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The godliness of Bitch | Lab Mr. Monroe I love your supafine self! Gay porn on Spike TV
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For what it’s worth, I don’t like Bitch Lab, I don’t read her, I don’t think she’s very bright, and I think the main thing she piggybacked on recently was a comment thread to a post she didn’t author. Nice appropriation, that.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
01-05-2006
Just go ahead and bitch
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This ‘theory’ is a bit of a crock. Notice whom this person quotes, Pinker, Dawkins, et al. All being of the ‘hardwired’ school of thought. I.e. dependent upon ‘just so stories’ for explaining why things are what they are.
As to dualism, it is well known that about ten million years ago in primates vision pathways doubled. Seeing motion and seeing stillness are in different pathways and that’s related to an increase in social group size and the variety of food that primates consume. The religion ‘theory’ would then encounter ‘dualism’ expressed in the subsequent line of primates. It does not follow that this creates a dualism of understanding things. The binding problem of consciousness applies here. It is very important that consciousness seem as a whole.
It seems to me that the origin of religion is language based. Infants learn language as a part of noticing their family, parents, mom, via how primitive pointing happens. Via hands, via eyes. It is obvious that theorizing ’spirit’ in a rock relates to animism, but we have a synergism going on with the infant in which they are learning to speak and their parents ‘culture’ comes in rapidly.
Parents then might have an unrealistic view of ’spirit’ or the theory of communal mind that represents, which the infant would get from their parents via language rather than via hardwired. It is a caution then to be aware of the ‘just so story’ aspect of asserting hardwiredness to anything.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor
this is pretty interesting, actually. maybe i’ll post to bm about it, but since i seem not to be getting any better at making/finding time to do that, a couple of quick remarks here.
the first thing that struck me was this: why, if we think that children are so effective at making this distinction, which we agree to be essentially accurate, do we think they are wrong about god or religion? is that only because we’re already convinced that there is no god and no intentionality in the universe? particularly if we take a pragmatist approach, it’s just a question of what works, right? not correspondence to some verifiable external reality? of course, then we have to wonder what it means for this to “work.”
second, we must work out much more thoroughly the distinction and relationship between causality and intentionality. it seems to me that underlying the interpretation of intentionality is an understanding that certain behaviors are caused by something . . . because *everything* that has not always been is caused by something. plato already formulates this quite concisely in a compact paragraph in the timaeus. if we admit this, then it’s just a question of what the causes are. if there is such a thing as intentionality, it is nothing other than a cause of things, whether it is itself caused by something else or not (and if it is not eternal, it has to be caused by something). maybe the real mistake of vulgar theism is to substitute ultimate causes for proximate causes too quickly. in this respect, the blogger would have done better, in invoking dawkins, to refer instead to the essay, “god’s utility function,” in _river out of eden _. sorry, there’s a lot in this paragraph that i don’t have time to expand on at the moment.
finally, how can the blogger (or the researchers) not gesture toward the implicit picture of God as “the big parent in the sky”? it hooks right up. i guess this is what you’re mainly complaining about, right?
re doyle’s point:
“It seems to me that the origin of religion is language based. Infants learn language as a part of noticing their family, parents, mom, via how primitive pointing happens.”
i’d be more inclined still to see it as a function of parenting. there are people who provide for you and you want to please them and you learn how to manipulate them and sometimes they are arbitrary but ultimately they are trying to look out for you in one way or another. there’s a certain intuitiveness about extending this to the universe as a whole. no?
Jeffrey writes,
there’s a certain intuitiveness about extending this to the universe as a whole. no?
Doyle,
That’s a safe bet. And you are right my point is just a theory, we don’t know how exactly infants acquire thoughts, but the key point still is that ‘hardwiring’ so far has contributed little to consciousness that we know of by the ’smoking gun’ of hardwiring. Instinctive counting, subitizing, is one hardwired ability which seems to be there at birth. The eyes can barely see then, learning to see color happens over the next few months.
Doyle