Where God comes from
Apr. 27th, 2006 11:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexxkayA recent post on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cvirtue's journal, as well as a cnversation with kestrell last night, got me thinking again about one of the Important Things I Know. At least, I think it's Important, and I think very few other people know about it. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it here before or not, but it's worth bringing up occasionally anyways, in order to let other people know about it.
I think I know where God comes from. Lots of people have explanations for the social/evolutionary reasons why organized religions prosper once founded, but few have tried to explain where they come from in the first place. Most religions are ultimately sourced in one or more people having what we call a "religious experience". This phenomenon is not well understood. Why do some people seem to have direct experience of something so utterly unlike everyday existence? Why are those experiences so similar in broad strokes, and yet so different in the specific details? And why do so many of those who experience them go on to *found* religions? I think I know.
I'm going to start with what may seem like an irrelevant bit of Computer Science history: The Halting Problem. One of the problems that computer programs have always been prone to is the "infinite loop", a program which runs out of control and never stops to produce a result. Early computer researchers thought that they might be able to avoid this situation by making a "supervisor" program that watched other programs while they ran, which could detect the presence of any infinite loops, and would terminate them before they got out of control. Unfortunately, it turned out that the creation of a perfect "supervisor" program like that is logically *impossible*. It is impossible to tell, ahead of time, whether any arbitrary computer program will halt. This is taught to all novice CS students, and is called The Halting Problem.
When I first heard about the Halting Problem, as a student, I had a typically rebellious attitude towards it. "OK, so you can't make a *perfect* supervisor program. But you should be able to make one that is arbitrarily *close* to perfect. You could make one that is good enough for 99.9% of cases that actually happened."
Later on, I came to believe the Strong AI Hypothesis. This is the idea that the human mind is "computable". That is, there's nothing that goes on inside your head that couldn't (in principle at least) be duplicated by a sufficently powerful and well-programmed computer program.
If the mind *is* like a program, then the mind must be subject to the same sorts of problems that programs face. Such as, for example, infinite loops. Obviously, falling into an infinite loop would effectively end the life of that mind. This suggests that there would be *huge* evolutionary pressure to come up with a solution, like the afore-mentioned "supervisor" program. As previously discussed, no *perfect* solution is possible. But evolution doesn't *need* perfection. It just needs "good enough to improve my reproductive fitness". And that much is certainly achievable.
Backing away from the CS perspective, let's examine things from a human perspective for a bit. What would an infinite loop *feel* like, subjectively? Well, it would be a series of repetitious thoughts, circling back upon themselves. I think it would feel a lot like what many people refer to as "existential angst". Many of you may have experienced this. You start by asking "Why am I here?" If you come up with an answer X, you then typically ask "OK, so why X?" Eventually, most people get into a loop like "X must cause Y, but Y must cause X, but X must cause Y, but but but..."
Many people have that sort of experience at times in their lives. Most of them manage to stop thinking those thoughts in some fairly straightforward way. A relatively simple internal "supervisor" function suffices to get them refocused on the daily business of living. But there are a *few* people who (for whatever reason) refuse to give up asking questions until they get an answer. The first-level "supervisor" can't derail them, and they keep looping. So there's pressure to evolve a more complex, higher-level "supervisor".
Let's follow a typical example of such a person. He keeps getting distracted by everyday life, but he doesn't want to be distracted, he wants to follow the chain of reasoning to its (unfortunately nonexistent) end. He decides to head out into a (literal or figurative) desert, away from other people, where he can think uninterrupted. Once he's alone, he thinks, and he thinks, and he thinks, for several days. Eventually, he has a vision! A supernatural authority figure appears before him. This vision fills him with happiness and satisfaction. It reveals the secrets of the universe to him. Later, after the vision has faded, he may not be able to coherently explain these revelations to others, though he usually tries. BUT (and this is the critical point) he remains FIRMLY convinced that these revelations are true, and that there is no longer any need to ask further bothersome questions (that have a tendency to infinite loops).
The supernatural authority figure is the subjective experience of what I believe to be a high-level meta-program designed to abort infinite loops. "God" is just one aspect of the arbitrarily-good "supervisor" program that I described above. And it *is* very effective. The subject is not only booted out of his current loop, but put in a state where he is much less likely to ever enter a new one. Moreover, he often has *greatly* increased reproductive fitness after the experience. Many such people gain huge respect from their communities, in their new role as "prophet", or "enlightened one", or whatever. Many of them found entire new religions, because they are so convinced that they have a perfect understanding of everything.
Curiously, believing this does not prevent me from having spiritual beliefs. Alan Moore said it well: "Now, the rationalist view of all magical encounters is probably that all apparent entities are in fact externalised projections of parts of the self. I have no big argument with that, except that I'd hold the converse to be true as well: we are at the same time externalised projections of them."
cvirtue's journal, as well as a cnversation with kestrell last night, got me thinking again about one of the Important Things I Know. At least, I think it's Important, and I think very few other people know about it. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it here before or not, but it's worth bringing up occasionally anyways, in order to let other people know about it.I think I know where God comes from. Lots of people have explanations for the social/evolutionary reasons why organized religions prosper once founded, but few have tried to explain where they come from in the first place. Most religions are ultimately sourced in one or more people having what we call a "religious experience". This phenomenon is not well understood. Why do some people seem to have direct experience of something so utterly unlike everyday existence? Why are those experiences so similar in broad strokes, and yet so different in the specific details? And why do so many of those who experience them go on to *found* religions? I think I know.
I'm going to start with what may seem like an irrelevant bit of Computer Science history: The Halting Problem. One of the problems that computer programs have always been prone to is the "infinite loop", a program which runs out of control and never stops to produce a result. Early computer researchers thought that they might be able to avoid this situation by making a "supervisor" program that watched other programs while they ran, which could detect the presence of any infinite loops, and would terminate them before they got out of control. Unfortunately, it turned out that the creation of a perfect "supervisor" program like that is logically *impossible*. It is impossible to tell, ahead of time, whether any arbitrary computer program will halt. This is taught to all novice CS students, and is called The Halting Problem.
When I first heard about the Halting Problem, as a student, I had a typically rebellious attitude towards it. "OK, so you can't make a *perfect* supervisor program. But you should be able to make one that is arbitrarily *close* to perfect. You could make one that is good enough for 99.9% of cases that actually happened."
Later on, I came to believe the Strong AI Hypothesis. This is the idea that the human mind is "computable". That is, there's nothing that goes on inside your head that couldn't (in principle at least) be duplicated by a sufficently powerful and well-programmed computer program.
If the mind *is* like a program, then the mind must be subject to the same sorts of problems that programs face. Such as, for example, infinite loops. Obviously, falling into an infinite loop would effectively end the life of that mind. This suggests that there would be *huge* evolutionary pressure to come up with a solution, like the afore-mentioned "supervisor" program. As previously discussed, no *perfect* solution is possible. But evolution doesn't *need* perfection. It just needs "good enough to improve my reproductive fitness". And that much is certainly achievable.
Backing away from the CS perspective, let's examine things from a human perspective for a bit. What would an infinite loop *feel* like, subjectively? Well, it would be a series of repetitious thoughts, circling back upon themselves. I think it would feel a lot like what many people refer to as "existential angst". Many of you may have experienced this. You start by asking "Why am I here?" If you come up with an answer X, you then typically ask "OK, so why X?" Eventually, most people get into a loop like "X must cause Y, but Y must cause X, but X must cause Y, but but but..."
Many people have that sort of experience at times in their lives. Most of them manage to stop thinking those thoughts in some fairly straightforward way. A relatively simple internal "supervisor" function suffices to get them refocused on the daily business of living. But there are a *few* people who (for whatever reason) refuse to give up asking questions until they get an answer. The first-level "supervisor" can't derail them, and they keep looping. So there's pressure to evolve a more complex, higher-level "supervisor".
Let's follow a typical example of such a person. He keeps getting distracted by everyday life, but he doesn't want to be distracted, he wants to follow the chain of reasoning to its (unfortunately nonexistent) end. He decides to head out into a (literal or figurative) desert, away from other people, where he can think uninterrupted. Once he's alone, he thinks, and he thinks, and he thinks, for several days. Eventually, he has a vision! A supernatural authority figure appears before him. This vision fills him with happiness and satisfaction. It reveals the secrets of the universe to him. Later, after the vision has faded, he may not be able to coherently explain these revelations to others, though he usually tries. BUT (and this is the critical point) he remains FIRMLY convinced that these revelations are true, and that there is no longer any need to ask further bothersome questions (that have a tendency to infinite loops).
The supernatural authority figure is the subjective experience of what I believe to be a high-level meta-program designed to abort infinite loops. "God" is just one aspect of the arbitrarily-good "supervisor" program that I described above. And it *is* very effective. The subject is not only booted out of his current loop, but put in a state where he is much less likely to ever enter a new one. Moreover, he often has *greatly* increased reproductive fitness after the experience. Many such people gain huge respect from their communities, in their new role as "prophet", or "enlightened one", or whatever. Many of them found entire new religions, because they are so convinced that they have a perfect understanding of everything.
Curiously, believing this does not prevent me from having spiritual beliefs. Alan Moore said it well: "Now, the rationalist view of all magical encounters is probably that all apparent entities are in fact externalised projections of parts of the self. I have no big argument with that, except that I'd hold the converse to be true as well: we are at the same time externalised projections of them."
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-27 03:42 pm (UTC)I don't get EA anymore- I have figured out what I think I'm suppsoed to do (make my corner of the world a better place) and the doing of it is up to me. I believe that God provides tools. I also believe that people have to get off their asses and have the initiative to use them. ("I sent you a guy in a boat! Why are you here?")
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-27 06:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-27 08:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-01 12:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-01 12:25 am (UTC)I think the tougher objection to deal with is that your goals aren't the same as your genes, and so something viable for them can still suck for you. I hope you are not in that unenviable position.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-01 12:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-27 03:52 pm (UTC)From a social perspective, it also frees up people to live and improve themselves, rather than being stuck thinking; hence, it's a useful fiction from the perspective of Folks What Need Stuff Done, usually the ruling overclass. Hence, opiate, masses, all that. The idleness of the upper class is what allows getting stuck back in these loops; hence, ennui and modern (post-Renaissance, mostly) angst. This is a literal interpretation of "idle (hand|mind)s are the devil's playground" -- those idle minds discover the reasoning you posit above, an anti-God argument: clearly work of the devil.
I find the Moore quote amusing, especially in light of, say, Promethea and her co-existence with her creators...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-27 06:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-27 08:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-03 09:46 pm (UTC)First, this statement:
If the mind *is* like a program, then the mind must be subject to the same sorts of problems that programs face. Such as, for example, infinite loops.
just plain doesn't follow. Not all programs hit infinite loops, nor even all architectures. If the brain was a straightforward Von Neumann machine I might buy the idea, but it's pretty clear by now that it follows a very different connectionist architecture, and there's no particular evidence that these sorts of machines are terribly prone to infinite loops.
Second, it presumes the circumstances of a religious experience, and that presumption matches neither much of the anecdotal evidence I've heard, nor indeed personal experience. You see, I've *had* a religious experience. The circumstances weren't appropriate for a public thread, and suffice it to say that it kind of washed off after a while, but it was quite intense at the time. And it had *nothing* to do with this sort of infinite-loop scenario that you postulate. It had a *great* deal to do with personal anxiety and ego issues, but those simply weren't in the looped mode. (A mode which, I should note, I'm quite prone to and familiar with.)
Similarly, it isn't clear to me that religious experiences tend to come from this sort of deep focused contemplation. Most that I can think of are more of the "Constantine on the road" sort -- perhaps related to some deep-seated questions, but nothing terribly intentional.
Your points about religious fervor and evolutionary fitness are plausible, and I could believe they have a statistical benefit. But that's unrelated to the infinite-loop thing -- that simply says that evolution selects for a modest fraction of the population to be particularly susceptible to religious experience.
It *is* reasonable to say that God is often the endpoint of metaphysical contemplation, but that doesn't require bolt-from-the-blue style religious experience. It's easy to wind up there as the hand-waving solution to the Turtles problem, more from intellectual laziness than anything else. And, frankly, humans are pattern-matching creatures. The things we make can all be attributed to purposeful intent, so of *course* we tend to assume the same for the things we didn't create. And once the idea is set up, it meshes sufficiently well that it becomes a proper self-perpetuating meme...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-04 12:01 am (UTC)Anything that kills the affected individual 100% of the time doesn't need to be anything that the population (as a whole) is "terribly prone to" to be strongly selected against.
Second, it presumes the circumstances of a religious experience, and that presumption matches neither much of the anecdotal evidence I've heard, nor indeed personal experience.
There, you are more convincing. I have also had a religious experience, and it wasn't (at least on a conscious level) anything "loop" related. And there are plenty of anecdotes that also lack obvious looping.
On the other hand, there's a fair amount of loop-like behavior to be observed in those cultures who deliberately set out to *manufacture* religious experiences (Christian hermits, Buddhist monks, Native Americans who do "vision quests", etc.).
I need to go pick up Kes, but before I go, a few more points (that I admit may not be terribly convincing):
* The Supervisor that I posit may be triggered by other conditions (either entirely by accident, or by evolutionary overloading of brain functions).
* Loops (or thing which are perilously close to loops, and thus trigger the Supervisor's attention) may happen at pre-conscious levels. Such loops may, indeed, be what we mean when we use words like "anxiety".