Clippings

…the general view of many, not all, neurobiologists is that consciousness is a function of the number and complexity of neuronal linkages of the architecture of the brain. Human consciousness is what happens when you get to something like 10¹¹ neurons and 10¹⁴ synapses. This raises all sorts of other questions: What is consciousness like when you have 10²⁰ synapses or 10⁵⁰? What would such a being have to say to us any more than we would have to say to the ants?

…there’s an extremely interesting statistical study by the American social scientist James Prescott, in which he has looked at the compilation by Stanford anthropologist Robert Textor of hundreds of different societies, not all of them still extant. …Textor just puts the various categories down as a compilation. What Prescott has done is to do a multivariate analysis, statistical correlation—what goes with what. And the things that apparently go with each other are essentially the two sets of characteristics I just described [powerful social hierarchies and almost nonexistent social hierarchies]. It is Prescott’s view that there are causal relations. That, in fact, in his view the key distinction has to do with whether cultures hug their children and whether they permit premarital sexual activity among adolescents. In his view those are the keys. And he concludes that all cultures in which the children are hugged and the teenagers can have sex wind up without powerful social hierarchies and everybody’s happy. And those cultures in which the children are not permitted to be hugged because of some social ban and a premarital adolescent sexual taboo is strictly enforced wind up killing, hating, and having powerful dominance hierarchies.

We have Ten Commandments in the West. Why is there no commandment exhorting us to learn? “Thou shalt understand the world. Figure things out.” There’s nothing like that. And very few religions urge us to enhance our understanding of the natural world. I think it is striking how poorly religions, by and large, have accommodated to the astonishing truths that have emerged in the last few centuries.

To say it still more explicitly, the view here is that we start out with the sense that our parents are omnipotent and omniscient, we develop certain relations with them—different degrees of mental health in those relationships, depending on the nautre of the relationship between the parents and the child—and then we grow up, and as we do so, we discover that our parents are not perfect. No one is, of course. There is a part of us that is deeply disappointed. There’s a part of us that has been inducted into a dominance hierarchy and doesn’t like the uncertainty of having to deal with things for ourselves. You know, one of the many reasons that are given for the advantages of military life and other powerfully hierarchical societies is that it’s not required to think for oneself very much. There’s something calming about that. And so, according to Freud, we then foist upon the cosmos our own emotional predispositions. You may or may not think that this explains a great deal about religion, but it is something I believe worth considering. Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov,

So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.