Hi Russ,
Hawking my wares again. I am sorry but SOMEBODY has to read this crap. The argument of this paper is that the flow of inference is actually in the other direction. We model our view of ourselves on our experience with others.
Nick
Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Russell Standish
Sent: Saturday, May 23, 2020 9:39 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] God
The theory which makes some sense to me is that we humans (as social
creatures) have evolved to anthropomorphise. This make sense for dealing with other humans, who might be competitors, or compatriots. And the modelling makes use of a remarkable trick - observe one's own mind, and use those observations to model somebody else's mind. This explains why we have self-awareness, if not consciousness.
The thing is, the same trick also works quite well with other animals, who may be predators or prey, irrespective of whether other species actually have minds or not.
So it makes sense that when some relatively rare phenomenon occurs, perhaps a thunderstorm, that the alpha male stands up and makes threatening noises. And it seems to work when the thunder goes away
eventually. And so the thunderstorm has been anthropomorphised. This got extended to other phenomenon, eg famines get blamed on angry gods who can be appeased by making the appropriate offerings. Eventually con-artists exploited this with ever more elaborate stories that leveraged this innate tendency to anthromorphise. I'm sure astrology started out as a cunning plan to garner research funds for early astonomers from ignorant kings.
Like most evolutionary stories, this is a "just so" story. But I think it has a grain of truth.
Cheers, Russell
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Principal, High Performance Coders [hidden email]
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