Comment 120 by Helga Vierich

Well i see this has been a pretty freewheeling discussion, zeroing in on organized religion as if this were the real issue in the greatest of human tragedies and injustices.

I am completely with you in this observation and your subsquent comments. The undeniable fact of the increasingly negative effects of mainstream religions (post say 600BCE) appears too often here to be a solution seeking out ever more problems to explain away. This is poor science and poor reasoning.

If people feel they will be modded of for failing to finger religion at every turn, they can at least find some common roots between the two, noting, for instance, that outgroup identification (a cognitive mechanism) probably preceded and helped form both ( that is, genocide and religion) and probably evolved to moderate our crude and exploitable (affective) kin detection mechanisms.

For me the simple measure of a society's likelihood of turning to the dark side is the concentration of psychopaths in power. Allowing a critical mass of these people to seize control of the levers of power-

a) removes them substantially from any corrective civilising views encouraging a maxing out of the "dark" idea.

b) creates an impression in the populace that the "dark" idea must be reasonable if so many clever people endorse it.

The very power of society to create a rich and productive culture comes from our overwhelming propensity to do as we're told. We must not expect the libertarian pipedream that every man and women can be a free and dissenting hero to be in anyway achievable. (It is interesting, however, that the populace are often co-opted into evil by painting them and their support as heroic.. A hero already indeed. No need for any more heroics.)

Comment 79 by DavidMcC

Perhaps I shouldn't have chosen such a contentious idea as metaphotical brains and embodied cognition, but I wanted an attribute required by a Shakespeare and in quick measure create an idea of how that would necessarily be an evolved attribute. Metaphorical brains fit the bill quite well and the SA blog was an easy chatty intro to the idea.

Embodied cognition is still only barely more scientific than the concept of memes. However, I think both will have their day once we start to think smaller about the reach of each concept and allow them to grow outwards from a firmer base. (Memes stand a very good chance of becoming proper science once we restrict them to defining movements, gestures and expressions. Such mechanical copying is easily detectable and has recently acquired a rich neurological explanation for its specificly heightened occurrence in humans.) Embodied cognition is a little further down the track, suffering a little now from the initial funding requirement of overclaiming for what is in its reach, but finding a growing number of supporters. I can't find the specific PDFs by Damasio that I wanted to link to at present (and its probably best not to take this thread too far off down a tangent), but in the interim here is a TED talk by Daniel Wolpert to hurry us a little way down another. At the start it notes the important reason for us to have brains at all is NOT so we can have thoughts and the like, but so we can move reliably. This would be the sort of brain to evolve abstract thinking as a synaesthetic/metaphorical development from a wiring system devised for the physical. (The rest of the talk is further off track still but shows how movement management is related to ticklishness...)

the brain does all the mental effort, surely.

Indeed so. But the fact that our recent physical history directly and predictably changes our value judgements, tells us that those value judgements are linked to a dynamic reference point also linked to our physical disposition and its recent past. (A beggar must be literaly abject [thrown down] in contrast to ourselves to earn most money from us. Looking destitute at the top of some steps earns them less than at the bottom. etc.)

That last "allotted task" should have been proto-allotted task.

Comment 75 by jimblake

Whilst the root of "evolve" does simply mean to roll (out) from (and I have to agree that the second law of thermodynamics is the driver for complexity, complexity being the fastest route to the heat death of the universe) I cannot find it in me to ascribe purpose at this level. Physical forces balance at every instant, by everything, on everything, and identity of artifacts in any sense requires observers to confer it. The shallow pan of water, slowed only by inertia, forms the hexagonal convection cell pattern that optimises heat transfer as soon as heat is applied. An evolved replicator cannot so assiduously respond to its environment. It has a legacy of behaviours it must carry until its demise. I am arguing this per-generation "quantisation" of behaviours and the inevitable approximate nature of their subsequent modifications, nets purpose over the generations. It is also the start of identity and agency.

For me thermodynamics is not a "proto-purpose" as it permeates the behaviours of everything. Homeostasis by contrast is the essential driver of behaviours within an identifiable packet of stuff and and as such over the generations can come to purposefully diverge, albeit briefly, from the mere "allotted task" of the heat death.