Previously: Preamble Chapter 1 - CULTURE AS AN EVOLUTIONARY TOOL [audio available here, courtesy of AskWho] Culture And Biology Why do we even want to craft a religion? The Collinses begin by talking about Culture writ large. Culture is the means by which complex behaviors—behaviors that cannot be easily encoded into biological instinct—“evolve.”
I don't think one can craft religion as a kind of intellectual exercise, religions are built around a supra-rational core, statements and assertions that were not arrived at rationally, yet are powerful because they are above reason. Producing something like that is the game for someone seeking to start a religion.
I agree. The best definition of a religion that I've been able to come up with is that a religion is a worldview that is demonstrably false to an ideal reasoner, but is logically self-consistent by virtue of having a central core of false beliefs which (a) reinforce each other, (b) prioritize poor sources of information, such as ancient texts whose veracity can't be established, or modern texts written using dialectic rather than logic, and (c) delegitimize or suppress the facts and methods of reasoning that prove the religion is false.
So for instance Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Marxism, post-modernism, New Age, Wicca, and Wokeism are all religions by this definition. Notice that as logic, technology, and social technology developed and became powerful enough to disprove Christianity (e.g., jubilees and forbidding usury are now known to be bad), Christianity became increasingly anti-science, delegitimizing things like machines, economic theory, and statistics, in a way it hadn't before.
Honest belief in the false beliefs seems to be necessary, although many people in any religion are faking it, or uneasy about some parts of it. It's a self-organizing way for a group of people to coordinate on cooperation.
The general principle seems to be that group selection naturally selects for discrimination against people outside the group, and so memes readily evolve which turn a group of infected people against everyone lacking that meme. The real purpose of a religion is to discriminate against people outside the group and unite the people within the group, in a way that provides both an individual and a group competitive advantage. It is an alternative to racism.
I think this explanation is wrong. For a secular explanation of religion to be complete, one would have to be able to start their own religion. One doesn't understand a technology until one can build something with it after all. Absent that, it is just speculation.
There is also a misunderstanding here that every religion works like the Abrahamic faiths. It is true those tend to invoke miracles and the supernatural, but that is not true of every religion. Buddha, in particular, taught that his teachings were to be tested, not taken on faith, that it was possible to verify for oneself that what he taught was true. Countless meditators these days test them, and find a lot of substance in them. Everyone can become acquainted with the nature of mind.
Non-abrahamic faiths tend to take a perennial/pluralist position, so they don't as easily become tools to discriminate against an outgroup. Buddhism spread around very peacefully. In the case of Japan, even just blending with the native religion of Shinto. There was no us and them dynamic.
But really, even the Abrahamic faiths are difficult to disprove. Even to this day, the moral intuitions of seculars come from Christianity, they were not something present in the pagan world. After all, only sophistry can be deployed against the commandment that one should love one's neighbor as oneself.
Re. "There is also a misunderstanding here that every religion works like the Abrahamic faiths. It is true those tend to invoke miracles and the supernatural, but that is not true of every religion." -- I don't think you read what I wrote.
Sorry, I should have taken more time to write that out: You wrote that I imagine every religion works like Abrahamic faiths, and clarified that by saying that "those tend to invoke miracles and the supernatural, but that is not true of every religion." I deliberately didn't write anything about miracles or the supernatural in my definition, because I don't think that's constitutive of a religion; and 3 of the examples I gave as being religions under that definition teach that there is no supernatural. So your response is not to what I wrote.
I agree that some religions spread peacefully, but it does seem in every case that the religion provides a group with cohesion, and members of that group devote most of their altruistic actions to other members of the group. So for instance we could call Mormonism a peaceful religion (though that hasn't always been the case), but Mormons discriminate intensely WRT whom they help and whom they do business with.
Buddhism is an edge case, and difficult to talk about because cultural Buddhism is so different from Buddhist philosophy. Cultural Buddhism, like cultural Hinduism, is AFAIK just another form of paganism, which doesn't even require you to have any particular beliefs, just to make the offerings like everybody else. Buddhist philosophy is more-closely related to post-modernism than to other religions.
There are a lot of edge cases. Epicureanism seems to be a philosophy, but the actual Epicureans had bizarre religious beliefs, such as avoiding beans, which would seem to qualify it as a religion. And then again it's hard to know, because most reports on Epicureans were written as slander, not as objective reporting.
I don't think one can "understand religion", because the word "religion" means too many different things, and is (I think) used more as a term of approbation or opprobrium, or as a historical record of lexicographic accident, than it is to honestly categorize belief systems in a useful way.
Fair enough. I focused on the supernatural in Abrahamism since that's the part where one can say it's falsified, but yeah, you did mention things that typically wouldn't be considered religion there.
I still take issue with defining religion as something that is 'demonstrably false to an ideal reasoner'. I feel an ideal reasoner could demonstrate anything to be false.
I expect that the primary ways culture shapes evolution are through group selection, especially by selecting for cultures with high reproduction rate. Individual selection is in that case aligned with group selection.
(Wynne-Edwards argued the opposite, that group selection could select for restrained reproduction; but his reasoning was very bad. Although culture would enable group selection for restrained reproduction in the way W-E wanted it to; it can channel rational foresight into unified group peer pressure against selfish actions. That might be happening today. I have Catholic relatives with a very large family, and they were bullied all along by most of the non-Catholics around them, who indirectly told them they were bad, irresponsible people for having a large family. Western reproduction rates have fallen drastically. The question is whether that is a new kind of reproductive success, in which the West gains control over the world by reducing reproduction rate and thus becoming wealthy; or whether Western culture is just being selected against in the old-fashioned way.)
On podcasts they seem genuinely very concerned about poverty as a source of human misery. They seem only sometimes concerned about female subordination. I think that, as two autistic/ish extremely high decouplers, they are switching levels frequently in an unusual way that just comes off badly, for the same reasons that I look suspicious when playing The Resistance with normies, because I model the spies too well.
Every "moral system" is a mishmash of objective stuff and culturally relative stuff. When you are talking about cultures and designing one, you necessarily speak in more morally relativistic terms. This isnthe nature of the subject matter. It doesn't mwan that you are abandoning your own (intra-cultural, inside-view) morals, though. Or at least, it needn't and shouldn't mean that, though some liberals get so caught up in tolerance they forget? Gah. I need to turn this into a proper full-sized post, it's been kicking around in my head for a month and this isn't coming out straight.
AFAICT, the Collinses actual value hierarchy is something like Human Survival > Glorious Space Future > Something Like Liberal Tolerance. So they value poverty as something like an absolute, since it's required for the space future. Whereas equality for women is more of a nice-to-have instrumental value. They talk about this some in their episode on Andrew Tate episode that probably aired after you wrote this.
Or you could just ask them to clarify. They seem like they love engagement.
> AFAICT, the Collinses actual value hierarchy is something like Human Survival > Glorious Space Future > Something Like Liberal Tolerance. So they value poverty as something like an absolute, since it's required for the space future.
Wait, can you expound on this? Why is poverty required for the space future? I don't think I got that from them, and I did hear the Tate episode recently.
I don't think one can craft religion as a kind of intellectual exercise, religions are built around a supra-rational core, statements and assertions that were not arrived at rationally, yet are powerful because they are above reason. Producing something like that is the game for someone seeking to start a religion.
I agree. The best definition of a religion that I've been able to come up with is that a religion is a worldview that is demonstrably false to an ideal reasoner, but is logically self-consistent by virtue of having a central core of false beliefs which (a) reinforce each other, (b) prioritize poor sources of information, such as ancient texts whose veracity can't be established, or modern texts written using dialectic rather than logic, and (c) delegitimize or suppress the facts and methods of reasoning that prove the religion is false.
So for instance Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Marxism, post-modernism, New Age, Wicca, and Wokeism are all religions by this definition. Notice that as logic, technology, and social technology developed and became powerful enough to disprove Christianity (e.g., jubilees and forbidding usury are now known to be bad), Christianity became increasingly anti-science, delegitimizing things like machines, economic theory, and statistics, in a way it hadn't before.
Honest belief in the false beliefs seems to be necessary, although many people in any religion are faking it, or uneasy about some parts of it. It's a self-organizing way for a group of people to coordinate on cooperation.
The general principle seems to be that group selection naturally selects for discrimination against people outside the group, and so memes readily evolve which turn a group of infected people against everyone lacking that meme. The real purpose of a religion is to discriminate against people outside the group and unite the people within the group, in a way that provides both an individual and a group competitive advantage. It is an alternative to racism.
I think this explanation is wrong. For a secular explanation of religion to be complete, one would have to be able to start their own religion. One doesn't understand a technology until one can build something with it after all. Absent that, it is just speculation.
There is also a misunderstanding here that every religion works like the Abrahamic faiths. It is true those tend to invoke miracles and the supernatural, but that is not true of every religion. Buddha, in particular, taught that his teachings were to be tested, not taken on faith, that it was possible to verify for oneself that what he taught was true. Countless meditators these days test them, and find a lot of substance in them. Everyone can become acquainted with the nature of mind.
Non-abrahamic faiths tend to take a perennial/pluralist position, so they don't as easily become tools to discriminate against an outgroup. Buddhism spread around very peacefully. In the case of Japan, even just blending with the native religion of Shinto. There was no us and them dynamic.
But really, even the Abrahamic faiths are difficult to disprove. Even to this day, the moral intuitions of seculars come from Christianity, they were not something present in the pagan world. After all, only sophistry can be deployed against the commandment that one should love one's neighbor as oneself.
Re. "There is also a misunderstanding here that every religion works like the Abrahamic faiths. It is true those tend to invoke miracles and the supernatural, but that is not true of every religion." -- I don't think you read what I wrote.
Since we're being blunt and snippy: you don't understand religion.
Sorry, I should have taken more time to write that out: You wrote that I imagine every religion works like Abrahamic faiths, and clarified that by saying that "those tend to invoke miracles and the supernatural, but that is not true of every religion." I deliberately didn't write anything about miracles or the supernatural in my definition, because I don't think that's constitutive of a religion; and 3 of the examples I gave as being religions under that definition teach that there is no supernatural. So your response is not to what I wrote.
I agree that some religions spread peacefully, but it does seem in every case that the religion provides a group with cohesion, and members of that group devote most of their altruistic actions to other members of the group. So for instance we could call Mormonism a peaceful religion (though that hasn't always been the case), but Mormons discriminate intensely WRT whom they help and whom they do business with.
Buddhism is an edge case, and difficult to talk about because cultural Buddhism is so different from Buddhist philosophy. Cultural Buddhism, like cultural Hinduism, is AFAIK just another form of paganism, which doesn't even require you to have any particular beliefs, just to make the offerings like everybody else. Buddhist philosophy is more-closely related to post-modernism than to other religions.
There are a lot of edge cases. Epicureanism seems to be a philosophy, but the actual Epicureans had bizarre religious beliefs, such as avoiding beans, which would seem to qualify it as a religion. And then again it's hard to know, because most reports on Epicureans were written as slander, not as objective reporting.
I don't think one can "understand religion", because the word "religion" means too many different things, and is (I think) used more as a term of approbation or opprobrium, or as a historical record of lexicographic accident, than it is to honestly categorize belief systems in a useful way.
Fair enough. I focused on the supernatural in Abrahamism since that's the part where one can say it's falsified, but yeah, you did mention things that typically wouldn't be considered religion there.
I still take issue with defining religion as something that is 'demonstrably false to an ideal reasoner'. I feel an ideal reasoner could demonstrate anything to be false.
Interesting, but I have to say so far it isn't persuasive for me personally.
AI narration:
https://askwhocastsai.substack.com/p/pragmatists-guide-to-crafting-religion-41b
(also a late narration of the preamble:
https://askwhocastsai.substack.com/p/pragmatists-guide-to-crafting-religion )
I expect that the primary ways culture shapes evolution are through group selection, especially by selecting for cultures with high reproduction rate. Individual selection is in that case aligned with group selection.
(Wynne-Edwards argued the opposite, that group selection could select for restrained reproduction; but his reasoning was very bad. Although culture would enable group selection for restrained reproduction in the way W-E wanted it to; it can channel rational foresight into unified group peer pressure against selfish actions. That might be happening today. I have Catholic relatives with a very large family, and they were bullied all along by most of the non-Catholics around them, who indirectly told them they were bad, irresponsible people for having a large family. Western reproduction rates have fallen drastically. The question is whether that is a new kind of reproductive success, in which the West gains control over the world by reducing reproduction rate and thus becoming wealthy; or whether Western culture is just being selected against in the old-fashioned way.)
Re:second-order pragmatism and lying:
On podcasts they seem genuinely very concerned about poverty as a source of human misery. They seem only sometimes concerned about female subordination. I think that, as two autistic/ish extremely high decouplers, they are switching levels frequently in an unusual way that just comes off badly, for the same reasons that I look suspicious when playing The Resistance with normies, because I model the spies too well.
Every "moral system" is a mishmash of objective stuff and culturally relative stuff. When you are talking about cultures and designing one, you necessarily speak in more morally relativistic terms. This isnthe nature of the subject matter. It doesn't mwan that you are abandoning your own (intra-cultural, inside-view) morals, though. Or at least, it needn't and shouldn't mean that, though some liberals get so caught up in tolerance they forget? Gah. I need to turn this into a proper full-sized post, it's been kicking around in my head for a month and this isn't coming out straight.
AFAICT, the Collinses actual value hierarchy is something like Human Survival > Glorious Space Future > Something Like Liberal Tolerance. So they value poverty as something like an absolute, since it's required for the space future. Whereas equality for women is more of a nice-to-have instrumental value. They talk about this some in their episode on Andrew Tate episode that probably aired after you wrote this.
Or you could just ask them to clarify. They seem like they love engagement.
> AFAICT, the Collinses actual value hierarchy is something like Human Survival > Glorious Space Future > Something Like Liberal Tolerance. So they value poverty as something like an absolute, since it's required for the space future.
Wait, can you expound on this? Why is poverty required for the space future? I don't think I got that from them, and I did hear the Tate episode recently.
Ah, I meant they "value" poverty as bad in an absolute way. Or rather, Space Future requires non-poverty.
I'll try to write this up like I was saying in this coming week and link you to it
Sorry, that wording was really terrible on my part