The Function Of Belief

[Tao_Equus]

Originally Posted by Ciel

"Nonsense Songs"

Nonsense songs often get you searching for deeper meaning dont you find? Maybe thats just me.





A Very Happy New Year to you too Ciel

[China Cat Sunflower]

I think that humans have always been compelled by the very nature of their own organic complexity to try to figure out what's going on in the world around them. It wasn't as though the cave people took a vote: "All in favor of evolving our survival skills say aye, all opposed..." They were compelled to devote themselves to figuring out how to better exploit their environment. They needed storage devices. Containers, not just to store food, but also to store data. How do you store the tribe's accumulated knowledge from season to season, hunt to hunt, generation to generation in preliterate societies? Stories and pictures, obviously. The warriors re-enact the hunt for the fire tenders when they get back from the hunt. But everyone re-enacts the sum total of all the tribe's glorious hunts, or victorious battles, or good crop years, by participating in ceremonial activities that cement the tribe's identity by reinforcing its continuity, and at the same time preserving it's accumulated trove of knowledge and expertise.

In this way humans evolve socially and culturally in response to the underlying need to create ever more sophisticated storage devices. As the availability of information increases exponentially, the human organism is compelled to enlarge itself in order to capture and store it. Families, then clans, tribes, coalitions of tribes, kingdoms, empires; the human super organism expands its capacity to capture and store information by creating ever more sophisticated iconography and mythology, art and architecture, ever more expressive and complex ceremonialism in religious and public monuments, buildings, and by creating ever more sophisticated systems of calculation and writing.

So, in light of all of that, it's reasonable to say that what drives humans to evolve in complexity as individual organisms to the point of primitive cognition where they begin to take note of , and formulate observations about their environment for the purpose of improving their chances of survival, is the same intrinsic urge that drives the super organism of human culture toward ever larger and more sophisticated arrangement and expression. From the very beginning it is the viral urge to become this super organism that has driven the evolution of our species.

Chris

[Ciel]

Originally Posted by Tao_Equus

Nonsense songs often get you searching for deeper meaning dont you find? Maybe thats just me.

Then Tao, see how easy it is to believe in anything if it provides a recourse of meaning, and why not...... even The Akond of Swat.

- c -

[Tao_Equus]

Originally Posted by Ciel

Then Tao, see how easy it is to believe in anything if it provides a recourse of meaning, and why not...... even The Akond of Swat.

- c -

Ahhhhhhhh But I never said I found it !!!

Tao

[Tao_Equus]

Chris,

Great post!!

Tao

[Snoopy]

Originally Posted by Tao_Equus

No accident. It is aesthetic choice of the female that drives this, the prettier the display - the higher the chances of mating. I feel you may underestimate the intelligence of birds, or perhaps more likely, overestimate human aesthetics.
Tao

You are able to get inside the mind of a female bird in order to understand its mate choice based on its aesthetic preferences? I'm impressed! Do some birds have better taste than others?

s.

[China Cat Sunflower]

Indeed, some birds do taste better than others.

Tao,

What's cool is that all along our consciousness building has been about understanding natural processes. All the mythology, all the anthropomorphizing, all the God concepts- they're all for the purpose of preserving what we learned from watching nature. Our selves being a part of that nature of course! It's all organic! What is reasonable is so because it is natural. We have observed it to be so.

Chris

[noctuary]

Originally Posted by China Cat Sunflower

Indeed, some birds do taste better than others.

Tao,

What's cool is that all along our consciousness building has been about understanding natural processes. All the mythology, all the anthropomorphizing, all the God concepts- they're all for the purpose of preserving what we learned from watching nature. Our selves being a part of that nature of course! It's all organic! What is reasonable is so because it is natural. We have observed it to be so.

Chris

Natural huh? I wonder if cats have a creation myth? They have survived quite well without hope, faith or belief.

[Paladin]

Originally Posted by China Cat Sunflower

Indeed, some birds do taste better than others.

Tao,

What's cool is that all along our consciousness building has been about understanding natural processes. All the mythology, all the anthropomorphizing, all the God concepts- they're all for the purpose of preserving what we learned from watching nature. Our selves being a part of that nature of course! It's all organic! What is reasonable is so because it is natural. We have observed it to be so.

Chris

Can you expand on the idea a little here Chris? I'd like to follow your idea that a mental construct like religion for example preserves our observations of nature. I do rather like the idea that there can not be man and nature since there isn't any way to step outside of it.
In the last sentence, are you suggesting that reason being part of nature is the same as building a conceptual agreement from which we all live? If so how would that explain the conflict with other agreements made by others?
I would like to think you are on to something quite interesting here rather than just another pedestrian "appeal to nature" argument.

[China Cat Sunflower]

Originally Posted by noctuary

Natural huh? I wonder if cats have a creation myth? They have survived quite well without hope, faith or belief.

You speak for the cats?

Chris

[noctuary]

Originally Posted by China Cat Sunflower

You speak for the cats?

Chris

meow meow

[China Cat Sunflower]

Hi Mark!

Look at it like this: A picture is worth a thousand words. A concept is worth a thousand pictures. An icon is worth however many concepts, and an archetype is worth even more. Byte, mega, giga... We're talking about storage capacity. How do you store a thousand stories without writing? How do you preserve and build on that knowledge without writing? I'm saying that religion, art, architecture, music, calculus, literature...are all storage devices. What are we storing? Observations of natural processes. In pre and proto-literate times these observations are compressed into myths and icons.

We humans are a natural phenomenon. We observe ourselves in the same way we observe other natural occurances. We are the prism of our own analysis of nature.

Chris

[China Cat Sunflower]

Originally Posted by Paladin

In the last sentence, are you suggesting that reason being part of nature is the same as building a conceptual agreement from which we all live? If so how would that explain the conflict with other agreements made by others?

Now that's a great question! I'm saying that I think that everything about our evolution is compelling us to form the human super organism. Our every survival urge from the very beginning, as well as our cultural evolution can be seen as feeding and facilitating the propagation of the super organism. We were born to collect information. Having to store that information forced our cultural evolution. Everything about who we are and who we've been is gnarled around this data collection imperative. And look around you... We've just now invented tiny storage devices like Ipods, and the 160 gig Ipod is now out for your data storage and media enjoyment needs. Generation lll.

Chris

[Tao_Equus]

Originally Posted by Snoopy

You are able to get inside the mind of a female bird in order to understand its mate choice based on its aesthetic preferences? I'm impressed! Do some birds have better taste than others?

s.

Of course, Chicken does not taste like pheasant. The profession I trained in and my fall back profession when I cannot find any other work is as a culinary artist. I love to cook, but not for a living, as it is a truly creative experience for me. My pallet of flavours and colours combine to produce art that both looks good, tastes good and can even evoke particular emotional responses. I always go to special lengths and details when cooking for the first time for a prospective lover. I wish to impress because good impressions get me what I want.... sex.
All art is the same. Artistic expression is always a statement of individuality that can be reduced to ego and wanting to be noticed. It is all peacock feathers. Of course it is other things too but it is always that at its core, that is where it stems from.
Birds do make aesthetic choices based on display and song. We cannot talk to a bird so we cannot know the individual criteria, like with humans, that will decide whether mating proceeds or not. So all aesthetics have there root in the need to breed.

Tao

[Tao_Equus]

Originally Posted by China Cat Sunflower

Indeed, some birds do taste better than others.

Tao,

What's cool is that all along our consciousness building has been about understanding natural processes. All the mythology, all the anthropomorphizing, all the God concepts- they're all for the purpose of preserving what we learned from watching nature. Our selves being a part of that nature of course! It's all organic! What is reasonable is so because it is natural. We have observed it to be so.

Chris

Sounds like good thinking there Chris. And an avenue of thought that I have not given any time but which at a glance seems to have that "I didn't know that I knew that" factor. I love being forced to think in new directions, thanks

tao