#51. A Theory of Christianity [Evolutionary Psychology, Population]

EP     PO     

Red, theory; black, fact.

My gut told me that there is more to be said about Christianity than what I wrote or implied in Post #50. My doubts about the completeness of my work began with this statement by Saint Paul:

“And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.”

1 Corinthians 15:14, KJV

I was struck by the clarity and insistence of this impossible claim. What is going on here? We as theoreticians need to drill down here.

“Risen” means having come back from the dead, which is still an impossibility for modern medicine. However, Paul explains that what dies is a “natural body,” whereas what rises, or is “resurrected,” is a “spirit body,” which is “incorruptible.” The word “resurrection” does not appear in the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), making its first appearance in Matthew, the first book of the New Testament. All things considered, the concept is obviously central to Christianity.

Postulate 1: Resurrection theology is an approximate theory, and as such, is allowed to contain an impossibility.

Postulate 2: Christianity is focused on taming a third stage of depopulation that follows the anger cycle and the sadness cycle if neither of these has returned population density to the reset value after a certain time (See Post #50 for explanations of these terms.). This is the total war stage, and it takes place on an international scale. Examples are WWI and WWII, which would be the international phases of national conflicts between a central-European majority and Serbs and Jews, respectively. Total war is arguably altruistic because each of two alliances or countries is helping the other with their population problem. The required signaling cycle seems to be that of the anger cycle but with the exchanged signals doing double duty as liquidation tactics. This is not just a fight, where the only consideration is what would be the shrewdest blow; there is a strong tendency to ape the opponent’s latest gambit, as expected in an exchange of signals "designed" to lock non-altruists out of the process. This psychology is called “sending back the bullet” in battlefield situations and “poetic justice” in everyday life. It is satisfying and it is a signal and it is illegal in peacetime, no matter that the other guy started it. In peacetime, you have to search elsewhere for your solutions than in mimicry and cooperation with a dangerous emotional program.

Furthermore, if you allow yourself to be drawn into a vendetta, you just wrote an “ = “ between yourself and the person you take exception to.

05-06-2022: The old, skeptical explanation of the resurrection, namely that the crucifixion was a fraud, deserves mention here. The New Testament mentions particular Romans and Pharisees sympathetic to Jesus. Extrapolating, I posit a pro-Jesus faction spanning all segments of that society and including many influential Romans and Pharisees, who would have had the resources necessary to pull off such a deception, but who could not openly interdict the crucifixion for lack of the necessary influence. Thus, the seeming miraculousness of the resurrection would in reality be a measure of the power of the illusion that groups identified as “The Enemy” are implacable and unitary. 

The total war program is well known for its destructiveness to the infrastructures of civilization, which suggests that the program evolved recently and is still being refined by natural selection. It may not even be older than agriculture, the last quantum leap in our ability to increase our numbers. That new ability may have generated the selection forces that brought forth the total war program.

Christian theology works a rational override on the anger cycle (See Post #41) by reassuring believers that they will be resurrected and therefore need not fear death. Since anger is fear in disguise, this reassurance undercuts the anger-cycle-like dynamics of the total war program.

Postulate 3: the corresponding exact theory of Christianity is that depopulation events always leave survivors and Christianity enhances your probability of being one of them. When population density has declined to the reset value, this should trigger a dramatic turnaround in the Zeitgeist from death-producing attitudes to nurturing ones, to start the population-density curve on its next long, slow upward climb. The resurrection of “spirit bodies” may refer to the re-establishment of life-valuing attitudes in Society.

03-25-2019: It follows that the human race is being selected for a predisposition to Christianity, and probably other religions as well.

The book of Revelation, the last book in the New Testament, appears to describe the sudden depopulation event that ends the population-density cycle. This is wrongly identified as the end of time/history, but remember that we deal here with an approximate theory.

Christian worship activities revolve around the Eucharist, a communal sharing and consumption of bread and wine. Its purpose is to eradicate the deepest roots of the fear of death, a fear that leads to the hatreds of the total-war emotional program. How does it work?

The Eucharist pacifies people by exposing them to the halting signal of the total war program. So, it halts. How did the consumption of bread and wine come to be the halting signal? Because they are made by people “playing with their food,” for the sake of variety, one imagines. However, this comes at the cost of caloric content (not caloric density) because the yeast always takes its cut. This practice will only make sense under conditions of plenty, which return with sufficient depopulation. Thus, alcohol (which I assume to be the active signaling ingredient) and leavened bread now signal to the human limbic system the return of abundance. I conjecture that these signals have a subtle pacifying effect, making it easier to resist tit-for-tat total-war signalling.

03-02-2024: Alternatively, Jesus may have been medicating the disciples with food and alcohol to keep their arousal level out of the panic zone at a time of peak emotion so that they could continue to function adaptively.

#43. A Discovery of Hackers [population, evolutionary psychology]

PO     EP     

Red, theory; black, fact.

9-07-2018: I was saving this for the Sunday before Halloween, but decided that it couldn't wait. The basic idea of this post is that the hacker phenomenon is psychologically and sociologically akin to what was once called witchcraft. Let me hasten to clarify that I am talking about witchcraft the social phenomenon, because I don't believe in anything supernatural. However, the height of the witchcraft hysteria in Europe occurred during the sixteenth century, when there were no computers. (I focus on Europe here because my ancestors came from there as did those of most people I know.) It was, however, a time of unprecedented scientific advance, and if science paced technology then as now, quite a few new technologies were coming into knowledge for the first time.

I suggest that the defining toxic ingredient in black-hat hacking is new technology per se. We should therefore expect that with time, computer hacking will spread to new-technology hacking in general and that the computer-centric version must be considered the embryonic form. This is bad news because there has never been so much new technology as now, but at what point in history has this statement not been true?

Belief in and persecution of witches is so widespread across human cultures that it must be considered a cultural universal. Scholars focus on the persecution part, blithely assuming that there is absolutely nothing real driving it, and that the subject people of the study are, by implication, a bunch of blithering idiots, and sadists to boot. I find this stance elitist. Never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes. These people all have brains in their heads built to the exact same design as our own, and the role of education may be overrated when cultural universals are in play.

I suggest that the defining idea of the witch/technology-hacker (tacker) is viewing new technology as a possible means to increased personal power. To produce a tacker, this idea must be combined with a mad-dog rejection of all morality. 

A technology ideal for tacking/witchcraft must be usable without the identity of the agent coming into general knowledge, and is thus sociologically similar to the ring of Gyges mentioned in Plato's Republic. The anonymity conferred by the Internet makes it one of our worst rings of Gyges, but just wait. More will be discovered in other realms of technology as the hackers branch out, perhaps in unholy alliance with the currently popular Maker movement. Makers, wake up! It's not too early for a manifesto!

How common are Gygean technologies? Hard to say, but it may help to list some.

• Ionizing radiation was known from the work of Roentgen in 1895 (x-rays) and Villard in 1900 (gamma rays) and for the first time, a means to destroy healthy, living tissue silently and through walls solid enough to conceal all signs of the agent, had become available. (See my blog "Journalist's Progress," at (Link under reconstruction)https://xrra.blogspot.com )
• The lead pencil, introduced in the sixteenth century already alluded to, was originally made with actual lead metal (instead of graphite and clay mixtures), which we now know to be insidiously neurotoxic, especially to children--knowledge to warm the heart of any proper witch.
• In the time of Christ in the Middle East, the Roman occupiers knew of ten or so plant-derived poisons, including opium. The very concept of a poison could have been new in those days, and poisons are the classical hard-to-detect weapons. If the weapon is hard to detect, so is the agent. A crypto-technological explanation for some of the events of the New Testament seems possible.

Gygean weapons are doubly "invisible" when based on new technology because these modi operandi are not yet on any body's radar, so the first x number of people who spot them are likely to be disbelieved and their sanity questioned.

Witches have always operated in the zone of perceptual blindness to abuses that transiently opens up after the introduction of any new technology. The psychological invisibility of weapons based on new technology is probably the factor that led witches to become associated with magic. 

Moreover, since the technology is unprecedented in human evolution, the levels of resentment that become inducible in the victims are potentially unprecedented and unphysiologically intense, leading to grotesquely disproportionate punishments being meted out to discovered witches, and this for strings of crimes that would have been extremely serious even considering strictly proportionate punishments. I suspect that the historical accounts of witch-burnings have all been cleaned up for a squeamish readership.

Why were a majority of European witches female? At the height of the anti-witch hysteria, the Black Death was raging and the local human population was probably having trouble keeping its numbers up. On general adaptationist assumptions, all kinds of social forces would have been working to reduce women to baby-making machines, whatever their endowments or aptitudes. This would have created an inevitable push-back in the most intelligent women to reclaim some of their personal power, and witchcraft would have seemed an attractive option for doing this.

Today, the hackers (soon-to-be tackers) are mostly male and the demographic challenge is too many people, not too few. Calhoun's overpopulation experiments on rodents imply that people will become more aggressive if forced to live at higher population densities, and such a relentless increase in aggressiveness may be driving the current reemergence of the witch/tacker. 

It doesn't help that organized religion, the traditional great enemy of witchcraft, is withering on the vine in this country, probably due to the intellectual fallout from Darwin's theory of evolution combined with the failure of the public to understand that a scientific world-view is never finished.

9-08-2018: Proposed definition of "witch": a person in moral free fall under the corrupting influence of technologies that lend themselves to secret abuse for the increase of personal influence.

#37. Two Kinds of War [evolutionary psychology, engineering, neuroscience]

EN     EP     NE     

Red, theory; black, fact.

3-17-2018: In my post "The Pilgrim and the Whale", I propose that much human conflict sub serves dispersal.

12-28-2017: There are probably two basic biological uses for human anger, the other one being an emergency brake on population increase that avoids Malthusian disasters by triggering wars. This kind of war ends life without being notably efficient in producing mass migration. This is the use discussed in my post "The Iatrogenic Conflicts of the Twentieth Century." Mention of the destruction of Coventry was struck out because it looks better suited to population reduction than to triggering mass migration.

3-12-2018: I have long wondered why the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse seem to include two gentlemen both in charge of warlike matters. Why the apparent duplication? The above postscript may give the reason: one (the guy with the bow) represents wars of (absolute) depopulation and the other (the guy with the sword) represents wars of displacement (relative depopulation).

The Coventry Blitz did, however, produce so much mass migration into the countryside surrounding that city that it was an embarrassment for the British government, calling into question Britain’s willingness to fight. This got me thinking: was Coventry some kind of watershed, before which the conflict was of the displacement type, and afterward, of the depopulation type?

The facts bear this out, considering Nazi treatment of the Jews as a litmus test of the zeitgeist of that time. After coming to power in 1933, the Nazis aimed at forcing the Jews to emigrate, and by the outbreak of hostilities in September, 1939, 250,000 of Germany’s 437,000 Jews had done so. The Coventry Blitz was in November, 1940. The Holocaust began, in terms of men, women, and children all being targeted for execution, in August, 1941, nine months later. The German zeitgeist, and perhaps that of the world, seems to have shifted gears in the fall of 1940, aiming at depopulation rather than displacement. I am obviously assuming that the evolutionary, selectionist justification of the Holocaust given at the time, in forums such as the 1942 Wannsee conference, was a rationalization.

I conjecture that wars brought on by population pressure begin as the displacement type, and if this does not result in sufficient local reduction in population pressure after a certain time, the hostilities shift gears to the depopulation type of conflict. If human population is under PID [proportional-integral-differential] control by the subconscious, the event causing the shift could be the amount of signal accumulated on the integrator rising above some threshold. This may actually be a second threshold, with the first and lower threshold controlling the outbreak of a war of displacement.

A paradoxical outcome of Calhoun's overpopulation experiments on rodents can be explained in terms of such an integrator. By providing unlimited food and water to a founder population of rats or mice, with regular bedding changes and exclusion of predators and parasites, the rodents were allowed to increase their population to fabulous numbers. However, the rodents were given no extra space. As the population soared to incredible densities, all kinds of pathological behaviors appeared along with a great deal of violence. Birth rates plummeted after a "behavioral sink" developed, and remained low, never recovering, as the population decreased all the way to zero.

My interpretation of the behavioral sink is that it is integrator windup, a pathology of humanly engineered PID controllers, and possibly natural ones too. The signal accumulated on the integrator has been building for so long, and the population crash is so sudden, that not enough time is spent at population densities below set point to cancel the "control debt" on the integrator, so it continues to insanely command a zero birth rate even as the population is heading for zero.

George Santayana wrote that "Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim." [source, Wiki quotes, accessed 06-11-2018] Sounds like integrator windup to me.

3-17-2018: To clean up some loose ends, let us postulate a third and highest threshold of the control debt, which, if crossed, leads to the human behavioral sink and the possible destruction of the human race due to essentially psychological causes. In the behavioral sink, I postulate that everyone would be a ZPG fanatic and unable to change without pharmacological help. (Good old booze? May not be that simple.) 

I myself may be a "ZPG fanatic", and produced in exactly this way, because I was born in 1953, just before suburbia became important, and may represent what most people in this country would now be had suburbia not been invented to take down the population pressure. At only 2 months from retirement age, I continue to be a virgin with no plans to change my ways, and I may be a straw in the wind, a harbinger of worse to come.

11-26-2019: I can testify from my own experience that the human behavioral sink is more like passive-aggressive personality disorder than anything else, but with particular attention to punishing the opposite sex by ignoring them.

3-22-2018: Correction: the modern suburbs were invented in London 200 years ago, but underwent explosive growth in North America after WWII. By 1950, half the American population was suburban.

#24. The Pictures in Your Head [neuroscience]

NE

Red, theory; black, fact.

My post on the thalamus suggests that in thinking about the brain, we should maintain a sharp distinction between temporal information (signals most usefully plotted against time) and spatial information (signals most usefully plotted against space). Remember that the theory of General Relativity, which posits a unified space-time, applies only to energy and distance scales far from the quotidian.

In the thalamus post, I theorized about how the brain could tremendously data-compress temporal information using the Laplace transform, by which a continuous time function, classically containing an infinite number of points, can be re-represented as a mere handful of summarizing points called poles and zeroes, scattered on a two-dimensional plot called the complex frequency plane. Infinity down to a handful. Pretty good data compression, I'd say. The brain will tend to evolve data-compression schemes if these reduce the number of neurons needed for processing (I hereby assume that they always do), because neurons are metabolically expensive to maintain and evolution favors parsimony in the use of metabolic energy.

Ultimately, the efficiency of the Laplace transform seems to come from the fact that naturally-occurring time functions tend to be pretty stereotyped and repetitious: a branch nodding in the wind, leaves on it oscillating independently and more rapidly, the whole performance decaying exponentially to stillness with each calming of the wind; an iceberg calving discontinuously into the sea; astronomical cycles of perfect regularity; and a bacterial population growing exponentially, then shifting gears to a regime of ever-slowing growth as resources become limiting, the whole sequence following what is called a logistic curve.

Nature is very often described by differential equations, such as Maxwell's equations, those of General Relativity, and Schrodinger's Equation, the three greats. Other differential equations describe growth and decay processes, oscillations, diffusion, and passive but non-chemically energy-storing electrical and mechanical systems. A differential equation is one that contains at least one symbol representing the rate of change of a first variable versus a second variable. Moreover, differential equations seem to be relatively easy to derive from theories. The challenge is to solve the equation, not for a single number, but for a whole function that gives the actual value of the first variable versus the second variable, for purposes of making quantitative, testable predictions, thereby allowing testing of the theory itself. The Laplace transform greatly facilitates the solution of many of science's temporal differential equations, and these solutions are remarkably few and stereotyped: oscillations, growth/decay curves, and simple sums, magnifications, and/or products of these. Clearly, the complexity of the world comes not from its temporal information, but from it's spatial information. However, spatial regularities that might be exploited for spatial data compression are weaker than in the temporal case.

The main regularity in the spatial domain seems to be hierarchical clustering. For an example of this, let's return to the nodding branch. Petioles, veins, and teeth cluster to form a leaf. Leaves and twigs cluster to form a branch. Branches and trunk cluster to form a tree. Trees cluster to form a forest. This spatially clustered aspect of reality is being exploited currently in an approach to machine intelligence called "deep learning," where the successive stages in the hierarchy of the data are learned by successive hidden layers of simulated neurons in a neural net. Data is processed as it passes through the stack of layers, with successive layers learning to recognize successively larger clusters, representing these to the next layer as symbols simplified to aid further cluster recognition. This technology is based on discoveries about how the mammalian visual system operates. (For the seminal paper in the latter field, see Hubel and Wiesel, Journal of Physiology, 1959, 148[3], pp 574-591.)

Visual information passes successively through visual areas Brodmann 17, 18, and 19, with receptive fields becoming progressively larger and more complex, as would be expected from a hierarchical process of cluster recognition. The latter two areas, 18 and 19, are classed as association cortex, of which humans have the greatest amount of any primate. However, cluster recognition requires the use of neuron specialist sub-types, each looking for a very particular stimulus. To even cover most of the cluster-type possibilities, a large number of different specialists must be trained up. This does not seem like very good data compression from the standpoint of metabolic cost savings. Thus, the evolution of better ability with spatial information should require many more new neurons than with the case of temporal information.

My hypothesis here is that what is conferred by the comparatively large human cerebral cortex, especially the association cortices, is not general intelligence, but facility with using spatial information. We take it on and disgorge it like water-bombers. Think of a rock-climber sizing up a cliff face. Think of an architect, engineer, tool-and-die maker, or trades person reading a blueprint. Now look around you. Do we not have all these nice buildings to live and work in? Can any other animal claim as much? My hypothesis seems obvious when you look at it this way.

Mere possession of a well developed sense of vision will not necessarily confer such ability with spatial information. The eyes of a predatory bird, for instance, could simply be gathering mainly temporal information modulated onto light, and used as a servo error for dynamically homing in on prey. To make a difference, the spatial information has to have someplace to go when it reaches the higher brain. Conversely, our sense of hearing is far from useless in providing spatial information. We possess an elaborate network of brain-stem auditory centers for accomplishing exactly this. Clearly, the spatial/temporal issue is largely dissociable from the issue of sensory modality.

You may argue that the uniquely human power of language suggests that our cortical advantage is used for processing temporal information, because speech is a spaceless phenomenon that unfolds only in time. However, the leading theory of speech seems to be the Wittgenstein picture theory of meaning, which postulates that a statement shows its meaning by its logical structure. Bottom line: language as currently understood is entirely consistent with my hypothesis that humans are specialized for processing spatial information.

Since fossil and comparative evidence suggests that our large brain is our most recently evolved attribute, it is safe to suppose that it may be evolving still, for all we know. There may still be a huge existential premium on possession of improved spatial ability. For example, Napoleon's strategy for winning the decisive Battle of Austerlitz while badly outnumbered seems to have involved a lot of visualization. The cultural face of the zeitgeist may reflect this in shows and movies where the hero prevails as a result of superior use of spatial information. (e.g., Star Wars, Back to the Future, and many Warner Bros. cartoons). Many if not most of our competitive games take place on fields, courts, or boards, showing that they test the spatial abilities of the contestants. By now, the enterprising reader will be thinking, "All I have to do is emphasize the spatial [whatever that means], and I'll be a winner! What a great take-home!"

Let me know how it goes, because all this is just theory.

#22. The Cogs of Armageddon [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

1-27-2017

This is a "just-so story" about how I believe everyday human behavior eventually accomplishes the all-important biological function of dispersal for the human race. A future post will attempt to explain how the "just-so story" got written in terms of natural selection and possible faster-acting proxies thereof needed by organisms with long generation times.

Dispersal is things like dandelions shedding airborne seeds, slime molds developing into spore cases on stalks and releasing the spores into the wind, territorial systems of birds and mammals forcing the unlanded young to seek widely for their own territories, and humans going into space because our science fiction writers keep scaring us about the possibility of meteor crashes wiping out life on Earth. To paraphrase the latter, a way to avoid extinction, long-term, is not putting all your eggs in one basket, geographically speaking.

The slime mold dictyostelium is triggered into its dispersal program by the food supply running short; I will adopt the assumption that the human dispersal program is also triggered by the end of the good times, that is, the price of bread rising relative to wages.

I conjecture that human neural pathways potentiate aggression when the hard times come, but of an elaborate kind adapted for ensuring efficient dispersal (i.e., with minimal loss of life). It begins with a two-person feud of the sort illustrated in cultural references too numerous to mention. In Canada, where I live, a cough accompanied by an angry expression plays the role of the instigation. The arbitrary stimulus, made offensive by some piece of Pavlovian conditioning, is traded back and forth with rapidly increasing energy. The process is remarkably like flirting, not surprising since the ultimate purpose has commonalities with reproduction--but of an entire society. 

However, the emotional component is strongly threatening rather than rewarding, because the participants must be induced to seek allies, which people do when threatened, until all of society is eventually polarized. The acts of provocation being traded back and forth become progressively more outrageous, as they must, to keep the polarization process going. Eventually, one side gets the upper hand and forces the other to flee.

The result is a diaspora, i.e., dispersal. Because of the long polarization process, an entire group is expelled, not single individuals one at a time. Thus, members of such a group can assist each other to survive and relocate, thereby reducing the mortality associated with dispersal, thereby making the dispersal event more efficient in terms of number of people relocated. The group who flees is then seen by the international community as the blameless victim, and the group who stays is seen as the unprincipled aggressor. This tends to elicit a sheltering of the refugees and an intimidation of the "aggressor," who is deterred from pressing his advantage, that is, pursuing the refugees and slaughtering them to the last man, which is what each side would dearly like to do to the other by this point. This, again, is an efficiency from the point of view of producing dispersal.

However, if each side is continually threatening the other, why don't they flee each other's presence during the very early stages? The answer seems to be that humans have a reflex that converts feeling threatened into a wish to injure the threatening party, possibly a behavioral leftover from some earlier adaptation, such as an anti-predation defense; to injure, you have to stick around. (Leftovers such as these form the building blocks of future just-so plots.)

Finally, settled refugees usually do not integrate completely into the host society, instead forming ethnic neighborhoods. This increases the resemblance to an entire society reproducing itself. However, the growth phase following reproduction in individuals seems to be lacking at the society level. However, being seen as ethnic by the host society, due to slow integration, could improve individual-level reproductive success of refugees because of disassortative mate-choice effects evolved to favor genes that produce dispersal.

2-24-2017

The dispersal-producing dynamic just outlined is fantastically powerful, as it must be to overcome all the reasons you would not leave your homeland forever at some arbitrary time: expense, risk of mortality in transit, opportunity costs, temporary loss of livelihood, need to learn a new language and customs, vulnerability to exploitation in the new country, etc., etc.

This dynamic is basically what theologians call evil, for which I propose the less judgmental, substitute term "dispersalism." If this is truly an insight, it should have a liberating effect on your life, even if you just remember that one word, but with the price of always being population-conscious: always trying to see what is happening at the population/zeitgeist level, and reading the paper every day at the very least.

At least one "just-so story" could probably be written for each of the pillars of the human species-specific objective function mentioned in previous posts, these being as follows: dispersal, genetic diversity, memetic diversity, and altruism. (The latter has not been mentioned until now.) Each of these must be optimized, not blindly maximized, for each comes at a cost. In terms of neurobiology, each pillar is probably a family of functionally related likes and dislikes wired up in the hypothalamus, but not obviously related to individual-level survival or reproduction.