The fact that stubbing your toe meant death in the past doesn't mean that facing massive adversity doesn't have real negative long term impact on one's mental well being.
You're equating psychological harm and learned patterns of behavior that are unresourceful with physical accidents, without explaining why we should see them as comparable.
Even if they were comparable, who's to say Neanderthal younglings with badly stubbed toes didn't also have skewed reward processing as adults?
Example of stubbing toe was about how unpredictable life was. Getting a wound to go septic was basically random for a long long time. Most of the time, stubbing your toe was about the same as it is today. Annoying and nothing more. Have it go septic, though, and it likely looked like someone had been cursed to death. And note that this goes for more than just literally stubbing your toe. Snag on a bush? Bitten by animal. It would have seemed far far more random.
My post is specifically in response to the one above me. It is framed with modern events and pushing that they are obviously going to seem unpredictable to people. My assertion is that they can be seen that way, sure; but don't think this is somehow a modern thing.
To your point, I would expect that reward processing is influenced by these events, sure. I would also expect any indoctrination that was happening at the same time to stick. My current bias is to expect indoctrination to stick more effectively than raw experiences. And yes, this is somewhat cheating because the indoctrination is almost certainly done to compliment experiences.
This largely runs to my point. It wasn't the arbitrary danger that led to religion. It was people teaching that the danger was from a directed source that did. Put differently, without priests, would there be religion?
It was people teaching that the danger was from a directed source that did
i'd rather think it was the demand for an explanation for those events. and just like any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, so is any unexplainable event indistinguishable from an act of god.
For this to work, though, you would have seen a convergence of all humanity onto the same explanations?
While I think you can almost make the case that there are some commonalities between origin stories, I think you would be stretching credibility a fair bit there.
This also hits a pretty tough point with regards to other animals. Do they have religions?
For this to work, though, you would have seen a convergence of all humanity onto the same explanations
given the dominance of monotheistic religions this is actually happening. there is no need for origin stories to have commonalities because the convergence can also happen through replacement. if every group comes up with their own explanation for the different experiences they have, their stories are naturally going to differ, and that is what we see in history. but also, commonalities are there. pretty much all stories have some kind of creator of the universe and many refer to someone who will come and bring salvation.
This is still to my point. If you require indoctrination to get "convergence" through replacement, then you would, by definition, not have the same stories without priests.
Yes, you can stretch some stories to say there are commonalities. But you are doing some heavy stretching. And you still don't address other social animals. Do they have religions? Why not?
indoctrination is not required. nor are priests. the story just needs to make sense, and if it does people will accept it.
how are the commonalities a stretch? they are self evident: somehow some entity created the universe. somehow this creator is communicating with us, not just once, but multiple times, and they will communicate again in the future. everything else is the content of that communication, and for that there is no need of any further commonality even though there still are many.
i am not addressing animals because that is completely out of scope. our understanding of the consciousness of animals is still very limited, and even if it is shown that animal are potentially capable of such higher order thinking, as long as we can't actually able to communicate with them, we won't know what they are thinking. the question if animals have a religion is therefore unanswerable for the time being.
well, i think there are more commonalities than that but since my argument was that commonalities aren't really needed, to me this point is not really important.
speaking of commonalities, this subthread has diverged from the original topic quite a lot and in an odd way is actually converging with the discussion on "Life is not a story" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41876979
regarding animals, i don't get which point you are making there.
Thanks for the link to the other thread, I skipped that article the other day. (Barely keep up with my threads on weekends.)
Point on animals is that it isn't just the story telling that propagates religion and similar, but persistent story telling. Writing things down and learning the symbols of previous generations is a fairly uniquely human activity.
thanks, now i get your point. essentially what we are discussing is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religio... a topic that i am not deeply familiar with, and to be fair, i also don't hold a strong opinion on. in my naive view i believe the following to make sense: storytelling precedes religion. religion evolved from storytelling and became more elaborate, motivating the development of the role of priests because the skills and knowledge needed took more time than a normal person had available and the role was deemed important enough to warrant significant time investment into learning it by selected individuals as part of the specialization of roles in a community. today priests are no longer needed because the skills needed to create, share and interpret stories can be learned by anyone.
to summarize the argument and bring it back to the main topic, i'd like to argue that adversity influenced storytelling which created religion and religion necessitated priests. so yes, without priests religions may not have persisted, but that's like saying without farmers farming would not have taken hold and we would still all be hunter/gatherers.
You're equating psychological harm and learned patterns of behavior that are unresourceful with physical accidents, without explaining why we should see them as comparable.
Even if they were comparable, who's to say Neanderthal younglings with badly stubbed toes didn't also have skewed reward processing as adults?