I think it is possible that the origin of religion is psychosis, but I think a simpler explanation is also possible and more widespread: Intellectual disability.
In the past, the easiest and most efficient way for the aristocrats to create additional religious serfs/laborers was to give them beer while pregnant, so that the children were born with just enough Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) to make them intellectually disabled, religious, and easily controlled.
Religious organizations are political organizations, not spiritual organizations, therefore I tend to think that the theory of intellectual disability is more often applicable than spiritual psychosis, but both are possible for sure.
I find your piece sufficiently interesting to want to reread it several times. Could I trouble you to go a little deeper into: "From the perspective of science, religion is the misattribution of intention to where there are no observable reasons to attribute intentions."
As I read this: “And as soon as some groups have discovered this hack, delusions are not only an advantage. They become the baseline for continued existence.”
I was reminded of option #3 at the outset (delusions are useful so can pop up independently like agriculture).
If groups with shared delusions consistently outcompete those without them, that’s a powerful selection pressure, one strong enough to produce religion independently wherever human groups form.
And the form it takes is almost predictable: hunter-gatherers immersed in nature, with rich inner lives, would naturally fuse the two into animism, especially with schizotypal individuals in the group bridging inner experience and the external world.
The convergence on animism doesn’t require a single origin. It requires a shared human condition and a shared selection pressure.
I've recently been writing about primitive tribes and "mind viruses" too, but in the context of trying to explain modern political phenomena. There's some overlap with what you're writing about here. I cover the Xhosa story, for instance.
Is it possible you're over-emphasizing the hallucinatory aspects? Something that becomes apparent when you study this stuff is how useful religions are, but also how pliable. I expect some animalistic religions might have keyed off stress induced psychosis, or just the frequency with which ancient man would have accidentally ingested hallucinogens or got sick in ways that provoke fever dreams. But a lot of later religions have aspects that don't seem likely to be linked to hallucinations, yet are clearly useful for that stage of human development. Trade between cities is much easier if people at both ends strongly believe in a religion that punishes dishonesty with an afterlife in hell, for instance. Whereas primitive tribes don't trade much, and so their religions don't emphasize honesty at all (gods frequently lie, trick each other, etc). On the other hand primitive tribes also don't have writing or scholarship, and their religions do strongly emphasize the strict following of ritual. So it seems that religions adapt pretty flexibly and quickly to the developmental context of the people who believe in them.
Speaking of development speed, I'd be very skeptical about any timelines coming out of archaeology. They present a lot of dates they claim are scientifically derived, but if you look at the methods carefully a lot is pseudoscientific. That's also true for radiocarbon dating and tree ring counting. They don't really know how many millions of years old a specific skeleton is, they can barely even hazard a guess, so any claims about progress stopping for long periods has to be treated with a big pinch of salt. Even claims about the timelines of relatively recent societies like ancient Egypt are absurd on their face and the dating methodologies are very questionable.
Finally, although it's a minor point that doesn't detract from your overall thesis, citing Elyn Saks as an example of how someone can be functional in society whilst also schizophrenic isn't doing your argument any favors. She's an academic, she literally exists in a subculture that worships disability and rewards delusion. She could have been dysfunctional her entire life, completely incapable of achieving anything at all in the private sector as a normal individual, yet would still have been elevated and praised by academia.
>>Is it possible you're over-emphasizing the hallucinatory aspects?
I believe that primitive religion is largely a product of hallucinations and delusions. When social complexity increases, religion evolved to rely more on principles and less on hallucinations.
>>She's an academic, she literally exists in a subculture that worships disability and rewards delusion.
And that serves my argument. My point was that some psychotic people were functional enough to serve as shamans. Not that they were great at producing things. If Elyn Saks can talk in a convincing way, that increases the probability that some psychotic ancestors could convince people.
"Science does little to help us with the first-mover problem. It doesn’t answer the basic question why matter and energy exists. It just accepts that it does. And we are millions, maybe billions of people who are quite fine with that."
Is this an accurate description of the contemporary world population? How many people are really "quite fine with that" and where are they? I assume you might point to people in elite institutions in the West like Harvard, the New York Times, the European Parliament or Silicon Valley, but when I read what people in these places are up to, I don't get the sense that they are "fine with" a world without a narrative. Whether it is social justice, environmentalism or trans-humanism, it seems like even the most erstwhile "scientifically-oriented" people are animated by a drive to worship unseen phenomena and "immanentize the eschaton" so-to-speak.
I agree with you that people in general are naturally religiously inclined. But I think that this quest for meaning is mostly on a general level. Being fine with not knowing the origins of the world is not the same thing as accepting that the world lacks meaning.
Most people seek meaningful narratives about their world. But they will not invent absurd stories in order to explain what they see. At the same time, a minority of people are brimming with fantastic stories that seems very real to them. I think the two groups are, or were, mutually dependent on each other.
Arguably the Big Bang theory almost is a religion. For the vast majority it's an untestable, unobservable "just so" explanation of where the world comes from. And it's absurd. I mean, if you weren't immersed in a culture that worships science, and you encountered a primitive tribe that explained the origin of the world as a giant fireball from which the universe emerged in an infinite cycle of death and reincarnation, it would sound just like a religious delusion. Even for astronomers there's a lot of stuff in it that's inconsistent and weird, and it's full of shrugs and just-so explanations (dark matter, why the universe has to work this way in the first place, where the energy to do this came from, etc).
Exactly! This is the way the Big Bang theory looks to a non-physicist like me. Rather than adhering to that theory, I prefer to say that I just don't know. I also don't like the notion on the universe as "infinite". It would be more honest to say that as far as we can see, things look rather uniform and beyond what we can see we don't know.
"Most people seek meaningful narratives about their world. But they will not invent absurd stories in order to explain what they see." Critical Race Theory? Q-anon? Marxism?
This may seem like a small semantic difference, but I don't agree that most people are "*fine* with not knowing the origins of the world." I think most people just get exhausted by the effort of trying to figure it out and ultimately decide that they have more pressing matters to attend to. If they truly didn't care about the origins of the world, they would be less susceptible to those claiming to know.
Most people will not invent Q-anon or Marxism. They will just believe in it. When I was a Marxist, I was the only one in my group who actually delighted in Marxist philosophy. In general, people just wanted to talk about the greatness of the working and the bad sides of capitalism. In particular the latter.
>>If they truly didn't care about the origins of the world, they would be less susceptible to those claiming to know.
Couldn't ot be that they just like to be told what to do? That was what seemed to appeal to most of the Marxists I knew: An ideology that told them who was good, who was bad and what was supposed to be done. Whenever I asked difficult questions like, for example, what a socialist society was supposed to look like, the typical answer was that such speculations were for "armchair socialists". People seemed satisfied to claim that their ideology was "scientific" without diving too deeply into the nature of that science.
Yes. I think it could be that they just want to be told what to do. As I consider it further, I find your explanations at least as plausible as mine. I’m not sure which is the more or less favorable view of human nature.
#1, Evolution does have conclusive evidence. There are countless accounts of watching it happen before people’s very eyes, and it is the only scenario that accounts for the way living organisms are as they are today—even the human body.
#2, Evolution is a science because of the basic mental method by which it seeks answers. Scientists observe nature, ask questions about it, hold tentative educated ideas about how it works, formulates ways of testing those ideas against reality (data), arrives at evidence-based conclusions, tests its conclusions against subconscious bias, and revises or even discards its conclusions if new evidence requires.
#3, Creationism is not based on any objective research or falsifiable evidence, but bases its entire belief structure on one a priori assumption—a supernatural creator. It will not, in the face of any evidence, modify or discard that conclusion. It is rigidly dogmatic and completely religious in its origin.
Your comment doesn't seem much related to the article?
Anyway, I'm not a creationist, but what you're saying in #3 is a mix of circular reasoning and anthropomorphization, ironically the sort of problem the article discusses. Of course an idea will seem "rigidly dogmatic", an idea cannot change itself. Only people can adopt, discard or change ideas. And the vast majority of people have indeed discarded the Biblical account of creation and don't believe it, or never did to begin with (Christianity has always recognized the Bible is full of symbols and allegories).
But what do they change their belief to? There's not a big gap. OK, the universe is older than 7000 years and wasn't created by God. The correct explanation is that the universe is 13.787 billion years old and the energy to create the universe came from ???? - remember, conservation of energy is a law of physics, but the creation of the universe doesn't itself follow that law! So the Big Bang theory is an explicitly supernatural theory. Even Wikipedia's article gets this right - the "rational" alternative to Genesis doesn't actually compete with it, because it doesn't explain where the universe came from. It just posits that some supernatural force that can override the laws of physics created a really big pile of energy in one concentrated place. What is the nature of that force? Beyond that it's supernatural by definition, science can't answer.
Didn't it occur to you that maybe you have blunted senses and that an entire aspect of human experience is escaping you, that you are, basically, color-blind?
I tend to give more credence to #1, even though I have a PhD in Physics (or because of that - I'm very aware of the impossibility to reduce the subjective to the objective), which is not incompatible with #2 and #3.
By the way, have you come across J.D. Unwin's "Sex and Culture"? Apart from the main topic, he gives an extraordinary account of the supernatural beliefs of 80 cultures. His model of religiosity is quite interesting
Yes, as you say, #1 is compatible with the other options, only #2 and #3 are incompatible with each other. I'm not an atheist. But I'm also no mystic. Whatever there is beyond the horizon of science, I'm no better positioned to see it than anyone else. So I stick to the scientific world view and leave what science can't explain to others. Personally I like the writings of Simone Weil to explain that side of reality.
I never looked closer at J.D. Unwin's work, mostly because his hypothesis seemed so absurd. But as you indicate, that is not what makes an anthropology book better or worse, so I will take a look at it. In general I think that anthropological information should be much better catalogued. In the world of anthropology, AI technology could do wonders.
In my opinion is not so absurd at all, and he himself doesn't like the outcomes, which is a sign of science done in earnest. After all, it's not so absurd that sexual restraint leads to sublimation and the channeling of energies elsewhere. He laments that such restraint comes with inequality and he hopes for a world of equality and restraint.
But, more than anything, his book is a treasure trove of anthropological data. Of course, it's quite boring to read, since the bulk of it is basically a long survey of societies. Probably you are right that it's an area where AI can be helpful. I'm on friendly terms with academics working in the field of ancient document reconstruction, and it's doing miracles.
One thing i want to point is that psychodelics can induce very "atypical" experience even for very typical ppl.
In my own experience cognitive effects from such experience lasts several weeks after the session
Its also possible to reach psychodelic state of mind throgh practices ( dietary, breathing, meditation). Though it takes time and discipline. Psychodelics are much faster
Thank you! Yes, I think psychedelics are very interesting in this context, because it seems much easier to chemically induce hallucinations in people who never hallucinate than to remove hallucinations from people who hallucinate too much. I don't know any studies, but from hearsay I guess that most people will hallucinate if they take psychedelics. Meanwhile, psychiatry still struggles to remove hallucinations entirely without severe side effects in their psychotic patients. To me that indicates that the human mind is wired more in favor of hallucinations than against them.
Makes sense that schizophrenia would not be a net negative in India given that an average Tuesday presents the consistent low intensity stress that leads to psychosis. Ergo, most would have had an episode multiple times in their lives.
We are human because we have meetings (meals) (that's how I paraphrase Wrangham BTW). Religion is an outcome of much later worlding that these meals allow, within a recidivist stratified society which agriculture allows. It is a word best avoided, unfortunately examples like the Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus was effaced by the Ausgustinian re-invention of Pauline Christianity as an Imperial cult of Empire, and we have had to put up with 'religion' as a thing ever since. "Religion" is really an arm of the state seeking to world all experience within its totalitarian and imperial impulses. Just ask Putin.
Egalitarianism overthrew primate social dominance via meetings over the long ages of the palaeolithic and all the various _Homo sp._ which populated that geographically and temporally dispersed city were involved.
https://substack.com/@mfgodeck/note/p-194957800?r=6zm6yu
I think it is possible that the origin of religion is psychosis, but I think a simpler explanation is also possible and more widespread: Intellectual disability.
In the past, the easiest and most efficient way for the aristocrats to create additional religious serfs/laborers was to give them beer while pregnant, so that the children were born with just enough Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) to make them intellectually disabled, religious, and easily controlled.
Religious organizations are political organizations, not spiritual organizations, therefore I tend to think that the theory of intellectual disability is more often applicable than spiritual psychosis, but both are possible for sure.
I find your piece sufficiently interesting to want to reread it several times. Could I trouble you to go a little deeper into: "From the perspective of science, religion is the misattribution of intention to where there are no observable reasons to attribute intentions."
I’m enjoying reading through the piece.
As I read this: “And as soon as some groups have discovered this hack, delusions are not only an advantage. They become the baseline for continued existence.”
I was reminded of option #3 at the outset (delusions are useful so can pop up independently like agriculture).
If groups with shared delusions consistently outcompete those without them, that’s a powerful selection pressure, one strong enough to produce religion independently wherever human groups form.
And the form it takes is almost predictable: hunter-gatherers immersed in nature, with rich inner lives, would naturally fuse the two into animism, especially with schizotypal individuals in the group bridging inner experience and the external world.
The convergence on animism doesn’t require a single origin. It requires a shared human condition and a shared selection pressure.
Ok back to it :)
Really excellent! Thought provoking stuff.
I've recently been writing about primitive tribes and "mind viruses" too, but in the context of trying to explain modern political phenomena. There's some overlap with what you're writing about here. I cover the Xhosa story, for instance.
"Leftist behavior is just ancient instincts": https://penbroke.substack.com/p/leftist-behavior-is-just-ancient
"Mind virology": https://penbroke.substack.com/p/mind-virology
Is it possible you're over-emphasizing the hallucinatory aspects? Something that becomes apparent when you study this stuff is how useful religions are, but also how pliable. I expect some animalistic religions might have keyed off stress induced psychosis, or just the frequency with which ancient man would have accidentally ingested hallucinogens or got sick in ways that provoke fever dreams. But a lot of later religions have aspects that don't seem likely to be linked to hallucinations, yet are clearly useful for that stage of human development. Trade between cities is much easier if people at both ends strongly believe in a religion that punishes dishonesty with an afterlife in hell, for instance. Whereas primitive tribes don't trade much, and so their religions don't emphasize honesty at all (gods frequently lie, trick each other, etc). On the other hand primitive tribes also don't have writing or scholarship, and their religions do strongly emphasize the strict following of ritual. So it seems that religions adapt pretty flexibly and quickly to the developmental context of the people who believe in them.
Speaking of development speed, I'd be very skeptical about any timelines coming out of archaeology. They present a lot of dates they claim are scientifically derived, but if you look at the methods carefully a lot is pseudoscientific. That's also true for radiocarbon dating and tree ring counting. They don't really know how many millions of years old a specific skeleton is, they can barely even hazard a guess, so any claims about progress stopping for long periods has to be treated with a big pinch of salt. Even claims about the timelines of relatively recent societies like ancient Egypt are absurd on their face and the dating methodologies are very questionable.
Finally, although it's a minor point that doesn't detract from your overall thesis, citing Elyn Saks as an example of how someone can be functional in society whilst also schizophrenic isn't doing your argument any favors. She's an academic, she literally exists in a subculture that worships disability and rewards delusion. She could have been dysfunctional her entire life, completely incapable of achieving anything at all in the private sector as a normal individual, yet would still have been elevated and praised by academia.
>>Is it possible you're over-emphasizing the hallucinatory aspects?
I believe that primitive religion is largely a product of hallucinations and delusions. When social complexity increases, religion evolved to rely more on principles and less on hallucinations.
>>She's an academic, she literally exists in a subculture that worships disability and rewards delusion.
And that serves my argument. My point was that some psychotic people were functional enough to serve as shamans. Not that they were great at producing things. If Elyn Saks can talk in a convincing way, that increases the probability that some psychotic ancestors could convince people.
Ah, I see. Yeah I guess if functional is defined as being able to convince people to agree with you then she would count, for sure.
"Science does little to help us with the first-mover problem. It doesn’t answer the basic question why matter and energy exists. It just accepts that it does. And we are millions, maybe billions of people who are quite fine with that."
Is this an accurate description of the contemporary world population? How many people are really "quite fine with that" and where are they? I assume you might point to people in elite institutions in the West like Harvard, the New York Times, the European Parliament or Silicon Valley, but when I read what people in these places are up to, I don't get the sense that they are "fine with" a world without a narrative. Whether it is social justice, environmentalism or trans-humanism, it seems like even the most erstwhile "scientifically-oriented" people are animated by a drive to worship unseen phenomena and "immanentize the eschaton" so-to-speak.
I agree with you that people in general are naturally religiously inclined. But I think that this quest for meaning is mostly on a general level. Being fine with not knowing the origins of the world is not the same thing as accepting that the world lacks meaning.
Most people seek meaningful narratives about their world. But they will not invent absurd stories in order to explain what they see. At the same time, a minority of people are brimming with fantastic stories that seems very real to them. I think the two groups are, or were, mutually dependent on each other.
Arguably the Big Bang theory almost is a religion. For the vast majority it's an untestable, unobservable "just so" explanation of where the world comes from. And it's absurd. I mean, if you weren't immersed in a culture that worships science, and you encountered a primitive tribe that explained the origin of the world as a giant fireball from which the universe emerged in an infinite cycle of death and reincarnation, it would sound just like a religious delusion. Even for astronomers there's a lot of stuff in it that's inconsistent and weird, and it's full of shrugs and just-so explanations (dark matter, why the universe has to work this way in the first place, where the energy to do this came from, etc).
Exactly! This is the way the Big Bang theory looks to a non-physicist like me. Rather than adhering to that theory, I prefer to say that I just don't know. I also don't like the notion on the universe as "infinite". It would be more honest to say that as far as we can see, things look rather uniform and beyond what we can see we don't know.
Yes I think that's the only rational way to approach it.
"Most people seek meaningful narratives about their world. But they will not invent absurd stories in order to explain what they see." Critical Race Theory? Q-anon? Marxism?
This may seem like a small semantic difference, but I don't agree that most people are "*fine* with not knowing the origins of the world." I think most people just get exhausted by the effort of trying to figure it out and ultimately decide that they have more pressing matters to attend to. If they truly didn't care about the origins of the world, they would be less susceptible to those claiming to know.
Most people will not invent Q-anon or Marxism. They will just believe in it. When I was a Marxist, I was the only one in my group who actually delighted in Marxist philosophy. In general, people just wanted to talk about the greatness of the working and the bad sides of capitalism. In particular the latter.
>>If they truly didn't care about the origins of the world, they would be less susceptible to those claiming to know.
Couldn't ot be that they just like to be told what to do? That was what seemed to appeal to most of the Marxists I knew: An ideology that told them who was good, who was bad and what was supposed to be done. Whenever I asked difficult questions like, for example, what a socialist society was supposed to look like, the typical answer was that such speculations were for "armchair socialists". People seemed satisfied to claim that their ideology was "scientific" without diving too deeply into the nature of that science.
Yes. I think it could be that they just want to be told what to do. As I consider it further, I find your explanations at least as plausible as mine. I’m not sure which is the more or less favorable view of human nature.
#1, Evolution does have conclusive evidence. There are countless accounts of watching it happen before people’s very eyes, and it is the only scenario that accounts for the way living organisms are as they are today—even the human body.
#2, Evolution is a science because of the basic mental method by which it seeks answers. Scientists observe nature, ask questions about it, hold tentative educated ideas about how it works, formulates ways of testing those ideas against reality (data), arrives at evidence-based conclusions, tests its conclusions against subconscious bias, and revises or even discards its conclusions if new evidence requires.
#3, Creationism is not based on any objective research or falsifiable evidence, but bases its entire belief structure on one a priori assumption—a supernatural creator. It will not, in the face of any evidence, modify or discard that conclusion. It is rigidly dogmatic and completely religious in its origin.
Your comment doesn't seem much related to the article?
Anyway, I'm not a creationist, but what you're saying in #3 is a mix of circular reasoning and anthropomorphization, ironically the sort of problem the article discusses. Of course an idea will seem "rigidly dogmatic", an idea cannot change itself. Only people can adopt, discard or change ideas. And the vast majority of people have indeed discarded the Biblical account of creation and don't believe it, or never did to begin with (Christianity has always recognized the Bible is full of symbols and allegories).
But what do they change their belief to? There's not a big gap. OK, the universe is older than 7000 years and wasn't created by God. The correct explanation is that the universe is 13.787 billion years old and the energy to create the universe came from ???? - remember, conservation of energy is a law of physics, but the creation of the universe doesn't itself follow that law! So the Big Bang theory is an explicitly supernatural theory. Even Wikipedia's article gets this right - the "rational" alternative to Genesis doesn't actually compete with it, because it doesn't explain where the universe came from. It just posits that some supernatural force that can override the laws of physics created a really big pile of energy in one concentrated place. What is the nature of that force? Beyond that it's supernatural by definition, science can't answer.
Didn't it occur to you that maybe you have blunted senses and that an entire aspect of human experience is escaping you, that you are, basically, color-blind?
Or just trained to be?
Yes. That did occur to me. So I made a list:
"Humans in simple societies everywhere, on every continent, believe that nature is filled with spirits.
There can only be three reasons behind that.
1. There actually are spirits living in nature. Those of us who fail to see them have just lost our ability to see things.
2. Religion evolved before the human race split into its current branches.
3. Belief in spirits is so useful that it evolved independently at different places, the way agriculture did."
I tend to give more credence to #1, even though I have a PhD in Physics (or because of that - I'm very aware of the impossibility to reduce the subjective to the objective), which is not incompatible with #2 and #3.
By the way, have you come across J.D. Unwin's "Sex and Culture"? Apart from the main topic, he gives an extraordinary account of the supernatural beliefs of 80 cultures. His model of religiosity is quite interesting
Yes, as you say, #1 is compatible with the other options, only #2 and #3 are incompatible with each other. I'm not an atheist. But I'm also no mystic. Whatever there is beyond the horizon of science, I'm no better positioned to see it than anyone else. So I stick to the scientific world view and leave what science can't explain to others. Personally I like the writings of Simone Weil to explain that side of reality.
I never looked closer at J.D. Unwin's work, mostly because his hypothesis seemed so absurd. But as you indicate, that is not what makes an anthropology book better or worse, so I will take a look at it. In general I think that anthropological information should be much better catalogued. In the world of anthropology, AI technology could do wonders.
In my opinion is not so absurd at all, and he himself doesn't like the outcomes, which is a sign of science done in earnest. After all, it's not so absurd that sexual restraint leads to sublimation and the channeling of energies elsewhere. He laments that such restraint comes with inequality and he hopes for a world of equality and restraint.
But, more than anything, his book is a treasure trove of anthropological data. Of course, it's quite boring to read, since the bulk of it is basically a long survey of societies. Probably you are right that it's an area where AI can be helpful. I'm on friendly terms with academics working in the field of ancient document reconstruction, and it's doing miracles.
PS Simone Weil is a great read
Welcome back to the world of righting <sic> things! ;-)
This is very good.
Amazing write up!
One thing i want to point is that psychodelics can induce very "atypical" experience even for very typical ppl.
In my own experience cognitive effects from such experience lasts several weeks after the session
Its also possible to reach psychodelic state of mind throgh practices ( dietary, breathing, meditation). Though it takes time and discipline. Psychodelics are much faster
Thank you! Yes, I think psychedelics are very interesting in this context, because it seems much easier to chemically induce hallucinations in people who never hallucinate than to remove hallucinations from people who hallucinate too much. I don't know any studies, but from hearsay I guess that most people will hallucinate if they take psychedelics. Meanwhile, psychiatry still struggles to remove hallucinations entirely without severe side effects in their psychotic patients. To me that indicates that the human mind is wired more in favor of hallucinations than against them.
Makes sense that schizophrenia would not be a net negative in India given that an average Tuesday presents the consistent low intensity stress that leads to psychosis. Ergo, most would have had an episode multiple times in their lives.
We are human because we have meetings (meals) (that's how I paraphrase Wrangham BTW). Religion is an outcome of much later worlding that these meals allow, within a recidivist stratified society which agriculture allows. It is a word best avoided, unfortunately examples like the Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus was effaced by the Ausgustinian re-invention of Pauline Christianity as an Imperial cult of Empire, and we have had to put up with 'religion' as a thing ever since. "Religion" is really an arm of the state seeking to world all experience within its totalitarian and imperial impulses. Just ask Putin.
Egalitarianism overthrew primate social dominance via meetings over the long ages of the palaeolithic and all the various _Homo sp._ which populated that geographically and temporally dispersed city were involved.
My entire blog is about this very thing.
Worlding the self among others selfing the world.