Theme: Civilization

VERY CLOSE TO THE FINAL WORD ON THE LIMITS OF RELIGION AND THE COMPETITION BETWEEN FEELS AND REALZ.

The word “anthropomorphization” is an enlightenment term from the 1700’s that refers to the human psychological tendency to attribute human properties to non-human characters for the purpose of substituting human intent when causality is beyond the grasp of the speaker – or as a literary device to communicate general psychological intuitions through non-human characters through conflation with animal behaviors or extraordinary circumstances.

This term was chosen to refer to the general tendency of humans to produce fantasy stories for use as wisdom literature in the absence of a literature of causation (science) throughout history. This fantasy wisdom literature is easily explainable as the product of evolutionary chance, human reason’s need for causal explanation (‘fear of vacuum’), and human imagination’s ability to perform substitution (permutation).

Moreover, appealing to intuition requires little or no burden-of-reason, and the repeating narrative is the lowest cost means of training intuition available to human beings, and is available from childhood onward. Even better, narratives that train inexpensive and powerful intuition which can then serve as a substitute for expensive and error-prone reason that survive generations of application cause behaviors whose consequences are correspondent to complex reality despite the fact that it’s causes are non-correspodent to reality, thereby reducing the error of the individual and the group regardless of their individual abilities to reason. Unfortunately the cost of adaptation of such narrative knowledge, reinforced by networks of related and interdependent narratives, is extremely high in relation to the rate of change. So intuitionistic programming by such narratives declines in value with the rate of change in knowledge and circumstance. And many peoples have been degraded, defeated, or exterminated because they were unable to adapt to changes due to confrontation with Guns, Germs, Steel, accounting, literacy, contract, law, banking, mathematics, logic, history, and Science.

The operationally descriptive term anthropomorphization accurately describes the deflation of the technique by which we produce imaginary experiences, the sedative and euphoric chemical rewards of those imaginary experiences that invoke our submission to the pack response, the frequency with which those chemical rewards are available due to the low cost of chemical rewards for imaginary experiences, the sedative and euphoric effect of those chemical rewards, and the value in social phenomenon of associating sedative and euphoric effects with otherwise stressful persistent problems of minds capable of reason in complex problems our reason cannot solve and therefore bring to rest.

Furthermore, we are all conscious of our status, whether reproductive value, social value, economic(productie) value, and political value. To the point where the combination of neuroticism (worry), status value, and agency(ability to act to change state), in concert with our ability to temporarily fool (sedate, stimulate) ourselves through imaginary self-narration, can drive us to destructive behaviors as we desperately seek to preserve the sedative and euphoric values of these (false) narratives in the face of evidence to the contrary.

The experiences provided by fantasy fiction wisdom literature, its use in training intuition as a discount on cost of reason, it’s use in sedation and euphoria as stress reduction, and the discount provided by non-rational, intertemporally tested, methods of decidability, and the value of such decidability in coordinating social groups of widely distributed ages, and widely distributed intellectual abilities, with widely distributed personality traits, and widely distributed circumstances, was the reason for its widespread success in increasing the number of people coordinating their actions by the same criterial, even if the consequences were maladaptive to the point where these networks due to their stability and interconnection were highly resistant to new knowledge, and in many cases outright forbid new knowledge leading to poverty conquest and extermination.

One can experience the feelings of love, friendship, passion, touch color, smell, fear, and a host of combinations. One can experience drugs, theatre, mu And one an remember those experiences, and one can empathize with those experiences in others.

One can understand the causes of those experiences independent of their experiences, just as one can ‘feel’ the experiences independent of an understanding of the causes.

It is true that an understanding of causes limits the range of experiences. It is true that the value of experiences limits the conclusions we draw from the causes. But it is the competition between experience and causality, like the competition between imagination and reason, like the competition between literature and history, like the competition between reason and science, that prevents our development of addiction behavior and zealotry to defend it, and scientistic behavior and zealotry to defend it. And the method of decidability we can use for both limits is ‘truth’.

For this reason we can separate good ‘religions’ from evil ‘religions’. And that line of demarcation is simple: (a) imagination rather than action, (b) deflation (competition) vs monopoly: fictionalism (conflation) rather than competition between true and wise, and advise and command, and history and myth. We can ‘rank’ better religions and worse religions by the same means.

And so it is profoundly clarifying, to both know and Feel, such that we form a competition between knowing and feeling, if for no other reason than to prevent of harm. And specifically, to prevent the harm of the abrahamic deceits, which succeed by self induced drug addictions through the ritualistic production of endorphins.

So there is a vast difference between between a monopoly of reason which burdens the less able and empowers the able, and a monopoly of feelings which empower the less able, and burden the able – and the whole civilization.

The compromise position – the compatible position – between reason and feeling, is that of the use of action rituals, and public rituals, and public festivals, to provide the beneficial returns of mindfulness, the social returns of trust and calculability, and the political benefits of organizing a polity by the same strategy, traditions, norms, and laws.

This is very close the the final word on limits of religion.

(Now, you might or might notice that I restated your criticism on a point by point and nearly paragraph by paragraph basis. or you might not. But it will be very difficult to defeat this analysis. )