Human Cognitive Architecture and Religion

Question 1

Modularity Reprised

Answer 1

• Some authors now propose that in fact there are many systems that aggregate together to perform cognitive activities
• Fodor (1983) was one of the early proponents to assert that the human mind consists of a number of “modules”
• These modules are NOT under conscious control. How they operate together is one of the critical questions within this theory.
• Modules are:
  
  • Domain specific
  • Innately specified
  • Informationally encapsulated
  • Fast and mandatory
  • Neurally specific? Hardwired and cognitively impenetrable
  • Autonomous
• Stanovich (2004, p44) notes there have been a large number of modules proposed over the last 20 years. Including:
  
  • Face recognition
  • Folk physics
  • ToM
  • Kin-orientation
  • Social exchange
• The information exchange between modules leaves open the possibility that output from one may become input of another thus leading to confabulation and distortion of reality as the systems are not externally calibrated.

Question 2

Boyer’s Model

Answer 2

• Boyer starts but asserting that human evolution has involved the generation of pan specific cognitive capacities. These include:
  
  • Intuitive physics
  • ToM
  • Parental investment
  • Mate Choice
  • Coalition and Cooperation Building
  • Living kind categorisation
• One of the great leaps forward for humans was the emergence of cognitive fluidity i.e. the ability to exchange information between modules. This meant that humans could build new kinds of representations
• Cultural learning involves perspective taking [ToM] + memory [storage].
• Boyer rejects the idea that culture could be infinitely variable. He asserts that there are severe constraints on the possible cultures that humans could generate.
  
  • Cultural concepts are strongly constrained by evolved category specific capacities
  • Cultures thus display alignment with recurrent templates
  • Some elements of culture are more effectively inherited
  • Cultural concepts develop from inference based on cultural input.
• Boyer outlines the template for religious concepts as including:
  
  • Religious concepts are constrained by intuitive ontology i.e. sets of objects [Person, Artifact, Animal, Plant] in the world and the causal properties of those objects.
  • These are two central components to the templates
    
    • Explicit violations
    • Activated generalised non-violated background expectations
  • Boyer creates a model of the template with several illustrations

Lexical label

Ghost

Ontological category

PERSON

Violation of intuitive expectation

Go through walls [breach of intuitive physics]

Default Non-violated expectations

ToM expectations

Additional broad information

Come back to where they once lived

• Ontological categories have large numbers of default inferences associated with them. They are rich in important social and physical inferences and so are part of a concepts cognitive efficiency
• The transmission of religious belief only requires the passing on of the counter-intuitive elements as the rest is spontaneously inserted via the general inference schema
• The violation feature is the attention grabbing aspect and is the element that facilitates memory for the concept and its transmission across generations
• Boyer observes that developed “theologies” do not stick in popular culture. He notes that populations revert to key elements of the violation + background underpinning in times of need and general thinking.
• Boyer is keen to explore the role of what he terms ”inference systems”. These are modules that have particular functions in social and cultural processes.
• Inference systems produce explanation without the individual being aware of it. This is consistent with both modularity and automaticity.
• Boyer acknowledges that religious concepts will be associated with life threatening situations and therefore the role of emotion processes is important in understanding the development and maintenance of religious concepts and practices.
• The human capacity for the social mind is critical to the development of religion.
• He notes that religious concepts are one of the better replicating memes i.e. their copy instructions work very well at all levels.
• Boyer reports in a number of publications his work with Barrett on the experimental demonstration of many of the concepts he has developed on the features of religious ideas
• Boyer observes that the role of episodic memory is critical to human activity across time. In fact he asserts that this form of memory is effectively mental time travel, which enables humans to re-experience the effects of a particular situation.
• He notes that the human capacity for imagination in combination with decoupling results in mental simulation which allows the exploration of alternative worlds. There is a substantial literature on so-called counter-factual thinking.

Question 3

What adaptive advantage do gods and spirits (G&S) bestow?

Answer 3

• Boyer notes that G&S are generally used to help account for specific occurrences. E.g. the role of ancestors in social life in many societies.
• Also many societies meet their ancestors in dreams and memory. They live on but are dead. How does one account for this paradox?
• Persons are recognised as the most complex ontological category. It is more effective to imagine a person as a religious concept than an artefact as persons are more rich in associations. Persons have minds!
• If G&S have minds then they have the paramount feature of agency? They have intention and the capacity to achieve and move toward goals.
• Remember that the development of an agency detector is one of the central capacities of the evolution of the human as a social animal from an evolutionary perspective.
• It could be said that the human module for agency detection is on a “hair trigger” from a survival POV
• Why G&S? Boyer postulates that there are two key originators for their existence in the minds of human beings. They are:
  
  • An overactive agency detection inference system; when in doubt assume a human agent behind the event or situation
  • The modules for cooperation and coalition inference system seize the opportunity to call upon these beyond human creatures for assistance with survival.
• What advantage could these creatures bestow? Boyer points out the importance of strategic information in social survival. These supernatural agents have human characteristics (e.g. ToM) and yet because of their level of existence they possess strategic information.
• G&Ss are engaged as agents to cooperate and benefit from given their strategic position. EG pray to when self or relative in mortal danger.
• Boyer postulates that G&Ss came into existence so as to facilitate the negotiation of the social world and so provide the individual with an advantage in knowing what to do and how to solve difficult social situations.
• Calling on these supernatural agents was in a sense a way to gain an advantage in terms of social survival. The advantage was due to their ontological category violations. These are not strange but essential to the transmission of the concept.

Question 4

Atran’s Model

Answer 4

• Sees religion as an outcome of evolution. The problem as he sees it is that we have “stone age minds for a space age world”
• Like Boyer, Atran asserts that the features and characteristics of supernatural agents and accompanying rituals are the direct product of evolved cognitive inferential and emotional constraints (2002)
• Atran however emphasises the importance of religion’s connection to the emotionally charged topics of birth, death, calamities and love. These events are ‘seen’ by ordinary people as the results of the intentional acts of some agent and matters of chance.
• Atran posits that religion is (2002, p4);
  
  • A costly and hard-to-fake commitment
  • Counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents
  • These agents master people’s existential anxieties (e.g. death and deception)
• Atran observes that there is a conundrum in this. How is it advantageous to believe what is materially false (people laugh, cry after dying) and to not believe what is materially true (people bodily disintegrate after dying).
• Atran notes that religion “results from a confluence of cognitive, behavioural, bodily, and ecological constraints that neither reside wholly within minds nor are recognisable in a world without minds”. Atran is thus introducing of the fit between human cognitive architecture and the broader material (including people) environment
• He also highlights the role and contribution of emotion processes. Connecting these processes to their physiological bases and their social functions.
• Atran tackles head on the question of verification and observes that since religious beliefs cannot “be validated by logical deduction or observational induction validation only occurs through satisfying the emotions”
• It is religions ability to satisfy people affectively and that it collectively secures them, that is reason for its survival
• Atran cautions against an overly naïve view of the process of natural selection in asserting that it doesn’t start from a blank slate but is bound historically antecedent compromises between organic structures and environments (2002, p32). This is important lest we come to believe that the structures that support religion are in themselves positively adaptive.
• Atran notes that the development of the human brain from the primates is an example of complexity cascading. Little additional material produces orders of magnitude increase in computational potential and power (2002, p42)
• Atran examines the idea of “spandrels”. This term is borrowed from architecture and refers to a type of by-product of other structures but it not meant to have any direct utility. He postulates that religion is a psychological spandrel with no direct evolutionary benefit but is a by-product of other adaptively useful processes.
• Atran asserts that in humans the default explanation of complex events is agent based. This is one of the TASS modules to use Stanovich’s term. Difficult to inhibit, automatic and convincing.
• The combination of three elements forms the basis of religious beliefs across cultures. The three elements are:
  
  • Object movements or folk mechanics
  • Essential kinds or folk biology
  • Intentional nature of agents or folk psychology/ToM
• Atran states that “spontaneous attribution of agency to physically unidentified sources isn’t counterintuitive”
• “Humans are cognitively susceptible to invoke supernatural agents whenever emotionally eruptive events arise that have superficial characteristics of telic event structures with no apparent controlling force. These include chaotic or chance events (earthquakes), uncertain events (disease), and future events that are normally beyond a person’s control but that people cannot avoid trying to manage, such as critical periods in the human life cycle (birth, puberty, old age, death). Awareness of death is one universal cognition that is especially anxiety-provoking”
• Norenzayan and Atran (reported Atran 2002, p66) found that inducing mortality salience induced greater belief in God and religiosity
• Atran points out that the tragedy of cognition is awareness of our own and loved ones mortality. This is a highly emotionally charged domain.
• Being such an emotionally charged domain results in the modularised system being primed to “see” things that are not present when stimuli are ambiguous. “mistakes or false positives would usually carry little cost whereas a true response could provide the margin of survival” (2002, p69). This is a trip wired agency detection process in the face of uncertainty, which is an ever present aspect of existence.
• Absurd commitments
  
  • Atran notes that a good myth enables the hearers to fit their personal experiences to the story’s episodes (2002, p88). Also accepting a text/story on authority means suspending the relevance constraint i.e. does this fit into the world as I know it.
  • Once a text is accepted on faith the usual processes of confirmation or disconfirmation are permanently suspended. The statements truth is guaranteed by the nature and eminence of the deity. Such beliefs are not only immune to falsification but become stronger in the face of attempts at falsification.
  • Atran asserts that all religions have myths that are attention grabbing because they are fundamentally counterfactual and counterintuitive (2002, p95)
  • Atran builds on Boyer (and Sperber) and asserts that religious beliefs violate innate characteristics of ontological categories.
  • Atran agrees that because of the violation of innate expectations these concepts are good candidates for transmission. Religious concepts achieve their effective transmission since they:
    
    • Are more attention grabbing
    • Have greater inferential potential
    • Cannot be processed completely
    • Are emotionally provocative
  • Atran notes that simple assent between individuals is not sufficient to guarantee action or the meeting of obligations. A display of commitment is needed.
  • Atran asserts that “emotionally hard-to-fake and materially costly displays of devotion to supernatural agents signal sincere willingness to cooperate with the community of believers”.
  • Atran thus takes the position that not only does adherences to a set of religious beliefs result from the nature of human cognitive architecture but also performs the role of a visible demonstration of commitment to the group.
  • He notes that ritual and sacrifice also are examples of the demonstration of commitment. It interesting to note the one of most common punishments for violation of dogmas is exclusion from the community.
  • In part this process also enables ‘believers’ to detect deception which is a major threat to group existence. By making the beliefs and rituals extreme those who belong to the community can be more assured that the members are truly committed.
  • Atran observes that fundamentalist religious groups of all kinds generate hate of the out group in their ‘gods’ name and so by carrying out brutal acts one demonstrates ones commitment.

Question 5

Dennett’s position

Answer 5

• Dennett offers a definition of religion that focuses on social system. “social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is sought” (2006, p9)
• He also notes that what underpins the widespread positive view of religion is the avowed intention to lead morally good lives and the desire not to do evil.
• Dennett strongly asserts that it is time to subject religion to “the most intensive multi-disciplinary research we can muster…(because) religion is too important for us to remain ignorant about” (2006, p14)
• The spell to be broken is the taboo against scientific investigation of religion.
• Dennett refers to Tetlock’s Sacred Values Protection Model (2006, p22) and the research using taboo trade-offs in which to even think about such immoral options brings about very negative and even angry reactions from subjects. This is the power of “sacred ideas” to resist scrutiny. Memes at their best/worst.
• Dennett wants us to treat religion as a natural phenomenon. He quotes David Hume who nominated two critical aspects of a study of religion:
  
  • Its foundation in reason
  • Its origin in human nature
• For Dennett there are several pressing questions including; How does religion
  
  • Command such allegiance
  • Shape lives so strongly
• Dennett examines the objection that Science cannot study religion i.e. that religion is not amenable to science’s methods or principles. Dennett does not accept this and points out the memorising the lord’s prayer is still a cognitive task. He wants to test the truth claims about religion as it sites its derivatives within the social and physical world which is the realm of science
• Dennett does not deny the good aspects of religion but also notes that many non-religious persons do good and carry out self-sacrificing acts.
• From an evolutionary POV Dennett wants to know how and why religion continues to exist. How does this meme replicate and through what processes?
• Dennett notes that some theories posit that religion exists for the improvement of cooperation within groups (not among)
• Dennett is in agreement with theorists who posit that our cognitive systems are the result of natural selection meeting the challenge of survival
• Dennett explores the problem of the death of a loved one. We are “pulled forward by longing and pushed back by disgust” (2006, p112) He asserts that our species put in place an elaborate ritual and so generates a ‘virtual person’ who goes on in memory and folklore.
• Dennett’s book is a very interesting exploration of many aspects of the background to a study of religion. He basically wants us in the West, without pre-judging the outcome, to carefully examine religion and to do so without fear of censure.