(the economics of spirituality)
I think where I stand today, is that I have almost fully converted to where i see the computational needs of the brain and the need to acquire certain resources (of all kinds), as causing emotional responses and wants. So when I study world religions it’s this computational savings I look for, and I try to understand what computational discount they’re ‘buying’ with it and what their ‘paying for it’ with external consequences of a large number of people doing so.
So I don’t any longer hold (believe) that we are trying to serve emotions, but that emotions inform us as to the demands of our computational necessities.
And so this allows me to extract my intuitions from the process of religions, because those religions were developed to ‘fool’ those intuitions by cheap means of training.
So just as using propertarian language has helped me disassemble social science, and acquisitionism has helped me disassemble psychology, computational demands have helped me disassemble what we call spirituality. The ceremony of religion is just satisfying our need for computational discounts by running with the pack for a while, in some kind of ritual. The dogma of religion is discounting our reason. The homogeneity of religious provides discounting on cooperation.
To some degree these computational efficiencies serve the same purpose as do money and prices: they create discounts from the production of commensurability, and incentive to pursue it.