Farhad Dastur 3
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Atheist (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/11
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Off tape, you were discussing and teaching me more about some of the specifics around type one and type two errors. This has relationships to the deep history of species in terms of evolutionary perspectives. How does this tie into religious faith in Canada?
Farhad Dastur: Well, maybe I’ll just provide a little bit of context of what I mean by type one type two errors in the context of evolutionary history. This is the notion that animal minds and where animals are biased towards making type one errors over type two errors where a type one error is saying that something exists when in fact it doesn’t and the type two error is failing to detect something that exists when in fact it does. So, because nature is a dangerous place; that sounds kind of simplistic. The world is a dangerous place in the sense and it’s a difficult place, it’s a challenging place because you’re constantly trying to solve problems of survival and reproduction, finding something to eat while simultaneously being avoid being eaten, avoiding illness and disease, avoiding being socially manipulated by members of your own species or perhaps even other species, finding shelter from the elements, etc. Let’s say that in most context if you think something is bad for you but you’re not sure, it’s probably prudent to act like it is. So, there’s going to be a certain kind of neophobia around novel foods because that food could be yummy and that’s a good source of calories or it could be poisonous in your death. Which problem is worse? Going hungry in the search for food or immediately dying? That noise in the forest could be a predator tracking you or it could be a branch falling but in terms of the design of your perceptual systems and your reaction to that information; does it make sense to continue munching the leaves or does it make sense to flee?
The deer that flees lives again but the deer that says “Eh, it’s probably just a branch,” every now and then will make a mistake. So, now making a huge inferential leap and compressing many generations; what does this have to do with relationship? I think in the sense that religion is a way is many things but one of the things that is, is a way of explaining the world and providing you with an answer to what is otherwise confusing. And confusion for every species is dangerous because it means you are not extracting the full potential of resources and knowledge and information that’s in the environment if you can’t make sense of it. Religion makes sense of the environment. It’s just that it does so in a way that’s not scientific and therefore in many cases especially in a complex technological world doesn’t make sense or it’s counterproductive but I think in in many contexts it’s very reassuring. It probably does get it right in a sloppy kind of way. So, if there’s lightning and thunder and the religion tells you the gods are angry so we should take shelter and let the anger rage out and maybe provide a sacrifice… well, you probably survive because you’re doing that but you don’t know why you’re doing that but the behaviour was one that did protect you and then you survive longer and you say “Yeah this is working.”
So, in that sense, religion is providing that type one analysis. It’s giving you patterned answers to a confusing world because that’s the way our minds are designed.
Jacobsen: Are there aspects of religion that have a sufficient fidelity with the actual world, accuracy with the real world that they don’t require too much push back against?
Dastur: Wow! I haven’t thought about that one deeply enough. I mean there may be some with regards to prohibitions against marrying people who are too genetically close to you. Religion doesn’t understand the genetic reasons for doing that but it understands the phenotypic consequences of doing that. You get mutations or congenital defects or miscarriages or various problems. It’s not like religion is bad, it’s just that it was the best we had before we had the scientific process or other ways of testing and being critical and deepening our understanding of the world. So, I would say probably that would be a good place where religion gets it mostly.
Jacobsen: How does this apply to people’s interpretations even up to high scholarly level in graduate schools of religious texts. So, you make this assumption that there is an afterlife and that this particular text will give you guidance on how to get there and then when you’re doing interpretation of it.
Dastur: Well, I think this speaks to the culture wars that’s happening most prominently in United States but in many places in Western education and really, it’s a question of how do we talk about different world views. So, while honouring them and I don’t know that there’s an easy way to do this… so, I came back from the Amazon Forest recently with students on a field school and the Shaman who had guided us into the forest and was teaching in us about the magical plants, the supernatural powers that can be derived from various combinations of plants understood this to simply be the way the world works. For many indigenous people there is no distinction between the natural and the supernatural world. It’s just the world and you either have access to going deeper into that world and if you do, we call it supernatural because magical things happen to our perceptions but to them it’s just normal.
So, the question was asked how do you create ayahuasca? How did the indigenous people know to create ayahuasca when it’s the combination of two entirely different species of plants that need to be prepared separately and then put together in a unique kind of way in order to get the effect? And in the absence of having pharmacology and ethnobotany; how would you know that these two plants would go together? He explained it kind of in a way that made us feel like he thought we were silly for even asking the question by saying well the plants told him. They spoke to him as to which plant should go in which plant. Now that’s a profoundly different worldview than biology is based on and yet it worked. And how do you square that? So many of their remedies work within a social cultural context of their community in that place, in that time. And so, I think as creative and critical thinkers coming from a western sceptical tradition, we can dismiss this too quickly but we can also embrace it too unthinkingly and there’s a middle path where, I don’t know what you call that path, but it’s a path that honours and respects indigenous ways of knowing alternative ways of knowing from other cultures while at the same time not abandoning this grand scientific activity that has also been very powerful but has not been a complete way of understanding the world.
Jacobsen:Thank you for your time, Farhad.
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