Is the Human Brain a "Belief Engine"?
Is the Human Brain a "Belief Engine"?
Religion_2 Lewis Wolpert believes that mankind's "incorrigible and wholly irrational" religiosity is as human, and as explicable, as the flint axe and the computer. It is a tool for the soul.
Religion and belief in a supernatural being is a natural consequence of how we are wired as human beings: our brains evolved to become "belief engines." And for that reason, we should not accept that our beliefs, particularly our religious beliefs, are correct.
Along with Richard Dawkins, the provocative Wolpert is one of Britain's best known atheists explainers of science. An eminent developmental biologist at University College London, he believes it is "ethically unacceptable and impractical to censor any aspect of trying to understand the nature of our world."
Wolpert penned a book-length meditation on "the evolutionary origins of belief," published as Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast. Having pondered the subject, Wolpert sees no reason to modify his reductionist, materialist, atheist view of the universe. Deconstructing the belief engine will usefully explain how humans are different from other animals. "I believe that religious beliefs are at least partly genetically determined. How else can you explain the fact that there's no society ever discovered that didn't have some sort of religious belief?"
"What makes us human," Wolpert explains, "is causal beliefs. What makes us different from other animals is that we have a concept of cause and effect in the physical world."
Wolpert believes that what made us human is technology: "It can be summed up in Kenneth Oakley's definition, 50 years ago, that 'man may be distinguished as the tool-making primate'." Once our ancient human ancestors figured out how to manipulate the natural world. Toolmaking made us human. Early hominids understood cause and effect and came to believe in unseen gods and spirits as causes for life's great mysteries, including illness and death.
But how does that get us to God? In an interview last year Wolpert said "It was the mental concept of cause and effect which was critical. Once you had that concept which enabled you to manufacture complex tools, you then wanted to understand other things as well - why we got ill, what happened when we died, why the sun shone or disappeared. Those, too, must have causes. And that's the origin of belief."
Posted by Casey Kazan.
Religion_2 Lewis Wolpert believes that mankind's "incorrigible and wholly irrational" religiosity is as human, and as explicable, as the flint axe and the computer. It is a tool for the soul.
Religion and belief in a supernatural being is a natural consequence of how we are wired as human beings: our brains evolved to become "belief engines." And for that reason, we should not accept that our beliefs, particularly our religious beliefs, are correct.
Along with Richard Dawkins, the provocative Wolpert is one of Britain's best known atheists explainers of science. An eminent developmental biologist at University College London, he believes it is "ethically unacceptable and impractical to censor any aspect of trying to understand the nature of our world."
Wolpert penned a book-length meditation on "the evolutionary origins of belief," published as Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast. Having pondered the subject, Wolpert sees no reason to modify his reductionist, materialist, atheist view of the universe. Deconstructing the belief engine will usefully explain how humans are different from other animals. "I believe that religious beliefs are at least partly genetically determined. How else can you explain the fact that there's no society ever discovered that didn't have some sort of religious belief?"
"What makes us human," Wolpert explains, "is causal beliefs. What makes us different from other animals is that we have a concept of cause and effect in the physical world."
Wolpert believes that what made us human is technology: "It can be summed up in Kenneth Oakley's definition, 50 years ago, that 'man may be distinguished as the tool-making primate'." Once our ancient human ancestors figured out how to manipulate the natural world. Toolmaking made us human. Early hominids understood cause and effect and came to believe in unseen gods and spirits as causes for life's great mysteries, including illness and death.
But how does that get us to God? In an interview last year Wolpert said "It was the mental concept of cause and effect which was critical. Once you had that concept which enabled you to manufacture complex tools, you then wanted to understand other things as well - why we got ill, what happened when we died, why the sun shone or disappeared. Those, too, must have causes. And that's the origin of belief."
Posted by Casey Kazan.
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Comment by DeSwiss on August 22, 2009 at 12:36am -
"What makes us human," Wolpert explains, "is causal beliefs."
I agree with this point. But in addition to causality, it has also been our brain's "associative" abilities as well, that has helped to make us human.
Human associative abilities have allowed us to take one of experience(s) and apply them to different circumstances. And just as the brain will often times "fill-in" the blanks for us when the eye provides insufficient data to determine the identity of an object, so too has the brain done likewise in other ways. Such as when we consider issues involving our own existence.
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Comment by paddo on August 22, 2009 at 1:23am -
I agree with both of you, but I think the salience of experiences adds to the power of association and skews the human ability to be rational. Thus for every 10 000 people to bathe at Lourdes and get nothing but hypothermia, it takes only one chance recovery or improvement to fuel the whole miracle industry because it was "astounding". I have no training in psychology and please correct me if i am wrong, but I think this is called "partial reinforcement" and is observed in pidgeons using food pellets.
Anyone for a eucharistic wafer?
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Comment by Reggie on August 22, 2009 at 11:42am -
@ Paddo - Confirmation bias.
I agree that we are primed to believe, but I loathe the way that it is phrased, especially in news reports and science articles. It almost gives the impression that we are primed to believe in a one true God or some nonsense. I see monotheism as a rather recent invention that evolved and outcompeted other religions due to the very belief system that has a strong tendency to propagate and spread. We are no more primed to believe in something like Jesus than we are in the gods of Olympus.
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Comment by Reggie on August 22, 2009 at 2:50pm
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@ Michel - I don't disagree. I only take umbrage to the framing these reports sometimes take. After reading James Randi's Flim-Flam, I'm amazed that there are rational people at all. He really highlighted the absurd things people delude themselves with and religion was not really even mentioned. Dousing, psychics, astrology, fairies, and so on and so forth. I'd like to see these reports lump religion in together with astrology and not just because they belong together. :)
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Comment by Reggie on August 22, 2009 at 4:58pm
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Bingo!
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Comment by LaRae Meadows on August 22, 2009 at 6:12pm -
You might enjoy "Beyond Belief" by Pascal Boyer. His book explains this phenomon and the others that were created for other reasons but have the biproduct of religion.
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Comment by Monika on August 23, 2009 at 12:41am -
I think religion is a habit forming belief system and addictive. It was passed on because it became tradition and is part of life, a pacifier to give quick answers and soothe the soul to keep us all put in the mold they created for us to only move and act as told . No one in their right mind has any good reason to believe there is a super natural being who actually cares. Whatever supernatural being means to them is just -being itself, rather then being a being.. It boils down to not wanting to accept responsibility for ones own action and face the world as it is.
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Comment by Wesley on August 24, 2009 at 12:33am -
For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.
Viktor E. Frankl
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked.
Viktor E. Frankl
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Viktor E. Frankl
Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.
Viktor E. Frankl
Frankl believed that people were 'meaning' making machines. Is that the same as a belief engine?... I think that meaning making machines can function as belief engines and maybe vice versa....but I think the social, cultural, historical conditioning 'software' that is programmed into them can over-ride and cover up the basic protocals. So we end up focusing on the sky-daddy's existence or not and his heavens and rules instead of the possibility of the engine or machine that created him.
Certainly the current belief systems did not pop into existence in their present forms... Nope, they evolved from much simpler beliefs.
This is what I would like to find research on... the 'roots' or ancestors of our present day belief systems and how they evolved to their current form.
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