In a recent conversation with a relative of mine who is a born-again Southern Baptist Christian, we got into a discussion about the afterlife. My relative insisted that "hell is a real place," while I pointed out that no one knows anything more about the afterlife than anyone else does. …
Quite often, our use of language is puzzling, indeed. For instance, we often walk up to each other asking, “How are you doing?” or “what’s happening?” when we would be annoyed if the person we addressed tried to answer our question. We spend a lot of time talking about the weather when it really doesn’t affect most of us. We crave to talk with our friends and co-workers about entertainment such as the performance of professional sports teams, as though our lives and moods should depend upon such things. And we love to gossip.
What is language for? Most people consider language merely as a means of preserving and communicating ideas. In “Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation,” Andy Clark set forth six additional ways in which we use language, each of these uses serving to “re-shape the computational spaces which confront intelligent agents.”
Clark discusses Lev Vygotsky, the Soviet psychologist of the 1930’s who “pioneered the idea that the use of public language had profound effects on cognitive development.” Vygotsky focused on the role of private language and scaffolded action in guiding behavior by focusing attention and controlling action. For instance, he found that children who are working on their own internalize the verbal directions previously given to them by responsible adults in order to guide complex tasks.
Clark makes a strong case that his “supra-communicative” account of language can transform, re-shape and simplify computational tasks that confront our biological brains in six ways. According to Clark, we …
This zany bit really hits the mark. It's short (about 4 minutes). Enjoy!
After reading this account by someone who attended a so-called "mega-church," I was struck by the many parallels between the methods used by that church and the methods used by Hitler. Slick propaganda, belittling and scapegoating of outsiders, blending religion with nationalism, using fear to manipulate emotions, praising self-interest, etc.,…
Why do people engage in religious rituals?
In keeping with suggestion of ethologist Niko Tinbergen, this question is actually four separate “why” questions. Rather than dealing with the first three Why questions (Phylogeny, Ontogeny or Function), I’d like to consider only the fourth Why, Proximate Cause, with regard to the practice of engaging in religious rituals. In other words, this post will consider the bodily machinery that leads people to attend religious rituals: the immediate payoff to the human animal.
Many believers would answer this question by introspecting. Believers have often told me that they go to church because they “experience God.” [How strange that God doesn’t so often hang out in the home, at cocktail parties or in Las Vegas!]. Many believers thus think that you can simply think about thinking to figure out why they do things. Numerous and repeated experiments have proven introspection to be woefully unreliable, however.
For instance, in 1977, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson published “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes.” [Psychological Review 84, pp. 231-259.] They allowed female subjects to examine and select stockings. The subjects offered lots of reasons for why they selected the stockings they selected (they spoke of such things as texture and sheerness). Unbeknown to them, the stockings were identical. This and numerous additional experiments robustly demonstrate that people, though they always gave reasons for their choices, are often mistaken. “Inner workings of important aspects of the mind, including our own …