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The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct

Jun 06, 2021
Thank you. It is a great pleasure to see you all here tonight. The festival has had conversations about science and religion over the years. Maybe some of you have reached one of those. And often there are two sides represented in that conversation and sometimes the two sides, you know, science and religion, sometimes they are contentious, sometimes they are harmonious, but tonight we are doing something different. We really only have one side here tonight. So, the group of people who will participate in this discussion are all scientists. They all come from the background of science, but our goal is to see if by walking this side, this trajectory of science, we can gain some illumination on the other side.
the believing brain evolution neuroscience and the spiritual instinct
From the side of religion to the side of faith. Before I introduce our esteemed group of panelists, I just want to set a little context, and to do so, I'll start with something that's probably familiar to many of you. This is what a beautiful star-studded midnight sky looks like in New York City. Now I also have a little cabin in upstate New York, in the Catskill Mountains, and when I'm there and there's a nice dark night sky, I can look up and see something that looks like this. Maybe not just like that. For this you need a Hubble space telescope, you know?
the believing brain evolution neuroscience and the spiritual instinct

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the believing brain evolution neuroscience and the spiritual instinct...

But you get the idea and when you see a wonderful sky like this, you can't help but wonder: how does it all work? How did it all come about? And I've spent part of my professional life trying to advance scientific understanding of some of these questions, and because I work on the more mathematical side of physics, when I look up, I tend to see order and harmony in a peculiar language. The language of mathematics, a language of symbols. But, for many others, when they look at a sky like that, other things come to mind, right? Ideas of soul, of eternity, of divinity, of God.
the believing brain evolution neuroscience and the spiritual instinct
And for some, that kind of conversation feels a little vague or lazy. For some, it is even unpleasant. But when you look at the data, you see something absolutely remarkable, right here in the 21st century, the modern technological era and we long ago cracked the atom, explored the surface of Mars, detected gravitational waves and much more. There are still many of us who are believers. So if we look at some of the numbers, approximately 2.2 billion of us identify as Christians. About 1.7 billion are Muslims. Hindus, Buddhists, that gives us another two billion, plus if we add my little tribe, it's about 14 million, right?
the believing brain evolution neuroscience and the spiritual instinct
And then if we add the atheists, this brings us to one and a half billion, which is equivalent to saying that there are many people on this planet who would look at the sky and think about heaven. So if aliens were able to descend on planet Earth, and let's say they had some wonderful equipment that would allow them to detect religious beliefs, to give us a sort of heat map of faith, this is what our planet would look like. You can probably figure out the color scheme yourself. Blue is Protestant, red is Catholic, etc. You get the idea.
We are a religious planet. Personally, I am not religious in any conventional sense, but I do consider myself

spiritual

and I certainly consider myself curious. One thing I'm certainly increasingly curious about is why do we believe? Now, the simplest answer is that we have religious beliefs because what religion tells us is true. That raises a lot of challenges that we're all familiar with and perhaps the most relevant to tonight's discussion is that there are over 4,000 different religions practiced on Earth and if we take just one of them, let's say we look at Christianity a In more detail, there are more than 33,000 different denominations.
Not everyone can be right. So the natural assumption is that at most one of them is right, which would mean that if Sarah here, happy in her own beliefs, thereby denies the beliefs of everyone else, like Terrik here, who again, happy in his own faith, denies the validity of all the others and that is true for Pim and for Ofryim and also for Amalyia and it is even true for, let's say this guy here, Richard, who not only denies the validity of all the other beliefs, but which denies the validity of all the others. beliefs. We may be a

believing

planet, but most of us deny the validity of most beliefs, which means that even if Sarah clings to her religion because it's true, she still needs to explain why everyone else clings to theirs. own wrong beliefs.
And that goes for everyone else. This brings us to a simple but notable conclusion. Normally, in the discussion of science and religion, it all comes down to what is right, what is wrong, what is true, and what is false. But here we see that even if a given religion is true, it hardly changes the issue at all. We still have to ask ourselves why so many of us have a tendency to believe. We have to ask ourselves what it is about the human species that drives us to find order and meaning and, in particular, to find the turn toward the supernatural so absolutely naturally.
In 1936, this guy here, Albert Einstein, wrote a letter to a schoolgirl named Phyllis who had asked Einstein about his own religious beliefs. Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifested in the laws of the universe. One that is far superior to that of man. In this way, the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special kind that is surely very different from the religiosity of someone more naive. Much has been made of Einstein's use of this phrase, religious feeling, but his later writings made it very clear that he was talking about an abstract

spiritual

ity, not a conventional religion.
The word of God is, for me, nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses. The Bible is a collection of honorable legends, but still primitive and yet quite childish. No interpretation, however subtle, can, for me, change this. Charles Darwin, the father of

evolution

by natural selection, admitted the possibility of God. I have never denied the existence of God. I believe that the theory of

evolution

is totally compatible with faith in God. I believe that the greatest argument in favor of the existence of God is the impossibility of demonstrating and understanding that the immense universe, sublime above all measure and man, was the result of chance.
At the same time, Darwin also pointed out that a religious belief, a religious sensibility, could arise from the interaction between biological and cultural evolution. Nor should we overlook the probability that the constant inculcation of belief in God in the minds of children produces such a strong and perhaps inherited effect on their

brain

s, not yet fully developed, that they would find it so difficult to get rid of that belief. belief. on God as if a monkey got rid of his

instinct

ive fear and hatred of a snake. The Dalai Lama has his own iconic perspective on these issues.
Both Buddhism and modern science shared a deep suspicion toward any notion of absolutes, whether conceptualized as a transcendent being, as an eternal and immutable principle like the soul, or as a fundamental substratum of reality. Both Buddhism and science prefer to explain the evolution and emergence of the cosmos and life in terms of the complex interrelationships of natural laws of cause and effect. From a methodological perspective, both traditions emphasize the role of empiricism. In Buddhist investigation of reality, at least in principle, empirical evidence should trump scriptural authority, no matter how deeply revered a scripture may be. Years ago I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with the Dalai Lama at an event that took place in Texas and I had the opportunity to ask him a question.
The question I was asked was, "Look, there are all these books arguing that what we're doing in modern physics is somehow a recapitulation or reflection of ideas that ultimately find their origin in Eastern religious thought." ". ". Then I asked him: "Is this true? Is this your perspective?" And he said very frankly, "Look, when it comes to questions of consciousness, that's where we have something to offer science." But he said, "When it comes to understanding fundamental laws and particles and all those details about how the world really works," he said, "we have to turn to science." So it was kind of a remarkable moment where this great spiritual leader showed this remarkable, broad acceptance of science.
At the same time At the same time, there are great scientists who show a similar embrace of religious thought. Here is the Nobel Prize winner, William Phillips. The thing is, there are many scientists who see no difficulty in taking their science and their faith seriously. I know many others, and you've seen the statistics that support that idea, but there's still a common misperception in society that this is not the case. And here's Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. I think most of the People are comfortable with the idea that science is a reliable way to learn about nature, but it is not the whole story and there is also a place for religion, faith, theology and philosophy.
But that perspective of harmony does not receive as much attention. I'm afraid that no one is as interested in harmony as in conflict. In 2015, the Pew Research Foundation found that the percentage of Americans who agreed with the statement that science and religion are often in conflict, they found that agreement with that was almost 60% and, again, so It's how the conversation is framed. Science versus religion. That's an important question. It may appear here tonight, but it is not the focus of what we are talking about here tonight. And so we ask ourselves: can we use science to illuminate religion?
Can we understand why people have the need to turn to a power that is beyond themselves, beyond the laws of physics? Is that need written in our DNA? Natural selection for that kind of worldview, right? Why does this world have so many

brain

s that want to believe? That is the question. And to address this issue, try to get an idea, we have a great group of thinkers and now I would like to bring them to the stage. Our first participant is a professor emerita at the College of William and Mary, where she taught anthropology for 28 years, and the author of numerous books, including Personalities on the Plate, How Animals Grieve, and Evolving God.
Please join me in welcoming our first guest...Barbara King on the fly. Our next guest is a research scientist at New York University Langone Medical Center. He is also a professor of cognitive and affective

neuroscience

at New York University and co-founded the Nonduality Institute, where he is the principal research scientist. Please join me in welcoming

neuroscience

, Zoran Josipovic. Also with us tonight is a distinguished university professor of psychology at Northeastern University with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Mass General Hospital. In addition to the book How Emotions Are Made, he has published more than 100 scholarly articles.
Please join me in welcoming Lisa Barrett. Very good, finally. Our guest is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and best-selling author of books including How the Mind Works and The Language Instinct, a pioneer and advocate of evolutionary psychology, named one of Time magazine's 100. Most influential people, welcome Steven Pinker. Okay, so we're going to have a pretty free discussion here, where we're going to try to address some of these questions and we're going to organize the discussion into three parts, broadly speaking. A sort of trinity of parts, appropriate for tonight's debate.
Let's talk about some of the history of religious beliefs. Let's talk about longevity, the fact that this is something that has been with us for some time. Then we'll focus on the benefits, if any, of this type of way of interacting with the world. What I'd like to do before we start, if you don't mind, especially since it's a nice small group, it's good to have an idea of ​​where people are coming from in this type of discussion, so if we could more or less go one by one , just give us an idea of ​​where... We'll do it...
If you don't mind, and it's not necessary, but if you're willing to do it. share it, just a couple words about where you come from on the religious spectrum. Steven, are you willing to say just a few words? Do you mean our own beliefs personally? If you do not mind. It is not necessary, but if you are willing to do it. Yes. Well, I don't believe in the existence of supernatural entities, including God, souls, spirits, genies, demons, etc. I'm a... I belong to the same tribe as you. I'm Jewish and I appreciate a lot of the iconography, the traditions, the community of myself and other cultural groups, but that doesn't mean you have to subscribe to the content, and I don't.
Good. Lisa. I'd say Steve summed it up pretty well for me as well. We practice some rituals in our house like, I don't know, not exactlyarchaeological artifacts, but they're artifacts of the past, you know? If we decide to light candles on Friday night, I'll use candlesticks that my great-grandmother brought back from Russia and people have been doing this for over 5,000 years, and that's significant. I also think Judaism is an interesting moral code that somehow...emphasizes behavior more than intention, which is appealing to us in some ways. I would say that we are... colloquially we are atheists like... definitely in our house, although we have trappings, as I said, of ritual in the way that I described.
Yes. Zoran. I was raised an atheist, but then I discovered that my family actually believed in scientism. Science has an answer for everything. It's a form of religion, I think for some people. Personally, I have practiced meditation for over 35 years and am most interested in these mystical unitary states are what we know as consciousness where people experience either unitary consciousness alone or experienced unitary consciousness. I'm interested in what it does to a person and what it does to the brain. Good. Barbara. Growing up in New Jersey, I was raised Presbyterian and spent quite a bit of time in the church.
I also know how to identify myself as an atheist. When I travel, I am drawn to churches, to sit in the stillness of a church and contemplate the art and architecture. I think it's a beautiful part of our history, but I do it as an atheist. And for my own sense of spirituality, I go to a Springsteen concert. Good. So, you know, there are some curious human behaviors that seem unusual to us, like, I think... I don't know to what extent this is true, but it is said that Beethoven always dipped his head in a bucket of water. ice water every morning.
It is said that Ben Franklin stood naked in front of an open window every morning. Nikola Tesla, you know, a great champion and an iconic scientific figure, apparently used to curl his toes a hundred times every night before he went to sleep. So you listen to them, you raise your eyebrows, it's something curious, etc. But we don't feel the need to explain that kind of behavior, but when it's behavior that is widespread and that lasts for thousands of years, then it seems like it deserves an explanation and that's why we're having this conversation here tonight. Maybe it starts with you, Barbara.
When I hear the word faith or religion, my mind automatically goes to one of the major religions practiced in the world today. Is that too limiting of you? Yes, I think it is a very natural vision, but anthropologically speaking, if we made that map of the world with heat sensors, we would see people who not only believe in God, or do not believe in God, but also many, There are many people who believe in Gods, plural, forest spirits, worship ancestors or have an enormous variety of beliefs. So I think broadening our view to understand that there are many ways, not only in the past but also now, to believe is a very useful starting point.
Now, you have also done work in which you have gone beyond this species, right? Absolutely. My work is with animals and there is a fascinating conversation now about whether it is reasonable to suggest that animals other than ourselves have a sense of spirituality or religiosity and there is a very vigorous debate going on. You know, Jane Goodall was the first person to suggest, as far as I know, that chimpanzees may be spiritual. But this continues for decades. This is not my opinion. I am not suggesting that chimpanzees are spiritual or religious. Where I come in is to suggest that their behavior is an evolutionary platform, so that what we see in our closest living relative gives us an understanding of the building blocks of what later became our religiosity.
So we know that chimpanzees, for example at a waterfall, can show what we might understand as a sense of wonder and awe. We know that chimpanzees can take another's perspective through theory of mind. We know that they can show empathy, compassion, that they have their own rituals and their own rules. And that's why I think we wouldn't be where we are today without our primate past, which includes, of course, not only living apes, but also, I imagine, what we'll talk about later: other human ancestors. The first Homo sapiens, the Neanderthals. So, just as culture evolved, language evolved, and technology evolved, I think the human religious imagination evolved.
So, Steve, part of what we're doing here is trying to think about behavior and thinking about evolution and how they can interact with each other, and I know the field of evolution in psychology is dedicated to trying to do that kind of thing. connections are precise. Can you give us an idea of ​​what evolutionary psychology actually does and how it can give us insight into these types of questions? Well, the brain, like other complex organs, owes its non-random organization to natural selection. That if there are circuits in the brain that accomplish improbable feats, then natural selection is the explanation for how they got wired the way they are.
And we are going to ask various psychological characteristics if they are adaptations. That is, if our ancestors' chances of reproduction increased. For many psychological characteristics, that's pretty easy to do. It is no mystery why we see in stereo, because it is... for many reasons, highly adaptable to get an idea of ​​the third dimension. Why we are repulsed by types of substances that are likely to transmit disease. Why we find certain partners sexually attractive. For religion, it is a religious belief. For supernatural beliefs, it is not so obvious. I don't think there is any accepted theory that religious belief, per se, is an adaptation.
Rather, it may be a byproduct of other adaptations. In particular, the ability to attribute minds to other people. We literally can't get into people's heads. The mind is invisible, colorless, odorless and tasteless, but we could not survive as social beings unless we assume that other people have a mind like ours. We interpret their behavior in terms of their beliefs and desires. From there, it may be a small step to attributing minds to entities that are not other human beings, such as trees, rivers, and wind, in which case we call it animism. We attribute minds to inanimate entities, to our own artifacts, in which case we call it idolatry.
Or no particular piece of matter, in which we call it... in case we call it spiritualism. Disembodied souls and spirits and parental entities that have no material existence, but have something that we naturally attribute to each other. So it would be an extension. One would then have to explain why the adaptation of attributing minds to others, sometimes called theory of mind, or mentalizing or mind reading, or intuitive psychology, should be so easy to overextend to entities that are not actually brains. And there, part of the answer comes from experience: what kind of input do we have in living our lives that makes this belief enjoyable?
Several anthropologists have noted that before the advent of modern neuroscience, the idea that minds can exist independently of brains was not so far-fetched. In fact, there is some compelling empirical data. I think Edward Tyler was the originator of this observation that when we dream, for example, it's clear that part of us is awake, walking through the world, and our body is in bed the whole time. A natural hypothesis is that our... some place of experience is not bound to the body, but can be separated from it. Or in death, if someone suddenly collapses, he may look identical to how he was a few minutes ago, but something seems to have left the body of him that perked up shortly before.
And reflections in still water, shadows, seem to capture the essence of a person, including their activity, their expressions, their goal-directed actions. And again, divorced from the actual piece of meat. If you are in a trance from lack of sleep, fever, or a drug, the experience is that your mind can separate from your body. So if we combine those experiences with our natural habit of attributing minds, it is not unreasonable to think that minds can exist separately from bodies. Now we know better. We know that the brain is the site of experience, that there are many ways in which the brain can be vulnerable to illusions, dreams being an obvious case.
There is brain activity when we sleep and that is why we experience things. But before modern neuroscience, it wasn't such a far-fetched belief. Another ingredient is that our beliefs depend on other people, on experts. I believe many things that I have no basis for

believing

in my own experience. Like quantum physics. Yes, like superstrings. I really believe... Do you believe in superstrings? I do it, because very intelligent people tell me they exist and I trust them. I'm not saying they exist. May exist. That they may exist. I give a non-zero probability of that. That opens up a niche for people to market all kinds of beliefs about unobservable entities, including gods, messiahs, demons, etc., and a whole series of questions that I won't talk about now are: what are the incentives for providers? ? of supernatural beliefs?
What is there for them in getting other people to believe in gods, souls and spirits? There are many reasons, but that's the other part of the story. Now let's assume that the overactive assignment of agency to the world is better than a hypoactive version of it, right? If you are walking and there is a rock and you think it has a mind, so be it, but if you are walking and there is a snake and you don't believe it has a mind, you don't believe it. I don't think I can attack you, that's probably not a good thing.
So, evolutionarily speaking, presumably this hyperactive allocation of agency has adaptive value. Possibly. It's not so clear. If it involves making sacrifices that are ultimately irrational, if it involves being manipulated by others, maybe not. But it may be that the overall benefit of being able to attribute minds outweighs the cost in cases where others can exploit us. In the case of animals, of course, animals really do have minds, so it's not crazy. In fact, many... In some hunter-gatherer peoples, they attribute enormous amounts of intentionality to the animals they hunt, and rightly so, because the animals are really trying to escape from them for the same reason we try to escape from threats.
So that degree of extension is not so far-fetched. It is when it comes to rocks, rivers, mountains, trees and wind, that it becomes more problematic. Good. So, Lisa, what's your take in terms of whether or not on some level we're prepared to believe is that an important part of the equation? I think it actually is. When we say... When you ask if we're programmed to have beliefs, I think that can mean a couple of different things, right? So in a sense, you could say, well, every brain, actually every brain on this planet, to some extent, is programmed to make predictions about what will happen next based on what has happened in the past.
So brains are not programmed to react to things in the world, but to predict. It is metabolically efficient to predict. Physiologically, most of the biological systems we have in the body are predictive to some extent. And so, if you mean... A lot of people talk about predictions where... When I say prediction I mean that our brains, for example, change the activation of their own neurons before sensory information reaches the brain. This is how you are understanding the words I am speaking to you right now. You have had a lifetime of experience with patterns, encoding patterns of what these sounds refer to and the patterns in their temporal contingencies.
All brains work like this, and if you think that a prediction is like a belief, that scientists write about predictions this way, as if they were beliefs or explanations that are preemptively offered to anticipate and explain incoming sensory stimuli, then yes , we are wired. You could say that another way we are wired is that... But that's to believing things presumably that are demonstrably true. That's belief anyway, right? So the idea that the brain is programmed to predict rather than react is a general explanation, it's a general computational approach to understanding meaning-making of any kind. So that means giving meaning to the fluctuating changes in light, which you experience as visions, as vision.
It involves making sense of fluctuating changes in air pressure, which are experienced as sounds. And it's also giving meaning to changes that occur over a longer period of time... longer, temporary sensory changes that we would consider an episode or an event. Little baby brains, you know, newborn brains... A newborn brain is not like a miniature adult brain. It's not completely... the wiring is not completely finished and we... So what babies do to some extent is wait for a set of wiring instructions from the world.The brain waits for certain inputs to be able to connect normally and connects to both the physical circumstances in which it grows and the social circumstances in which it grows.
We encourage it... So, that's the normal look. of brain development that is related to being wired to believe, but we also wire our children to believe in other ways. We please them. In our culture, we allow them to believe in the animability of their blankets, their strollers, and their toys, and some people in this room might believe that their cars have minds, right? So, we do...that's another way that brains can be wired to believe in the sense that development actually influences the wiring of the brain. Then we could also talk about feelings as the root of belief.
That to a certain extent feeling is believing. When you believe... When you feel something very strongly, you are more likely to believe it and feeling is the core of the wiring of our brain, and you could really argue that it is the brain of most mammals. Some people would like to make that argument, make it even earlier. I'll come back to that for Zoran, you've spent some time studying the human brain. Do you think there's evidence that we have... there's an internal physiological predilection for religious beliefs? Yeah, I wouldn't do that as much... Yeah. I think as much as the brain is organized for consciousness, it's organized for spiritual experiences and indirectly for beliefs, as Steve and Lisa pointed out.
I think something happened to us, to our species, right? We don't know when, maybe 3,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago, maybe more. Suddenly, we become aware. We became conscious in a very unique way. It's not just us who have experience, or who have conscious experience, but we know that we are conscious. We implicitly carry the knowledge that we are aware of. We have an expression of religiosity that goes as far back as we have records, you know, about 3,000 years ago, maybe longer actually, but we no longer have records of that, that people were really trying to figure out what this is. .
We are aware, what is it? Who is this person who is conscious? What is conscious within us? And furthermore, what is this universe? The way it appears when we perceive it with the depth of our consciousness, not just with the surface of our mind, but with the deepest part of ourselves. And that leads to a kind of very deep exploration into the nature of the human mind that we have records of. When we look... What I personally feel is a kind of innermost core of religious practices, in practically all religious traditions we find this, these unitary experiences, experiences of consciousness itself.
They can be a very deep mental silence in which all mental processes calm down and then there is total darkness and then within it there is only consciousness. Consciousness itself. It does not think, it does not feel, it does not need to do anything, but it is conscious and it knows that it is conscious in an innate, direct way. You don't have to think. You don't have to take yourself as an object. Only consciousness itself. So, that deeper part of ourselves, if it is suddenly awakened, and within our experience, then the quality of our experience changes dramatically, from this ordinary experience where I am here, I am limited to my body, I am limited. to the surface of my skin, everything that my mind has built and learned throughout my life, who I am, what the world is, how to relate to each other, how I relate to others.
So we have this elaborate model of the personal world inside our head that filters everything you experience. That takes a temporary break, however brief, and suddenly we experience that everything is one reality. An interdependent consciousness, but also at the same time, a consciousness that seems to extend, that is the experience and it is all-encompassing. I think religiosity tried to capture what this is. When theistic religion says that God is both transcendent and immanent in all things. So, in all things. In this experience that we are having here, sitting in this wonderful place, this is the experience that God is transcendent and immanent at the same time.
That's one way to put it, right? I didn't see it that way, but that's very true. So another way of saying it is that we have two sides of our consciousness. One side is the mind that creates experience. The other side is consciousness, which is like a mirror. It simply records what is happening without doing anything to it. The two are different. From this point of view, they are separated by the substrate that is like an unconscious film. Matrix. It actually exists in the universe, they say. No. The interesting thing is that what happens is that when the mind wants to find what consciousness is, it simply finds itself.
You find attention, you find intelligence, and you find vigilance, but you can't... If you don't know how, you can't penetrate through this unconscious substratum. And then he basically concludes that there is no consciousness. It's just a mental process, right? From the point of view of consciousness, what the substrate does is that consciousness cannot recognize itself. He cannot recognize what he is directly, so he experiences himself as a subject who is having experience. From that perspective, spirituality and spiritual beliefs are consciousness trying to find itself. He's trying to figure out what it is. So, Barbara, can you go back to the earliest evidence we have of that kind of internal self-reflection that ultimately we think may have been the seed of religiosity?
The first thing I would like to start and say is that yes, it is true that we attribute intentionality to many animals, but the fact is also that they are intentional. So we certainly don't have a corner in the market for intentionality or consciousness or sentience or any of these other things. But if we are going to talk about the human evolutionary trajectory, we know that our species is about 200,000 years old. Our genus is about 2.4 million years old. So the question is when do we start to see any of these symptoms, so to speak. It is very interesting that there is a cave in South Africa, the Rising Star Cave, which is the home of this human, perhaps ancestor, but hominid in any case, called Homo naledi and apparently there were numerous individuals who were literally dragged by others into an underground chamber. very deep in this cave.
So Rising Star is a very famous project in paleoanthropology and you can often see live feeds of scientists trying to study these chambers and having to crawl through these incredibly small hallways. And yet, we know that approximately 250,000 years ago, people ritually disposed of their dead in a very intentional way, and spent a lot of effort and a lot of energy doing it. The problem becomes: Is that controversial or is that why? Also, the fact that they bring people to the camera is not particularly controversial. The next step... But it was a ritual burial. Exactly. The next step is controversial because of course we have this little problem, which is that belief doesn't fossilize, so we don't know, and we have people, we have a camera, and we have our minds and since we're talking about it, We are always seeking and longing to resolve this.
But isn't it the case that... people from... anthropologists have already discovered, let's say, skeletons of Homo Neanderthals that are... You know, they've been buried and posed in a particular way with things ? around them and then, it's... Like in Sungir, right? Okay, but we're going in sort of order, so I'll start a little before the Neanderthals. This time we have the roots of the Neanderthal populations, but what's fascinating is that the Neanderthal burials don't go back to a hundred thousand years ago or 60,000 years ago at Sungir in Russia, which is a Homo sapiens site that I just mentioned, It is about 27,000 years old. .
So my idea is that, again, we have some glimpses and some intriguing hints, 250,000 years ago. Now, fast forward, let me jump many thousands of years, we have reached the Neanderthals. They are not our ancestors. They are our cousins. We used to say that they lived from 200-odd thousand to 40,000 and then became extinct. We no longer say that because here in the public there are tons of Neanderthal genetic material and many populations, except for some populations in Africa because we didn't have Neanderthals in Africa, we find just as you were saying, Lisa, that there are very intentional burials. with all types of funerary trousseau.
So people didn't just nail people into the ground. They marked the graves as something special. To give you an example, there is a 40,000-year-old child's burial in what is now Spain, with a hearth around it, 60 sets of oryx and bison horns, and a rhinoceros skull. This was a place that mattered. In a certain sense we can consider it a sacred place. The question is: does belief in an afterlife exist? Is there a belief in supernatural beings? How would we know? We are imposing much of our framework on the past. Let's continue moving forward in time, we arrive at rock art.
And, of course, we are familiar with cave paintings. These are not only early Homo sapiens, but also, in some cases, Neanderthals. We know that now. This is a relatively recent discovery, that we are not the only cave painters, but what is fascinating to me is that you have these glorious representations of animals that these people hunted, but in addition to that, some very mystical and fantastic figures. A man with the head of a bird in the Lascaux cave in France. A human who is part bison. Some other figures just wild. So it's not just about people representing the reality that they saw before them, but there is an interest in what is not in front of you, what is not just here and now.
We move fast once again. We're going to Turkey, to this particular temple, perhaps, Gobekli Tepe, which dates back to that period on a hill in Turkey. Huge 50-ton blocks that people moved to a hillside and carved, again, elaborate images, largely of animals. We believe this is a ritual space. Not everyone agrees. This is controversial. But in each case there is a good argument for the possibility of the human brain decoupling from the here and now to think about these questions of the supernatural. And we have clues. We have to move forward in time again before we reach a truly institutionalized religious system.
But again, the reason I think the human religious imagination evolved is because of all these signs above. Well well. I think it's important... I think Barbara is bringing up something really important and that is that we are all talking... We talk fluidly back and forth, as if spirituality and religiosity are identical forms of meaning-making and They really aren't. There are many, many ways to be spiritual. Some involve belief in a supernatural deity with agency, but not all of them do, right? Some of them...sometimes spirituality simply means being filled with awe and wonder at something bigger than yourself, transcending transcendence, like connecting with nature, for example.
As Einstein said in his book. Exactly, and I think... So one way to think about this is that when we talk about the evolution of religious thought or spiritual thought or we talk about the biology of spiritual thought, we have to think about the fact that here we are talking about different psychological characteristics. One has to do with connecting with something in the moment that is bigger than you and could transcend you. An element or characteristic has to do with the explanation, right? Another has to do with the agency. And they may not all have evolved at the same time, or they may not all be meaningful to all people, so maybe everyone in this room has had a spiritual experience.
They may not call it that, but they have had an experience where they have connected with something that is bigger than themselves and that leaves them in awe, but not everyone would take the extra steps of trying to find an explanation in it or trying to find agency in that and so on. But if we focus on beliefs that transcend simply the sense that there is a larger reality that you are a part of and move toward a supernatural belief in things that science wouldn't normally confirm, do you see the potential for adaptive value? , for a progression that would lead to a brain that would have a tendency to do that?
It is difficult to give an adaptive explanation for belief in entities that do not exist. There may be an explanation adapter for the search for explanations that are obviously not infallible and can be misled by lack of evidence, by people who have an interest in promulgating certain explanations. I think the question needs to be addressed not to the content of the beliefs that we associate with particular religions, but simply to particular ways of thinking, but rather ways of interpreting the world, ways in which people influence the beliefs of others. What are the types of things that we can hypothesize and what leaves us vulnerable to hypothesizing that, from the perspective of science, we know may be wrong, but that can nevertheless be very seductive to a mind that isprone to think a certain way? addresses.
So what does your view say about those who have argued that adaptive value is not so much in actually believing in things that perhaps don't exist, but in the cohesion, the group cohesion that that can produce if there are many people who share that belief, do you suddenly have a stronger group bond? Does that have any weight for you? There's a popular theory of evolution that holds that all adaptations are aimed at group cohesion because whenever there's some mysterious aspect of human psychology whose adaptive value isn't clear, people say, "Well, it fosters group cohesion." ". Why do we enjoy music?
The cohesion of the group. Why do we dance? The cohesion of the group. But there are a couple of things wrong with that style of explanation. I am deeply suspicious of the explanation that always says group cohesion. One of them is that, in fact, group cohesion is not what natural selection selects for. Select for gene propagation. Sometimes cohesive groups can help the individuals within them, but if a group is too cohesive, the group could exploit you. You could be cannon fodder. You could be a victim of sacrifice for profit, for group cohesion. But any gene that allowed itself to be exploited by the group would be selected because genes are selected much more quickly than groups.
Also, I think it's too easy to use our own intuition that we like to bond over music, religion, etc., but that in itself is a part of our psychology that needs an explanation. Why would beliefs in invisible entities make a group more coherent? You can't take that for granted. This is as disconcerting to a psychologist as... But we do see, we do see evidence of it, even though we need to explain it. We do, although... supernatural beliefs can also divide a group, it goes without saying. There are religious wars and precisely because... The content of those beliefs is not derived from a shared experience.
They are not things that anyone can just open their eyes and see. These are things they have to tell you. And that means that if different shamans or different priests or imams tell you, you can go to war over those beliefs. That's why I think group cohesion does not seem like a satisfactory explanation of belief. Lisa, do you have a different view on that? I have... yes, I think I have a different opinion or maybe I want to add some information. You can be confrontational. You could just say: Believe me, I have no problem being controversial.
Anyone who knows me knows this to be true. This is what I mean, that I think there is an immediate potential advantage, and that is that there are two that I can think of that relate to the functioning of a nervous system in the following way. First, uncertainty is tremendously stressful on the human nervous system. And I don't mean stress in a euphemistic way. I mean, it adds a metabolic load to the nervous system that, if it persists, can make someone sick, and I think religious beliefs can reduce uncertainty. Sometimes they explain the inexplicable. The things we can now explain through science used to be considered magic or caused by a deity.
So I think in some ways it's not only psychologically comforting, but it's actually physiologically potentially less... it reduces people's stress. It reduces your load, what scientists would call allostatic. Very simply, step back a minute and say, in part our brains evolved not to think, see and feel, but to regulate our body systems. As our bodies became more complex, brains became larger. The brain's main job is to keep your body's systems alive and well so you can spread your genes to the next... let me finish. I know you won't agree, but... Your brain is constantly budgeting for your body's resources, and it's not budgeting for money, it's budgeting for glucose and salt, and so on.
And so, if you think that your brain manages a budget for your body, uncertainty simply depletes that budget. It drains that budget much faster and makes it really harder for people. I think there's a social aspect to this as well, in the sense that we are social animals, we evolved to be social animals. Being social animals is one of our greatest adaptive advantages. But what that means is that we regulate each other's nervous systems. We do not support that body budget alone. We have other people who help us do it. There are other social species, right?
So insects are social and they regulate each other's nervous systems through chemicals, through smell. Rats and some mammals add touch and may add hearing, and primates add vision. We, as primates, have all these ways of regulating each other. Furthermore, we have ideas that we share. Therefore, there are many ways that religious beliefs can reduce the metabolic load on the nervous system. Is there data for that? I mean, is there data that actually makes a compelling argument that religious beliefs do reduce... Are there actually? I'm not defending this, I'm just saying, as a scientist, that there is data.
There is data that shows that people who... I mean this, you know, I'm not denying any of the challenges or problems that religious beliefs introduce into a fitness argument. I'm just saying that there is another side where there is data that shows that people who are religious are actually somewhat happier and healthier and have greater well-being. But that's because, of course, they live among other people who believe what they believe. Steve, you had an answer again. Barbara... yes. I really wanted to make it clear that we're actually operating within a framework of human exceptionalism when we keep asking things like whether social cohesion was part of the reason we were religious, or whether being religious drove social cohesion, because, you know...
Why don't we ask about the orcas, for example? Orcas are exquisitely cohesive and they do things as a group and they regulate each other as individuals and they solve their problems as a group and they manage to do it without God. And chimpanzees manage to do this without God. So I think, in addition to the problems that Steven pointed out with social cohesion arguments, there's a constant dismissal that we can just look at the natural world and we can see that there are many different paths to this. If we just look at our species and don't take this comparative approach.
We are not going to get answers to these questions. Yes. Steve. Lisa, I agree that religious beliefs can reduce stress, but I don't think that can be an explanation for why it is adaptive. Because the fact that uncertainty leads to stress is itself an adaptation, that is, there... we lack information that is critical to our well-being and we are... when we get stressed and nervous, that motivates us to seek that information or act in a way that keeps us safe even in the state of ignorance. But there can be no adaptation to reduce stress through false certainty.
That is, having certainty about something, some statement about the world that is not actually true. Because if I'm very nervous, let's say because I think there might be a predator, and someone convinces me, no, it's actually a rabbit appearing in the guise of a predatory cat, that might reduce my stress, but it's not an adaptation. Fair enough, fair enough. So, Barbara, you told us some of the history of where you think this might have started in human history. What is your idea of ​​why it has persisted for so long? I tend to come back to this question of community and practice.
Because I think that if we change our perspective and stop looking so much at beliefs and sacred texts, what we tend to do in today's world. You know, you put up a slide that talked about the percentage of the pie in terms of Christianity and Islam and that's an important aspect of this, but I think for a lot of people in the world, there's something that's irreplaceable in that sense. of community, that sense of ritual practice and that sense of familiarity. And it is... Sure, it's possible to try to replace that with other ways of finding those same things, but there's something about the connectivity that comes through transcendence that I think is important.
When you bring those two elements together, community and transcendence and sharing that emotional meaning, it is created. And one of the things I really like about people who discuss whether there is faith in other animals is the idea of ​​breaking the link between making religion always text and belief. So I think that helps us understand this question a little bit. The idea... I think of what Martin Buber wrote, coming from the tradition of Judaism, when he wrote that all real life is an encounter. There is something particularly transporting to me about sharing encounters of transcendence and I really feel that it has something to do with the persistence that we see.
But clearly, when we talk about the

instinct

of spirituality, it is a very fraught term because of the secularization that is happening in the world. If that really were considered an instinct, how would we explain the tremendous transformation we are going through? So people are finding communities of humanism, other communities with a different kind of transcendent connection. I think there's a balance between what continues as a very, very strong tradition that moves communities forward and new ways of imagining some of these same things that are emerging. The ways people can experience religion now. I mean, they extend to communities with AI.
They extend to virtual realities, virtual churches, virtual connections, virtual mosques, but also to the idea that we are starting to think differently about animals and nature. We know Emily Dickinson's church, right? Well, we also know that one of the beauties of the evolutionary perspective, among many others, is not only understanding our own place in the world, but also our deep sharing with other animals. So, I think there is a possibility that we continue this shift of finding different ways to share transcendence as I feel it with nature, with animals. So, is that transcendence related to...? I mean, Steven J.
Gould, I think he once said that all religions begin with the awareness of death. So is that transcendence deeply connected to death or is it somehow independent of it? I think you've hit on something important. Part of my last six years of work has been deeply dedicated to the issue of animal grief and grief. And I'm not suggesting, again, to be very clear that animals have some kind of sacred sense of death, but they have a deep awareness of loss, so we find over and over again: Can you give us an example? I mean, that's... Yeah, I can give a lot of examples.
For example, with elephants we know that the entire community responds if a matriarch dies. There was a particular example in Africa. A particular community of scientists who followed for seven days, a parade of mourners who came to this particular matriarch that she had died. Her name was Leonor. Not just her family, but the matriarchs of other families as well. Some watched the body, others rocked over the body. Others showed anguish. So my definition of animal grief involves some type of distress symptom. Social withdrawal, inability to eat, inability to sleep, some vocalizations. But we don't just see this in what I call the usual suspects, the big-brained mammals like chimpanzees, cetaceans, and elephants.
My research shows that we find it in animals as different as collared peccaries in Arizona, chickens, all kinds of domestic animals, the animals we live with. And again, what I think is so important about this is not necessarily that animals have the same awareness of death that we do, but that they feel this deep sense of loss. That's emotional meaning-making and that's where you enter into this community of transcendent experience in an animalistic way that I think is the basis of this discussion. So, Steve, let me ask you. Transcendent experience, community, is a powerful way to think about what religion offers.
On the other side of the argument are people like Dan Dennett. We have people like Pascal Boyer and several others, whose explanation tends more towards a mechanism. The diffusion of ideas. The spread of memes, you know? An idea jumps from brain to brain to brain and naturally tickles certain receptors that we are naturally in tune with and therefore certain ideas have a tendency to stick and spread, among them are the same ideas that constitute religious beliefs. Do you think that's an approach that gives us insight or is that not a useful way to think about it?
Yes, because what baffles us when we try to explain the prevalence of religious beliefs is not so much why people mourn the dead, they feel a sense of loss, they feel it deeply affects their lives, because it deeply affects their lives, it should. If you didn't mourn someone when he was dead, when he died, how did youcould you have loved him when he was alive? That is, in a certain sense, a set of reactions that are easier to explain. What is disconcerting about religion is the belief in the Trinity and in hell and in 72 virgins and all the other contented beliefs that go far beyond a sense of awe at the immensity of the cosmos or loss in the sense of death. .
That's where Pascal Boyer, Dennis Barbour and others will step in to explain why we are vulnerable to such specific beliefs rather than emotional reactions to important events that affect us. In that sense, I should give credit to Pascal Boyer for linking the idea that we are mentalizing and tend to attribute minds to others as one of the central explanations for why we are subject to religious beliefs that lead to spiritualistic beliefs. Good. So, Lisa, what's your take on these two types of poles, the need for a transcendent communal experience and maybe something that just speaks to the way that certain ideas stay naturally within a brain that evolved to perform certain tasks? and survive?
I think both explanations are, to some extent, phenomena. I'm not really sure if you refer to them as explanations or just phenomena; They're actually ingrained in our sociality as a species, so I think it's not a metaphor to say that we regulate each other. We do it, in very substantial ways and in ways that we are completely unaware of, and part of how we do it is by creating shared meanings and realities that emerge only by virtue of collective agreement. What I mean by this is... We're talking here, for example, about pain and that animals, non-human animals, feel pain, etc.
Non-human animals feel lost, no doubt. I think there is no doubt that that is the case and they suffer. I think there's no doubt that that's the case, but research on emotions suggests quite clearly that there is no inherent emotional meaning in any set of physical signals that occur in the body. What we do is… humans, we learn to impose meanings on those signals, right? So a frowning face, for example, is not a universal display of anger. People only frown about 25% of the time when they are angry and they frown many other times when they are not angry and there are many cultures around the world, including hunter-gatherers that do not recognize a frown as anger, For example. example.
In many cultures, and it's an interesting question about why that is, but we'll put that aside for a moment, what we do is impose meaning on a frowning face, we impose meaning on a frown, and by virtue of that meaning that we have imposed on it, the frown literally takes on that meaning and we can easily predict what will happen next. What I mean by this is that it works the same way money works, right? There is nothing inherent... Nothing that has ever served as currency in human cultures does so solely by virtue of its physical nature.
What happens is that a group of humans impose meaning on pieces of paper, or pebbles, or salt, or barley, or big stones in the ocean that can't be moved, or mortgages, or any number of things and a whole De Suddenly, those things literally become valuable. They can be exchanged for material goods only because we all agree that they can and when someone moves their agreement, when people withdraw some number, people withdraw their agreement, those things no longer have value. Well, emotions are built the same way. Heart rates change, faces move, distress can arise due to loss, when you lose someone who helps you regulate your body budget and you lose that person, you feel like you have lost a part of yourself because you have actually lost someone who helped you regulate your nervous system.
We impose meaning on those physical events that take on that meaning. I mean that physical events take on those meanings by virtue of the fact that we, as a culture, agree that that is the case. I think, in my opinion, this is partly why memes happen, because ideas are contagious in a sense because often we, as part of our... one of our superpowers as a species is the ability to create meaning. The ability to create something real where there was nothing real before, only by virtue of a collective agreement. We impose meaning on something physical and then that physical thing takes on greater meaning.
To some extent, I think we also do this with what we consider transcendent experiences. So when a group of people are all together having a similar experience of being in awe or awe of something in nature, there is an opportunity to create a social reality, to create a meaning that didn't exist before, that replaces simply the shared wonder of the moment and therefore, I do not see these ends as really different. I see them as emerging from the same capabilities. So in the remaining time, maybe we can focus on humans and religious beliefs and maybe we can start with you, Barbara.
Mm-hmm (affirmative). There has long been a view that as science progresses, it sort of eliminates the need for religion, in terms of its explanatory abilities, etc. It is now suggested that over time the role of religion will diminish. Do you imagine that's the pattern that will develop or is it a completely wrong and indirect way of thinking about the role of religion and therefore what its future will be? Yes, it's interesting. I feel two things at the same time. I think the growing trend towards humanism and secularization is very welcome. I mean, I said I'm here speaking as an atheist, as a person who is a non-believer.
We certainly want to be able to think clearly about science and about the forces at work in this world, and we know, we all know, that religion is not always useful in that particular way. At the same time, I think it's really important to think again about cross-cultural patterns and the number of people in the world who don't believe in big sky gods, who in some cases don't even have a word for religion. I'm not suggesting that makes them different on any kind of intelligence scale, not at all. We know that all human populations have the same capabilities.
But sometimes, just being religious is just the way life is. It's such an important part of the times, of the way you live, that it's not something that's going to change. I think they are two different ways of looking at it and I'm not sure how to weigh them. I'd be interested to hear what other people would say about this. Why don't we move on? Zoran, do you have any? I think, at its best, it gives us a framework to experience spirituality, to be able to connect with something that is bigger than ourselves. So if it fulfills that role for people, I think that's its purpose.
I hope that as the years go by, science and spirituality will basically flow into each other smoothly. I think that for that we really need more research on these topics. Lisa, thoughts on the future? I think I would stand by my descriptions that I think religious beliefs have some advantages, but I think there are also some very, very important disadvantages, some of which Steve has talked about and I think that... From my perspective, it's probably time to wonder if, frankly, the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. Because there are other meaning-making systems that are available to humans to help them make sense of the world, some of which may not have the disadvantages.
They may have the advantages of religious beliefs, but they may not also have the disadvantages. So I'm probably leaning more towards the question of how would it be possible to test that, investigate that. Steve, what do you think about that? Several trends in the general historical record of disbelief when there are many religions have become more humanistic. They no longer take their literal beliefs as seriously as they once did. If you are a true Christian believer and believe that if you don't accept Jesus you will go to hell, then you should try to convert people at the point of the sword.
And you really should kill the heretics. You would be doing... It's like a great public health measure. You are saving an eternity of suffering in hell for billions of people. But most Christians, no matter how seriously they take their belief, no longer try to convert people at the point of the sword. They have no inquisitions and they are not completely consistent and that is a kind of benign hypocrisy among many believers who fortunately do not act according to the totality of their religious beliefs and that has been a very beneficial trend. Institutions persist in the all-encompassing nature of beliefs, we deceive ourselves.
Another is that when people change their religious affiliation, the overwhelming tendency is to have no religion at all, so the world becomes less religious. There are two reasons why this may seem hard to believe. One of them is that religious people have more babies, so the number of religious people is actually increasing, and is expected to increase even as the number of people who shift leans toward non-religion. The other is that religious groups tend to be more politically organized. So the problem with secularists and humanists, and the so-called nones, N-O-N-E, non-N-U-N, that is, people without religion, is that they do not vote.
All evangelicals vote. I shouldn't say everything. Something like 80% of evangelicals vote, only 25% of the unaffiliated vote. And so there is a huge influence of religion on politics because of this organization. Our perception of the growing influence of religion is not exactly an illusion, but it is driven by the increased fertility and political organization of the religious, even as the general direction shifts away from religious beliefs with secularization, including in the United States. , which was a... for a long time it was an outlier that all the other Western democracies had become less religious than the United States.
The United States is now moving in that direction as well. One last question that is something like the inverse of the topic that occupied part of our time when thinking about animals and their reactions and beliefs. What happens if we turn it over to the other side? So, a hundred years from now, or 500 years from now, an alien civilization will visit us and we'll show them what we've learned in math and physics and they'll nod their tentacles and they'll... you know, we're all kinds of good. But then we showed them our religious beliefs. Do you think they'll look at that and say, "Yeah, yeah, we get it.
You know, we got Jesus out too." Or will they be completely baffled as to what this thing called religion is? Barbara, what do you think about that? Wild speculation. I have no idea the answer to that question. That seems fine to me. If I had to guess, I would be baffled. I think if you think about how 500 years ago, we didn't know much about electromagnetism, right? And now we can do all kinds of things and we can entertain ourselves with them. Well, think about aliens coming and understanding the role of consciousness in the universe, right? And they can use the consciousness that we use for all kinds of things.
For them it's not any kind of mysterious thing. I think that's where it's headed. Lisa? I don't think they're fazed and I don't think they necessarily share it... I mean, I'm just... I'm not even speculating, I'm imagining. I think they'll see it as part of the evolutionary trajectory of... Or the evolutionary development of a species and maybe something that was a necessary step along the way, but became unnecessary at a certain point. Final thoughts on that, Steve? I tend to agree there. It may be similar to our attitudes toward the animistic beliefs of people we have encountered.
We can... or some intelligible ones but we could consider them obsolete. Do you think they would have had a similar evolutionary trajectory? I know... Is this an intrinsic part of the way a living system would evolve that can survive and necessarily ascribe agency in the world and tell stories about what those agents do and the role they play or is it something like that? What peculiar thing happened to the human species? A great, profound question, but I suspect that... I guess the question is: does sociality depend on reciprocal mentalization, on the attribution of complexity to other creatures?
I suspect so, but it is speculation, and if so, would there be enough evidence early in the history of an intelligent species that it would not be tempted by an over-attribution of cognitive organization to entities that in reality perhaps don't they have it? Very good. So someday we may find the answer to that question, but until then, join me in thanking the group here.

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