the science of belief

[rone]

I've been meaning to share this with you for months now, but i kept forgetting.  Something whipartist posted reminded me about it.

Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe.  Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for this phenomenon.  One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena.  And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry.

The companion interview to this article, "Wired for Creationism?", should also be read.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The logician and pop writer on philosophy Raymond Smullyan has some similar ideas--he once wrote that he didn't think belief in an afterlife was just wishful thinking, because there are some religions in which reincarnation is mostly bad and you are supposed to work to become sufficiently enlightened to eventually extinguish yourself entirely. A member of such a religion might dismiss disbelief in the afterlife as wishful thinking.

Instead, he thought that people believe in an afterlife because people can't viscerally not believe in it--it's very difficult, maybe impossible to fully conceive of not existing, because you keep trying to think of what it feels like.

He also, to my mind, somewhat over-romanticized Eastern religion, but I thought some of his ideas were interesting.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...He also, if I recall correctly, pointed out that the reason many people are horrified at the prospect of dying and just staying dead is that on some level, maybe without intellectually realizing it, they're imagining experiencing the process: experiencing being shut up alone in a dark box forever and ever. I think that's true--I recall having conversations in which people express horror at the idea that instead of going to heaven they'll just "lie in the ground and rot", and it's almost as if they're imagining being buried alive and rotting while conscious. The inability to fully conceive of nonexistence leads to this sort of horror-movie imagery in its place.

There are well-known ways of partially wrapping your brain around it, such as realizing that the state of being dead is exactly like the state of not existing yet, which you seemed to have no problem with for the billions of years before you were born; or that, as Hofstadter and Dennett once said, if you're not currently in Paris then you know what it's like to be dead in Paris right now. But they're a lot like the thought experiments we use to think about quantum mechanics or other intuitively alien things.

[nixzusehen.livejournal.com]

I read two books last month, the first was by Paul Bloom, who wrote the article. Called Descartes' Baby, he doesn't really focus on the God idea, though it is mentioned. Pretty interesting read. The other was Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, it focuses on the way percieve the future and how that effects our perceptions of happiness. Essentially what we do when we try to imagine how we'll feel about things, is think about we'd feel if that happened now, and assume that we'd do the same in the future. And how we're ususally not very good at predicting how we ultimately will feel.

Anyway, when I think of dying, I don't think of rotting in grave -- I try to imagine no longer having an existence. That freaks me out way more.

[schwa242.livejournal.com]

The idea of non-existance after death used to scare the hell out of me, until one day it clicked in my brain, "Oh hey, by definition, I'm not going to be there to experience not existing, so how could it be scary?" Of all the after-death possibilities, it's not only the most likely, but also one of the most preferable.

-- Schwa ---