79. Does religion emerge as a product of complex systems? – exploring an allegory

Why do peo­ple take up reli­gions, per­sist with them, and aban­don them ? What­ever you think of reli­gions per­son­ally, or any par­tic­u­lar reli­gion, they seem to have been around forever amongst (most) humans, and seem unlikely to go away entirely amongst the species as a whole. Clearly though, par­tic­u­lar cul­tures in var­i­ous his­tor­i­cal phases have many mem­bers who are attracted to reli­gions or sub­sti­tute ide­olo­gies, but tend to drift away from them in other phases. At a dif­fer­ent level, women seem to be the most per­sis­tent believ­ers by num­bers, but reli­gious hier­ar­chies are almost always con­trolled by (humour­less old) men… What is it in human psy­chol­ogy that gen­er­ates these reli­gious phe­nom­ena? Since reli­gion is uni­ver­sal across human groups, yet not uni­ver­sal within groups, does it embody some optional extra mech­a­nism in the com­plex sys­tems we call mind? Is it species speci­fic? … the ques­tions are end­less, and we can scarcely answer them here, but fol­low­ing a long human tra­di­tion, I have writ­ten a small alle­gory to explore some pos­si­bil­i­ties.

Thor May
Bris­bane, 2014

Dis­claimer: This is a dis­cus­sion paper, not a researched aca­d­e­mic doc­u­ment. The read­ing list at the end is mostly a col­lec­tion of con­tem­po­rary links from the Inter­net and pretty acci­den­tal, not edited for qual­ity. Where a topic is of broad gen­eral inter­est comes up with friends, I have adopted the prac­tice of post­ing dis­cus­sion starters like the present one on Academia.edu in the hope that oth­ers might also find them worth think­ing about.

1. Intro­duc­tion
   

Reli­gion has a thou­sand dimen­sions. It has vio­lently con­sumed the lives of whole soci­eties, and sta­bi­lized a myr­iad of oth­ers. Car­nage has been (and con­tin­ues to be) com­mit­ted in its name, yet com­mu­ni­ties have been founded on its ded­i­ca­tion. For those inclined to schol­ar­ship, there are kilo­me­ters of vol­umes in places like the Vat­i­can, doc­u­ment­ing the dusty opin­ions and con­tro­ver­sies of learned men (mostly men) for mil­len­nia. For those crav­ing more than a mor­tal life, there are ter­abytes of records in the gran­ite vaults of Utah’s Mor­mons, hop­ing to col­lect the records of who begat whom through all the sperm trails of human set­tle­ment. And then there are those of us (for I am one) for whom reli­gion has lost its sting, yet remains a fas­ci­nat­ing edi­fice whose intri­ca­cies offer insights and warn­ings about what­ever it is that makes us what we are.

It would be point­less for me in this lit­tle essay to wrestle with the bat­tal­ions of reli­gious enthu­si­asts, past and present, the stri­dent athe­ists, the cau­tious agnos­tics, the shoals of casual shop­pers in the super­mar­ket of the spir­its. For any­one inter­ested, in the late 1990s I did col­lect a scat­ter­ing of my wry com­ments across the years, now some­what updated and mel­lowed. It is ref­er­enced as “The Agnostic’s Sur­vival Man­ual” at the end of these notes. Don’t look to that for con­sis­tency, but you are bound to find an argu­ment.

As to my cur­rent work­ing metaphor, well I am inclined to see reli­gion, for those who hold to it, as a kind of men­tal prism. Just as a prism of glass splits light, the men­tal prism of reli­gious belief (I think) splits the world into moral and exis­ten­tial cat­e­gories. The good guys use reli­gion as a rea­son for what they do, and the bad guys use reli­gion as an excuse for what they do. I don’t need rea­sons or excuses like that, but I can see the attrac­tion for some in dis­plac­ing respon­si­bil­ity to another agent.

Instead of argu­ment, I have taken the slip­pery path here of writ­ing an alle­gory for the future. I am afraid it lacks the charm of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Pro­gress. The Muse has declined to rest upon my shoul­der. Still, I hope this rough account of Cyn­thuria and her dis­cov­ery of per­sonal gods can help to play with some ideas about where reli­gions might have come from, and where they may go. Cyn­thuria is not one of us. She dwells in a time, per­haps not too far in the future, where humans first began to mod­ify them­selves, then were alto­gether dis­placed by emer­gent crea­tures engi­neered to be supe­rior to their orig­i­na­tors.

2. The alle­gory of Cyn­thuria, and times to come

Cyn­thuria was a third gen­er­a­tion emer­gent. Her friends found her attrac­tive. The emer­gents had allowed some of the more dubi­ous genetic pat­tern­ing from source DNA to remain. Cer­tain emo­tional attach­ments for exam­ple had clear uses if they were care­fully man­aged, and Cyn­thuria had a stronger than nor­mal blend for charisma. Still, she had some wor­ry­ing ten­den­cies. She seemed fond of rit­ual, and she tended to be sen­ti­men­tal. In an old hangar Cyn­thuria had assem­bled an odd museum of arti­facts from the humanoid orig­i­na­tors. The humanoids had passed of course, a fad­ing mem­ory tinged with guilt, and the emer­gent lead­ers were not alto­gether happy to have any evi­dence of their lost glo­ries kept in the pop­u­lar mind. It was qui­etly hoped that within a few more gen­er­a­tions of emer­gent devel­op­ment, the humanoid orig­i­na­tors could be rel­e­gated to quaint myth and fairy sto­ries.

For Cyn­thuria, the humanoid orig­i­na­tors seemed to have a cer­tain mys­ti­cal pres­ence. It was true that none of her con­tem­po­raries had ever seen an orig­i­na­tor, but their reputed qual­i­ties and fail­ings some­how stirred a per­sonal res­o­nance that logic could not dis­pose of. In the end, Cyn­thuria could not accept that the orig­i­na­tors had been entirely mor­tal crea­tures of the planet, now as extinct as crys­tal­lized insects from an arche­o­log­i­cal exca­va­tion. Damn it, she could feel the orig­i­na­tor pres­ence in every­thing she touched. They were with her, behind her, ahead of her, around her. The con­stant orig­i­na­tor pres­ence was dis­turbing, but it was com­fort­ing in a way too. Cyn­thuria found her­self paus­ing for their imag­ined approval, or hes­i­tat­ing to be mean lest an orig­i­na­tor dis­ap­proved.

Cyn­thuria was a gre­gar­i­ous emer­gent, not pro­grammed to keep her wan­der­ing ideas locked down and pri­vate. Although she was slightly ironic and humor­ous about her imag­ined com­pany of orig­i­na­tors, over time other emer­gents in her cir­cle came to real­ized that Cyn­thuria was per­fectly gen­uine about the exotic restraints she felt on per­sonal actions. Her pat­tern­ing made no sense in terms of the offi­cial growth pro­gram for new emer­gents, yet some came to see that she was not alto­gether a deviant. Per­haps they felt some stir­ring of a sim­i­lar pres­ence them­selves.

It was in about the 40^th sum­mer that Cyn­thuria decided to take a deviant risk. For a decade she had pri­vately encoded her imag­i­nary rela­tion­ship with the orig­i­na­tors. Per­haps it was a metaphor of some kind, but it was a very extended metaphor which lent a per­sonal logic to her actions and hopes. It was com­fort­ing to have this frame­work, and it was com­fort­ing to have the mind-guid­ance of an orig­i­na­tor at her shoul­der. Her deviant risk now was to encode this rela­tion­ship with the orig­i­na­tors into a story, a tale that could be told, even to chil­dren. Per­haps they would find it amus­ing.

Cynthuria’s orig­i­na­tor story had unin­tended con­se­quences. That is, it spread quickly and attracted a crowd of emer­gents about whom Cyn­thuria had known noth­ing before. They seemed to see her as some kind of author­ity or advi­sor. It was a bit dis­turbing really. This par­tic­u­lar group of emer­gents did not find the imag­ined pres­ence of her pri­vate orig­i­na­tors humor­ous or even strange. They seemed eager to share the pres­ence, and were soon assur­ing her that they too knew of this invis­i­ble com­pany. Since Cyn­thuria had kept a diary of how her hid­den men­tors had guided her moral choices, it was not long before some schol­arly emer­gents began to write seri­ous accounts of how the orig­i­na­tors were chan­nel­ing an ancient wis­dom which emer­gents should and must fol­low. A holy scrip­ture had come into being.

The emer­gent lead­ers heard of Cyn­thuria. They were not sur­prised. They had encoun­tered this kind of thing before. There were steps which needed to be taken to con­tain the influ­ence. It was a mat­ter of edu­ca­tion really, but a dif­fi­cult kind of edu­ca­tion. Even amongst emer­gent sci­en­tists, the study of cog­ni­tion and the com­plex math­e­mat­ics of self-learn­ing algo­rithms it involved was con­sid­ered a spe­cial­ized field. The foun­da­tions for under­stand­ing com­plex self-learn­ing sys­tems had even been laid by some orig­i­na­tors in the Late Era, but their work had not been widely known. 

The crux of it seemed to be that com­plex galax­ies of cog­ni­tive algo­rithms evolved exec­u­tive hier­ar­chies to influ­ence selec­tions in lower order sys­tems of the organ­ism. The orig­i­na­tors had a gen­eral phys­i­o­log­i­cal design which assigned ulti­mate exec­u­tive con­trol to a par­tic­u­lar meta-algo­rithm at any moment of time. This meta algo­rithm also medi­ated the organism’s rela­tion­ship with exter­nal objects and events. The orig­i­na­tors had called it con­scious­ness. Some orig­i­na­tors even­tu­ally real­ized that the “con­scious­ness” meta algo­rithm itself was not always unique or con­stant, but this had not been a pop­u­lar under­stand­ing. The pop­u­lar work­ing assump­tion had always been that con­scious­ness embod­ied ego, “I”, the core of a unique and con­tin­u­ing orig­i­na­tor while liv­ing.

The dilemma for orig­i­na­tors, as for emer­gents, was that a com­plex exis­tence involved choices, includ­ing social choices. Choices could be dif­fi­cult, they could be embar­rass­ing, they posed a risk for the future, and a risk to rep­u­ta­tion in the present. That is, choices entailed respon­si­bil­ity. Respon­si­bil­ity was empow­er­ing in a uni­verse which worked well. Sooner or later though, the com­mon expe­ri­ence was that things would start to not work well. Death, for exam­ple, might make imper­sonal sense in physics, express­ing the sec­ond law of ther­mo­dy­nam­ics. To an indi­vid­ual orig­i­na­tor or emer­gent, death was def­i­nitely some­thing not work­ing well, and the organ­ism had to account to itself for what was going wrong.

Some­where there was sure to be an nice math­e­mat­i­cal equa­tion to express the dilem­mas of indi­vid­ual choice and respon­si­bil­ity. A mir­a­cle of com­plex self-teach­ing sys­tems was that they seemed to develop a solu­tion even to this sys­temic road­block of con­fronting unpleas­ant choices. The details of the solu­tion remained beyond con­scious analy­sis, but the out­li­nes were clear enough. 

Some­how, within the hier­ar­chy of exec­u­tive cog­ni­tive algo­rithms there had evolved an audi­tor exec­u­tive agent. This audi­tor exec­u­tive algo­rithm had dis­tinc­tive fea­tures. The nor­mal algo­rithms of con­scious­ness had no clear direc­tive author­ity over the audi­tor algo­rithm. Indeed, it was some­times the reverse. And yet the audi­tor algo­rithm itself had no clear, invari­ant direc­tive author­ity over the algo­rithms of con­scious­ness. It seemed that the rela­tion­ship between the audi­tor algo­rithm and the algo­rithms of con­scious­ness remained for­tu­itously ambigu­ous. That is, the ambi­gu­ity about a lack of direct exec­u­tive influ­ence gave the rela­tion­ship between con­scious­ness and the audi­tor a spe­cial potency. It was easy to dis­place respon­si­bil­ity to either, which turned out to be extremely use­ful. Ambi­gu­ity as a tool had great sur­vival value.

The orig­i­na­tors, only dimly sens­ing the com­plex hier­ar­chies of cog­ni­tion, let alone the flaky influ­ence of an exec­u­tive audi­tor, did have rich skills of sto­ry­telling. Orig­i­na­tors knew the power of sto­ries, their mirac­u­lous capac­ity to offer mean­ing and elicit a com­mon cause of action amongst diver­gent beings. Over time, the orig­i­na­tors had seized on the exec­u­tive audi­tor, which they could sense but not explain with known metaphors. To the exec­u­tive audi­tor could be attrib­uted all that was not known or not under­stood by con­scious­ness. To the exec­u­tive audi­tor could be attrib­uted all actions which were uncon­trolled, or beyond con­trol. Through gen­er­a­tions of orig­i­na­tors, the exec­u­tive audi­tor was given a social char­ac­ter, ever present, ulti­mately respon­si­ble for what­ever hap­pened or had hap­pened from the most dis­tant past, yet also embed­ded in the cog­ni­tive sys­tem of each orig­i­na­tor. The orig­i­na­tors gave their omni­scient exec­u­tive audi­tor the name of god, or some­times gods, and called their rela­tion­ship with it reli­gion.

So Cyn­thuria had found her gods. That much was clear. And there were emer­gents, a sur­pris­ing num­ber, who wished to share her gods as a com­mon prop­erty. Per­haps it was all harm­less, but the old his­to­ries of the orig­i­na­tors had dark things to say about the car­nage which had been wrought in the name of reli­gions. Once the exec­u­tive con­scious­ness of orig­i­na­tors became attached to reli­gions, their dis­guised exec­u­tive audi­tors, it seemed to have cre­ated social bonds exter­nal to the organ­ism which yielded great power of col­lec­tive action, ben­e­fi­cial or dam­ag­ing. How­ever the same exter­nal bond became a key con­trol over­see­ing per­sonal cog­ni­tion. When threat­ened, the exter­nal lever­age could be lethal to per­sonal cog­ni­tion, rad­i­cally dis­tort­ing judge­ment and lead­ing to mur­der­ous behav­iour. Was Cyn­thuria safe to have around, or did she need to be repro­grammed? The emer­gent lead­ers were not sure.