From jbauer@noodle.hi-line.net Thu Sep 3 16:48:08 1998 Date: Sun, 30 Aug 1998 16:26:01 -0600 (MDT) From: Jim Bauer To: lucy_ogden@yahoo.com Subject: the sociobiology of religion (fwd) Dear Little Lucinda: Here is another rainbow for your hair: the following forward, as noted in the text, is an essay I sent to all my brothers with e-mail about some of my ideas on religion. Hopefully, the ideas aren't too abstract as it was intended for a sophisticated audience. Though I suppose you're very sophisticated. If you would be so kind and good to interleave comments thru-out the text, I'll post it on the web. I'm also planning to put some of my artwork on the net. Stay tuned for future installments of SLIME-THING COMIX. And so it goes. (Do you realize I'm Curt Vague&Nuts and wrote VENUS ON THE HALF-SHELL, but lost all the buckadingdongs in the lawsuit?) Nicotine-free Jim ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 29 Aug 1998 16:10:50 -0600 (MDT) From: Jim Bauer To: jbauer@sas.upenn.edu Cc: jbauer@mcs.net Subject: the sociobiology of religion (fwd) To my brothers: The folloing is an elaborate essay I sent Joe, which he probably won't respond to, as it's not about computers, he thinks I'm too ignorant to understand his religion (they deliberately refuse the mentally ill from joining they're religion as "they can't handle it") and, although he knows a lot about computers, he knows very little about evolutionary biology or philosophy of science--which, ironically, was taught me by an engineer. I'd like this commented on and returned as I want to post the ideas on the web. Even putting it in the public domain would be OK as I am not concerned with starting a new religion or making money from the essay. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 15:41:14 -0600 (MDT) From: Jim Bauer To: "Joseph H. Bauer" Subject: the sociobiology of religion Dear Joe: Just out of curiousity, I checked out the Eck home page. Here is an essay I've written on the subject. If you write back with comments, I'll post it on my home page. As far as what I believe goes, all religion, as with all social behavior, can be explained thru evolutionary biology. I realize you've probably had no formal training in sociobiology, as with philosophy of science, particularly philosophical psychology, but I must inform you that the metaphysics in this regard are particularly materialistic. Or, as Daniel Dennet says in CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINED on Cartesian dualism: "How can a system with no mass or energy (the soul/mind) interact with a system that does (the brain) without violating all the laws of physics?" The only way I can understand this quandary is to resort to pantheism, as justified by Gordon G. Globus thru generalized complementarity. My own beliefs also highly resemble Ernst Haeckel's "monistic religion," in which materialism and pantheism are the obverse side of the same coin. This scientific pantheism (non-science but drawing on metaphors from it) can also be justified thru Wimsatt's cognitive-adaptive identity hypothesis. The root-metaphor of evolutionary epistemology is that any evolutionary system possesses three basic properties: heritability, mutation and a selection process. This is also true of mind, where heritability is memory, mutation is new ideas, and selection processes are decisions. The point here is that all evolutionary processes follow the same laws, whether biological or otherwise. If evolution is radically reduced to cybernetics, change in information over time due to selection processes, most physical entities would be both cognitive and adaptive, therefore, the Evolution of the All is the Thought of God. To preserve the Gnostic root-metaphor of the cosmological relationship of God and the Universe (the theological counterpart to the mind-body problem), I believe that the only transcendent spirit is that of the Void, which is an Imaginary Being: as with the idea of imaginary numbers, there must be some being whose negation is nothing and not something--which transcendence creates an infinitely complex system out of the cosmos; the only definition of God I can accept is an infinitely complex system. This is also a statement that can be taken as either a metaphor or a literal statement. This is in keeping with my own mystical experience of the death-rebirth experience from within a gnostic/nihilistic perspective; thus, I'm inclined to take the Nag Hammadi Library as scripture. In my opinion, the death-rebirth experience is the component of the collective unconscious which proscribes the root-metaphors of all religion: life after death. The explanation here is inclusive fitness, which also creates kin altruism. Kin act alruistically, even to the point of their own death, because they share genes with each other. This is why insect societies are so highly organized; they're haploidiploid and the workers share 3/4 of their genes, not 1/2 like diploid species. Having death-rebirth experiences while near death simply erases fear of death, making them selected for. Such an evolutionary entity is undoubtedly very ancient and as such, contains a lot of noise from the environmental background. Also, the "legally dead" who come back reporting marvels do so because it takes time to have an elaborate hallucinatory experience. Furthermore, to explain "sound and light," the religious and artistiv components of the collective unconscious are allied as both were sacrosanct in tribal societies, the only social group with enough historical duration for their information-content to be encoded as aarchetypes by the Baldwin effect. So they're tied together at that level, as well. In addition, "magic" is metaphor: to cope with its environment, an organism with a sufficiently complex brain needs a concept of cause and effect, and that also evolves. For example, the alchemists used to make crystallized antimony which, because of a star-like shape, they referred to as a "star regulus." Antimony was believed to be an imperfect form of the philosopher's stone, hence it is rendered by the symbol of a green lion. Regulus translates from Latin as "little king," and there's a green star called Regulus in the constellation Leo. This in turn connects with astrological symbolism; the best time to make your star regulus is when Leo is in ascension. I think this fairly well demonstrates that magic embodies a notion separate from causality which Jung dubbed "synchronicity." For me, synchronicity is the transcendence of the Void, and there is Void in all things--the complexity I was talking about. Returning to the idea of evolution of causality as a perceiving system, it would be modulated by sexual selection, thus, Freudianism and Rankianism (Otto Rank postulated return to the womb memories) are innate as sexual metaphors projected onto the environment. Innate Rankianism is also another component of the death-rebirth phenomenon. Again, let me know how you feel about all this. Nicotine-free Jim