Michael Graziano2013-05-22T23:14:40-04:00Michael Grazianohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=michael-grazianoCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Michael GrazianoGood old fashioned elbow grease.The Spirit Ends When The Brain Diestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9838522011-10-05T10:13:45-04:002011-12-05T05:12:01-05:00Michael Grazianohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-graziano/the link between the brain and the mind. That post received so much interest and so many comments from all perspectives that I thought it would be useful to explore the topic more systematically. Nobody should be mistaken about the cultural importance of the topic. The link between the mind and the brain is not merely a medical story. Its implications reach into almost all aspects of religion and spirituality including the belief in God, ghosts, angels, devils, and life after death.
When most of us think about the key conflicts between science and religion, we tend to think about Darwin's theory of evolution published in 1859, or Galileo's persecution by the Catholic Church in the 17th century. These famous clashes between science and religion are resolvable. Every sensible modern religion accepts the fact that the Earth orbits the Sun. Liberal religions are gradually accepting the scientific fact of biological evolution.
One disconnect between religion and science, however, is much older, much more profound, and may be much harder to bridge. It dates back at least to Hippocrates in the fifth century BC. At that time there was no formal science as it is recognized today. Hippocrates was nonetheless an acute medical observer and noticed that people with brain damage tended to lose some of their mental abilities. A passage attributed to him summarizes his view elegantly:
"Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. Through it, in particular, we think, see, hear, and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good, the pleasant from the unpleasant..."
Hippocrates evidently understood the central conflict between observation and most spiritual beliefs. The belief in a spirit world, a world of consciousness that exists independently of physical substance, that survives the death of the body, that comprises ghosts and angels and deities, is incompatible with the observation that damage to the physical brain systematically takes away chunks of the mind. The medical facts suggest that mind, though it definitely exists, is something created by the brain and that it dies piece-by-piece as the brain dies.
About a century later Aristotle famously disagreed with Hippocrates, placing the mind in the human heart. Aristotle listed his reasons, many of which sound vaguely plausible given the analogical and somewhat mystical thinking of the time. How did Aristotle go so wrong in his medical analysis? He was a theoretician. Hippocrates, who worked in a hospital, saw the effects of brain damage every day and grounded his theory in observation. Nobody who spends appreciable time with brain-damaged patients can avoid the obvious conclusion. The brain is the source of the mind.
Another famous view of the brain/mind problem was outlined by Descartes two thousand years later, in the 17th century. In Descartes' view the mind was an ethereal substance, a fluid, that was stored in a receptacle in the brain. When he dissected the human brain he noticed that almost every structure came in pairs, one on each side. The human soul was obviously a single entity and therefore it could not be stored in a double structure. In the end he found a small single object at the center of the brain, the pineal body, and deduced that it was the house of the soul. The pineal body is now known to be a gland that produces melatonin and has nothing whatever to do with a soul.
Descartes' idea, aside from being wrong in the particulars, has a deeper problem. There is no part of the brain that, when damaged, takes away the Cartesian soul. Instead damage to different structures takes away different chunks of the mind. The ability to formulate a sentence? Lost in damage to Broca's area. The ability to understand language? Lost in damage to Wernicke's area. The ability to see, imagine, or comprehend color? Lost in damage to specific regions of the visual system. The ability to think about the space around the body? Lost in damage to another set of brain areas. The ability to intuit the feelings and intentions of others? Impaired after a stroke to a specific network of brain regions. And so on. The mind is a collective and bits of it die when parts of the machinery are mucked up. Even awareness itself, as I wrote about last time, can be splintered apart and compromised by brain damage.
The effect of brain damage is certainly not the only pertinent evidence. Some of the more interesting evidence comes from the direct electrical stimulation of the brain. A little more than a century ago scientists tried applying minute sparks of electricity to surface of the brain, stimulating the circuitry. The technique was improved and elaborated and is now one of the main methods for probing the brain's circuitry. For example, before removing a tumor from a person's brain, a surgeon will expose the brain while the person is awake and under local anesthetic. The surgeon will then study the effect of electrical stimulation, mapping out the function of this and that brain area, to avoid surgically removing any area necessary for language. Some of the most colorful and memorable experiments of this type were done by Penfield in the early 20th century. He found, as have many others since, that electrically tickling a specific spot in the circuitry has a specific and predictable effect on the mind. Whether seeing, hearing, feeling hunger, feeling rage, remembering a scene from childhood, making a coordinated gesture, even feeling as though you've intentionally chosen to make the gesture, these many bits and components of mind can be turned on and off by altering the activity of neurons.
The evidence is now overwhelming that every aspect of the mind is produced by the brain.
The realization that the brain produces the mind is similar in some ways to the theory of evolution before Charles Darwin got to it. Prior to Darwin, the theory of evolution was much discussed and the fossil record certainly supported it, but nobody could point to a plausible mechanism. How exactly did one species evolve over time into many new species? Darwin proposed a mechanism that fit the evidence: natural selection. Survival of the fittest. With the discovery of this simple mechanism, the science of biology was revolutionized.
The idea that the mind depends on the action of the brain is amply supported by the scientific evidence. But nobody knows how a brain produces the inner experience -- the feeling of consciousness. What is the mechanism? That is the question of our time. Many theories have been proposed, including one of my own, and only time and data will tell who is right.
I draw two personal lessons from the neuroscience of mind.
First, far from dismissing mind, or spirit, or soul as nonsense, I see these quantities as far more precious precisely because they are vulnerable and finite. In a sense I've become more spiritual as my scientific understanding deepens and I realize that spirit is a passing conjunction of information.
Second, the neuroscience of the mind gives me a wonderful opportunity to work on a scientific problem that is truly meaningful. About 25 years ago Francis Crick, famous for his role in understanding DNA, posed a question. Is it possible for brain science to address consciousness, a topic traditionally studied by philosophers and theologians? The answer is a definite yes. Many neuroscientists including myself have joined that effort.]]>Does The Eternal Soul Exist?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9536582011-09-19T18:38:30-04:002011-11-19T05:12:01-05:00Michael Grazianohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-graziano/
A clinical syndrome called hemispatial neglect may help to answer the question. It is one of the most fascinating, and horrible, syndromes in the medical literature. Neglect was first described early in the 20th century, and over the years much has been learned about it.
Imagine waking up in the hospital after a stroke to find that half your world is gone. The left side of space and everything in it has been erased from your consciousness. You can talk to the people who stand to the right side of your hospital bed, but when they walk to the left side they disappear from your mind. You dress the right side of your body but forget to dress the left. You think you've eaten everything on your plate, but have eaten only the food on the right side. You can't even conceive of a left side of the plate. When someone rotates the plate, food that you didn't acknowledge before suddenly appears. When you draw a clock, you crush all 12 numbers into the right side of the drawing and don't notice that anything is wrong. You have no insight into your own condition because, lacking any awareness of a left side of space, you can't realize what is missing.
This bizarre and crippling syndrome is not simple blindness. After all, blind people and sighted people who close their eyes know about the objects around them. Instead it is a mental blindness. It covers vision, touch, hearing, memory and concept.
Over the years, different varieties of neglect have been described and associated with damage to different brain regions. But the most dense, profound loss of awareness is associated with a region of the cerebral cortex roughly just above the ear on the right side of the brain. Much more rarely, neglect of the right side of space is caused by damage to the same general area on the left side of the brain.
Neglect is a peculiar syndrome. It suggests that awareness is not a unified item, but like many constructs of the brain it can be knocked apart into a right and a left half. It suggests that awareness is constructed at least partially by a specific region of the brain. It suggests a close relationship between awareness and attention.
The findings are controversial. That same general region of the brain has been found to play a role in social thinking -- in understanding the minds of other people. Why would a brain area involved in social intelligence also participate in one's own basic awareness? Which of the rival accounts is correct? I have argued in my scientific writing that the two functions are not rivals, and instead are closely related. Awareness, sentience itself, may be part of the toolkit we use to understand ourselves and each other. It may be a function of our social brain.
In my view, there really is such a thing as a spirit, a soul, but it is not as people have imagined it in the past. The soul is information of a special kind, wrapped up into a complex structure, instantiated in the circuitry of the brain. It is quirky and individual to each of us, and is precious because it is not eternal.
]]>Is Spirituality a Byproduct of Evolution?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9188012011-08-05T08:16:47-04:002011-10-05T05:12:01-04:00Michael Grazianohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-graziano/Homo sapiens evolved to be socially intelligent. Over millions of years, perhaps more, the primate brain evolved special machinery to allow us to think socially, to build abstract concepts of each other's minds and to react emotionally to each other in a way that more or less maintains the social web. In one theory that is gaining greater acceptance, the social machinery in the human brain is the direct cause of spirituality. Spirituality is the human brain doing exactly what it is exquisitely well evolved to do. It is the functioning of our social intelligence.
If spiders could ever become super intelligent, they might see the world through the metaphor of a web. They might talk about sticky strands of thought. They might envision a universe pulled out of a spinneret. They might judge beauty by radial symmetry. Looking at the moon, they might see a web-in-the-moon instead of a man-in-the-moon. The natural talent of humans is to spin metaphors of minds and intentions, and that is how we evaluate almost everything around us. We understand and react to the world through our social capability. It defines us more than any other trait. Even language is a refinement of social communication. We are truly Homo socialis.
Yet the theory that spirituality is a product of social intelligence seems to have certain limitations. If spirituality is defined rather narrowly as the human tendency to believe in a spirit world -- in ghosts, gods, angels, and life after death -- then the explanation is plausible. We believe in spirits because we are predisposed to see minds in the things around us. But to most people, spirituality has a much larger halo of meaning including moral decency and love and religious awe and an all-embracing sense of fellowship. How are these spiritual experiences products of an evolved social machinery?
It may be that the more emotional, less tangible aspects of spirituality are particularly well explained by the theory of social intelligence.
Awe, for example, is at its root a social emotion. Its utility lies in shaping our behavior toward others, especially others that we perceive to be wiser or more powerful than us. It is one ingredient in hierarchical social structure. Awe of a beautiful landscape, awe of music (another spiritual experience I've written about before), awe of the spread of stars as you look up at night, all of these instances of awe are traditionally connected in a hazy way in people's thoughts and feelings with awe of a larger, deistic presence. In the social-intelligence theory of spirituality, these instances of spiritual awe are the result of bits of a social machinery constantly spinning, constantly computing. Such emotional reactions follow from the human tendency to see almost everything in our world through the filter of the social machinery.
Religious awe may belong to a category of biological trait along with male nipples and the gill slits in human fetuses. It has an understandable evolutionary past. The adaptive advantages that led to it are real, but the present adaptive advantage of it, if any, is not entirely straightforward. It doesn't need an adaptive advantage to be a part of who we are.
Note that nowhere in my description do I condemn spirituality or scoff at awe. I am not calling for its end. I am no so-called New Atheist advocating the debunking of human spiritual belief. I consider my perspective more that of a strict naturalist trying to understand the behavior of a species of animal that happens to be my own species. I have no interest in fighting a cultural war against a natural phenomenon, the intrinsic behavior of us humans, that I am trying to study.
I would love to see us humans tackle our world problems rationally, but it is difficult to do that without first understanding who we are, and my interest, scientifically speaking, is to understand who we are. We are beings that do not see the world literally or dispassionately. We see the world filtered through our most developed talent, our social intelligence, and spirituality is a direct consequence.
]]>Casey Anthony, the Jury's Decision, and the Neuroscience of Moralitytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8943392011-07-11T11:42:41-04:002011-09-10T05:12:01-04:00Michael Grazianohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-graziano/
In 2001, researchers at Princeton University began a new line of experiments about how the human brain computes moral judgments. The experiments of Green and Cohen suggested that morality may come from two sources in the brain. There may be two flavors of human morality that sometimes come into conflict with each other.
Volunteers were asked to think about moral dilemmas. For example, would you push one person in front of a train to save five others? While thinking about the dilemma, the subjects were scanned in an MRI to measure the oxygenated blood flowing through the brain. The more oxygenated blood flowing into a specific brain area, the more active the area. What areas of the brain become active when people compute moral judgments? It depends on the moral dilemma. Some moral judgments can be made intellectually, by semantic rule, with little engagement of emotion. Other moral dilemmas provoke an emotional reaction that alters our moral views, contradicts rationality, and recruits different brain areas.
One of the favored tests of moral reasoning is the distinctly perverse trolley dilemma. And here I must apologize to my readers. If the examples given below seem too raw on the heels of a murder trial, keep in mind that the science of morality uses such raw examples in order to get at the issue. In the trolley dilemma, a trolley is about to run over five people. You can save the five people by pulling a lever. The lever will divert the trolley to a different track, where it will kill only one person. Would you pull the lever? Many people weigh the five against the one and reply that they might pull the lever. They judge the action to be morally justified. But it is not an easy judgment.
Now suppose that, to save the five people, you must actively push one person in front of the trolley thereby stopping it. This version of the story puts you in such physical proximity to the act of murder that it provokes a stronger emotional reaction. Your rationality comes into conflict with your gut revulsion. Regions of the brain involved in conflict become active. Most people claim they would not push a person to his death to save five others.
In yet another variant of the story, the trolley is going to kill one person. If you pull a lever, the trolley will be diverted to a different track where it will kill five people. Here the answer is obvious to everyone. Simply do nothing. Withhold action, and the least harm is done. This easy decision recruits areas of the brain involved in higher order thought, but does not engage the emotions as much.
The curious property of these many variants is that, effectively, they are the same. In each case you must make a decision. If you choose A, five people die. If you choose B, one person dies. Yet depending on the immediacy of the scenario, and therefore how much emotion is engaged, people tend to respond differently, and indeed to draw on different brain mechanisms for computing morality. The right moral decision can seem perfectly obvious, and yet diametrically opposite, depending on the framing of the question and the brain mechanisms that are tapped.
How does this psychology and neuroscience relate to Casey Anthony?
As I watched the jury announce the verdict of Not Guilty, and felt the same astonishment that the rest of the pubic felt, and as I saw outrage ripple through the media and the public, I realized that we were witnessing a textbook example of the two different kinds of morality. One is rational, intellectual, and evidence based. The other is an immediate emotional response that sweeps away the rational. It is a gut revulsion. Here we have the trolley dilemma all over again.
The jurors were charged with the task of weighing the evidence rationally and inferring whether A was proven or whether B had some probability. Yet the public, the para-jury you might say, the national collection of us watching from a distance and forming our own opinions -- we pursued a different approach. Our task was to decide what we felt about the case, the characters involved, and especially the little girl. It is a sad and upsetting case. TV pundits, especially, framed the case in terms of an emotional revulsion toward the crime and the accused. Under these two different ways to frame the moral dilemma, given the science, it is not surprising that the jury and the public arrived at diametrically opposite decisions, and moreover, that the side of moral right should seem so terribly obvious to everyone. Frame the question one way, recruit one set of brain mechanisms, and A is the morally right choice. Acquit. Frame the question differently, engage a different set of brain mechanisms, and B becomes the obvious moral choice. Convict.
For my part, I now believe the jury made exactly the right decision under the circumstances given the task they were assigned. It was not an enviable task.
The decision of the jury, and the public's moral outrage, are to some extent scientifically understandable because they are part of a normal human pattern. Understanding Casey Anthony, on the other hand, is more difficult. Neuroscience tends to examine the norm rather than the abnormal. Yet if science can help us understand the normal mechanisms of morality in the human brain, then perhaps we will someday develop a better understanding of how those mechanisms can go wrong and what might be done to prevent it.
]]>Why is Music a Religious Experience?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8753522011-06-15T10:55:04-04:002011-08-15T05:12:01-04:00Michael Grazianohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-graziano/
As I've written before in books and blogs, I am an atheist and yet I have an empathy for religion. Intellectually, I do not think there is a literal God. Emotionally, I am not anti-religious. One of the reasons why I feel an emotional empathy for religion is that it reminds me of my attitude toward music.
Many of the moral generalizations that have been applied to religion apply just as well to music. Music is a cultural phenomenon. It intensifies emotions. It helps cement communities. It can range from the terroristic to the sublime. The Nazis after all had nationalistic Nazi music to fire up their citizens, and in more recent decades we've seen cop killer music. On the other end of the spectrum, the rousing music of the civil rights movement advocated for equality, and Beethoven's Ninth was a politically and socially radical statement about the joy of human solidarity.
Yet something else harder to put into words, something that goes beyond cultural impact, unites music and religion. When I am listening to certain pieces of music I feel a reverence creeping over me, an awe that has a spiritual quality. For myself, classical music does it. For others, of course, different styles of music trigger the same reverential reaction.
I do not see any contradiction between my scientific atheism and my emotional reverence. I am a biological being subject to the same emotions and affinities as others. I am, however, scientifically curious about the phenomenon. At least one aspect of the phenomenon may have a surprising basis in the social machinery of the human brain.
In complexity, the human brain tends to see intentionality. We are after all social animals. We evolved to be social beings -- to look at the complex pattern of behavior of others and infer a mind state, a personality, a persona. When we encounter complexity, the social machinery in the brain is engaged. It generates hypothetical mind states and intentions and attributes them to the complex entity. It is an automatic reaction. We can't help the impulse.
This type of social perception has been studied extensively. Social neuroscience, as it is called, is now one of the hottest topics in the science of the brain. I've written about it myself in academic articles and also in my book, "God, Soul, Mind, Brain." The general region of the brain that appears to be particularly involved in inferring mental states in others is more or less above the ear and about an inch in. It is adjacent to and probably densely connected with the auditory cortex.
When I listen to Mozart, I believe what is happening could be described as follows.
Certainly, I admire the man. Any person who could create great music has my admiration. I also admire the music. But that intellectual admiration, an admiration of the craftsmanship, is not the same as spiritual awe. Something else happens.
In the deep logic of the music, I sense a presence. My brain generates a mind state, a persona, and attributes it to the music. Not the mind of Mozart the man, but a kind of soul that invests that particular piece. The piece has a persona. It has a palpable spirit, and I feel as though I can have a personal relationship to that spirit. The social, interpersonal, emotional machinery of my brain has been recruited.
My brain is treating the music like a universe of complexity and investing that universe with its own deity, for whom I feel some measure of awe and reverence. My relationship to the music is, in the most fundamental sense, the same as a religious relationship to the real world.
I do not know if other people react to music in the same way. I would be curious to hear from my readers.
]]>The Spirit Constructed in the Braintag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8551602011-04-29T12:43:50-04:002011-06-29T05:12:01-04:00Michael Grazianohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-graziano/God Soul Mind Brain.
This theory of consciousness begins with something called social perception. Humans are social animals, and not surprisingly the human brain has special-purpose machinery that allows us to be socially intelligent -- to reconstruct information about the contents of other people's minds. When I interact with another person, I reconstruct what he might be thinking and feeling. I monitor what he might be aware of or what he might be attending to. All of this information forms a linked, interconnected bundle of data, an informational model of another person's mind, computed inside my own brain. It is a perceptual model of someone else's consciousness, and the study of the brain circuitry that computes this type of perceptual model is called social neuroscience.
Social neuroscience arguably began in the 1960s with experiments on monkeys. Monkeys are social animals, and it was discovered that neurons in a particular brain area carry information of social relevance, such as visual information about faces or about body gestures. The scientist who made these initial discoveries was Charles Gross, my long-time mentor. I worked in his lab for many years.
The findings from monkeys were picked up by many scientists and extended to the human brain, mainly by putting people in MRI scanners and measuring brain activity. It turns out that the human brain contains specific areas, mainly in the right hemisphere, but to some extent on both sides, that emphasize the task of social perception: of building an informational model of another person's mind. Damage to these brain areas can lead to a disability in social perception.
Now I would like to draw a distinction between two items: social perception and social cognition. The terms are used differently by different scientists, and the border between them is not absolute. We understand other people's minds at many different levels, some more cognitive and some more perceptual. But generally speaking, one might think of social cognition as more a process of intellectually figuring out what might be in someone's mind and social perception as more intuitive, more basic.
One of the best examples to get across this distinction is ventriloquism. In ventriloquism, as an audience member looking at the puppet, you know intellectually, cognitively, that there is no conscious mind in its head. But perceptually, you fall for the illusion. That is what makes ventriloquism fun. When a good ventriloquist makes the puppet move in realistic ways, directs its gaze with good timing, makes it react to its environment in a plausible way, the effect pops out. You can't help feeling as if consciousness, awareness, agency were emanating from the puppet. The social machinery in your brain constructs an informational model of a conscious mind that you project onto the puppet. In fact, you build two perceptual models of minds, one that you project onto the performer and the other that you project onto the puppet. Ventriloquists have worked out a set of tricks to enhance this illusion of two separate minds. That is why the puppet always has a different tone of voice and usually argues with the performer.
Ventriloquism is an exotic example, but this tendency to perceive mind in things is something we do every day. How many times have you gotten mad at your car? You know it doesn't have a mind, but you can't help constructing that perceptual model. We do the same thing to our TVs and to our computers. Some people talk to their plants. Children talk to their stuffed animals.
We do the same thing with respect to each other. When I meet a new person, my brain constructs an informational model of a mind, a consciousness, and attributes it to that person. That model allows me to predict the person's behavior, at least to some extent, and to interact more effectively.
According to the theory, I do the same thing with respect to myself. I perceive consciousness in myself. My brain constructs a perceptual model of a mind that thinks this and that, feels this and that and is aware of this and that; the mind is attributed to my own location. That model provides an organized, coherent way for me to understand myself -- to predict and help guide my behavior. It is not always accurate; it is woefully incomplete; but it is a useful model of myself.
This realization that consciousness is a perception is counterintuitive. We think of consciousness as something ghostly that inhabits an object. But according to this neuro-social theory, consciousness is a perception that is attributed to something. Like beauty, consciousness is in the eye of the beholder. Our brains actively paint consciousness onto ourselves and onto the objects around us.
The implications for spiritual belief are rather startling. In this theory, the spirit world is the complex, richly detailed universe of social perception, the perception of mind. We not only perceive consciousness in ourselves and in others, but we perceive it in the objects and spaces around us. Spiritualism is a fundamental mode of perception by which humans relate to the world. In this view, spiritualism is not an incorrect theory; not a misapplication of rational thought; not pseudoscience. One of the reasons why scientific rationalism has such trouble dealing with religion is that spirituality is not generally about rational thought, evidence or logical inference. At root it is a built-in tendency to construct perceptions of mind, project them around us, and then move through and interact with that perceptual world.
I find myself in the end with a theory that does not fit neatly into anyone's political bunker. It is decidedly materialistic and atheistic. Yet according to the theory, spirits exist -- deities, ghosts, souls, the consciousness of other people, one's own consciousness -- as rich perceptual simulations run on the hardware of the brain. That perceptual world has psychological reality and genuine importance to human existence.
]]>The Darwinian Evolution of Religiontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8466352011-04-11T09:15:06-04:002011-06-11T05:12:01-04:00Michael Grazianohttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-graziano/
Why do the religious believe so strongly in the importance of preaching to the masses and proselytizing people? Because this belief is intrinsically good at propagating itself. Religions that don't include this conviction don't spread. They are out-competed. This belief is, biologically speaking, the replication drive.
Why do so many people believe that religious doctrine is sacred and must never be changed? Because this belief is intrinsically good at protecting itself from change. Religions that include this belief are good at maintaining themselves. This is why all religions are protective of their doctrines. They are conservative. If they weren't, they'd die out.
Why do religions promote community? Because religions that help the community offer benefits to people, and benefits help to gain recruits and keep followers.
Belief after belief, each component of a religion is ultimately present for one historical reason: The religion was better able to spread and survive because of it. Darwinian evolution selected for those traits.
Each new person who enters into a religion, whether from the outside or born into it, contains a unique understanding of the religion. These variations among people are inevitable. Of these millions of variant beliefs, across millions of people, some are better able to spread to new recruits than others, and the more successful variants become dominant. As a result, over years, over millennia, a religion becomes honed, shifting, changing, until it is well adapted to survive. A religion is good at spreading, at protecting itself, at fending off other religions, at cozying up to the quirks of human psychology, at tapping human emotion, because any variant of the religion that is weak in those respects is soon out-competed and dies off. New religious flavors, new interpretations, new splinter groups are constantly being formed, remain for a while, and fade away or take over, as they are worse or better at their own spread and survival.
A religion is a life form that grows in the Petri dish of human culture.
The idea that religions are meme structures, and that the evolutionary pressure on them pushes them toward their own benefit and not ours, was proposed by Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) and elaborated by other philosophers of memes including Blackmore (The Meme Machine) and Lynch (Thought Contagion).
This situation with religion is arguably an example of a Nash equilibrium, an equilibrium between two interacting entities that have goals that are not quite identical. In this case, the two entities are the religion itself and the people who comprise it. Religion can never be truly 100 percent in the service of the people because the evolutionary pressure on religion is ultimately to promote itself.
One could even plausibly argue that conservative and liberal religions, or conservative and liberal groups within a religion, represent two distinct but stable mathematical solutions to the Nash equilibrium problem. A conservative religion is more stick than carrot. It has settled on a relatively draconian punishment attitude toward deviance from the core beliefs, thereby protecting itself from dilution. As a down-side, the draconian attitude risks making the religion alienating and unwelcoming, thereby impeding its spread to new recruits. In compromising among the various factors, it has found an equilibrium that places relatively more emphasis on protecting the ideology and relatively less emphasis on the needs of the constituents. It emphasizes both, but one more than the other.
A liberal religion is more carrot than stick. It has settled on a relatively lenient attitude toward variants of the core beliefs, thereby allowing itself to be welcoming to a greater diversity of people. It is better at pulling in recruits. As a down-side, the liberal religion risks dilution of its core beliefs and therefore its own extinction. It has found an equilibrium that places relatively more emphasis on furthering the needs of the constituents and relatively less emphasis on protecting the ideology.
These two strategies, or efficacious compromises, could be understood as distinct, stable solutions to the Nash equilibrium. Just as a guitar string can vibrate at different stable frequencies, so the religious culture might vibrate in different equilibrium states --conservative and liberal. (Conservative and liberal politics, at least in the United States, seem to be mainly carried over from conservative and liberal religious beliefs.)
As an atheist, I guess I am supposed to be anti-religious. Some commentators favor the complete eradication of religion, any religion, all of them, whatever the particular story of creation, or the particular name given to a deity or deities, or the particular set of rituals involved. The most common argument for exterminating religion is that it promotes brutality and intolerance. In startling contradiction, one of the most common arguments for spreading religion is that it promotes moral behavior. I find this question extremely interesting. Should we, as a rational scientific society in the information age, work to eliminate superstition and religion, or work to spread it further? Let the culture wars rage.
To be honest, I am not sure that religiosity is statistically correlated with brutality or decency. I tend to think that people are brutal and decent, selfish and incredibly generous, whatever level of religiosity they may practice. Yes, wars have been fought in the name of religion, but the Soviet Union also did a good job of violent mayhem with an atheistic premise. I remain utterly unconvinced by either argument. I am a scientist and to me the controlled experiments have never been done and the data do not support either contention. As far as I can tell, religion neither causes nor prevents violence, though it tends to come along for the ride either way, and may tend to intensify the emotions. There certainly are examples of religious splinter groups that advocate violence and those that advocate peace.
My main problem with the view that a rational society should eliminate religion, however, has nothing to do with the dangers or merits of religions. I simply think that eradicating religion is not possible. It is a fallacy that ignores the specs of the human machine. We are not rational entities. Religion, like all culture, grows on the social machinery in our brains. To function socially, we must understand each other's minds; therefore we are built to mirror each other's mind states; therefore beliefs and customs spread by imitation from person to person; therefore a cultural competition among beliefs emerges; therefore belief systems evolve to be especially good at promoting themselves. Therefore religion. For that matter, therefore politics. Therefore entertainment. Therefore business. Therefore all of human culture. If religion is profoundly irrational, so is the rest of human culture. Culture is by nature a complicated, bizarre, irrational, fantastic, addictive pleasure, sometimes brutal, sometimes incredibly generous. People being who we are, masters of inconsistency, we are able to be irrational and at the same time intellectually aware of it. We can study the human mind from a scientific point of view and come to a logical understanding of its intrinsically bizarre illogic. To me, that contradiction is one of the most marvelous properties that we humans possess.
This is an excerpt from the book 'God Soul Mind Brain: A Neuroscientist's Reflections on the Spirit World' (Leapfrog Press, 2010) by Michael S. A. Graziano, a professor of neuroscience at Princeton University. ]]>