On Religious Behaviors

The Right Brain Narrates and Judges

The unfolding realization that the subjective impulse to join hands with other members of an ad hoc community came to me fully realized as I ate my delicious Torchy's taco on Burnet Road across from Savers where I had just found a very nice shirt. I was musing on my wardrobe find when it was revealed to me by my subjective theatre of the mind that the community of folks that give unwanted clothes to Saver's and Goodwill is much like a community of religious believers joined in a communal ritual of common purpose.

I have recently recanted my angry atheist stance -- religion is a tool of sick cultural overlords bent on the subjugation of weak minds -- to grudgingly accept the true nature of good feelings that arrise from willing participation in group activity. Domesticated primates crave community and will invent communities ad hoc to ease the pain of individual, unconnected experience. Atheist participate in these rituals as well, forming chat rooms and meet-ups so that they can gather, talk and share in a comforting feeling of belonging to a group of fellow believers. Although atheists remind each other that they are free of unsupported belief -- that is their group belief. We enjoy the false sense of volition and free will that comes from subjugating our feeling that this life is just one damn thing after another. Shared narratives are the most popular kind of mind control practiced by our kind of minds.

The irrational kant of rationalist; they have only the kinds of beliefs that can stand up to rigorous peer review; is correct as far as it goes. The book of the unbeliever is not, as they would claim, tested and retested because our minds are not constructed like that. From Julian Jaynes' Bicameral Mind to Daniel Kahneman's System 1 and 2 thinking we see over and over that all of us are slaved to a narrative impulse. We seek out normative behaviors so that we are not outside the pack or the tribe. We still listen to the inner voice that seeks a narrative flow. The narrative flow assesses and re-assesses our behaviors and actions to keep us between the ditches.

Rituals do not exist to provide us with comforting belief they exist to provide us with a toolkit of shared behaviors. Whether I attend morning prayer by reading together a core of dogma in the gospel of Luke or the gospel of Think Atheist I am actually in the business of constructing and reinforcing a reality tunnel that excludes some thought and includes some thoughts about proper behavior. Whether the fish on my bumper sticker says Christ or Darwin I am still putting out the message that I am a member of a community.

So whether you are prohibited from telecommuting at your Yahoo! job or gathering at Section 9 HQ you are part of a process that reinforces normative behavior. Kneeling in prayer or driving to work becomes a sacrament or talisman that reminds us to give up free will so that group will can prevail. All chimpanzees do it but some chimps are aware that this collection of behaviors exists for the purpose of mind shaping.

Emerging Bicameral Mind

My emerging thesis -- the Rough Beast is running a simulation of me on the universe as computer -- follows both the dictates of reason and the impulse to discern an ongoing narration. All things precede the present moment or the specious present and all things flow from the now. This is the Dream Now or the envelope of perceptible events and meaningful causes.

The cyber-brains of GiTS started as bicameral minds with the mechanical embodiment of the first computing machines in the 1940's. Most modern chimpanzees treat the output of our out-sourced cognition as separate from our biological minds in brains. I claim that we have already moved beyond this old construal but we are in denial. I outsource my mental life to my laptop, my Galaxy Tablet and my Android smart phone just as the author of the Iliad outsourced volition to the right brain. The unifying synthesis is normative. We are forming a community of like minded individuals who worship this new religion just prior to our understanding of a new narrative.