of social, cultural, and environmental influences. Our methods and findings provide a blueprint for how the increasing wealth of ecological, linguistic, and historical data can be leveraged to understand the forces that have shaped the behavior of our own species.

Having 'no self' as self transcendence, or spirituality.

I've finally read another item in my queue of potential posts, an interview by Gary Gutting of Sam Harris, whose most recent book is titled "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. " I recommend the article to philosophically inclined MindBlog readers. Harris takes deities and religion to be nonsense, but argues that spirituality (probably the foundation of many religions) is a noble pursuit. The following clip is Harris on contrasting the claims about mind and cosmos made by science and religion:

There is a big difference between making claims about the mind and making claims about the cosmos. Every religion (including Buddhism) uses first-person experience to do both of these things, but the latter pretensions to knowledge are almost always unwarranted. There is nothing that you can experience in the darkness of your closed eyes that will help you understand the Big Bang or the connection between consciousness and the physical world. Look within, and you will find no evidence that you even have a brain, much less gain any insight into how it works.

However, one can discover specific truths about the nature of consciousness through a practice like meditation. Religious people are always entitled to claim that certain experiences are possible — feelings of bliss or selfless love, for instance. But Christians, Hindus and atheists have experienced the same states of consciousness. So what do these experiences prove? They certainly don’t support claims about the unique divinity of Christ or about the existence of the monkey god Hanuman. Nor do they demonstrate the divine origin of certain books. These reports only suggest that certain rare and wonderful experiences are possible. But this is all we need to take “spirituality” (the unavoidable term for this project of self-transcendence) seriously. To understand what is actually going on — in the mind and in the world — we need to talk about these experiences in the context of science.

In the interview Harris gives one of the nicest and most simple expositions of how our sense of self can be an illusion that I have seen. It is a response to Gutting's question:

You deny the existence of the self, understood as “an inner subject thinking our thoughts and experiencing our experiences.” You say, further, that the experience of meditation (as practiced, for example, in Buddhism) shows that there is no self. But you also admit that we all “feel like an internal self at almost every waking moment.” Why should a relatively rare — and deliberately cultivated — experience of no-self trump this almost constant feeling of a self?

Harris:

Because what does not survive scrutiny cannot be real. Perhaps you can see the same effect in this perceptual illusion:

It certainly looks like there is a white square in the center of this figure, but when we study the image, it becomes clear that there are only four partial circles. The square has been imposed by our visual system, whose edge detectors have been fooled. Can we know that the black shapes are more real than the white one? Yes, because the square doesn’t survive our efforts to locate it — its edges literally disappear. A little investigation and we see that its form has been merely implied.

What could we say to a skeptic who insisted that the white square is just as real as the three-quarter circles and that its disappearance is nothing more than, as you say, “a relatively rare — and deliberately cultivated — experience”? All we could do is urge him to look more closely.

The same is true about the conventional sense of self — the feeling of being a subject inside your head, a locus of consciousness behind your eyes, a thinker in addition to the flow of thoughts. This form of subjectivity does not survive scrutiny. If you really look for what you are calling “I,” this feeling will disappear. In fact, it is easier to experience consciousness without the feeling of self than it is to banish the white square in the above image.

Rules of implicit evaluation by race, religion, and age.

Axt and collaborators look at a very large sample (N > 200,000) of people of varying race, religion, and age and find, that after ranking their own race, religion, or age most favorably, people rank remaining categories in the same hierarchy, suggesting that rules of social evaluation are pervasively embedded in culture and mind. The subjects in the study were American citizens who submitted data to Harvard's Project Implicit. Their abstract:

The social world is stratified. Social hierarchies are known but often disavowed as anachronisms or unjust. Nonetheless, hierarchies may persist in social memory. In three studies (total N > 200,000), we found evidence of social hierarchies in implicit evaluation by race, religion, and age. Participants implicitly evaluated their own racial group most positively and the remaining racial groups in accordance with the following hierarchy: Whites > Asians > Blacks > Hispanics. Similarly, participants implicitly evaluated their own religion most positively and the remaining religions in accordance with the following hierarchy: Christianity > Judaism > Hinduism or Buddhism > Islam. In a final study, participants of all ages implicitly evaluated age groups following this rule: children > young adults > middle-age adults > older adults. These results suggest that the rules of social evaluation are pervasively embedded in culture and mind.

The authors comment on the noteworthy finding that Black people generally received more positive implicit evaluations than Hispanic people.

Past research has indicated that Blacks occupy the lowest rung of the racial status hierarchy. Recent work suggests that Hispanics may in fact occupy a position of lower status in the United States. For example, Hispanic men and women have lower weekly earnings than their White, Asian, and Black counterparts (U.S. Department of Labor, 2013). Our Study now reveals that Hispanics are evaluated less positively on average than Blacks, at least implicitly.

A reason for the power of prayer.

Friesea and Wänke find one source of the power of prayer that is not supernatural: it enhances self control by buffering self-control depletion, that is, protecting from breakdowns of will. In a sequential experimental paradigm, subjects were told to watch a humorous video but stifle emotional responses (this causes cognitive depletion) and then performed the stroop task, in which they indicated the ink color of words spelling various color, with the words being either consistent or inconsistent with their actual colors. Studies have shown that this task is harder after cognitive depletion. Both religious and non-religious who were asked to pray about a topic of their choosing for five minutes showed significantly better performance on the stroop task after emotion suppression, compared to participants who were simply asked to think about a topic of their choosing. The authors suggest that people might interpret prayer as a social interaction with a deity, with that social interaction enhancing cognitive resources. Other studies have found that social interaction enhances general cognitive functioning. Here is the Friesea and Wänke abstract:

The strength model of self-control has inspired large amounts of research and contributed to a deeper understanding of the temporal dynamics underlying self-control. Several studies have identified factors that can counteract self-control depletion, but relatively little is known about factors that can prevent depletion effects. Here we tested the hypothesis that a brief period of personal prayer would buffer self-control depletion effects. Participants either briefly prayed or thought freely before engaging (or not engaging) in an emotion suppression task. All participants completed a Stroop task subsequently. Individuals who had thought freely before suppressing emotions showed impaired Stroop performance compared to those who had not suppressed emotions. This effect did not occur in individuals who had prayed at the beginning of the study. These results are consistent with and contribute to a growing body of work attesting to the beneficial effects of praying on self-control.

The biology of sacred values.

Frank Rose does a nice piece in the NYTimes, pointing to the work of Gregory Berns and others, on brain correlates of why financial incentives are irrelevant when “sacred values” are at stake. (As in the failure of financial incentives offered by the West in getting Iran to give up its “right” to enrich uranium for “peaceful” uses.) Attempts to offer money to get people to alter strongly held beliefs - with issues like gun control, abortion, Israeli or Palestinian rights to the West Bank of the Jordan - result in moral outrage, feelings of contamination, and a need for moral cleansing. Work by Berns and others suggests we have radically different ways of processing ordinary and sacred beliefs. Berns…

...took M.R.I. images of participants’ brains as he asked them to consider changing their personal beliefs in exchange for money. Would they trade their preference for dogs over cats? What about their belief in God? Would they be willing to kill an innocent person?

When participants were questioned about issues of the dog-or-cat variety, their brain scans showed activity in the parietal cortex — a region that’s thought to be involved in making cost-benefit calculations. But when asked about issues on which they declined to make a trade, entirely different parts of the brain were activated — systems that are associated with telling right from wrong and with storing and retrieving rules. The result, Professor Berns observes, could be a new way to gauge sacred values “that is not solely dependent on self-report.”

Are we going to start running international negotiators through an M.R.I. machine to see where they’re processing the issues? [and determine whether or not someone is faking it when they claim sacred values] Highly unlikely. But results like Professor Berns’s might at least disprove the idea, still held by many, that every belief has its price. Given the intensely negative emotions that financial incentives can trigger, this might be a good lesson to learn.

Here is the abstract from the Berns et al work "The price of your soul: neural evidence for the non-utilitarian representation of sacred values" to which the above is referring. It gives a bit more detail on the brain correlates of sacred values:

Sacred values, such as those associated with religious or ethnic identity, underlie many important individual and group decisions in life, and individuals typically resist attempts to trade off their sacred values in exchange for material benefits. Deontological theory suggests that sacred values are processed based on rights and wrongs irrespective of outcomes, while utilitarian theory suggests that they are processed based on costs and benefits of potential outcomes, but which mode of processing an individual naturally uses is unknown. The study of decisions over sacred values is difficult because outcomes cannot typically be realized in a laboratory, and hence little is known about the neural representation and processing of sacred values. We used an experimental paradigm that used integrity as a proxy for sacredness and which paid real money to induce individuals to sell their personal values. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found that values that people refused to sell (sacred values) were associated with increased activity in the left temporoparietal junction and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, regions previously associated with semantic rule retrieval. This suggests that sacred values affect behaviour through the retrieval and processing of deontic rules and not through a utilitarian evaluation of costs and benefits.

War of science and the humanities redux: Ross Douthat on The Scientism of Steven Pinker

I enjoyed a very well written article by Steven Pinker in the New Republic titled "Science is not your enemy", which argued that an increasing melding of science and the humanities should not be seen at a threat to, but rather as an expansion of, humanistic studies - enhanced by science's quest for intelligibility of the world and a quest for objectivity about its workings. Ross Douthat writes a critique that nails more clearly than I would have the insidious naturalistic fallacy that still lurks in Pinker's prose, the conflating of "is" with "ought to be". He notes that Pinker offers a

...defensible-if-tendentious account of how the progress of science has undercut the world-pictures bequeathed to us by tradition, intuition and religion. Now an innocent reader might assume that the crack-up of these world pictures, with their tight link between cosmic design and human purposes, might make moral consensus more difficult to realistically achieve. After all, if our universe’s testable laws and empirical realities have no experimentally-verifiable connection to human ends and values, then one would expect rival ideas of the good to have difficulty engaging with one another fruitfully, escaping from the pull of relativism or nihilism, and/or grounding their appeals in anything stronger than aesthetic preference.

But then cites the following passage from Pinker to point out that isn't where Pinker is going:

In other words, the worldview that guides the moral and spiritual values of an educated person today is the worldview given to us by science. Though the scientific facts do not by themselves dictate values, they certainly hem in the possibilities. By stripping ecclesiastical authority of its credibility on factual matters, they cast doubt on its claims to certitude in matters of morality. … The facts of science, by exposing the absence of purpose in the laws governing the universe, force us to take responsibility for the welfare of ourselves, our species, and our planet. For the same reason, they undercut any moral or political system based on mystical forces, quests, destinies, dialectics, struggles, or messianic ages. And in combination with a few unexceptionable convictions— that all of us value our own welfare and that we are social beings who impinge on each other and can negotiate codes of conduct—the scientific facts militate toward a defensible morality, namely adhering to principles that maximize the flourishing of humans and other sentient beings. This humanism, which is inextricable from a scientific understanding of the world, is becoming the de facto morality of modern democracies, international organizations, and liberalizing religions, and its unfulfilled promises define the moral imperatives we face today.

Douthat:

This is an impressively swift march from allowing, grudgingly, that scientific discoveries do not “dictate” values to asserting that they “militate” very strongly in favor of … why, of Steven Pinker’s very own moral worldview! You see, because we do not try witches, we must be utilitarians! Because we know the universe has no purpose, we must imbue it with the purposes of a (non-species-ist) liberal cosmopolitanism! Because of science, we know that modern civilization has no dialectic or destiny … so we must pursue its “unfulfilled promises” and accept its “moral imperatives” instead!

Douthat suggest Pinker is promulgating the Whig interpretation of history (from Wikipedia: Whig history ... is the approach to historiography which presents the past as an inevitable progression towards ever greater liberty and enlightenment, culminating in modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy. In general, Whig historians emphasize the rise of constitutional government, personal freedoms and scientific progress. The term is often applied generally (and pejoratively) to histories that present the past as the inexorable march of progress toward enlightenment.)

Like Sam Harris, who wrote an entire book claiming that “science” somehow vindicates his preferred form of philosophical utilitarianism (when what he really meant was that if you assume utilitarian goals, science can help you pursue them), Pinker seems to have trouble imagining any reasoning person disagreeing about either the moral necessity of “maximizing human flourishing” or the content of what “flourishing” actually means — even though recent history furnishes plenty of examples and a decent imagination can furnish many more. Like his whiggish antecedents, he mistakes a real-but-complicated historical relationship between science and humanism for a necessary intellectual line in which the latter vindicates the former, or at least militates strongly in its favor. 

That's the nub of it. What authority does science have to define what "maximizing human flourishing" means?

The gospel according to me...

I want to pass on a few clips from the stimulating essay by Critchley and Webster in "The Stone" forum of the New York Times:

…many citizens in rich Western democracies have merely switched one notion of God for another — abandoning their singular, omnipotent (Christian or Judaic or whatever) deity reigning over all humankind and replacing it with a weak but all-pervasive idea of spirituality tied to a personal ethic of authenticity and a liturgy of inwardness. The latter does not make the exorbitant moral demands of traditional religions, which impose bad conscience, guilt, sin, sexual inhibition and the rest.

In the gospel of authenticity, well-being has become the primary goal of human life….The stroke of genius in the ideology of authenticity is that it doesn’t really require a belief in anything, and certainly not a belief in anything that might transcend the serene and contented living of one’s authentic life and baseline well-being. In this, one can claim to be beyond dogma.

This is the phenomenon that one might call, with an appreciative nod to Nietzsche, passive nihilism….In a seemingly meaningless, inauthentic world awash in nonstop media reports of war, violence and inequality, we close our eyes and turn ourselves into islands. We may even say a little prayer to an obscure but benign Eastern goddess and feel some weak spiritual energy connecting everything as we listen to some tastefully selected ambient music. Authenticity, needing no reference to anything outside itself, is an evacuation of history. The power of now.

Work is no longer a series of obligations to be fulfilled for the sake of sustenance: it is the expression of one’s authentic self…But here’s the rub: if one believes that there is an intimate connection between one’s authentic self and glittering success at work, then the experience of failure and forced unemployment is accepted as one’s own fault…A naïve belief in authenticity eventually gives way to a deep cynicism. A conviction in personal success that must always hold failure at bay becomes a corrupt stubbornness that insists on success at any cost. Cynicism, in this mode, is not the expression of a critical stance toward authenticity but is rather the runoff of this failure of belief.

Nothing seems more American than this forced choice between cynicism and naïve belief. Or rather, as Herman Melville put it in his 1857 novel “The Confidence Man,” it seems the choice is between being a fool (having to believe what one says) or being a knave (saying things one does not believe). For Melville, who was writing on the cusp of modern capitalism, the search for authenticity is a white whale.

A spiritual home for atheists.

For many of us secular humanists, agnostics, or atheists, life after our alienation from conventional religious congregations that offer prayers to an anthropomorphic god (or gods) ends up feeling a bit rye-crispy. We lose also the sense of belonging and community that was part of the experience of being in a church congregation. Thus I was struck by this article about a former Pentecostal minister who has started in Baton Rouge, LA., to offer atheist services with impassioned sermons, singing and light swaying, exhortations to service, etc., everything but God! Jerry DeWitt, who was raised as a pentecostal and served 25 years as a minister, now offers an emotional counterpoint to more academic atheist exponents like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. While other non-deistic spiritual congregations now exist, especially in many larger urban areas ( usually with some mix or mysticism, new age rituals, or religious-scientific components) I doubt that many of them get quite as close to reproducing the gut-wrenching intensity of DeWitt’s pentecostal service minus God!

Would Tarzan believe in God?

Some clips from Konika Banerjee and Paul Bloom:

Would someone raised without exposure to religious views nonetheless come to believe in the existence of God, an afterlife, and the intentional creation of humans and other animals? Many scholars would answer yes, proposing that universal cognitive biases generate religious ideas anew within each individual mind. Drawing on evidence from developmental psychology, we argue here that the answer is no: children lack spontaneous theistic views and the emergence of religion is crucially dependent on culture.

...if universal, early-emerging cognitive biases generate religious ideas, we would expect to see these ideas emerge spontaneously. This would be akin to the process of creolization, such as when deaf children who are exposed to non-linguistic communication systems create their own sign language. However, such cases are, as best we know, non-existent. There are many examples where children are quick to endorse religious beliefs, often surprising their atheist parents. But this is consistent with receptivity, not generativity, as these beliefs correspond to those endorsed within the social environment in which children are raised.

Findings from developmental psychology support the following theory of the emergence of religious belief: humans possess a suite of sophisticated cognitive adaptations for social life, which make accessible certain concepts that are associated with religion, including design, purpose, agency, and body–soul dualism. However, more is needed to generate fully-fledged, sustained, and conscious religious beliefs, including a belief in gods, in divine creation of natural entities, and in life after death. Such beliefs require cultural support.

How to dress to say it is wrong to be gay!

I had to pass this on.....

FABULOUS! The Pope Emeritus, wearing a fabulous vintage chiffon-lined Dior gold lame gown
over a silk Vera Wang empire waist tulle cocktail dress,
accessorized with a three-foot House of Whoville hat
and the ruby slippers Judy Garland wore in the Wizard of Oz,
on his way to tell us it's wrong to be gay.

Stay plain and simple, Francis! Stay plain and simple!

Psychological benefits of religiosity ride on cultural values.

Gebauer et al. at Humboldt-University in Berlin analyze profile data on the eDarling online-dating site from 187,957 individuals in 11 European countries. Their bottom line summary is:

The religiosity-as-social-value hypothesis posits that the psychological benefits of religiosity (benefits to social self-esteem and psychological adjustment) are culturally specific: They should be stronger in countries that tend to value religiosity more. Data from more than 180,000 individuals across 11 countries were consistent with this prediction.

Overall, believers claimed greater social self-esteem and psychological adjustment than nonbelievers did. However, culture qualified this effect. Believers enjoyed psychological benefits in countries that tended to value religiosity, but did not differ from nonbelievers in countries that did not tend to value religiosity. Replication of this pattern with non-self-report data would be desirable. Regardless, the results suggest that religiosity, albeit a potent force, confers benefits by riding on cultural values.

Cognitive dissonance reduction in conservative and liberal Christians

Ross et al. offer an interesting study showing how the answers of conservative and liberal Christians to the question "What would a contemporary Jesus do?" reduces the cognitive dissonance of their own opinions:

The present study explores the dramatic projection of one's own views onto those of Jesus among conservative and liberal American Christians. In a large-scale survey, the relevant views that each group attributed to a contemporary Jesus differed almost as much as their own views. Despite such dissonance-reducing projection, however, conservatives acknowledged the relevant discrepancy with regard to “fellowship” issues (e.g., taxation to reduce economic inequality and treatment of immigrants) and liberals acknowledged the relevant discrepancy with regard to “morality” issues (e.g., abortion and gay marriage). However, conservatives also claimed that a contemporary Jesus would be even more conservative than themselves on the former issues whereas liberals claimed that Jesus would be even more liberal than themselves on the latter issues. Further reducing potential dissonance, liberal and conservative Christians differed markedly in the types of issues they claimed to be more central to their faith. A concluding discussion considers the relationship between individual motivational processes and more social processes that may underlie the present findings, as well as implications for contemporary social and political conflict.

Good minus God - distrust of atheists

Gervais et al offer yet another study on us poor atheists. I follow their abstract with some comments on such studies:

Recent polls indicate that atheists are among the least liked people in areas with religious majorities (i.e., in most of the world). The sociofunctional approach to prejudice, combined with a cultural evolutionary theory of religion's effects on cooperation, suggest that anti-atheist prejudice is particularly motivated by distrust. Consistent with this theoretical framework, a first study using a broad sample of American adults revealed that distrust characterized anti-atheist prejudice but not anti-gay prejudice. In subsequent studies, distrust of atheists generalized even to participants from more liberal, secular populations. In three further studies description of a criminally untrustworthy individual was seen as comparably representative of atheists and rapists but not representative of Christians, Muslims, Jewish people, feminists, or homosexuals. In addition, results were consistent with the hypothesis that the relationship between belief in God and atheist distrust was fully mediated by the belief that people behave better if they feel that God is watching them. In implicit measures, participants strongly associated atheists with distrust, and belief in God was more strongly associated with implicit distrust of atheists than with implicit dislike of atheists. Finally, atheists were systematically socially excluded only in high-trust domains; belief in God, but not authoritarianism, predicted this discriminatory decision-making against atheists in high trust domains. These 6 studies are the first to systematically explore the social psychological underpinnings of anti-atheist prejudice, and converge to indicate the centrality of distrust in this phenomenon.

In the New York Times online Opinionator, Louise Anthony makes some interesting points about such studies. A few brief clips:

I gather that many people believe that atheism implies nihilism — that rejecting God means rejecting morality. A person who denies God, they reason, must be, if not actively evil, at least indifferent to considerations of right and wrong. After all, doesn’t the dictionary list “wicked” as a synonym for “godless?” And isn’t it true, as Dostoevsky said, that “if God is dead, everything is permitted”?

Well, actually — no, it’s not. (And for the record, Dostoevsky never said it was.) Atheism does not entail that anything goes.

We “moralistic atheists” do not see right and wrong as artifacts of a divine protection racket. Rather, we find moral value to be immanent in the natural world, arising from the vulnerabilities of sentient beings and from the capacities of rational beings to recognize and to respond to those vulnerabilities and capacities in others...many theists, like many atheists, believe that moral value is inherent in morally valuable things. Things don’t become morally valuable because God prefers them; God prefers them because they are morally valuable.

The Buddha's Biology

I had started to occasionally re-post an old post that really struck me during my scan of this blog since its beginning in 2006, and now repeat the following old post, having come upon it for a second time:

I want to mention a book by that I have found to be a useful summary and distillation of correspondences between classical Buddhist psychology and modern psychology and evolutionary biology. Don't let its self-helpy new-agey title put you off (Buddha's Nature: A Practical Guide to Discovering Your Place in the Cosmos). It's by a crazy guy named Wes Nisker, a stand up Buddhist comic and veteran of the sixties and seventies new age San Francisco scene whose other writings include "The Big Bang, The Buddha, and the Baby Boom" and "The Essential Crazy Wisdom". It is a largely accurate descriptions of how Buddhism's four foundations of mindfulness can be taken to correspond to the bottom-up construction of our nervous system and consciousness, and to stages in the evolution of our nervous systems.

Sensing or exploring the nature of our elemental physical existence, our body breathing and homeostasis, is a focus of the Buddha's First Foundation of Mindfulness. This first foundation corresponds to physical elements of the body and homeostasis (regulation of blood flow, body temperature, etc.) These functions center in primitive brain stem structures we share with reptiles and other vertebrates. This core regulates interactions with the physical world elemental to having a self that we seldom think about - like breathing, supporting ourselves against gravity, seeing, tasting, smelling, touching, hearing.

These core structures also regulate our urge to remedy hunger, to have sex, to approach or avoid, to flee or fight when suddenly presented with very threatening situations. Our experience of these primary and instinctual basic drives, in its urgency and automaticity, has a very different quality than our experience of thoughts or more complicated emotions. The Buddha's Second Foundation of Mindfulness rests on the sentience of the nervous system which can note these elemental feelings, impressions of pleasant/unpleasant/neutral/painful, etc. We can, in more quiet moments of reflection or meditation note the more muted `flickers' of these primal forces, appearing and disappearing almost as transient quantal energies.

Our human introspective access to, observation of, emotional feelings more nuanced than the basic drives mentioned above is the focus of the Buddha's third foundation of mindfulness (affection, fear, anger, sadness, playfulness, etc.). These are regulated by a new kind of cortex that appears in mammals between the brain stem and the outer layer of the cortex, usually referred to as the limbic system.

Finally, our higher level cognitive abilities associated with the newer cortex (neocortex) that forms the top layers or our brain - our ability to note how thoughts and feelings are produced, as natural occurrences like breathing or the heartbeat - are a focus of the Buddha's fourth foundation of mindfulness.

Nisker's book has several sections of exercises or meditations useful in sensing layers of the self, its evolutionary nature, and its symbiosis with the external social and physical world.

Dopamine, reward, and beliefs

I want to point to comments made by Charles (The Dopamine Project) on the How we form beliefs post below. The Sapolsky video is quite entertaining.

How we form beliefs

A.C. Grayling offers a review of Michael Shermer's latest book "The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths," which looks like a fascinating read. Shermer is a psychology professor, the founder of Skeptic magazine and resident sceptical columnist for Scientific American (I've done MindBlog posts on several of these columns). Grayling does such a concise job of summing up Shermer's main points that I pass on chunks of the review here (Sigh...like many of you, I suspect, I read many more reviews of books than actual books.)

Two long-standing observations about human cognitive behaviour provide Michael Shermer with the fundamentals of his account of how people form beliefs. One is the brain's readiness to perceive patterns even in random phenomena. The other is its readiness to nominate agency — intentional action — as the cause of natural events.

Both explain belief-formation in general, not just religious or supernaturalistic belief. Shermer, however, has a particular interest in the latter, and much of his absorbing and comprehensive book addresses the widespread human inclination to believe in gods, ghosts, aliens, conspiracies and the importance of coincidences.

The important point, Shermer says, is that we form our beliefs first and then look for evidence in support of them afterwards. He gives the names 'patternicity' and 'agenticity' to the brain's pattern-seeking and agency-attributing propensities, respectively. These underlie the diverse reasons why we form particular beliefs from subjective, personal and emotional promptings, in social and historical environments that influence their content.

As a 'belief engine', the brain is always seeking to find meaning in the information that pours into it. Once it has constructed a belief, it rationalizes it with explanations, almost always after the event. The brain thus becomes invested in the beliefs, and reinforces them by looking for supporting evidence while blinding itself to anything contrary. Shermer describes this process as “belief-dependent realism” — what we believe determines our reality, not the other way around.

He offers an evolution-based analysis of why people are prone to forming supernatural beliefs based on patternicity and agenticity. Our ancestors did well to wonder whether rustling in the grass indicated a predator, even if it was just the breeze. Spotting a significant pattern in the data may have meant an intentional agent was about to pounce.

Problems arise when thinking like this is unconstrained, he says. Passionate investment in beliefs can lead to intolerance and conflict, as history tragically attests. Shermer gives chilling examples of how dangerous belief can be when it is maintained against all evidence; this is especially true in pseudo-science, exemplified by the death of a ten-year-old girl who suffocated during the cruel 'attachment therapy' once briefly popular in the United States in the late 1990s.

Shermer's account implies that we are far from being rational and deliberative thinkers, as the Enlightenment painted us. Patternicity leads us to see significance in mere 'noise' as well as in meaningful data; agenticity makes us ascribe purpose to the source of those meanings. How did we ever arrive at more objective and organized knowledge of the world? How do we tell the difference between noise and data?

His answer is science. “Despite the subjectivity of our psychologies, relatively objective knowledge is available,” Shermer writes. This is right, although common sense and experience surely did much to make our ancestors conform to the objective facts long before experimental science came into being; they would not have survived otherwise.

Powerful support for Shermer's analysis emerges from accounts he gives of highly respected scientists who hold religious beliefs, such as US geneticist Francis Collins. Although religious scientists are few, they are an interesting phenomenon, exhibiting the impermeability of the internal barrier that allows simultaneous commitments to science and faith. This remark will be regarded as outrageous by believing scientists, who think that they are as rational in their temples as in their laboratories, but scarcely any of them would accept the challenge to mount a controlled experiment to test the major claims of their faith, such as asking the deity to regrow a severed limb for an accident victim.

Shermer deals with the idea that theistic belief is an evolved, hard-wired phenomenon, an idea that is fashionable at present. The existence of atheists is partial evidence against it. More so is that the god-believing religions are very young in historical terms; they seem to have developed after and perhaps because of agriculture and associated settled urban life, and are therefore less than 10,000 years old.

The animism that preceded these religions, and which survives today in some traditional societies such as those of New Guinea and the Kalahari Desert, is fully explained by Shermer's agenticity concept. It is not religion but proto-science — an attempt to explain natural phenomena by analogy with the one causative power our ancestors knew well: their own agency. Instead of developing into science, this doubtless degenerated into superstition in the hands of emerging priestly castes or for other reasons, but it does not suggest a 'god gene' of the kind supposed for history's young religions with their monarchical deities.

This stimulating book summarizes what is likely to prove the right view of how our brains secrete religious and superstitious belief. Knowledge is power: the corrective of the scientific method, one hopes, can rescue us from ourselves in this respect.

We are lost in thought.

Some clips from Sam Harris' contribution to this year's Edge Question "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?"

While most of us go through life feeling that we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a distorted view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of cortex or pathway of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging "center of narrative gravity" (to use Daniel Dennett's phrase). In subjective terms, however, there seems to be one — to most of us, most of the time.

Our contemplative traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc.) also suggest, to varying degrees and with greater or lesser precision, that we live in the grip of a cognitive illusion. But the alternative to our captivity is almost always viewed through the lens of religious dogma. A Christian will recite the Lord's Prayer continuously over a weekend, experience a profound sense of clarity and peace, and judge this mental state to be fully corroborative of the doctrine of Christianity; A Hindu will spend an evening singing devotional songs to Krishna, feel suddenly free of his conventional sense of self, and conclude that his chosen deity has showered him with grace; a Sufi will spend hours whirling in circles, pierce the veil of thought for a time, and believe that he has established a direct connection to Allah.

The universality of these phenomena refutes the sectarian claims of any one religion. And, given that contemplatives generally present their experiences of self-transcendence as inseparable from their associated theology, mythology, and metaphysics, it is no surprise that scientists and nonbelievers tend to view their reports as the product of disordered minds, or as exaggerated accounts of far more common mental states — like scientific awe, aesthetic enjoyment, artistic inspiration, etc.

Our religions are clearly false, even if certain classically religious experiences are worth having. If we want to actually understand the mind, and overcome some of the most dangerous and enduring sources of conflict in our world, we must begin thinking about the full spectrum of human experience in the context of science.

But we must first realize that we are lost in thought.