Cognitive Thrift 56 – Angels
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/02/01
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There’s some other relevant things to the human organism. We have such – I think one of the markers of our tremendous cognitive capacity with respect to acting in the world are statistics on beliefs that are housed in the brain, brought forth by the brain of course, that are completely detached from the world. By which I mean, they are detached from –
Rick Rosner: You mean like ghosts.
Jacobsen: Not just ghosts.
Rosner: Angels.
Jacobsen: Angels, heaven and hell, a bearded man in the sky; sensory information to confirm these is pretty important thing. Yet, most people most of the time tend to believe them.
Rosner: What that tells me is that such beliefs don’t have much daily relevance, they’re compact beliefs. You don’t need much brain power relative to the human brain to not believe some non sense, but that kind of non-sense does not take much cognition, doesn’t hurt your cognition, and it doesn’t affect your daily activities. And also because of our success as a species, we do have a little slack to believe non-sense, but beliefs are often and usually separate from actions.
Dogs don’t have any beliefs, and animals as far as we know don’t have any spiritual beliefs, except maybe vague feelings of rightness and wrongness of their place in the world. That might be a stretch, but they are able to function competently without any beliefs about their place in the world.
Non-sense is non-sense. There are junk genes that are just floating around.
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